Raves have become very well known. We hear about them all the time and they happen around us all the time but do you wonder where did these wild music events come from?
Raves actually began in Europe in the 1980's. They were described as an underground dance scene in which only a limited amount of people would attend. The raves in the 1980's would be "invite only events". Although these events were not very well known a similar style began to develop in America.
In the 1990's raves became very popular in the U.S. especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They became very wild parties that drew large crowds in and began to get frustrating for law enforcement. At many raves back then and especially now, there is a lot of substance abuse like alcohol and drugs which are illegal.
Although raves are not illegal and some require an age limit, there have been many raves that have had deaths due to illegal substance abuse. Raves are very hard to control and a huge amount of police officers are need to help maintain order.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Steve Jobs and the Rise of Apple
In today's society, many Americans use their iPhones so much that they have become an integral part of our lives, taking up much of our free time and allowing social media platforms to overtake face-to-face communication. While most understand that the iPhone and various other successful products such as the iPad and the iMac were created by Apple (a company that is today world famous for its success), few know about the origins of the company and how Steve Jobs brought it into competition with other massive companies such as Microsoft. More importantly, few know about the struggles and initial failures that Jobs had to push through in order to achieve his and ultimately out Apple into the high position that it is today.
When Jobs first began to grow Apple in the 1970's and 80's the company was initially slow to gain ground and sales were mediocre at best. Most days, Jobs would spend his hours locked in his garage in his home in Los Altos, often planning out prototypes for new pieces of technology or making improvements to existing ones. In 1976, he and his partner Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer and followed this up with the Apple II computer in 1977, but neither of these sold popularly and the two were left to continue making improvements to the computer in hope of its eventual large scale sale. Over time, the two began to consistently add improvements to their technology and sales went up, leading Apple to a position of greater success. However, after the development of the expensive Macintosh computer in 1984, sales dropped massively and Microsoft (which had partnered with Apple at that point) threatened to pull the plug on the product's development. This sent Apple into a downward spiral and almost put the company out of business as money ran low and Jobs began arguing with his coworkers and left the company for a period of years. There was however, a light of success that would present itself in Apple's near future.
Upon his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs jumped on to the scene with a new sense of optimism and charisma, immediately bringing up the tempo of Apple's company mindset. The company then invented the iMac that same year which was a product of massive success throughout the nation due the simplicity of its aesthetic appearance and ease of placement within a household. Beyond this, the massive purchase rate of the iMac made the internet a much bigger part of the average American's life, improving communication and entertainment as well. After this success, Apple continued to grow exponentially as a company into the 21st century, improving the value of its stocks, growing its advertising, and improving its technology. This led to the eventually development of the iPod music player and the iPhone which most Americans now use on an hour-to-hour basis, showing that while Steve Jobs and Apple started out small, it was the determination and the character behind the company the brought it to the success it has today.
Sources:
http://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805
http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/history-of-apple-steve-jobs-mac-3606104/
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1873486_1873491_1873530,00.html
bvaopenmind.com/en/5-inventions-steve-jobs/
Y2K
The 20th century was one in which there was a major technological advance. New technologies were being produced and improved like for example, the IMac computer. Everything seemed to be great for America's economy and technological advances or so American's thought.
It was not until Y2K was discovered that Americans began to fall in a panic of the world coming to an end in the year 2000. So what was Y2K and why did it cause people to believe the world was ending in 2000?
Y2K was a computer failure and was also known as the "millennium bug". It was an error in computers that had to do with changing the year. The computer systems were only programed to change the last two digits of the year. This meant that the first two digits were programed to always stay at 19. To give you an idea of why this was a problem think about it like this, when the year 2000 would come the first two digits would remain at 19 and the last two digits would change to 00 because they were the only two digits programed to change and this would mean the year would be 1900.
This caused people to believe the world would end because there would be technology errors all over the world that would lead to a chaos so huge it would be the end of the world.
Katherine Johnson
Naomi Zimmermann
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Goble Johnson is an African American mathematician and physicist who worked at NASA during the 1960s and 70s and made critical contributions to several of their space projects. You may know her from the recent critically acclaimed film Hidden Figures, where the story of her contributions to NASA as well as those of two other women, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson.
Katherine was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. From a young age Katherine showed enormous curiosity and cognitive abilities which allowed her to skip grades in school. At 13 she enrolled in high school at West Virginia State College, and by 18 she was enrolled in the college. She graduated with the highest honors in 1937, being mentored by W. Clayton, a groundbreaking African American himself who was the third black individual to earn a PhD in math.
Two years later in 1939, Katherine was chosen and was the first woman to enroll in West Virginia University as part of the inconspicuous desegregation of universities in West Virginia. Katherine moved to Newport News in 1953 in order to work at an an all black computing section at NACA (the precursor to NASA), which was led by Dorothy Vaughan.
The Cold War dramatically changed the direction of Katherines career after NASA scrambled to keep up in the space race. The 1957 Sputnik launch humiliated the nation and there was enormous will for the US be able to surpass these achievements. She provided the math for different assignments that the Space Task Group undertook throughout the years, including analyzing the trajectories for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 mission in 1961, which was America’s first human space flight.
Katherine as portrayed by Taraji P. Hensen in the movie Hidden Figures.
Katherine is even better known for her work on John Glenn's Friendship 7 mission. The human capsule would circle the earth in an elliptical movement and eventually shift to a parabolic pattern for it to land. The orbital calculations were so complex that they resulted in an international communication network which linked IBM computers to different tracking devices stationed worldwide. The IBM computer calculated the orbital equations of flight and the landing areas(go no go areas), but John Glenn asked for Katherine to verify the landing coordinates as the computers weren’t always reliable. John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission was successfully completed which proved that the human body could survive in microgravity and allowed for NASA to make further space advancements. Furthermore, the success changed the nature of the Space Race competition.
Links:
https://history.nasa.gov/friendship7/
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