You Better Stand

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is in my eyes one of the greatest things in the Bay Area. It makes travel easier and it is better for our environment. The thirty minute trip to go to San Francisco on BART is much easier than to wait in traffic and pay for the bridge toll if you drive your car. BART is so easy just to hop on and get where you need to go in the Bay Area. But now when you ride on BART you may want to stand instead of sitting in the blue clothed seats they provide. They have been doing research on the seats and they have found bacteria infested in them.

Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Ms. Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.

My idea about what they should do about the seats is make plastic seats that are easy to clean. If you make plastic seats, they would be able to wipe off the germs with a handy wipe. The trains should have paper towels and some sort of sanitizer offered to their riders so they don't have to worry about what they are sitting on. If they keep the old seats, we will have even bigger problems with more and more people standing in the trains, not wanting to sit in the germ infested area. Also at night, the cleaners of the trains could just wipe them down if they didn't want to hand out towels and sanitizer. Either way there has to be a change to the seats because these bacterias could be harmful to many of the 330,000 daily commuters.

Don't Leave Us Twitter - Love S.F.

Twitter is a very powerful website. It was what helped lead Egypt to get where it is today. Without Twitter news wouldn't be able to travel as fast and much of the world would be oblivious to it. May teens and young adults use twitter to find out their information. Not many teens or young adults read newspapers any more, but would rather use the internet to find out what is going on. With Twitter, many people tweet what they think is important to know with a link explaining what is happening and many people click on the links. I use Twitter rather than reading the newspaper or watching the news because I can find out what I want to know when I need to know. Now Twitter is thinking about moving to Silicon Valley to make it less expensive for their business. Twitter is asking for a tax break so they can stay in San Francisco where it originally started up.

“If the tax exemption does pass as currently outlined, Twitter is committed to signing a lease that will keep the company in San Francisco for six years and likely for a subsequent 10-year renewal term,” Rowghani wrote.

Twitter moving would not really affect Twitter users. It would only affect the employees and their families. Twitter is a great website and no one would want this to affect their time spent using twitter. It Twitter shuts down, it would result in a lot more users switching to Facebook which is a much more ineffective way to get information across the world. Facebook is more about talking to friends and "liking" peoples statuses. While Twitter is more about linking people to websites that can get others more informed. If Twitter moves it doesn't really have an effect on its users so this tax break isn't such a big deal. But if this were about Twitter shutting down, it would be a whole different story.

Technology These Days

A camera with Wi-Fi? It is truly crazy what technology can allow us to do today. Who would have thought that we would be able to take a picture with our digital camera, connect to Wi-Fi, and upload them to facebook? I sure wouldn't have, but that is the great thing about technology, it can surprise us beyond our beliefs.

Now, some camera companies are trying to make it easier to share high-quality photos with WiFi-enabled digital cameras. I tested Samsung's ST80, a 14.2 mega pixel point-and-shoot camera that lets you send photos straight from the device over WiFi.

This Samsung ST80 allows you to take a picture, and then makes it so you can upload it to the Internet. It is a much simpler way than to have to connect it to your computer, add them to your photo album and then add them to the Internet. Now this camera allows you to skip most of those steps and put them right where you want them. I was amazed when I read this article by how technology is so advanced these days. People used to have cameras that they had to go down to the local store to get their film developed, and now with a little help from Wi-Fi they can put it on their facebook right after they take it. This camera had some flaws but in due time the camera will be up to par and a lot of people will have their precious moments on the Internet right away. This was a great business move for Samsung because many of their users probably have a facebook and many people want to be ahead of the game so the sales I think should be going up.

Book Ads

An ad in your book? A book is a place that is supposed to let you get away from all the commercial ads and Internet ads. A book is a place that should let you relax instead of a place where a bunch of ads are trying to sell you the next big thing. I think E-books were a great invention because you don't have to carry a bunch of books around and you can have them stored on to on little device. It's basically an iPod for your books.

Marketers are exploring a variety of formats, including sponsorships that give readers free books. Videos, graphics or text with an advertiser's message that appear when a person first starts a book or along the border of the digital pages are also in the works. Ads can be targeted based on the book's content and the demographic and profile information of the reader.

I feel that no one will want to see an ad while they are reading their favorite book. A book isn't supposed to be flooded with ads, that's why we have the TV and Internet. These companies should shy away from putting their ads into books because I feel that the readers will just get mad and not like those companies anymore. Sure, an ad here and there wouldn't kill us all. But not in our books. It's our one place to get away from you major corporations trying to sell us all of your stuff. People like their e-books and will want to continue to have them but may have to pay the price of a few ads here and there.

BYD?

Chinese battery and car maker BYD Co. has future plans to start putting electric cars into Southern California. They plan to ship 50 e6 electric cars to test how they work out. They are also supplying e-buses which if that is a big hit, will lead to a major manufacturing plant in the city. Who knows, these electric cars could be the thing of the future, but we will be helping out China's economy a lot more.

Originally, the e6 vehicle was supposed to launch in the U.S. this year. The delay has been a setback for the global ambitions of China's auto sector, which wants to use electric-vehicle technology to close the distance with more-established global car makers.

I think this is a great idea because it will be a lot more helpful to our environment. The only down side to this is that it may hurt our economy because many of the American car companies will go out of business because so many people will be wanting this new green technology car. But jobs aside, this could really help our people because it will not pollute and we won't have to be taking fuels from hell anymore. This is a major breakthrough and a great step for people to becoming green. I just don't see why they don't send over more and get the e-buses sent already because we need major improvement to our environment and this is the starting point. People should buy this car because we need to start changing if we want this earth here for a really long time. If this pops off, this business will skyrocket and be a world leading car manufacture.

BP Making Transformations

No one wants another huge catastrophe of oil being leaked out and killing our wildlife again. For oil, we keep drilling deeper and deeper and this is putting us at risk for another enormous leak. But BP is making a lot of new safety regulations and trying to keep our water clean while we continue to offshore drill. To this day, we are still cleaning up from the huge explosion on April 20th (picture below) and we can not afford another one.

The oil and gas industry needs a "major transformation" in its approach to safety to avoid another big offshore-drilling disaster, a leader of the presidential panel investigating the BP PLC accident plans to tell a gathering of industry officials Wednesday.
 

I think this is a great thing for this business to do. It will help the image of their business to make them seem like that care about the environment to take every precaution so we don't experience another spill. This is a great business move also because they won't have to deal with any big future spills if they make everything more safe when they offshore drill. I just wish that the company would have thought about making these changes before we had our huge spill because now the Gulf of Mexico has major damage that will stay there for a very long time. People wanted BP to stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but they said that it was unrealistic because it would threaten U.S. jobs and energy needs. BP just needs to pay for their mistake and clean up and make every possible precaution to avoid having another enormous spill.