The summer after my junior year of high school, I began working on a mobile application called Neighbor Ninja. The overarching purpose of it was to notify neighbors of suspicious activities in their communities. I used a crowdsourcing-based system and geolocation to achieve this. You can read more about it here. I spent June-August of that summer developing the application and was ready to launch before a friend notified me of a new app with a very similar purpose. They were backed by UC Berkeley and had a team of graduate students who ultimately created a tool Neighbor Ninja couldn’t…
As one of the fourty-five million players around the world addicted to Fortnite, I can easily say it has had a large impact on my daily schedule. Fortnite, a video game on PC, consoles, and iOS, is a “mass online brawl where 100 players leap out of a plane on to a small island and then fight each other until only one is left” (The Guardian). Although the game officially released in July 2017, it did not really pick up until around the second week of January 2018, as reaffirmed by this graph of trends on Google search.
Regarding blockchain, there are three main types of people I have encountered:
Person 1: Has no idea what blockchain is.
Person 2: Blockchain enthusiast; doesn’t really know anything about it but thinks it will take over the world.
Person 3: Actually understands the technology and has mixed thoughts about it.
No matter which of the three you happen to be, I want to clear up some misconceptions, targeting Person 1. As a student in Silicon Valley and the University of Michigan, I am at the center of entrepreneurship and stupidity, and I have definitely seen many people of each type.
Samast Varma
Computer Science at the University of Michigan
