Author Archives: Julissa Arno

When I was growing up in the Dominican Republic, the municipality where I lived didn’t have 24 hour electricity. We experienced blackouts that will last more than half the day. Imagine being in the middle of your favorite telenovela or cartoon and there is an outage. You will just hear the collective complains of the people.  I did enjoy the peace and quiet that overcame my barrio (district) when there was a blackout. When the light returned everyone cheered and turned on their radios and televisions. The electricity problem in my country is still prevalent today, but mostly in poor areas, distribution networks cover 88% of the population. Populated areas like the capital Santo Domingo and Santiago have 24 hour electricity in commercial and tourist areas. One of the main reasons for the improvement of the electricity in the Dominican Republic is the use of Indra Technology to manage the electricity distribution system. My country has three electricity distribution companies, EDEESTE, EDESUR and EDENORTE. The contract between the government corporation CDEEE and Indra has implemented the Indra Smart Distribution (iSD) system which is a distribution network management system. This will allow the three power companies to start developing a more modernized system which will minimize the time required to connect new customers to the network and reduce supply distribution. It will also manage the notification of incidents and support the network operation process such as notifying the system of outages in specific locations to send a technician from the power company to investigate and fix problem. Indra will become the main supplier of technology services in the country’s electricity market.

http://www.indracompany.com/en/noticia/indra-technology-to-manage-the-dominican-republics-electricity-distribution-network

By: Julissa Arno

By having more of our lives online, will our daily lives become more visible to outsiders on the internet?

Facebook, twitter and instagram, are just some of the social utilities people use to share their lives with friends, families and if they don’t have their settings set to private, also share their lives with the world.  When people use these platforms to post status updates of the time they woke up or that they just had a cup of coffee, where they are going or went,  followed by photos of their lives they are becoming more visible to outsiders on the internet. Privacy settings give us a false sense of security as if we are only visible to those friends and family we allow on our list. However, these privacy settings change all the time and what if someone sitting at a desk at Facebook headquarters is bored and decides to snoop and look at profiles. People have control of what they post, that is about the only control people have,  and if they are smart they will be very cautious. If you wake up one day and decide to become a more private person after being open on the worldwide web is very difficult to delete all those embarrassing things. It may go away from your page but who is to say someone didn’t save that embarrassing photo and sent it to someone or that your picture which you forgot to set as private is not in a website in another country. Some people also post every single aspect of their lives online, about their home life, they job or school and their social life outside of wok. Some are overexposed and I feel as if I know their whole lives. To me is a learning experience of what not to do.

How do we prevent outsiders from viewing and tracking even the smallest details of our lives?

Privacy settings change all the time and often times we are given a small window to change them to prevent our information from being accessed by the public. Technical glitches happen as well and there are thousands of hackers. If you only trust a few people with your most embarrassing photos and the daily routine of your life then maybe you should consider not posting it online because it may turn up somewhere you don’t want. Perhaps you can text or call your close friends with what you are doing and not post it on Facebook.  At the end of the day it depends on the person you are, if you are social, have a lot of friends and the information you post is harmless then using social media is for you. However, if you are a private person that only uses social media as a platform to express views and not about displaying your personal life then you  may want to keep it that way.

http://us.cnn.com/2012/12/04/business/leweb-parallax-internet-things/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

By: Julissa Arno