With hurricane Sandy starting to be felt in Bloomsburg, I feel natural disasters such as these can have a humbling experience. Pertaining to this class, many people could lose their social media outlets for days, depending on the severity of damage to the area. With no electricity and therefore limited social media exposure people feel stranded in their houses. Right now I am typing on a computer that could lose power any second, and I'm definitely wondering what I would do if the power went out now. Most of my coursework requires a computer!

Hopefully I keep power for most of the storm. Last year I went without power and water for nearly a week!

Last week's presidential debate was not as interesting as I was anticipating, although it was full of sly remarks and attacks, which was to be expected.

Unlike in the Vice Presidential debate, both participants in last weeks debate were confident, composed, and enthusiastic. They both used good posture and "powerful poses" as discussed in last week's TED talk. Both also exhibited smiling and other confidence facial gestures, as well as body gestures that displayed attention and confidence. Both, as expected, kept their cool quite well (except for the few times when both were trying to talk over one another). In the VP debate, some criticized Biden as being mean or accused him of laughing at the issues. On the other hand, I felt it displayed Biden as extremely confident of his stances, with most chuckles indicating what he thought was "BS" or a statement that permitted a response. During the first debate, we saw a much more powerless and unresponsive president, but during the last debate we got to see a completely new Obama who kicked back with great amounts of confidence.

The town hall style debates are supposed to seem more welcoming and casual, as well as a chance for the public to ask questions. However, I did hear rumor that all the questions were predetermined and merely given to people to ask. I have not researched this claim further but felt I would mention it. I feel it is also worth noting that the only "clear" win in last week's debate was when the moderator pointing out Romney's false remarks towards Obama's handling of the Libya incident. Besides this one point, people start watching the debate and already know who is going to win. In other words, I feel people usually think that who they already support "won" the debate, regardless of who had better responses or body language.

Tonight's debate, the last one, should prove to be very interesting. How will Romney and Obama act? Will they both appear confident and powerful again, or will one become submissive? Tune in at 9:00PM EST tonight to find out!

Our readings this week focus on the Tragedy of the Commons, game theory, and social dilemma's. These topics interest me greatly and are brought up in the mathematics and computer science fields frequently. My focus with this post, however, is to hit a little closer to home for Bloomsburg University students.

Our student population has grown tremendously in the past few years, with large growth in incoming class size in the past 2 years. This has been accompanied new campus housing as well as multiple off-campus housing developments. One neglected area, however, has been parking.

Recently, Bloomsburg University sent out an email about this year's particularly poor parking situation. With just two commuter lots near campus and an increasing number of students who can be commuters (freshmen cannot so the large increase 2 years ago is just now hitting the commuter lots) coupled with increased off-campus housing opportunities has resulted in a large increase in commuter-status students. With such a large number of commuters (which is only growing year by year) and limited parking area, finding a parking space after the first classes of the day becomes extremely difficult. The universities answer? To remind and encourage drivers that there is a commuter lot on upper campus that usually has open spots and that students can get bussed from upper campus down to lower campus.

Obviously, nobody has listened to the email. Each driver, in trying to benefit himself or herself, still fervently tries to acquire a space at one of the closer commuter lots. If they find a spot, they have saved themselves much wasted time compared to driving further to upper campus and then being at the mercy campus busing. However, in the end, many of the students actually spend more time trying to find a spot, or end up having to pay costly tickets. This decision is something game theory would study, and the public parking (although only open to certain "public") can be studied as a resource utilized by the commons. The resource allocation scheme of over-scheduling utilized by the university is something that is interesting to look at from a statistical, moral (especially when parking is a privilege that is paid for), and economic perspective as well.

My question is this: is there a better way to manage the current parking situation besides reminding students there is an upper-campus lot and hoping that they listen? Even if this did work, it would end up disadvantaging the students who chose to listen even though they are the desirable students and the ones that allow the system to function. I think quite a few superior solutions could be formulated from the ideas of this week's readings as well as from the independent minds of my fellow classmates. Maybe the university bureaucrats should be taking this class instead!

On the topic of last week's discussion (social control and censorship), I came across an article about how the interception and recording of internet traffic was detected on the internet connection of the Megaupload.com founder who goes by the pseudonym Kim Dotcom.

Kim Dotcom is a big name in the computer industry, especially among the sharing community primarily for his founding of the file hosting and sharing site Megaupload.com. The site was blocked by the US using DNS blocks and the site was later permanently taken down by the New Zealand government. Kim Dotcom is currently in a large legal battle with New Zealand and even the US (who wants him extradited).

The article explains how Dotcom's internet connection may have been monitored much earlier than earlier claimed. Regardless of how you feel about Dotcom's website and business model, it is clear that illegal monitoring of any connection is wrong. The New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau is currently under investigation for admitted illegal spying. This is something that Dotcom may be able to use to his advantage in his legal battles, so it goes to show the breaking the rule doesn't always pay - even if you are the government.

Danah Boyd's Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites takes a look into the social constructs found in social networking sites, particularly the "friends" feature. Friends seem to be an integral part of all social networking sites. Obviously, such a site without the feature would be very "social" at all.

The interesting aspect about social networking sites and their friends feature is that friends are made public for others to see. This creates an interesting dynamic where your friends determine your social niche and your place within the network. The number of friends you have is displayed as well and may be a testament to ones popularity or likeability. In this sense, your network of "friends" is what anchors you into the network.

Boyd goes on to make some assertions about how friending norms evolved and why. At this point, I got to thinking: "what friending norms?" Sure, if somebody tries to friend us on a social networking site that we have never heard of and is from a long distance away we might not accept it (some people would, though). What I feel turns half of this upside down is how nonchalantly many people accept "friends" who they now nothing about simply because they have a high number of mutual friends, are from the same area, go to the same university, etc. I'm not going to lie, I have quite a few such friends. Do I feel this is bad? No. I do wonder, though, if Boyd is over-analyzing this "friend" thing too much by applying assumptions and generalization gained from in-real-life networks to social networks. Social networks clearly have many differences with "real" networks, and one such difference is often their norms and rules.

Overall, I feel Boyd does offer some insightful ideas about friending on social networking sites, but I have to question if some of the ideas are bit over thought.

Today I was diagnosing an internet problem for a family member and the connection was getting unusually slow speeds. Although this is not most likely the cause of the slowdown, it got me thinking about how ISPs currently have the ability to prioritize traffic and to slow down users who are using lots of bandwidth (or for other reasons, theoretically even content). This is definitely a form of censorship and social control that can be asserted by the large ISP companies. Comcast, in particular, is known for aggressively monitoring connections for P2P traffic and will slow down heavy users. This is, probably more than many people think, a decently strong social control mechanism over the internet that is purely at the discretion of the ISP company. Although there may be legitimate uses for prioritization and monitoring, it seems most people do not agree with it. Comcast has gotten a lot of criticism for the practice.

Those who think that "all traffic is created equal" believe is something called net neutrality. There are multiple internet and technology organizations (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, to name a few) that support the stance. If you want to get more information about contributing to the cause, consider visiting this site.