Thoughts on the reading..
I found Andy Clark's chapter on Global Swarming to be interesting. It is interesting how links between webpages, rather than just the content itself is being used in search engines and so forth. Also, I found interesting the concept of "highlighting" much used areas, and the problem that this could pose as people are drawn a less desirable area, which was perhaps highlighted by mistake after a few random hits. Maybe a bunch of people were instructed to go there for a college course, as an example of a bad source of information. They are told to pay particular attention to a very misleading detail. Other people might then go there for the mere reason that the site, particularly the misleading detail, are indeed highlighted. These new people thus make the area remain highlighted and possibly even cause it to obtain some greater level of highlightedness. This pattern follows the real life patterns of movies or books that are not very good, but get ranked highly on a list because of some sort of initial hype. Then people who do not examine closely, perhaps do not read reviews, might go to the movie or buy the book based merely on its position on a list, only to be disappointed, but in the same time having strengthened its ranking. Perhaps, some sort of ranking devised in the viewing of a website, etc, of a likeminded person, as we saw in the Amazon example of book recommendations would be better suited than the highlighting method..

Notes on Unix Commands

I found the Unix commands to be simple to understand and easy to use. Also, I liked the black on white format, it somehow seemed less mysterious than DOS through command post. Here are a few of the commands we learned and their DOS and Windows counterparts.

FUNCTION	Unix	Dos	Windows
change directory	cd directory name	cd file name	click on icon of desired folder
view contents of current directory	ls	dir	double click on its folder icon
remove a directory	rmdir directoryname	deltree foldername	right click on folder icon, then choose "delete"
remove a file	rm filename	del foldername	right click on name of file, then choose "delete"

I haven't posted anything in awhile so I'm going to do a quick post. Here is the link to the home page I did for last week's assignment. http://www.msu.edu/~coond/terri/home.html I like the modeling we've been doing in class, with the flocking and plant growth simulations. I decided my eight year old son would really like this class, watching Lion King and doing Star Wars html assignments! Plus, in my Children's Literature class before Wednesday's lecture we watched a pretty long scene from Harry Potter. All of this is right up his alley! I think the picture says it all...