Digital Design Journal by Jawad Rahman

The self driving car used in the experiment      Self-driving cars are an emerging technology in the auto industry. Automotive companies are increasingly researching and developing cars that don't need the input of a human driver behind the wheel. Many companies say it self driving cars will move past the experimental stage and into the markets within the next decade. But as of right now these cars are still being developed and recently Ford and Domino's teamed up to test the application of self driving cars in delivering pizza. The goal of the experiment was to see how customers respond to the concept of pizza delivery by driverless car. Observations included if the customers the customers preferred a certain place for the car to pull up (driveway or curb), if the customers would come out of their homes to get their pizza under certain weather conditions (snow, rain, etc.), if the customers would unintentionally damage the equipment of the self driving car such as th...

     The Internet has gone through many stages of evolution since its creation in the 60s. From being a network only accessible to select universities to being accessible from many electronic devices and used by billions the Internet has become larger than it has ever before. The increase of the capabilities of the Internet and the growth in users has left an impact on the world. With this impact has come many implications on things such as personal information, security/surveillance, intellectual property, and the law. These implications, for better or the worse, affect our everyday lives and and will continue to do so in an every growing society equipped with technology.      In the world of the Internet personal information is not guaranteed to be safe or private. The collection of information on a single person and its spread/use is evermore prevalent in the modern age of the Internet; this can be both good and bad. The ease of retrieving and spreadin...

Appendix          The infancy of the Internet was a crucial time for deciding how it would function. One of the most important decisions made was choosing the nature of the network that the Internet would use to exchange data from place to place. The Internet uses packet switching to communicate data. The way this works is first, data being sent from one client to another is broken up into packages. These packages are each given a serial number and are then sent through a system of routers. The packages don't have to go down the same route as once all the packages are received by the client at the other end the packages are reassembled according to their serial number.      Today this type of network proves to be a great way to communicate data over the Internet. It allows for messages of unlimited size to be sent and received and the network capacity is only limited by the amount of data traffic. Another type of network was being considered fo...

     Net neutrality was a set of rules made to protect the consumer from ISPs. It helped in making sure that consumers did not have their Internet unfairly throttled and that all data on the Internet was treated equally. These rules were enacted in 2015 but were struck down in 2017 by the FCC led by Ajit Pai. Ever since the striking down of these rules some evidence has arised that ISPs may already be throttling data unfairly. A research team from the University of Massachusetts found that US cell providers are practicing throttling with data from 161 countries showing ISPs give a fixed amount of bandwidth to something like streaming but have no limits for other types of traffic. Different plans may also be subject to throttling, with ISPs choosing to throttle people with a particular plan while not doing the same to others on a different plan. For the time being what the consumer can do to combat this is to switch to an ISP that doesn't throttle and check the specs of th...

     When one breaks spaghetti to make a dinner they usually take a handful of noodles to cook. But some, very curious, people see what it is like to break a single strand of spaghetti. Those who have done this know that this results in the strand breaking into multiple small pieces. This nature of spaghetti has been in the attention of MIT students as well. MIT graduate students, Ronald Heisser and Edgar Gridello, investigated this dilemma and used state of the art technology to create a solution to such pressing problem. Heisser and Gridello weren't trying to find out why a single strand of spaghetti does this as it already had an answer, rather, they were trying to find out if a single strand of spaghetti could be broken in half . What they came up with is quite ingenious, a single noodle must be twisted to be broken. Heisser and Gridello created a contraption with two clamps, one that would hold the strand in place and the another that would gently twist it 360° witho...

     The main idea of Koan 7 is that information today travels faster than it has ever before, even faster than some human to human communication. Koan 7 presents a few key points about why this is true which has led me to agree with this koan. Processing power and storage capacities of computers and devices has increased exponentially in the past few decades. Personal computer ownership and power have all increased in the past decades making us more interconnected with fast machines. The processing speed of processors have only increased exponentially according to Moore's Law and radio communication has become more widespread than ever. It is possible for an email to reach a person faster from one side of a room than an actual person walking to tell someone the same information. This speed has made it easier to get information to places once difficult or expensive to get to. To communicate information from New York to London might have been expensive over phone...