Incoming Computer Skills Students!

Hey everyone! So today is my last day of Computer Skills taught by the legendary Ms. Belisle. It was a great class and I learned a vast amount of information and skills about computers, photo editing and design, and making a website. I'm sure some of you taking this class are thinking..."psh, I know computers. This class will be a breeze." For some of you this may be true, but for most, I want to give a few pointers:
Listen to everything Ms. Belisle says, it's all important.
Do your homework carefully and on time. There is a lot of it.
Don't miss class. Each class has info you don't want to miss

It's not many pointers but it's really all you need. I hope everyone enjoys the class and gets as much out of it as I did.

...Hunter out...

Pics that Lie

This is a picture of the San Antonio skyline that I doctored to include the image of two F-22 Raptors that went rogue and bombed downtown. I even included an explosion near the center of the image. It's small in the blog so you will have to click on it. I chose this picture because I wanted to make a scene that depicted a disaster. I wanted to pick a scene that everyone recognized. Since we all live in San Antonio I figured it would be a good starting point. I found this image on Google. I liked it because it was during the day and you could have a clear visual of any disaster that happened during the day. Then I started thinking of disasters and I remembered San Antonio houses an Air Force base. So I came up with the idea of a rogue squadron bombing downtown.

I manipulated the imaged by first taking the F-22 raptor image and taking the jets from it and put them into the skyline with a separate layer. Because they are moving I added a motion blur to them to add an aspect of realism. Then I found the explosion on Google and cropped the image from the original and put it into the skyline as well. I lightened up the explosion a little bit and added a bit of a blur to it because it is a far away explosion and adds the effect of movement.

The manipulation that I created could certainly be harmful. It's a picture of an explosion in downtown San Antonio. If someone, perhaps a journalist, saw the image and thought that it was real, could create a completely artificial story around the image whether it is true or not. Then, people in San Antonio would read the article and think that the Air Force base near the city was unsafe and their lives were in danger. So yes, I would say that this type of manipulation is certainly harmful because this sort of thing does not happen.

Quote From The Article
"One new check on science images, though, is the blogosphere. As more papers are published in open-access journals, an informal group of watchdogs has emerged online."

This is completely true. Not only for science images but any doctored image that is thrown around on the internet like a baseball. Billions of people use the internet and there's a good chance someone has seen the original image of a doctored image and there is also a good chance that those same people have seen the doctored image itself. The problem is that they will notice this and post about it on a blog just like this one. One website I frequent is Digg.com which houses serious and humorous news articles, images, videos, etc. I can click on a funny image, then go to the comment section, and more often than not there will be a comment posted by a random person showing that the image is fake with a link to the original. Thanks to the internet, if you doctor an image and throw it on public domain, someone will figure it out and point it out.

Favorite Presentations

My favorite presentations on Tuesday were Michael's presentation and Monica's presentation. Michael's presentation was very informative and I was very surprised to learn about all the endocrine inhibitors that are present in our very water supply. What bother's me is that even the EPA doesn't bother to report about it. The other thing that bothers me is that he mentioned Houston as one of the cities with high endocrine inhibitor water supplies. Really makes you wonder if we're taking any steps to improve this little problem? My other favorite presentation was Monica's. She had some amazing photo's in there and I learned quite a bit about lining up that perfect shot. Her animations pertaining to the photo's she showed worked really well in showing us the "rule of three" and the "hotspots."

PowerPoint Tips and Tricks

So PowerPoint is the greatest thing since sliced bread, for some people at least. It's a great tool for organizing your ideas into a presentation and sharing it with others. But what makes a successful PowerPoint presentation? Everyone likes pretty colors and funny pictures, but you don't want that in a PowerPoint presentation. You want your presentation to be simple yet informative enough to grab your viewers attention. You also want to avoid wordy slides because then your viewers will only be reading what is on the slide and not listening to a word you are saying. Another good thing to remember is to lay off the flashy slide transitions and how text is introduced to the slide. People love graphics. Period. Throw in some charts and graphs showing change over time and progress and you're golden, only if the chart is easy to understand. Along with the idea of not using flashy things, avoid flashy fonts such as cursive fonts that are too hard to read, people don't like that. I think that a solid combination including all of these elements should make for an intriguing PowerPoint presentation.

CLT

The Center For Learning and Technology is a great tool for every student at Trinity. If you’re looking for equipment for advanced photo editing or video manipulation, this is the place for you. Each computer is fitted with the best video and photo editing software available. CLT has a help desk for those who need assistance with any of the programs. To be honest, I have only used CLT to rent a camera and watch the occasional football game on those boring Sunday nights in the library on their nice high definition TV. CLT is a great spot for our class because it’s so highly devoted to image editing and the artistic side of computing which is what we are working on now.

Excel thoughts...

Excel is by far my favorite program to use out of my self proclaimed "extensive" knowledge of computer programs. It has so many features and its capabilities are endless. I knew a bit about excel coming into the class but that was only with the older version of excel. I was so surprised to learn all of the new features in the new version of excel and how much easier it is to navigate and perform simple tasks such as chart making. One thing I was really surprised to see is actually how many different functions there really were. I always thought that there were maybe fifteen different functions but there are well over that number. Each one does something unique and different. I think that learning how to use excel is incredibly crucial when going into the business world. Pretty much all business plans are driven from excel spreadsheets and knowledge of how to manipulate excel to get a number you want is invaluable. I know that my new knowledge of excel will truly come in handy when I graduate and find myself sitting behind a desk taking orders from the man in charge.

Chris Nolan part I

Chris Nolan came and spoke to our class today about using Google search, among other things. I always thought I was pretty versed with using Google. I could just type pretty much anything my heart desired into the search box and then I would be instantly gratified with bountiful information ripe for my picking. But according to Chris, there is so much more than that! You can throw in all sorts of different types of symbols and even use something called "advanced search"...spooky I know. But it all truly was incredibly helpful. One thing he mentioned was that when you search for something, Google displays the item based on popularity. So the popular articles are going to be on top, which include Wikipedia and the like. As you scroll down the search options, the articles become more scholarly. I had no idea about this! This new tid-bit of information just made my researching for papers just that much more easy. No longer and I going to have to use Wikipedia for my research papers...not that I do anyway. Another really handy trick that I learned was using the minus sign (-). If you put the minus sign after what you are searching for, you can exclude certain items. For example, if you are looking for facts about Mexico, you can use the minus sign trick to get rid of words such as "New Mexico". Also, he showed us that Google can find movie times!