NHD UPDATE

We are going to State. 

On March 11, my group participated in the regional competition and now we are moving on to the State competition held at ASU.

This week is going to be me fixing the website and researching more about Edward Murrow and McCarthyism.

Here is a great Ted Ed lesson video about McCarthyism to make up for my short blog post.

Silent Coup

This week has been difficult to say the least.

First I had to send emails to Arizona PBS to see if I can interview some of the journalists on the show about fake news and its effects on politics. I realized that I have not done much research about fake news and how exactly fake news is becoming a huge problem. Take this weekend and today for example, when Donald Trump tweeted that Obama had his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower before Election Day. According to CNN, NPR, CBS and other media outlets, it is supposed that Trump tweeted this to a narrative in Breitbart.com titled Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama's "Silent Coup" vs Trump. I believe this type of opinion based "news" falls under the categories of fake news becasue ones opinions are not facts and any fact always has strong evidence supporting it. Sorry I digressed a little. Going back to the emails, I have contacted the volunteer office at Arizona PBS to see if I could do what I had planned and the coordinator emailed me back saying that I could not interview them at the moment but she does have another opportunity lined up for me. At the ASU downtown campus, I can attend this Press, Politics and the Public: Fake News event where I would be able to discuss the impact of fabricated news. The discussion will be lead by Dan Gillmor who is the Professor of Practice and digital media and he will be interviewing BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist who founded “Regret the Error,” a popular site that reports on media errors and trends in accuracy. I am so excited for this event and sad that it is three weeks from now.

Then, I had to email the senior programmer that works for my on-site mentor about the app for the SiREN which is the wearable device. I am currently taking a android studio (software used to build android apps) class on Udemy. I highly recommend Udemy for anyone, beginner or advanced, interested in learning coding, web development, and app development. Anyway, I had to email the programmer to find out how to have XCode (software used to build iOS apps) on my windows laptop. According to my research XCode can only be downloaded on a Mac and I was not interested in buying a new laptop for this internship. The programmer said it is possible to have XCode on windows but they are not the legitimate ways and he would not suggest using them. So, all my Swift iOS training will not be applicable for this internship. Thus, right now I am leaning about how the app for SiREN works and the problems the app currently has so I will keep you posted on that in the blog for next week.

However, I would still like to talk about the iOS training. I built a calculator app using swift and I am pretty proud of it because I did not realize that a calculator would be so hard to make. Note: I had to use my neighbors Mac to make this app so huge thank you to them for letting me do this. Sure I might think it is hard because I am learning swift while making the app but I did not realize that the computer or phone has to constantly remember new information each time the user does an action. That is a lot of information to keep track of and coding that was pretty intense.

Will put a picture of my calculator app later but in the meantime enjoy this gif I found online.

So this week was about finishing my calculator app, learning more about android studio and making an app with that. My biggest challenge for next week is figuring out how to enable users to sign into any app using various services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. I think I need to look more into the backend of app development such as user management but that is a topic for next week.

Closer to My App

This week was super eventful. Like I said in my previous blog, I was unable to contact my on-site adviser for the internship. However, I did have a conversation with my school adviser and she told me to right now focus on learning Swift and android app development.

Before I started my internship I was taking this Stanford course on iTunes U to learn Swift (the new programming language used to make iPhone/iOS apps). I had to stop the course because I needed to focus on the hardware part of training. I needed to understand the hardware so that I could understand how information travels within the application layers that make up the Internet. This was a crucial aspect to understand so that I could better grasp the concept of cybersecurity and where the Internet is the most vulnerable to hacking.

However, now that I have completed the Computer Networks book A. Tanenbaum assigned to me, I am free to continue my training with the Swift learning Stanford course on iTunes U. My school adviser also gave me a great book to read to learn how to make apps on android using Java programming. The reason that I needed to learn how to make apps on android and iOS is so that when I finally get in contact with my on-site mentor she can tell me what device I will make apps on. I already know Java from my AP Computer Science class so it will not be as much work to learn app development on android as it would be for iOS.

Futhermore, this week has been me finishing up the Computer Network book by Forouzan. This book is just reference material for the previously mentioned book and it summarizes all I need to understand (for now at least) about cybersecurity. Encryption and decryption algorithms are called ciphers. A key is a number (or set of numbers) that the cipher operates on.

This is an example of a key needed in a type of a traditional cipher that we use today to protect information on the Internet.

Using the key (previous picture) we can encrypt and decrypt code.

Furthermore in the Stanford Course, I am slowly working on making a calculator app as I try to understand the Swift programming language. I have to say that I truly enjoying my experience with app development.

MUST WATCH

The New York Times has a new Marketing Campaign: "The truth is more important now than ever." 

You have to watch this TV commercial that the New York Times put out because it is basically a video that sums up why my project matters.

Do not share news on any social media platforms if you did not read the article, research information in the article, and if the source does not seem credible. Check my later posts for when I explain what is credible and not. 

HouseKeeping

It has been brought to my attention that I have not really discussed what I have been doing so far in this internship. It should be noted that this internship requires a lot of previous training since I have limited knowledge about cybersecurity. At the current time, the president of the company who is my on-site mentor has some financial issues that she needed to focus her time on. This means that I will be doing all my training during this time period. 

The first order of business is to understand important information about computer hardware(did I ever mention how much I hate computer hardware?). In order to do that I had to read the book Computer Networks by A. Tanenbaum. I only had to read specific chapters but that took me at least a week to complete becasue I had to do the reference material for the given chapters found in the Computer Network book by Forouzan. 

Then last week was my week off. 

Now, I am focusing on the app development part of my internship training which consists of me doing this Stanford course about titled Developing apps using Swift  (the programming language used to make iOS apps) that I found on iTunes U.

SideNote: What I learn from this internship about making apps and app security will be what I would use for the fake news app that I will be building. I should really come up with a name for my app. 

Time to Fix Things

So last week I had to take a break because I had some family issues to take care of and the internship was at a standstill because I was unable to get in touch with my on-site mentor. The thing with my internship is that I basically have full freedom to do the necessary tasks assigned to me at any time I wish to do them. Its as if I have a work from home job. Basically, I do not have a specific location that I need to work at unless I have to go meet with the mentor. So, last week when I had finished the main part of my training, which was reading all assigned chapters on computer hardware in the Computer Networks book, I had to call my internship mentor so that she can tell me my next training assignment. After emails, phone calls, and voicemails I could not get in touch with her. So, I decided to worry about the situation next week because I already asked for this week off. I had some family problems in which my parents and I were deciding if it would better for us to go to India and take care of the situation there.

Going back to the internship, I am still unable to get in touch with my on-site mentor which is a big problem considering the internship had a rocky start. (I basically did not know if I could do the senior project since my first internship had to be canceled due to circumstance out of my control and this internship I did find had problems because the start-up company had financial problems that needed to be taken care of first.) The reason I decided to post today instead of at the end of this week is to verify what my plan will be for this week considering the situation. First order of business is to speak to my school adviser about what I can do for the next part of training. I am hoping that my adviser will have some ideas considering that the on-site mentor has not given me some tasks for this week. I want to start leaning how to make apps using Swift. However, if I cannot run the idea with my on-site mentor, I hope adviser can shed some light on the situation. 

Check back on Sunday for more details. In the meantime enjoy this gif.

Cute!!! Just made my day.

Apology

Hey guys, I apologize but I am unable to post this week because so much is going on with my internship. Good and bad. Just think of this week as my spring break week so I guess this week I am on break. Thank you and please check back next week. I will fully explain the situation then.

So Much Fun

I will start by apologizing for not posting on time. It has been confusing, crazy, and fun all at the same time.

So this week, I meet with my adviser to discuss my plans for the internship now that it has officially been confirmed. There was this period of time where I was unsure if I could continue with the internship since the company was facing financial trouble. With that said, let me explain what I did this week. This week I had to finish the outline for the NHD website, read a book titled Computer Networks by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and learn HTML.

The NHD competition is closing in soon and so I had to finish my part of the work. In case I forgot to mention it, I am participating in the competition with a close friend of mine. We split up the work and I had to do more research into some of the work that Edward Murrow did during his time in the European CBS network way before he joined television broadcasting. This included understanding how he created the "Murrow Boys" who were war time reporters that worked with Murrow to cover WWII from all areas, understanding how Murrow got introduced to radio broadcasting when his job at CBS only entailed persuading European officials to use CBS to broadcast over rather than their competitors NBC, and listening to more of Murrow's radio broadcasts of WWII. All this research made me understand how time, effort, and research really goes into creating a single broadcast. On an episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver explained how in no means was he a investigative journalist in his video on journalism. He does not do the research on his own (he has a team to do that for him) and whatever evidence he does use is simply cited from other sources. In retrospect, that is what journalism has came to be today. All these late night shows, and morning news channels, simply use what is already been researched by others as a source for their own commentary. They do not do the research themselves. Yet, a lot of people mistake them for investigative journalists. However, nowadays the press seems to be the real journalists as they are the ones who ask the questions, rather data, and compile them together. Still, asking questions seems to be a great problem since it has been so easy for the White House to lie and still not understand that they are lying. Last year, Spotlight was won the Oscar for Best Picture and that movie revealed that the time and effort that goes into real journalism is much more than we think. Newspaper companies have been downsizing for years and people do not understand the consequences of this since most people get their news from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. These places are only distributing work that was down from newspapers themselves. You may say you do not read the newspaper but every time you watch CNN Live for example you are since the sources they cite are coming from print sources. Newspaper companies are going out of business but people are essentially getting their news and the accurate information they desire from these print sources.

Last Week Tonight John Oliver video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ

Sorry about my little rant there but jumping back to what I did this week let us discuss the material I had to read for training. I had to read Computer Networks by Andrew S. Tanenbaum to understand why  and how the Internet was built, the different layers that are used for both standard models of computer networking: the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) , and how the security of a system works. I won't bore you too much with the details but it essentially comes down to this. United States Department of Defense, DoD for short, had to create some type of flexible architecture so that the network could survive loss of subnet hardware without existing conversation being broken. This way even if the routers and internetwork gateways get blown off by the Soviet Union, the DoD can still have its connections intact. After all, the best way to cause chaos in a nation is to breakdown their infrastructure. Furthermore, the DoD initially built the Arpanet which became the basis for the Internet in the late 1950s at the height of Cold War to have a command-and-control network that could survive a potential nuclear war. At that the military was using the public telephone network that was not at all secure enough and was too vulnerable to outside hacking. With the creation of the Arpanet, the DoD could easily protect its infrastructure were a nuclear war to happen.

This week, I also learned some HTML using tutorials found on Codeacademy.com. I highly recommend this site to anyone interested in learning how to program be it for fun, to create an app/website, or for school purposes. The lessons are super fun and do not require previous experience of programming. The reason I am trying to learn HTML is so that I could create a timeline in my NHD website. I know a very silly reason to learn HTML but I finally finished the timeline and it looks so cool. Here is a link to my NHD website but please keep in my that it is still a work in progress. http://15158537.nhd.weebly.com/

Furthermore, HTML/CSS are helpful in learning how to code an app on iOS since I will be using Swift, a programming language created by Apple. I will discuss more on this in my next blog so see you then.

Welcome to my Blog

I am Shivaani Methuku, a senior at BASIS Peoria. In this blog, I will track my progress at iShadow technology, a start up company that is in the process of creating a wearable device, called SiREN, which monitors a child's activity and vitals. This device was designed with the audience seniors, alzheimer's and autism patients in mind. I will be assisting the senior programmer on software protection for the corresponding app. At the same time, this blog will also explain my research outside of the internship which corresponds to my research project.

When I first decided to do the Senior Research project, I knew right away that I wanted to expand my knowledge within the field of computer science. I’d rather be the creator of an app than a consumer. Despite its frustrating moments, computer science engaged my curiosity, motivated me to think outside the box, and challenged me to solve the puzzles of code. Rather than letting technology keep people inactive, I enjoy using technology to help our community progress with my research.

At the same time, after doing National History Day (NHD) for three years I realized that humanities and technology can go hand in hand. NHD is a research and history competition where students create websites, documentaries, displays, essays and performances. Why do I bring NHD into the mix? The reason is because the theme of my project is politics and cyber security in social media. 

My project is essentially about creating the blueprint for an app that allows people to easily place any news articles they believe to be fake news into this app that will cross-reference the information from the article, with other news articles from credible sources. Determining what sources are and are not credible will be difficult. However, it should be noted that I will not be truly making the app public given the fact that I will be unable to code it in the given time frame. [At least I have something to do in the summer instead of worrying about college.] Right now, I will be more focused on learning swift (the programing language I will be using to make the app) and the database design for the backend of the app.

You may still be wondering where NHD comes into play here? This year, I will once again be participating in NHD and the topic is Edward Murrow, a broadcast journalist who criticised Joseph McCarthy for inciting fear among American citizens about communism at home than at abroad. Murrow created a series of television episodes where he exposes McCarthy and brings honesty and truth at an otherwise questionable time. Murrow used his skills as a journalist to deliver true facts regarding McCarthyism to the sacred public. With the 2016 election there is a growing concern to the infrastructure of cyberspace. According to the Pew Research Center, about four in ten Americans get their news online. Moreover, "Within the digital realm, mobile news consumption is rising rapidly. The portion of Americans who ever get news on a mobile device has gone up from 54% in 2013 to 72% today". However, the recent election has been filled with "alternative facts" and Russian hacking be it with Hillary's emails or the election poll results. This is the time where people need to remember Murrow who fought to deliver true and honest news in time of great fear and understand that fake news cannot keep circulating. Getting someone to stop checking their news via Facebook is that much harder versus instead getting that same person to use their smartphone to report the fake news. 

My project is about stopping the spread of fake news and encouraging people to fat check everything they may read on social media or online and I cannot wait to start this journey.