The class discussion today was mildly disturbing. To a degree I know I’m constantly under surveillance of some kind. Every website wants to link my social media and all my ads are tailored to things I have searched before. My computer also knows what I have googled on my phone and vice versa. But to know that individuality is specifically linked to state control is a bit unsettling. Especially the fact that grid based cities were specifically designed with surveillance and government access in mind. That being said I would be interested to see if there is a correlation between city planning and crime rates, specifically if grid cities had lower crime rate or higher arrest rates.

I tried out the Nielsen Segmentation site and looked up my zip code and I personally didn’t see the similarities between my family and the results but I did see some similarities with some of the people from my area. It’s a bit funny that software originally designed to predict where riots would occur is now used for marketing.

The readings for this class about Pandora radio and music genome were… confusing. I felt like I was jumping into a conversation with no idea what it was about and I had to use context clues to figure out what was going on. That being said the idea of linking different songs and genres together as well as using other people’s music choices to generate recommendations is pretty cool. I’ve got to say though Pandora does have its faults. I hardly use it anymore partly because of the ads and partly because it does tend to replay a lot of songs and I often don’t like the recommendations.