Things Katrina says

As I mentioned before, this post is a continuation of  Is Black Mirror becoming a reality? Part I and I will be looking into some more examples of how the Black Mirror episodes are becoming true in real life. 'Be Right Back' and Bina48 robot In 'Be Right Back' a woman loses her boyfriend and realizes that there is a possibility of such service that can bring him back to life using machine learning, which takes his essence from social media, photos, and videos. It first starts with chat and phone calls with her dead boyfriend and ends with her having a full replica of him. It is known that AI chatbots exist already and also a personality prediction service  Crystal . And one step further is the  Bina48  social robot, which uses video interview transcripts, laser-scanning life mask technology, face recognition, artificial intelligence, and voice-recognition technologies. Company Humai is working on a  technology , which will allow transfe...

Not long ago I was discussing the new China social credit system (more on that later in this post) with my classmates and we agreed that the famous TV show Black Mirror is slowly becoming a reality. I wanted to dig deeper into this topic and see what is out there now that has the potential to develop into something that we see in the sci-fi TV show. This post will be divided into two parts so I can go through more examples of these cases. Black Mirror (Image source: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a14587741/why-black-mirrors-called-black-mirror/ ) Black Mirror is a sci-fi TV show, where the main storyline goes around the future technology; how can it backfire and go against the ones who are using it. Each episode happens in different reality and time and is not mutually connected as each of series studies different cases that involve technology. Here is a trailer for those who have not watched the series: What could become reality? 'Nosedive' and the...

In this post I will go through the animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender and why it is my favourite animated show of all times. I first watched the show around 8 years ago and rewatched it again recently. Image source:  https://www.playbuzz.com/item/79e569ca-3921-4be3-8cb3-191b6d609d80 Short plot summary Avatar: The Last Airbender is portrayed in a world where people are divided in four nations:  Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Fire Nation, and the Air Nomads. Each nation has benders, who possess one of the elements ( waterbenders, earthbenders, firebenders and airbenders ).  The story goes around the main protagonist Aang, who is The Avatar, meaning that he is possessing all four elements and his task is to establish harmony between all four nations. The Fire Nation has engaged the world in a war that lasted for 100 years and it is Aang's mission to defeat the Fire Nation and restore the peace. This is the intro part of the series: ...

Summary of Do you even Cult? TV Reality show Do you even Cult? is a reality show, where the main goal of the participants is to create their own cult and gain as many followers as possible. The teams are divided behind the scenes before the actual filming. The judges consist of people who are/have been leaders of successful cults. Contestants have to create a cult within three months and the judges will evaluate each team on certain criteria, such as the ability to influence and followers count. The teams can take whatever actions to gain more followers, such as go out on streets, offer prizes for joining the cult etc. However, one of the cult evaluation criteria will be a faith test, where cult followers will be asked to take controversial actions based on the idea of the cult they joined. This is meant for reducing the count of cult followers and as a test of how faithful the followers are to their cult.  The winners of the show get 10k for each member. By th...

I regularly encounter different posts, videos, and memes about nationalities on social media, which most of the time are made just for fun based on various stereotypes. This post is made just for a laugh (and are not necessarily true) and I will collect some examples of how different nationalities are portrayed in media. Image source:  https://theculturetrip.com/europe/articles/these-hilariously-rude-maps-show-europe-according-to-europeans/ French French people wear berets, they love wine and baguettes. They eat frogs, snails and a lot of cheese. Image source:  https://www.memrise.com/course/33/introductory-french-vocab/ Italians Italians eat a lot of spaghetti and pizza. They are very loud and finally: Image source:  https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1232712-how-italians-do-things   Americans Americans love fast food and peanut butter. College life in America is all about crazy parties, drinking, and sex. They are crazy about guns. Ima...

In this post, I will be talking about my experiences from the two-day Mindtrek tech conference, which I had a chance to attend. I listened to different speeches about immersive tech, open world, and smart city during these two days. Day 1 The first speech that I attended to was a keynote speech from Amanda Cosco: Augmented and Virtual Reality Changing the Fashion Industry. She spoke about different aspects of how VR and AR are currently used in different fashion brands to enhance shopping experiences and give a chance to save time and resources on shopping. The speech was quite interesting for me, especially when it came to what the future of a virtualized fashion industry might be. The most fascinating aspect was that it will be possible to go shopping in a VR environment for example to New York without even leaving home. Amanda's Cosco keynote speech. The next speech I attended to was about Gamification, which was one of the academic speeches. It was t...

In this post, I will write about the hidden side of the Internet, more specifically about the Dark Web. The so-called surface web, which is what most of us are familiar with and can easily access takes in fact only 4% of the Internet. The Deep Web refers to the content that is not indexed by search engines and requires special access - it can be such things as medical records, government documents, and academic information. However, the Dark Web is the deepest layer of the Deep Web and the content on it has mostly illegal nature. Image source: http://newsbytes.ph/2017/12/03/killers-for-hire-illegal-drugs-freely-available-for-pinoys-in-dark-web/ How does the Dark Web work? The Dark Web requires special access through a software and the most popular one is called "Tor". It allows accessing sites anonymously by routing web requests through a series of proxy servers held by thousands of volunteers, which results in rendering the IP address untraceable. It is not...