IF I by Demetri Martin

Remember the Amphitheater meet? To really understand CSA one has to look beyond the managerial aspects of it and delve into its technical as well as social depths.

Friday the 13th, a get-together of the association with Demetri Martin‘s award-winning ‘If I’ video to be aired as a starter followed by the semester review meeting. There was a decent audience that gathered despite the chilly night and the sudden illness that many of them (inside and outside the association) took to.

The introduction ‘nubes‘ receive for Demetri is thus:

• he composes everything on his own for his show: the music, the art and the witty lines of course;
• his jokes are not just funny but they are thought-provoking;

The show takes us through different phases of Demetri’s life by exploring the dictionary meanings of the word ‘IF‘ and using it to explain some why he did the things he did. Here are the hidden thoughts that should get you searching You Tube for the videos (the links can be found below).

1. Trying/Doing things that you really like: Does solving the cube interest you more than studying for a mid-term test, go ahead!
2. Achieving technical competency in areas where you think you are good: Good at social media? When a social media activist asks you to talk about it for five minutes on the topic are you up to it?
3. Keeping your mind strong through self-imposed hurdles: Does waving at the girl-next-door scare you? Do at least one thing everyday that makes you feel scared/insecure.
   

Trust me, you’ll find your niche in the one hour you spend on it. The entire video is in 6 parts of nine minutes each:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

55minutes of watching and 5 minutes of reflection (maybe a blog post?) should make your day! Hope you have all the fun in the world, provided IF you have access to youtube… 😛

Copyright issues College Associations Need to Worry About

Copyrights secure the owner of a creative effort the exclusive right to control who can make copies, or make works derived from the original work. It is a legal protection given to authors, artists, and composers to prevent reproduction, sale, or adaptation of their work without their consent. The copyright owner has exclusive rights for printing, reprinting, copying, selling, and adapting the copyrighted material. Rights included in copyright may be inherited or transferred much as other property. They may also be protected against infringement in the courts.

Works not protected by copyright are in the public domain and may be copied and used freely by anyone. Copyright protection extends throughout the author’s or artist’s lifetime and 50 years beyond; upon expiration of the copyright, the work falls into the public domain.

Here are a few simple ways in which college (or university) associations (or societies) can avoid all the trouble and get work done without worrying about copyrights:

• Be Creative. Or at least Innovative: Before dictionaries start claiming copyright infringement let us define the words as follows.

Creativity is doing something never done before and innovation is building something never seen before.

If you are creative you are not only innovative but also original. If you are building on something (derivative works) that is already present and exhibit it as something never seen before you are just copying original ideas. But, it is sufficient if you are able to innovate in this manner because it would be a lot difficult to see if really you have violated copyrights.

• Publicize when required:

Now, when college associations conduct events we often need to exercise a lot of care as to the material we use or produce. For example, a case study event should not borrow cases from a book/website directly. Even if we do (for educational purposes, say) we should not put it up as our own work i.e., the matter should not move beyond the gates of the campus.

If you are not sure about the material in hand, then make sure you know the places where it is being put up: blogs?Website? Social Media (highly dangerous)

http://cheezburger.com/builder.aspx?bt=graphjam&vs=4

• Create awareness:

People would not really violate the copyrights if they understood the consequences of it. So tell them about

1. Copyrights
2. Copyright Infringement
3. Protecting Copyrights

You could do so from:

• Brad Templeton or
• Wikipedia or from
• here 😀

CSA Meeting

Venue: SAC Amphitheater, Time: 9 PM

Like most of the CSA meets, this one too was initiated with a round of questioning each new recruit asking them their interests and plans for future. Many of them had common interests: while some in programming, some animation and some even in gaming!

The advice given

1. Trouble seniors: Ask people to teach you whatever you want to leatn without bothering what their reaction would be.
2. Meet people: Don’t confine yourself to your rooms, move out and get to know how people work, how they think. 
3. Explore: As first and second years are not very much equipped with a lot of technical knowledge it is very important for them to keep searching newer avenues and that alone will aid them in understanding the subject
4. Attend: Watch out for every single notice that comes and attend the lectures, events, workshops which are going on in the campus. Learn something new from them. 
5. Manage: Whenever CSA organizes a event it is very important to know the minutest details of how it is organized. Hence your presence is mandatory in two ways: learning what is being taught and understanding the back-end preparation. 

We do hope to have such meetings from time-to-time and develop good team spirit. After all, Team work means More WE and Less ME. 

Hello World!

A familiar title to start with? Well, being the Computer Science Association, we feel nothing would suit us better than “Hello World!” as our first step in the blogging world. Now that we are here, its better to get a few things clear. 

What we are not going to blog about: 

• Articles already existing on the web. We use Google Reader to share those. 
• Coolest of links and latest of news from the tech savvy world. Our Twitter updates tell you as much. 
• Constant updates that tell you when our next event is or which room number it shall be conducted in. We use the public Google Group for that. 

What we are going to blog about:

• Our  newsletters which give you a BYTE of knowledge every fortnight.  
• The history and reasons behind each event we conduct. Just a mention of the rules. This will be of course followed by a synopsis of that event. 
• The ‘CSA’ perspective on the things that keep happening around us and get us interested. We share our opinions, our thoughts. 

A special attraction:

Apart from the three broad headlines we have mentioned, we will also be having contributions from various sources in terms of innovative project ideas. We, at the association, plan to nurture such ideas and take them to completion. Further, these projects would be displayed at APOGEE, the ISO 9001:2008 international annual technical festival of BITS Pilani, Pilani campus. This year’s APOGEE will be its 28th edition, one of the oldest and biggest technical festivals in India. 

Each blog decides to aim at a particular auidence: we are looking to target the average Computer Science enthusiast. Your feedback will perhaps be the most important thing for us, since no blog can run without its targetted audience showing some enthusiastic response. Rest assured, we will have a lot of fun in the days ahead.