ENGLISH TEST

MY SCORE : 20 out of 20 (100%).

TRY IT YOURSELF 😉test

I’m not sure Nicolas and Segolene got a good score :

“Wikipedia : the free encyclopedy that anyone can edit”.

I’m sorry to contradict you Mister Wikipedia, but things are a little bit more complicated… Indeed, despite our motivation and willingness to contribute to the universal knowledge, there are thousands of obstacles to curb, slow down or even to prevent the publication of our text.

Wikipedia expects its user to write an article about something which diserves a certain fame without promoting it, by furnishing precise pieces of information and giving its sources. I tried to answer to these rules in order to write an article about Krystle Warren, an American young musician who is very talented. But because I didn’t post the different links of the websites thanks to which I wrote this text and  because Krystle Warren is not very known yet, my article was rejected.

If I was quite hurt by this suppression, I think the complexity of the process is clearly representative of the unlimited ambition of Wikipedia. Actually, if a website pretends to become our on-line encyclopedy, there are many traps it should avoid such as : desinformation, desguised publicity and so on. In fact, with such a good referencement, Wikipedia cannot take the risk to publish “anyone” as it pretends to.

However, it should work on its communication with its users  by acting with more transparency, by explaining to its users why their article hasn’t been published and why it didn’t answer to their request. Because after all, knowing and learning implies sharing and communicating with others.

E-book or Book The Return

A very interesting interview about the Kindle (Amazon’s e-book). Francis Pisani, a French journalist, gives the pros and cons of this tool and presents the new one : the Nook. I’ll resume it as soon as possible in English !

One month has passed and I feel ready to present you Mr. Kindle, Amazon‘s e-book. In a precedent post, I gave my opinion about this technology and the potential threat it could represent for the book industry. But, since that post I have found very interesting articles about it which made me think out-side the box. One of them was written by Francis Pisani – a French independent journalist who currently lives in San Francisco – on his blog “Transnets”.

Since the day he bought the Kindle (2 years ago), Francis Pisani never goes out without his tool. Indeed, the journalist highlights the fact that e-book are handier than books because of  their weight, and because it centralizes in one media a plurality of texts. After recalling the fact that his Kindle hasn’t erase books from his habits, Mr. Pisani explains he prefers reading on his Kindle before going to sleep because it is more easy to manipulate, and there’s no need to turn the pages… Moreover, the Kindle is easier to carry during travels since it enables you not to fill your suitcase with books you  won’t read. ( I totally understand this point because each time i’m going on vacations, i use to travel with 4 or 5 books to be sure that one of them will fit with my mood).

Then, Mr.Pisani raises a very important point about the Kindle. Despite all the criticisms you can make, it offers a very precious opportunity : reading and writting at the same time. Because reading does not sound like passivity. Thanks to the Kindle, you can highight the sentences which interest you the most, or transfer several quotations from you E-book to your computer and so on…Eventually, Francis Pisani rejects the theory according to which E-books would be the ennemies of our traditional books since they foster the act of reading (no matter how). In fact, the journalist confides he buys more book now that he has a Kindle.

Francis Pisani doesn’t forget to give us the Kindle’s weaknesses. According to him, it is a transitional technology since  many things need to  be improved :

• its price is still too expensive : 257 $
• the format of the texts you download isn’t the same from one e-book to another so it is difficult to keep your files when you buy a different e-book
• it is still hard to gather your different texts in files

Eventually, Mr. Pisani compares the Kindle and the Barnes & Nobles’s e-book. The” Nook” offers several possibilities which are not included in the Kindle :

1. it has a wifi connexion
2. it is colourful
3. its user can download texts even if he’s not in the United States

Nevertheless, Amazon maintains its lead over Barnes & Nobles (the  most important library of the United States ) since it gathers more than 350 000 texts.

I hope I’ve informed you a little more thanks to the  resume and the traduction of this article.

🙂

Internet rules !

1. Do not make fun of your friends thanks to the web. Youtube, Dailymotion, Facebook, Twitter…there are thousands way for them to take revenge publicly. (x o x o…)

2. Choose the same password for the millions of networks and accounts you have on the internet . And if possible, not  your birthday date (it  is known by the 300 “friends” you have on Facebook).

3. Do not follow more than 2 soap operas each week or you’ll soon become a geek.

4. Do not think becoming a “geek” is cool or even funny. It is just a funny world to describe a no-life who spends his entire life in front of his screen.

5. Be synthetic : mails are not sent by pigeons but it’s not a reason to write a book.

6. Be patient : you could be the one to bug.

7. Try not to buy too many things on-line. When it comes to money, abstraction can have disastrous effects.

8. Do not believe you’ll find your charming prince on Meetic. You could be disappointed.

9. Do not steal virtual fournitures, clothes, or other stuff on the web because one day real policemen  will come to arrest you.

10. Do not use the media, BE the media !

E-book or not e-book ? That’s the question.

Our dear book is the oldest media which exists. It’s therefore not surprising that the recent appearance of its modern rival, E-book, produces so much debate. Even if the aim of an innovation is to ease our everiday life, breaking habits might be longer and harder than creating and producing a new technology.  It’s not the quality of the E-book which is currently questioned but the possible destruction of a ritual : going PHYSICALLY to the library, turning pages, enjoying the particular smell of books, choosing this book rather than that one because its cover looks like more attractive and so on… A ritual which is universal and which illustrates the relationship between books and their readers. Opening a book is like offering time and disponibility to an author and his whole imaginary. Will the word “e-booking” replace “reading” ?

If we consider the evolution of the mediasphere, it is obvious that no media has managed to destroy an other. Nevertheless, their cohabitation is far from being harmonious. And that’s precisely why the arrival of the E-book is synonymous of fear for the Books’ lovers. In front of the situation of the musical industry, one cannot be afraid of illegal downloading which is such a complex issue (as I said in my first article).

Personnally, if I had to choose one E-book in particular, I’d rather buy the brand new one from Barnes & Nobles called Nook since this company gathers more than 700 000 texts online whereas Kindle Amazon has 350 000.  Moreoever, Nook enables its user to read traditionnaly (in black and white) and to surf throught the internet with a coloured screen.

The famous object is bellow :

Many things to learn about the internet and …me !

Since the creation of my blog, there are many things that I thought very complex which I consider obvious today. A few weeks ago, posting a link, a video or a photo were unknown activities to me. Now, thanks to this blog I’ve realised how the CMS (Content Manager System) such as WordPress or Blogger really ease these kind of tasks.

I just discovered how tu use Moviemaker because I did a video presentation of myself. It’s a very handy tool which doesn’t demand you to be a geek and which enables to gather videos and drawings quite well as you can see.

I know the quality of the images could be better. I’ll try to fix this.

See you later 😉

E-learning

The 1st of  september, my sister Melina became a slogger. One year sooner, such a sentence would have been totally absurd since Melina was more synonymous of sitting down a chair and watching movies on streaming, going out with friends, succeeding at school without opening a book and so on…Today, thing’s are different : Melina studies medicine. And as the thousands of students who prepare medicine each year, Melina has closed herself into her room hoping her brain will be able to remember the numerous names of bones that unfortunately (for those who have to know them by heart) constitute our skeleton. Metatarsals, ilium, scapula, ….

Nevertheless, Metatarsals, Ilium, Scapula and Femur are not the students’s worst ennemies. Because of the very tough selection which prevents many students from achieving their dream of becoming the new Dr McDreamy or Dr Grey‘s successor, each student is an ennemy to the other. Hazing has become a well-known strategy in medschools. It is actuallty very used by the students who’ve failed to pass the first exam and who’re forced to double. As a consequence, many universities have created a system of e-learning in order to counter hazing so that it cannot be an obstacle for student’s success.

Hazing is such an important issue for medschools that when you wright : “bizutage” on Youtube, the first thing that comes up is “bizutage medecine”.

On the video below you can see how a class of anatomy can become a total mess !

Cybercrime

If Internet has brought to our society many ways of gathering people thanks to the numerous social networks which have appeared these last years. Nevertheless, it also gave birth to new forms of illegality called “cybercriminality”.

In november 2007, a Dutch teenager was arrested for having stolen 4000 euros of virtual furnitures on Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website which has been created and organised as a virtual world where netsurfers can tchat, play together, create their avatar, decorate their room and even buy products. If the world in which netsurfers roam is virtual, their crime are, on the contrary, totally real.

As the spokesman for Sulake – the company that operates Habbo Hotel – told it to BBC News at that time : “It is a theft because the furniture was paid with real money”. (to view the article on Bbc News, it’s here !)

Here is the complexity of the Internet : a virtual world which has concrete influence over our world and society.

Hopefully, instead of trying to swindle, many people have understood that social networks are, first of all, places to have and give fun as the netsurfer who produced the video bellow thanks to Second Life, a social network which has been conceptualized as a virtual world :

From window-shopping to screen-shopping

How could we imagine that window-shopping would eventually become old-fashioned? Since the arrival of the internet, more and more consumers have morphed into  on-line buyers.

Transparency : internet’s great boomerang

Last week,  every one could eventually have access to the brand new web site of Segolene Royal and her association “Désirs d’avenir” created in the aim of proposing and building a socialist plan able to convince French citizens and to counter Mr Sarkozy’s policy. Despite its ridiculously  old-fashioned background, Segolene Royal’s website is in keeping with the current trend that every single politic is respectively following : transparency.

Creating websites, having blogs, being on Facebook, Twitter and so on, are various ways to communicate and to make citizens believe that all pieces of information can be shared with them, that they can be aware of every single movement or actions of their political representatives. Before being elected as the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy helped by his communication advisers also tried to be in vogue by creating a website dedicated to promote the candidate’s political plan and to enable French net surfers to question him about it.

If transparency, one of the major impacts of the internet on our society, has been used by some politics as an effective  strategy of communication, it is also a trap in which many of them have been caught. Facebook.com, Youtube.com, Twitter.com…Since the arrival of social networks, thousands of videos and images are broadcasted and shared between millions of net surfers each day. Taken from cameras or mobilephones, these images are very threatening for politics who are forced to control and curb all their acts and speeches. No off !  That’s what transparency means.

Recently, Mr.Hortefeux experimented the drawbacks of this famous internet transparency while making a quite unwarranted joke about Arabic immigrants in France. The Minister was speaking with some supporters of the UMP and taking pictures with a young man (who seems to have Arabic origins) before saying, obviously speaking about Arabic people : “It’s always important to have one. When there’s one, it’s fine. It’s when they are numerous that it is a problem”.

Politics like to pretend acting with transparency.

Unfortunately for them, it’s a boomerang whose jar is quick and painful. Unfortunately for us, many of these same politics have developed a liking for making their private life transparent.

Thanks Internet transparency ! Thanks to you, we can also watch  Mrs Bruni Sarkozy and her husband kissing each other and talking about jogging, or about their dogs Clara, Toomy and Dumbledor – who, of course, are not as cute as  Bo.

You don’t know Bo !! Does this ring a bell ?