[caption id="attachment_171" align="alignnone" width="798"] A warning outside a Lago Vista High School Classroom[/caption]
By Sean McCormick
Jim Ed Baugh, who teaches the Lago Vista High School audiovisual program, recently noticed one of his students taking a picture of his math homework with an app on his smartphone. The app then solved the mat…
Author: Sean McCormick
Culture Clubs
By Sean McCormick
My biggest takeaway from this class regarding culture is that cultures are dynamic. No matter how remote the village, so long as humans are involved, societies are going to inevitably change. Also, no one person can possess their own individual culture. It’s a group effort. In the late 1990’s, during the height of the tech bo…
NYT Memo Assignment
By Sean McCormick
September 19th, 1963
Dear President Kennedy,
We are nearly finished preparing your speech to the United Nations. I apologize for the delay, but there have been ongoing developments this past week that have required some eleventh-hour additions (and a couple of corrections). The nuclear test ban treaty, which the Senate will hop…
Digital Winter is Coming
By Sean McCormick
Many industries experienced a golden age prior to the internet, but the sudden capability to turn once-tangible products and services into a series of 1’s and 0’s, rendered many companies obsolete, or at least ill-equipped to remain competitive. I had a front row seat during one such transition. This paper provides an overvie…
Projection
By Sean McCormick
Until I was about 26, I was a pretty lousy student. I had zero ability to fake an interest in that which didn’t strike my fancy, which led to many appearances of “I” and “W” on my transcript. That being said, every so often a class would come up that did float my boat, and I tended to get an easy “A” in those. In 19…
The Moving Target of Advertising
By Sean McCormick
Advertising tactics and techniques have evolved just a tad from the days when Greek prostitutes (Pornai) in ancient Mesopotamia would lure potential clients with imprints of "follow me" in the dirt, made by special sandals they wore (Smithfield, 2016). Today, advertisers are able to get their wares in front of eyeballs far more e…
What a Fool Believes – The Actual Impact of Fake News
By Sean McCormick
Before 1990, if you wanted to create a widely read fake news story, you would go broke attempting to share it with everyone. That is, unless your last name was Hearst or Pulitzer. Newspapers and broadcast networks were cumbersome and expensive to establish and maintain. Spreading disinformation is hardly new. Some accounts have b…
A Digital Immigrant’s Tale
By Sean McCormick
Analog Origin Story
All 10 lbs of me arrived in 1967 in an analog, yet enhanced (c-section) fashion. This was the year the occupants of Apollo I burned to death during a routine launch pad test, Star Trek was in production, and the floppy disk was invented. The Internet aka ARPANET, consisted of a whopping two computers at MIT. …