Cities have been existing for thousands of years, both coming and going, but now, a new type of city has just emerged into being a city of dreams, opportunities, and innovation, and it is Dubai. A city that used to be one that embodied a traditional culture and heritage like neighborhoods in Bastakia, now it has been booming since even before the unification of the UAE. Dubai aims to be a city like no other, and it does so by creating an immersive experience for everyone. Examples include amusement parks, high-end hotels, 2020 Expo, and Aladin city. How can these new emerging attractions increase the tourism and create new communications in the UAE? Why is there always a vision of 2020, 2030, and 2050 of Dubai? What is the role of Dubai’s tourism, and what can be gained from this?
Author: Ali
Phone Phorever
For my rewiring assignment, I have decided to entirely use my smartphone for a day, and not use my laptop. This may be normal for people, but for an NYUAD student, both you laptop and your smartphone are you life. Nowadays, it is very easy to integrate yourself into solely using your smartphone for your day to day life. This is because our smartphone can achieve as much as a laptop can. The question here is how convenient and efficient it is to do it!
I use my laptop for surfing the internet, reading (pleasure and academics), watching youtube, netflixing, and coding! For today, I did all of the above on my phone except the coding part. While it is fully possible to code on your phone, it certainly does not look good.
As you can see, it may seem like it is a good idea as first, but being a computer science major who fiest started coding in my laptop, I have completely acclimated myself into coding in my laptop. Dcoder is an IDE compiler that is based in android, and lets you code on the go. When even trying to code a simple print statement, I struggled with the interface and how things are used on the application. I kept on pushing the wrong buttons and always going on and off the IDE to the file system. I just gave up afterwards.
For my entertainment, I am used to watching youtube videos on my phone, but not Netflix. On the one hand, watching youtube videos on the phone is a great experience, especially having a high quality screen with high quality videos. Also, the fact that the videos would typically range from 1 to 10 minutes would help with the experience because holding the phone with your hands for that long would not pose a problem. On the other hand, watching a 25 to a 40 minute show or even a movie on Netflix would really make my hands and arms tire from holding the phone. Now if you are a person who has a nice phone case that acts as a stand for the phone, great on you, however, I did not have that, so I had to hold the phone. The ratio of the screen did not make it a bad experience per se, however it did give me the feeling of wishing for a bigger screen.
Working on homework and assignment on the phone is not completely impossible, on Android there is microsoft word application ready to be installed that can help with writing essays and such. Even as you are reading this I am writing this blog on the phone.
Do not get me wrong, my experience with rewiring my use of technology allowed me to be exposed to new applications of the smartphone. Coding in Decoder was not a complete annoyance, I am confident that this can be used in a teaching setting where people can learn how to code through only their phones. However, since I was exposed through it in a computer or laptop environment, I think I got used to the handiness and convenience of the file system, seamless tabular window changing, and a bigger screen to fit more code. The good thing about having smartphone is when the time urges its use. I even downloaded a scanner application called Tap Scanner which can scan physical documents by taking images and processing them to create good quality PDFs.
Tap Scanner saved me from my fast approaching deadline when I had to scan physical documents and then send them in for submission. For people who are on the go, smartphone can safely replace computers. For me, I had a great experience, though sometimes annoying. This made me realize about some of the dependacies I had for my computer and its utilities.
Stack Overflow
I signed up in Stack Overflow because I genuinely had a question for my CS capstone about strings and objects, specifically in nodeJS and SQL. Before posting the question, I had to thoroughly search up similar questions that might have answers. Of course, my question is kind of specific, so I carried on and drafted the question. I tried hard to make my question as clear as possible, and probably had put in more unnecessary details in it. After posting, not even 30 seconds had past until someone comments in an answer.
The following half an hour was just a bombardment of answers. I even had my question edited by a senior stack overflow user who kind of cut my question short without some details. I commented on some of the answers given for some clarification, but then I miscommunicated about what my next steps would be after I get my answer. Eventually, my question was down-voted because it was not very clear to some users. I also did not have the privilege of officially up-voting or down-voting because I was still a novice in the site. The site still did record my votes just unofficially.
I received a few badges like “Scholar”, which is what beginners get when asking their first question. This form of rewards would incentivize users to further engage in the community and give a game-like situation where other users would have privileges than others.
I love the extra features that go into the site like creating tags in questions which helps a lot in finding users who are interested and knowledgeable in the topic or question.
Lateefa & Ali’s Semaphore System
For our Semaphore System we decided to develop a system based on colors that corresponded to letters. At first it was just an idea we came up with and kept as a placeholder in case we thought of a different system, but we decided to stick with it in the end.
Our first job was to lay out all the characters we were going to use; we referred to Google to give us the most used letters of the English alphabet, so we would assign primary colors to them that would make them faster to distinguish. As we laid out our letters we began to realize that there aren’t enough bright/visible colors to actually cover 37* characters.Our next step was to cut down the amount of colors we could use, we did some math and figured out we could cut our colors down to 10 instead of the original 37*; that was one step towards efficiency.
We relied on color combinations and gestures to manage all the characters. For example, If the color Red was pointing upwards then the sender was indicating the letter ‘A’, if the sender held the stick horizontally showing the colors Red and Blue then that would indicate the letter ‘L’ and finally if the sender were to shake the stick slightly that would indicate the number associated with the two colors, ‘5’.
We matched the color combinations with the sticks, meaning that every stick covered 4 character’s total, two letters on each side plus the one combination letter and finally the number.We initially were going to have 10 sticks but cut it down again to 5 by sticking our colored pages on each side instead of one making us have less sticks to rummage through.
To cut our performance time down we also had sticky notes next to each stick that indicated what both sides had so the sender would not have to scramble to find a letter.As for the receiver they just had to indicate a thumbs up once they’ve decoded the letter, so the sender can move on to the next one.
Some of the problems we faced were the following:
-The printer was completely unreliable with color accuracy, so a couple colors turned out to look slightly similar that you couldn’t discern them immediately.
– We made the mistake of practicing the night before and realizing that the Art’s Center shut off all the lights upstairs, so we could not tell any colors apart. Meaning that our system would be unreliable during night time.
– One more possible problem would be the possibility of either participants being color blind and simply rendering the system useless (Unless it was redesigned to accommodate that.)
Analysis Paper Ideas
Al Sadu
Al Sadu is a traditional weaving tool in the United Arab Emirates. It is used by the local women who have the weaving skills, and make soft furnishings and decorative accessories for camels, furniture, bags and many more. Because of its significance and rich tradition, it was inscribed in 2011 of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. Although the tool was used in the past century, it is still being used today when women would come together as a group and weave. Al Sadu brings much communication in the UAE in terms of trade, majlis seating, and fiber arts.
Sources:
Al Sadu Book (will be shown later when I get the book)
Shasha
The Shasha is a traditional fishing boat that is primarily found in the East coast of the UAE, particularly in Fujairah. It is made from Palm trees and from the Palm’s fronds. Fishing was an integral part of the UAE trade where locals and South asians would go out to the sea and go fishing. The tradition is still carried on in some parts of the country, however, it is slowly dying down, and becoming more of a business aspect rather than a tradition. Chanting and having intimate conversations during fishing in the Shasha boats were huge outgoing activities with the people. Much history and communication would be made during these fishing sessions where communities would interact with each other such as some India’s Bollywood entertainment would arrive at an Emirati’s TV set.
Sources:
Al Ain Emojis
After hearing about the 15 year old girl who submitted the “Hijab Emoji”, the thought of creating and proposing an emoji crossed my mind. I do believe that emojis represent people and culture, and think that there is not enough representation about Arabs or Muslims. For the purposes of the Emoji project, I have decided to pick my hometown, Al Ain, to be the center for my proposed emojis.
While I was brainstorming about ideas, I thought about how to include Al Ain’s culture both in a youth’s perspective as well as the older generation’s one. I have created three emojis that represent the culture of Al Ain which are: 1) Falaj (or Falay in my dialect) 2) Mountain Dew and Sunflower Seeds 3) Dates. My first prototype of these emojis were a bit ugly but gets the point across. Here it is:
This was my first attempt at drawing them. After a few edits here and there, I finally managed to get a decent revised product:
After working on these emojis, I had realized that there is a copyright issue with the mountain dew emoji, so I know this will definitely not do, nonetheless, it was great seeing the reactions of my friends who live in my hometown. I send these to my friend Ahmed, and he recognized all but one of the emojis which was the Falaj one, he thought it was a road or street. He says that they were authentic and that they represent another side of Al Ain other than its beautiful scenery. My other friends also think that they are cute and that they might need more work on it in terms of looking like a real emoji.
I am quite happy about this project (other than the fact that there is copyright). I hope that maybe someday at least, the dates emoji could be true!
8-hrs Detox
The detox for me was not at all a shocking and surprising experience because during my time in the military high school, we did not have any electronics after school hours. I did, however struggle a bit about my other classes and homework, but I managed to incorporate them in the eight hours by practicing piano and reading. I could not have done the detox on a Friday because it is a family day, and I had to use electronics. I had instead pushed it on a Sunday because I can utilize my time in that day like exercising and other activities. I also wanted to talk to friends during my meals so that is a plus.
In conversation with “The Machine Stops” by Forester, I did not feel as isolated as Vashti or the rest of the world. Quite the contrary, I felt more open and connected with society and the NYUAD community. Even though the premise of the whole novella was about the isolated world with people and their living conditions, I feel as though it has not been the case for me even with the long hours of no electronics during the military high school. The only news we, as military students, could have gotten was from our teachers and officers. I remember when Felix Baumgartner did the free fall from space experience, and we did not know any of what was going on until the next day when our Arabic teacher had told us. There might be some disadvantages from being away from electronics, because we can get the “newspaper” effect where we would receive news from the previous day.
All in all, I felt that it was a good experience having to get a break from all the campus drama and stress from social media.
What does communication and technology mean to me?
There are two aspects to understand before combining communication and technology. Firstly, communication means the contribution of expression and opinion to another entity, and therefore a response either needed or not. Secondly, technology means to apply certain innovative actions to produce human advancement. These two factors in unison would later create a huge and burgeoning world where in the 21st century, more people are getting connected through webs of influence. I believe that through the advancement of technology, communication can be a double-edged sword. Human connection and interaction have been increasingly growing at a rate that would crush the old days, however, there would come with it many problems such as rumors, hacking, fake news, and many more. Battling these problems would give out long debates and discussions that would last years, and sometimes the solution would not fit everyone’s satisfaction. For example, copyright was a huge issue through internet platforms such as streaming or downloading content. Until now, there are still providers of such services, and the act of cloning websites that have been banned or cracked down is an easy task to do with a change in some letter in the URL. Strings of influence through social media act as a huge source of communication, and because of the lack of supervision in some platforms, there can come many implications such as sending false information or manipulating people as well as abuse of power. Engaging in these issues should bring up many helpful questions to serve as a back and forth for people to contribute in. Although Connecting with millions of people can be very challenging, communication still persists in the world whether it is conveyed through one mouth or a headline in an article read by thousands. Technology has been helping communication out through projecting in different media and in larger volume.