ENG102 Hacker Michael Hillard
Who or what does Hacker mean? To me a Hacker is someone that can break or crack through some sort of software to gain access inside of it, usually illegally. After a Hacker gains access he or she can see all the information that they are looking for and even change the information to say what they may want it to say. Even steal information like a persons bank information to steal money that is in a person’s bank account. But, what is the definition of Hacker?
According to Dictionary.com, as a noun- A person or thing that hacks. Slang, a person who engages in an activity without talent or skill: weekend hackers on the golf course. Then there is Computer. Slang. a computer enthusiast or a microcomputer user who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems.
Most of the time hackers are viewed as criminals but they also can be good guys too. Although hackers do steal people’s information, take over other’s computers to use them to send out mal-ware across thousands of harvested e-mails and infect others computers with viruses and mal-ware. Hackers can also do great and honorable things. Hackers are hired by the government to look for weakness in our highly valuable and vulnerable government computer systems. The military needs hackers also to not only protect them from being hacked but to also do some hacking into the enemies systems to see what they may have got going on that could harm us. The F.B.I. and C.I.A. uses hackers to go after thugs and criminals. Hackers can decipher information like a hidden code of sorts. During WWII hackers were able to hack a coding machine which was thought to be unbreakable called the Enigma Machine. It told us of what Hitler was doing and where he was going, so that we could get a jump on him to bring that horrible occupation to a end.
Hackers can also help with making something’s get better. Like computers, they make them better cause computer companies learn from hackers where their weaknesses are in the computer, thus forcing the computer companies to make safer and better computers. Tons of computer software gets better cause of hackers finding weaknesses and altering the software. Now companies are starting to embrace some hackers and even tell the hackers where or how to break into their software to see how the software could be made better. The software for example are like internet browsers, games, office suite and other useful applications. Open source software is now a big thing going on because it is usually free software made by hackers that mimic more costly and expensive software. Open Source software is just as good a piece of software if not better than the ones you may go to the store to pay money for. It is called Open Source because no one person owns it and is constantly being developed by other hackers. A hacker starts off with this software he has hacked or coded then turns it out into the wild ,as they may call it in the hacking community, after it is put out, other hackers can use the code and change it to what they think may make it better, plus sense it is not owned by anyone it is free to whomever wants it. This type of hacking is fun to do and not illegal. If a hacker does try to make the Open Source software for him or herself and put a different name on it then try to sell it to others. The hacking community will know and will cut off any contact with this person thus making them a lonely hacker, a cast out or shunned by the Open Source community. In the end, I guess it just depends on the hacker if he wants to a good person or a bad person.
ENG102 Peace and Conflict Michael Hillard
This is a statement on a report and interview of Dr. Gabor Mate on Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/6/dr_gabor_mat_obama_admin_should. He states that the “War on Drugs” is a failure and that the whole thing needs to be scraped, due to what a high level international panel findings had come up with. The panel had on it several former heads of state, like George Shultz, Republican, which they brought up on the show. He also states that there should be a change in the approach of how we treat drug users and legalization to the use of marijuana. While I do agree with how we should treat people that have drug addictions and the legalization of marijuana. I feel he is just trying to push a agenda against the Obama administration. He states several times through the interview “just another failure” and even shows a Obama interview, before he was even president, that Obama had stated he felt like there should be looks made into the decriminalizing in the use of marijuana, then makes a statement afterwards that Obama has changed his stance “yet again” on a subject. Most of the figures he gave were true of what the “War on Drugs” has cost the people of the United States, which was something in the neighborhood 25 Billion annually, yet he didn’t state anything of how much had been taken off the streets or of who had been arrested. He just keeps on reiterating the failure of the “War on Drugs” and it is Obama’s fault.
If Dr. Gabor Mate wants to prove his point, he should just stick to the facts about the
“War on Drugs” and not start with political mudslinging. This war has been going on for awhile, even with Republican presidencies. Hell, it goes all the way back to Eisenhower.
Another statistic he brings up is that drug usage around the world has went up. The Doctor states that, heroin use went up by nearly 30 percent, cocaine use by 25 percent, and marijuana use by 8.5 percent, all this between the years of 1998 to 2008. But, he doesn’t let you know is that the overall population has also gone up in between those years quite a bit too. And that the tracking of those drugs usage had gotten better do to policy changes on drug usage and medical facilities being more effective in collecting data. So before those years it wasn’t recorded as well as it should have been and that information collected, during 1998 to 2008, is coming in more from other resources and places. This can slant those numbers he quoted and smudge them just a bit in my opinion.
To me this hurts Dr. Mate’s stance and only makes him look bad, because it seems he does have a agenda to push and is using this “War on Drugs” as a launching point to do it.
This upsets me because people like me want to know what is going on and how others in the world are being effected by government involvement and policies. But, then we turn to these so-called professionals to get this information, it is always spun to their political view or agenda. Just give us the facts. Leave out the rhetoric. We can make up our own finds after that and don’t need a damn nudge from you in a certain direction to your bias bullshit.
Writing II Someplace Like America Michael Hillard
Starting off reading this article it angered me thinking of how we treated other people here in United States. Not immigrants either, I am talking about actual legal citizens of the U.S. Not saying that we should treat immigrants bad, but our citizens do have legal rights here in the U.S. The people in this article are not treated as citizens, but more like a plague. Which I think comes from conditioning from various people, news agencies, movies and so forth and so on that tell us that homeless people are bad people. This is outright discrimination really if you think about it. Socially accepted discrimination. This is very, very wrong and it makes me feel bad for, not only myself cause I feel I have discriminated against homeless people in someway or another and not even thought about it, but also for America in general thinking this way. We should all be ashamed of ourselves. I think of myself as a tolerant and fair person, as I am sure others around me probably feel the same way when it comes to thinking of themselves and discrimination. Why do we do this? What causes us to treat homeless people this way? I think of stories I have heard in the past of a homeless guy begging for money and turns out he was rich. This makes me feel as if I am getting duped you might say, but if you really think about it what are the odds that ever homeless person I see on the street corner begging is really rich. Or I have heard if you give a homeless guy money he will just buy drugs or alcohol with it. Is this really true? It is more likely than a homeless person being rich, but still if you think about it this probably isn’t the case. When we hear of a disaster that happens in another place in the world, we feel we should help and donate millions of dollars to the cause, but yet still we don’t, I feel, help our own like we should. Even in the wake of hearing that the people that headed up the companies to handle the donations were stealing the money and lining their own pockets. We still give more quickly to other countries, instead of stop and hand our own money directly to a homeless person. Which to me would make more sense cause you are helping someone standing right in front of you that is from this country and are not putting ourselves in a situation that a company could steal the money and have some CEO pocket it. So the question still stands. Why are we still treating homeless people this way? Maybe the same people that told us that homeless people are not worth it should take the first stand and help correct this problem. By reporting the truth and showing us who they are and what they are really about. In the article the two writers that travel around talking and living with the homeless, following their stories, this is a great start. Because it shows just how human these people are and you can see just how easily it could be yourself in their shoes. Even more it shows just how tough and resilient the homeless really are. Hell I don’t think I could do what some of these people do from day to day. I guess I could if I was pushed to it, but still talk about tough. How the writers describe the police and how they treat them is embarrassing to me. To describe police officers I think of serve and protect and professionals in handling people in situations that are not your typical human situation. These guys are right there on the front line so it seems logical to me it starts there. Have the police to help shine a light on these people not hinder and treat them less than human. Maybe if we could see more stories like this one and have more great people like Bruce Springsteen involved it could change this stigmata we have toward the homeless. This story did help me change my view toward them and it helped show me how ignorant I have been. It also showed me just how mean and hateful people could be toward this stigmata we have about homelessness. Shame on the people who think it is okay to beat and kill them. To think it isn’t crime to beat, murder and harass another human being is not acceptable. The vigilante named B Ware I hope you burn in hell for what you have done. The police officers who thought it was okay to just go in and run them off instead of protect them, I don’t see how you sleep at night. To think that you could go home, look at your families, then lay your head on your pillow and fall right off to sleep baffles me. This actually scares me just as much as the killer. If only we as Americans could stop and take care of our people. If only corporations could stop thinking about it’s shareholders and think about it’s own workers who make them their riches. If only the government, that is in power cause of us, could change it’s policies toward homeless people and letting jobs go overseas. These if’s are not out of reach and impossible to meet.
I will change my thinking and I hope others will too. To the homeless out there, I am sorry for what you are going through and wish you well. Let’s all make a difference for our fellow man.
Writing II Miscommunication in Medicine Michael Hillard
Sources: Websites: “The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare“, “HCPro“, “National Institute for Patient Rights” and “National Summit on Medical Errors and Patient Research”. Book Sources: “Talking at cross-purposes: the dynamics of miscommunication” by Angeliki Tzanne. “Understanding misunderstandings : a practical guide to more successful human interaction” by Robert L. Young.
Magazine I would be writing to: ScienceDaily: Health and Medical News.
Specific Purpose: To inform what and how miscommunication in the medical field can affect you and the adverse effects it can have on your life.
Thesis: Would like to let the people of the class know how the different types of miscommunication goes on and that we should be treated better with privacy, respect and compassion.
Preview points: Give examples of what has been wrote about and how these types of miscommunication can affect your life and health. That as a patient you have rights, you have to be very diligent and must stand up for yourself on how you may be being mistreated.
As for my first point, a elderly lady almost gets a unneeded blood transfusion because the first lab tech didn’t run her blood tests correctly and reported the result wrong making it look like she was bleeding out and needed blood immediately when in fact her blood was perfectly fine. Good thing about this story is another lab tech caught it just as they were fixing to give her the blood and let the doctor know that the result was fine and she didn’t need the blood. The doctor was at a lost for words because he knows that if he had gave her this blood to save her, like he intended, it would have in fact killed her. Good thing this was caught by the other lab tech and she intervened just in the nick of time. The tech that caught the mistake was my wife.
Talk about what I went through at doctor’s offices when they found out my insurance would not cover what I needed done. How they didn’t care about me and how they just wanted to get paid and didn’t care if it put me into bankruptcy.
As mentioned on the medical website, The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, 80% of all serious medical errors was due to miscommunication. When caregivers responsible for a patient is handed off or transferred to another caregiver.
As told on the website, HCPro, miscommunication caused a surgical fire. Miscommunication between a surgeon and a anesthesiologist caused a fire that burned a patient’s face.
As reported on the, “National Institute for Patient Rights” website. 98,000 patient deaths ,in one year alone, was due to miscommunication that caused medical errors that lead to the deaths.
Explained on, “National Summit on Medical Errors and Patient Safety Research“, Experts estimate that more than $500 billion in annual healthcare costs is spent on unnecessary clinical care and administration. Time and money that could have been better spent on providing improved care. In addition to the economic costs of inefficiency, miscommunication among healthcare professionals and missing information can pose significant risks to a patient’s health and to a provider’s credibility. For example, adverse drug events affect an estimated 1.3 million Americans every year. ADEs are frequently caused by written and verbal miscommunication among doctors, pharmacists and administrative staff. A recent Journal of the American Medical Association study found that when physicians prescribed electronically, the rate of ADEs was reduced by 55% and yet less than one percent of the three billion annual U.S. prescriptions is written electronically. New technology now available from ePhysician uses a handheld computer in the exam room, on hospital rounds, and even at home or hundreds of miles from your office. The program allows the physician to order prescriptions and lab tests in real time or while the physician is face to face with the patient. The information is transmitted by connecting to a personal computer or by a wireless handheld device. The data is sent to the ePhysician server via a quick and secure Internet connection. After the information is rapidly processed and checked for a variety of potential conflicts such as drug interactions, the ePhysician server sends information such as prescription or lab work orders to the pharmacist or laboratory of choice, either electronically or fax. By automating these tasks, ePhysician makes the medical practice more efficient.
ePhysician allows doctors to eliminate conflicts arising from illegible handwriting. A recent case in Texas resulted in $450,000 award to a patient’s family when the doctor was found negligent and a cause of the patient’s death due to poor handwriting on a prescription that was filled incorrectly. The prescription was supposed to be for 20mg Isordil every six hours to treat the patient’s angina. Because the prescription was written poorly, the pharmacist provided the patient with Plendil, normally used to treat high blood pressure, at the 20mg every six hours dosage. The maximum daily dosage of Plendil is only 10mg. The patient suffered a fatal heart attack after taking the overdose of Plendil. Had the cardiologist had an ePhysician computer and program, this fatal error would probably not have happened.
You can file a complaint with the states medical board, of which they do take serious.
You can also look-up a doctor or facility to see what if any malpractice claims have been filed against them and the doctor’s office are to tell you about these concerns if you ask them.
Go to www.fsmb.org which is the Federation of State Medical Boards website. They have all the state medical boards web addresses and other nice information on what to do.
Go to National Institute for Patient Rights website which details all the rights you have as a patient. The website is www.empowerpatients.com .
You have rights like:
Consent or refuse any treatment.
To know about hospital rules and how they are suppose to treat you.
To receive compassionate care.
To be able to review your own medical records.
These are just a few explained and you can see the many more rights you have on that website.
From what I have went through and what my wife has seen at medical facilities.
What you have maybe went through at a doctors office or hospitals.
The stories I have told you about in my speech.
You have the right to be treated as a human being and you have rights that they have to acknowledge, protect and are sworn to uphold.
Please for you and or your loved ones sake, take what I have told you and the information I have shared out into the world. Stand up for yourself and let them know that they are in a trusted position of your personal health and life. That they will be held accountable because you already have a lot to handle with just being ill and don’t need anymore worries from their miscommunication.
MLA Works Cited:
“Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare Tackles Miscommunication Among Caregivers” Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. 21 Oct. 2010
http://www.pwrnewmedia.com/2010/jointcommission_01021_miscommunication/index.html
“Hospital: Miscommunication Caused Surgical Fire” HCPro 5 Feb. 2007.
http://www.hcpro.com/SAF-66786-874/Hospital-Miscommunication-caused-a-surgical-fire.html
“What We Have Here is Failure to Communicate!” National Institute for Patients Rights no date.
http://www.empowerpatients.com/index_files/Page1583.htm
“Me, my Wife and What We Have Been Through” Michael Hillard. 2005-2011
“National Summit on Medical Errors and Patient Safety Research”, QuiC Additional Statement by Dr. Neil Baum. Sept. 2000.
http://www.quic.gov/summit/abaum.htm
Young, Robert L. Understanding misunderstandings : a practical guide to more successful human interaction.
BCTC Library 1999. E-Book.
Tzanne, Angeliki. Talking at cross-purposes: the dynamics of miscommunication.
BCTC Library. 2000. E-Book.
