Last Blog for 540

The timing of certain events in this world and this program never cease to amaze me. Doing the Google Trends assignment over the past couple days in the wake of the 8.9 Richter Scale reading earthquake was very ironic, yet enlightening. With the quake producing tsunamis that reached Hawaii and the western coast of the contiguous U. S. and watching the changes to the searches and their locations in Google Trends was fascinating to watch. Now, with the possibility of core meltdowns in the reactors of the nuclear power plants there are related searches going on that are flooding the search engines. I've also seen the Japanese Nikkei Index and yen being hot topics in searches. God help us!

I find it very sad, this being selection Sunday for the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament, that something so relatively trivial as college sports will begin to eclipse the hardships, the poor residents affected in Japan are dealing with, in the minds of our citizens so quickly.

4th? Blog of 540

I don't think I ever want to stop taking classes during my lifetime. I remember thinking a few times before starting this master's program, "Where else can I go to look at interesting info on the web". Now its a matter of managing the time to go to all the places I want to investigate further.

Also, I am becoming more aware of the new knowledge I have acquired. For instance, I now know what the little icons mean at the bottom of the screen at the end of TV news programs. And there was a clue on "Jeopardy" that showed the icon for RSS and asked what it was (in actuality - the icon was the answer, the contestants had to say "What is RSS?"). I would never have known what that icon was before this program and would have gone on with my existence in ignorance and obscurity - all the while thinking I know so much. I also saw Diane Sawyer's intro to a piece on the current TED conference that just convened. I must admit I wondered what TED stood for and tried to find it a few months ago but deemed it relatively unimportant. Incidentally, TED stands for technology - entertainment - design. Thanks Diane! I did take the time to look at the 3 videos ABC news deemed worthy of my time. One of them was shown to us in an earlier class from this program.