The Next New Thing

My hope for the near future is for increasing the usage of New Media technologies in the field of medical treatment and counseling. People who are ill, either physically or mentally, often find it very difficult to make it to doctor's appointments in offices and wait for hours at clinics. A lot of times a physical inspection is required, and in these cases the patient will have to be seen in person, but there are many cases in which a mere description of the physical symptoms by the patient is needed or that the patient needs to ask the doctor a few questions. I suggest online internet clinics, not as an alternative but as an addition to conventional clinics. These online medical communities of professionals will allow patients to make online appointments in which the patient will communicate with the doctor through a video chat window (such as Skype, but with a much better sound/visual quality than Skype so that the doctor could clearly see the patient's body parts.). This will also enable the doctors to quickly communicate among themselves if they need advice, or want to start a discussion about a specific case. Any qualified doctor could join an internet clinic and see the patient from the convenience of their own home. Every internet clinic as such should be government approved and have an official website so that patients could just call the clinic to make an appointment without having to wonder if the people they see are really doctors.
 I think this could be beneficial especially in the field of mental health or chronic illnesses such as diabetes where patients' bodies don't usually need to be inspected and all that required is verbal counseling. As someone with a disability which makes it very difficult for me to travel, I could find this development very useful.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I added a few terms to the Glossary and defined them. I started the P2P page, edited the skeleton (list of "contents") and wrote the introduction as well as History section. 
I edited the Entertainment page and added the New Media in Video section (it had previously included only New Media in Music) which includes video streaming websites and video downloading on the web (I filled in the content) as well as added references for the page.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is the practice of distributing digital data, such as audio, images and video, electronic books and computer software.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital data using the technology of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking which utilizes a specialized P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network and locates the desired content. The peers of such networks are interconnected via the Internet.
Some examples of P2P file sharing networks are Napster and BitTorrent.
As mentioned in the article The BitTorrent Effect in Wired magazine, BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3.
Bram Cohen, the creator of Torrent, realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up. He sketched out a protocol: To download that copy of Meet the Fokkers, a user's computer sniffs around for others online who have pieces of the movie. Then it downloads a chunk from several of them simultaneously. Many hands make light work, so the file arrives dozens of times faster than normal.

Privacy

A piece of information on the internet, such as a personal photograph, will, in the words of Daniel Reed, "remain in the electronic ether forever". I.e., we cannot put boundaries on the amount of time during which the photo will be accessible to anyone.
Also, social network privacy settings make it very hard to put boundaries on the network of people who would have access to one's personal information.
Third, it's difficult or impossible to control the ways in which the persons who access one's personal information might use it in the future. E.g., one cannot grant the right to look at a photograph but not sell it, alter it or combine it with other media.

Advice

I would like to suggest a better accommodation for students with disabilities (either mental or physical) or a difficult work schedule who would like to enroll in classes at Baruch College. My suggestion is to have every class digitally recorded (video and audio) and uploaded to the college web site. Every course lecture series will have its own password and every student will have his/her own username, so that only students enrolled in a specific class could have access to the online recording of that class. Another alternative is uploading the lectures to youtube while making them "hidden" to the public and only available for viewing to specific users, i.e. the students of the specific class.