31Dec,2015.

by

「我不想再見到你。」這一句話深深的刻印在Shelley 這一年的腦洗裡。

Shelley 是一位二十歲的女生，她與普通女性一樣，憧憬愛情。她相貌平平，並非無人問津，但她每次喜歡上的人都會逐漸疏遠她，就像她疏遠喜歡她的人一樣⋯⋯

今年，她在新公司上班，遇上一個男孩，她對這男孩的第一印象很是淡然。只是當她在上班時遇到難題，男孩也會主動幫助她。於是，女孩對男孩漸生好感，在上班的第一天後，女生便在心中對男孩予以很高的評價。

女孩有信心，男孩會在下班後於Whatsapp 中聯繫她。果然不出她所料，男孩於當晚便聯繫了她。Shelley 由於欠缺愛戀經驗，於是她打從一開始回覆男孩的時候，便為自己趁上all-or-nothing 之路。她憑藉與男孩的相處，打賭男孩是男校出身的，而這亦成功引來男生的好奇：「你怎麼會知道？」順利成章地，男孩與女孩透過Whatsapp 每晚也聊天，一連十日。女孩的情緒就這樣被男生牽著走，逐漸的失去自我，一旦萌生害怕失去之心，女生心知，她已佔下風。

不久，上班後，女生有意無意的透露出她對男孩的渴望，男孩則對女生漸生厭惡。男孩在離職前，對女孩說的最後一句話是：「我不想再見到你。」女孩的心碎了，但她還是冀望男孩有一天會回心轉意，喜歡上她。可是，從現實的角度來看，這機會微乎其微。

我常常在想，要有多大的程度的討厭，才能說出「我不想再見到你。」這句話。很多時候，我們在否認愛情是一場遊戲，只是因為我們並未看懂箇中運作的原理。愛情本是一場遊戲，若我們執著於取勝，很多時候，我們便會忽略了遊戲規則，一味只義無反顧的向前衝，然後就被罰犯規離場，你多次的遊戲經驗，便是累積失敗。

失敗，代表負面是無可置疑的，但你若未經歷過失敗，又如何會得知何謂勝利？就如快樂與不快樂，你若不曾體驗過痛苦，又何嘗會了解到幸福？所以我們應該感謝失敗，從失敗中找出成因，咀嚼痛苦，你才能從中發現過失，進而改善自己。

無人完美，再好的人也會有過錯，可是懂得自省的人，永遠會知道自己的不足，因而為自己變得更好。我們要做的是看清楚現實，不自傲亦不自卑，走好自己的每一步。

 

Third thought on “Instagram is now bigger than Twitter”

by

My own views:

The above link described the new Instagram Hyperlapse Stabilization function.  I think this new function is useful and good for any users to create their videos regardless the experience of holding the camera.
From my point of view, I do think that Instagram is a convenient and user-friendly e-album, it is easy for anyone to use.  Instead of the real thick album at home, Instagram can cut the cost of printing out photos by inks and release more space at home.  Moreover, Instagram can save videos, therefore, the varieties of e-album are increased.
I do like using Instagram because images are always eye-catching, and we can search a lot of beautiful photos there by the searching engine.
However, one the cons of using Instagram is the fixed photo size.  Through Instagram, the users are limited to post the square size of photo.  Thus, it will be a pity that some of the photos cannot share on Instagram or they might change the original size.
Instagram are now a part of the Facebook company, it will be great to see these two popular phone application and Internet platform to work together and bring us the more innovation technologies in the coming future.

(204 words)

Second thought on “Instagram is now bigger than Twitter”

by

The pros of using Instagram:

From users view –

Instagram has divide the people of an account into two types, it gives users more choices to choose which information they want to accept or not.  The two types of people classified on Instagram are Followers and Following.  Follower means the people you choose to follow, and Following means the people who you allowed to explore your own information.
Moreover, the users can create their own album as a little art gallery.  Instagram is a phone application of sharing photos mainly.  As a digital native, we are more often get attract by infographic.  Consequently, Instagram will be a good place to draw our attentions.  By exploring the photos sharing from friends and the people we followed, it is a method to consume time no matter we are in elsewhere and it is convenient to do, we just need a device in hands.

From companies view –

According to AppInsight: Mobile App Performance Monitoring in the Wild: The number of handset subscribers worldwide exceeded 5 billion by the end of 2010. In Taiwan, there were 17.84 million handset subscribers by the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, resulting in an overall 120.2% mobile communication penetration rate. Among these handset subscribers, 18.2 million subscribers subscribed to Internet access service. These data show that mobile devices not only serve as personal communication devices but have also become important Internet access devices. Therefore, mobile handsets can potentially serve as a new advertising channel. Advertising messages are also displayed in a multimedia format as a result of the advancement of mobile communication. Right now mobile advertising only represents around $2.7 billion of the global $500 billion advertising market based on Interpublic Group of Cos.’ ad forecaster Magna. According to eMarketer, in the US alone, mobile advertising spending is expected to be more than doubled by 2014 to $2.6 billion, from around $1.1 billion in 2011.

With a lot of users, Instagram becomes a popular platform to be an advertising space to let the company make profit.

Advertisers want to use mobile advertising to consolidate existing markets and develop new potential customers. Hence, aside from sending advertisements to their own members, they also use the mobile service provider’s database to select appropriate targets to which to send the additional advertisements. The advertisement text production and event planning are entrusted to mobile marketing agencies and content providers, who will then send the completed advertising messages to users via the mobile service providers. Interested users can find interactive advertising and further access relevant information. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Adidas are examples of such advertisers.  From Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

The users of Instagram can receive advertisements by the searching engine in it.  It is a personally feature on Instagram, thus, the users can search out what they want efficiently.  In the meantime, this phone application can earn profits.

(215 words)

Featured image

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

(Mobile advertising industry value chain)

Reference of articles:

1. Peng-Ting Chen, Hsin-Pei Hsieh
Technological Forecasting and Social Change: Personalized mobile advertising: Its key attributes, trends, and social impact
Volume 79, Issue 3, March 2012, Pages 543–557

http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.lib.ouhk.edu.hk/science/article/pii/S0040162511001788

2. AppInsight: Mobile App Performance Monitoring in the Wild
Lenin Ravindranath, Jitendra Padhye, Sharad Agarwal, Ratul Mahajan,
Ian Obermiller, Shahin Shayandeh
Microsoft Research

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi12/osdi12-final-91.pdf

One thought on “Instagram is now bigger than Twitter”

by

Instagram changes the way we live / work / think:

As we all know, Facebook is the most popular internet platform for people to share and exchange the information such as their own thoughts, news, the music they like and so on.  It is obvious that online internet platform could be one of the ways for companies to advertise, as a result, these advertisements may become the profits of online internet platform.
In order to gain profits, many companies are trying to create an interesting online platform to attract the different types of internet users, no matter they are digital native or not.

According to Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram: “We’re proud to announce that there are now more than 300 million Instagrammers. Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70 million photos and videos each day.”

Instagram is one of the successful examples that gain a lot of users.  I am one the Instagram (Abbreviation: IG) users too.  I become more interested to visit Instagram more than Facebook.  And the reason why it will changes my flavor is I think Instagram is more secure and unlike Facebook always have the negative news of they are not respecting the privacy of users and sometimes sell it as a product.
In fact, Instagram is a sort of phone apps.  In this new era, major of people own a smart phone.  It becomes a trend that people are more likely to use smart phones instead of computers.  Therefore, Instagram became a popular platform to let people share their moments, photos and thoughts.  With such a convenient way to share and exchange our thoughts and information, Instagram grows to become one of our entertainments, and it is no uncommon to see people go online to Instagram on train or anywhere to explore others information.

(267 words)

Instagram news source from:

http://blog.instagram.com/post/104847837897/141210-300million

Third thought on “Family: Hands On With Jibo, The Family Robot”

by

My own views:

I would love this digital technology.  It is because this family gadget is multi-functional and it reacts like having real conversation with a real person.  As the description of Jibo, it’s a robot that looks like something out of Pixar‘s Wall-E and has a personality.  I never thought that some impossible in cartoon may appear in reality successfully, it is my pleasure to see that technology improvement can bring us more funny and laughter in life.
In my opinions, I think Jibo maybe a good listener to the elderly.  As the aging population problems are growing everywhere, the elderly are looking for someone to talk to and they also need entertainment.  It would be good for the elderly as they are not the native technology users as well as us, therefore, Jibo will be easy to use by the elderly.  The elderly just need to control the robot by sound, so it will be a great and user-friendly devices for them.
Yet, it will be the problem of the cost of such a innovating robot.  It will be my concern that not every family can afford such a robot, thus, it may not be popular as usual.  For me to tackle this problem, it would be great to see the government can allot more funds in technology aspects, so we can live in a more efficient way.

(230 words)

Second thought on “Family: Hands On With Jibo, The Family Robot”

by

The pros of Jibo:

There are both pros and cons when we created a new technology.  I would like to focus on the benefits that brings by Jibo.
The first advantage of Jibo brings to family aspect is it helps in many parts of our lives so we can live more comfortable. For instance, order food, snap a photo, being a reminder, send messages, communicate with each other at home, being a MP3 players and it can dance and introduce itself.  According to the above examples, it shows that new technology can make us live in a more convenient way, we just need to give out our commands clearly, then Jibo will works for us.  It does reduce the time we consume to do such trivial things.
The second advantage is that Jibo may replace maids or secretary in result of reducing expend.  Jibo as a smart assistant, it can remind us our daily planing.  We just need to jot down the things by speaking out to Jibo, it can ensure that we transfer the messages accurately and make sure that Jibo will remind us on time.  For example, if I need to wake up early the next day, I just need to say this to Jibo, and Jibo will wake me up the next day just function like a multiple alarm.  With such functions, Jibo can partly replace the job of maids or secretary.  It does help cut the costs of hiring a maid or secretary.

(247 words)

One thought on “Family: Hands On With Jibo, The Family Robot”

by

Technologies change the way we live / work / think like below:

The first impression when I saw this new technology I was amazed. It totally breaks the distance and make people live in a faster and easy life. With this device, we can communicate with either family members or friends in our home.
Jibo is a multi-functional robot, we can give orders to Jibo only by sound, and it will react the orders from us probably. Jibo can be a reminder, camera, mp3 player and it even can dance to entertain us.

According to Ouellette, Judith A.; Wood, Wendy in 1998:”Past behavior guides future responses through 2 processes. Well-practiced behaviors in constant contexts recur because the processing that initiates and controls their performance becomes automatic. Frequency of past behavior then reflects habit strength and has a direct effect on future performance. Alternately, when behaviors are not well learned or when they are performed in unstable or difficult contexts, conscious decision making is likely to be necessary to initiate and carry out the behavior. Under these conditions, past behavior (along with attitudes and subjective norms) may contribute to intentions, and behavior is guided by intentions. These relations between past behavior and future behavior are substantiated in a meta-analytic synthesis of prior research on behavior prediction and in a primary research investigation.”

If once we gave out our order to Jibo and it replied, we would think that everything is easy to handle by speaking aloud. Then, we may get used to charge people to do things instead of doing the things by ourselves. In long term of it, this living mode will become our habit.
On the other hands, it may replace the maids in families, and we may reduce the cost of hiring maids. As the above blog’s article mentioned that if you feel hungry, tell Jibo to order a pizza and it will go online to get your usual. It shows that we do not even need a maid to cook the daily meal for us because we can record it to Jibo and it works as our agenda.
If we make this device to contribute in our house, this smart assistant will become one of our inevitable needs in the foreseeable future.

(237 words)

Reference of book:

Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior.
By Ouellette, Judith A.; Wood, Wendy
Psychological Bulletin, Vol 124(1), Jul 1998, 54-74.

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1998-04232-003

Family and Entainment: 4 free tools for making your own maps

by

A new “activity” to “play with children.

glennw's avatarHistory Tech

Most of us are very familiar with Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Tour Builder, and ArcGIS. Awesome tools all. But there are other tools out there to help you and your kids create and share maps.

They may not have the same cache and brand name awareness but these types of tools can be very handy. Play with them a bit and run them by your kids. You may be surprised.

View original post 164 more words