The latest trends in the music industry for teenagers
By: Amzhar
Introduction
Music has been around for generations and the latest songs are usually the most popular among teenagers. For myself, I enjoy listening to music though my musical influence is not the popular among my peers. I listen to mainly rock music and some oldies. Most teenagers however, tend to listen to the mainstream music that plays on the radio and found on teen channels such as MTV.

In the recent years, distribution of music has been a major issue. With the advancement of technology, music can be shared easily among friends and family. A few years back, people would burn the songs that they would like to share onto a blank CD and pass it to their friends. Today, most teenagers share songs through file sharing softwares such and LimeWire and through instant messaging programs such as mIRC and MSN Messenger. Doing this is actually illegal and many have been caught and charged for illegally sharing their music.

However, music companies know the rising trend of portable and downloadable music. Therefore, online shops such as iTunes have been set up to sell individual songs or albums. Users can pay a certain amount of money and purchase music from the website. This developement have been encouraging as many users have turned to such sites for their music needs.

Resource
http://forums.digitaltrends.com/showthread.php?t=10623

Summary of resource
From what is written on the message boards or forum, we can see them discussing the manners in which songs are shared over the internet. There are differing views on the issue. In is interesting the way the discussion is conducted and I think you should register and give your inputs on the matter.

They also discuss the different trends on how music was/is shared. From what I've gathred, IRC and newsgroups were used during the time the Internet was still not as widespread as it is today. Technology back then focused on efficiency rather than on the visual aspects today. IRC was a very simple technology with very view visual aspect. It consisted of a message box where user can type in their messages and a function that allows them to send files to other users. Now, there are many more methods to transfer files and these has led to a decline in IRC users.

Conclusion
From the research done, I can conclude that the latest trends are sharing of music. I foresee this trend growing despite it being illegal. As technology enhances further, there would be many more methods to trade music over the internet. With internet speed growing faster and faster, a music file can be sent to someone within seconds.
The only way record companies can curb this trend is to offer more than just songs on their online stores.

Impact of Diabetes on patients

Introduction
Diabetes is a incurable illness whereby people can just get it suddenly. For example, during my secondary school, I had friend who was well and good and was 1 of the top students, he had gotten diabetes just 1 day suddenly. After being diagnosed with it, he became depressed and had dropped from being 1 of the top students to 1 of the bottom students. It is disheartening to see friend became like that. Therefore, with this topic, I hoped that I am able to find more details about diabetes and its impact of patients so that if in future, anybody got this illness, the person will know how to handle with it and the stress and the difference in living. Nobody will know who will be the next patient and when will anybody just got any illness

1st resource used:
Diabetes support from Bayer. (n.d.) Retrieved May 17, 2008 from World Wide Web: http://www.bayerdiabetes.com/us/diabCare/aboutDiab/index.asp

Summary of resource:
I chose this source is because this source provides me with the full detail of Diabetes. Although my topic is "Impact of Diabetes on patients" but I strongly believed that before I can start to research on the impact, I must first understand what is Diabetes and all its complications etc. The source provides me with all the necessary details I need.

Firstly, under the navigation tab, there are "About Diabetes", "Controlling Your Diabetes", "Testing", "NoCoding Technology" etc. Under the "About Diabetes", it gives a thorough explanation of what is diabetes and what are its complications, how to test and the medication and treatment needed. I have searched other website but I find that this website gives the most detail explanation. Now, I am dealing with healthcare issues. Dealing with such issues, details must not be neglected as one small thing missing can caused a big difference. Then, it also shows how diabetes are being treated commonly and the medication needed.

What I had said so far are the information only. Actually, the best part of this website is that it gives the viewer a more unique and simpler way of treating diabetes. Not really treating but rather more on maintaining. As we all know, Diabetes have no cure currently. The ways of maintaining it so as to not worsen may be very boring and tiring. Therefore, this website works with their professionals and develop new and unique and simple ways to maintain diabetes. This will allow diabetes patients to actually maintain the diabetes at a healthy level yet not boring manner.

2nd resource used:
Diabetes support forum. (n.d.) Retrieved May 23, 2008 from World Wide Web:
http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ws-diabetes&tid=24668

Summary of resource:
Now, after the first resource, we now have a full understanding of what is Diabetes and its complications etc. So now, back to my topic, how it impact on the patients. I chose this resource basically its because it gets in contact with the patients themselves. This is actually a forum, it is a medical forum. The topics are all medical based and the people are all participating actively. Therefore I chose this resource hoping to get primary information from Diabetic patients themselves. I actually posted a thread asking how diabetes affect their lifes and I do get back valuable information from patients themselves. They told me about how they actually accept the fact that they got diabetes and how they from do not care about the illness and after some life and death issue which led them into maintaining their diabetes very carefully. It is very interested and nice to hear people talk about their illness so sincerely and trying to help others.

Conclusion
After researching on so many websites, I find that Diabetes is a much more complicated illness than what most of us can imagine currently. It can happen to anybody although it is more prone to elderly. However, cases after cases that diabetes strikes on teenagers from as young as 13. This should signal to us that we should all take good care of our body no matter what and we should never give up on ourselves no matter what happens even if incurable illness strikes us. Illness do not choose people, but people can choose how to deal with it.

Impact of online gaming on youth
Contributed by: Lim Chun Hui

Introduction
Gaming is a common entertainment that everyone enjoys playing, I believe all of us have played before games during youth. To many people they play games to kill some time, distress themselves, or for their interest to that particular game. I myself played my first game during primary school, which is considered later compared to those other kids now, and the game I played is of very much lower visual graphics. I have seen kids of very young age, some even at the age of 5 playing computer games, which includes the popular online gaming now.

Nowadays online gaming have become very common, due to the fact that its free and many teenagers like to make virtual friends in there. Online gaming can be a very good source of entertainment for us but it could also cause many impact to us, such as getting too addicted, neglects our studies, conducting violence act, overspending and mixing with bad companies. I personally also get addicted to online gaming during youth, which is also why I chose this topic as I want to find out more about other impacts on youth.

1st Resource Used:
MAVAV. (2002, December, 30). “Video Game Addiction: What to Watch Out For”. Retrieved May 20, 2008 from World Wide Web: http://www.mavav.org/2002/12/30/video_game_addiction_what_to_watch_for.php

Summary of resource:
This resource talks about one of the impact I stated earlier addiction, it teach us how to spot the symptoms when a teen is addicted to gaming. One of the common symptoms is spending many hours in front of the computer, only taking their breaks for a bath or during mealtime. This behavior is commonly known as “grinding” and “farming” which can last up to several hours till the entire evening, in the worst case it may lead to an out-of-control 24 hour gaming binge.

Grinding is when a player does repetetive task to gain exp points related to a task
Farming is when a player havest resources like money just for the purpose of selling it for real world money

Another symptom is poor school grades, typically a teen that is addicted to gaming will have a much higher grading in Mathematics and Typing test.

Recommendation to prevent teens from having these symptoms is to arrange more outdoors activities for them, leaving lesser time for them to get into gaming.

Besides talking about the symptoms in this resource, if you try to browse through the site to look at other articles in this resource, it also includes some example of violence games and how it will cause harm to teenager. As from what I found out from some of the violence games, it contain the scence of beheadings, bludgeonings with baseball bats, jamming of syringes into eyeballs, cutting opponents testicles off and etc. I believe its not wise to let teenager play games with these types of violence graphical scence, if things went wrong they might just pick up any of it and happen in real life

2nd Resource Used:
William. (2008, January, 24). “Virginia Tech, Suicide And World Of Warcraft”. Retrieved May 20, 2008 from World Wide Web: http://news.filefront.com/virginia-tech-suicide-and-world-of-warcraft/

William. (2007, June, 11). “Violence Causes Games”. Retrieved May 20, 2008 from World Wide Web: http://news.filefront.com/violence-causes-games/

Summary of resource:
Although violence is one of the impact that could cause on students in online gaming, but in some cases it is not. Above is 2 articles written by the same author debating on fact that “games cause violence”, I personally think that these articles is quite interesting for my topic as it is trying to talk about the good side of gaming, so enjoy reading. =)

This is an article about a senior student from Virginia tech who commits suicide with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, and many people is making assumptions that somehow his death is link to the world’s famous online game “World of Warcraft”.

The victim Daniel Kim was an avid Warcraft player who developed numerous friendships playing the game over the past few years, and in fact this game is one thing that gives him the life to live on. During the edge of his death, many warning came in the form of emails from various WoW players were send to the university. But unfortunately, little action was taken from the warnings and now he is dead.

Conclusion:
After researching and reading from many different sites, I can see that there are people who likes and also people who doesn’t likes gaming. I personally still plays games during my free time, but those that I played are hand held and strategy games now. Last time I’m also addicted to online gaming and other stuff, but now I find it boring and feel that their story line is lame and meaningless. I hope teenagers or kids will start to think properly now and don’t get too addicted to it, it’s alright to play a little as it brings us fun and entertainment in the form of distress. Haha

Impact of Computer-crime in business
contributed by:Ong Shi Lun
Introduction
Computer crime which is also commonly known as cyber crime is a big offence in the world. Hacking is the most common computer crime in the world. I myself doesn’t know some of the hacking methods and what are the consequences and so do many of us of the same age therefore we don’t have much information on computer crime and this is why I am doing this topic as to gain more knowledge. There is one computer crime which happened in Singapore recently is the RI student hacked into their school system to look at his friends result. He was caught for hacking into the school system; I think he did not know that it is an offence to hack the school system.

Resource Used
Ron O’Brien(2007, January, 22). "Cyber Crime's Impact on Business". Retrieved May 22, 2008 from world wide web:
http://www.ebizq.net/topics/security/features/7573.html?page=2

Summary of Resource

The resource above says that biggest impact of computer crime is data being stolen. Today the most common computer crime people do to company computer are mostly the Trojan horse. The Trojan can devastating programs that pretend to be normal software which is hard to detect and they do attack computer. Other than attacking computer destroying the files the Trojan also contain key logger which will capture the password and user ID when the user is trying to log into something important. Other than the Trojan horse, there is a form of hijacking called Denial of Service this attack is something like a robot which keep sent the request to their target and let their target (a computer) overwhelming of request which is commonly called spamming on the system. Therefore important request was unable to process and result in slow response.

My View

I personally think that hacking is a big issue for the company which the data being stolen, imagine that the company information being stolen is a hospital. Your personal health information will be shown to everybody, this to those healthy people might not cause any harm. However for those people who suffer from AIDS or HIV, it is not nice to their health information being release out to public. It is worse that if the victim is a famous star or a country minister. In banking, I will be worst if the credit card information is being stolen. The hacker can just do what ever they want using your credit card information and thinking about your address or telephone number is being release on the internet or to the public, it won’t be nice.

Conclusion
After doing all this research, I found out that the impact of computer crime is not just on the business only. They do also impact our normal daily’s life, the impact do the company is that they lost the data and the company lost their trust from their customer and lost their reputation. Image and reputation is important for a company or organization and even us. Who likes to live up with a bad name or spoilt reputation where other people will look down or keep saying bad things on you? I really don’t understand that why do people keep doing all this hacking. If they really hate the company so much just join their rival company and perform better than the company is a much more useful way. Oh maybe is the rival company ask a hacker to hack into the company >”< (haha, just guessing don’t sue me)


Development of Cancer research
Contributed by: Deny

Introduction
Cancer is a kind of diseases in which a group of cells display the traits of uncontrolled growth, invasion (intrusion on and destruction of adjacent tissues), and sometimes metastasis (spread to other part of the body via lymph or blood). Cancer can be caused by tobacco smoke, radiation, chemicals, and infectious agents. Adult and children also can get Cancer if they do not practise a good and healthy lifestyle in their dailylife. According to American Cancer Society, about 7.6 million people died from cancer in the world during year 2007. Some sign & symptoms of this disease are unusual lumps (tumor), weight loss, enlarged of lymph nodes, and many more. Cancer categorised by type and its stages. The highest the stages, the patient cannot be cured from cancer. I did not know that Cancer is one of the most dangerous disease in the world.

Resource Used
American Cancer Society. (2008,May,08). "Study better defines risks of smoking, benefits of quitting for woman." Retrieved May 20, 2008 from World Wide Web: http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_1_1x_Study_Better_Defines_Risks_of_Smoking_Benefits_of_Quitting_for_Women.asp

Summary of Resources
In this article, Research shown that the risk of smoking and the benefit of the quitting smoking for woman. current smokers have a greater risk of death compare to those woman who never smoke before. The risk increases with the number of the cigarettes smoked per day. Women who still smoked were more than 20 times more likely to die of lung cancer than those who didn’t smoke, while former smokers were about 5 times more likely to die from it. Current smokers also had a 63% increased risk of dying from colorectal cancer compared with never smokers. Former smokers had a 23% increased risk. The researchers suggest this data should help sound the alarm to direct more attention towards developing school tobacco prevention programs and enforcing laws to keep cigarettes out the hands of kids.

Conclusion
After I read this article in the website, The danger of Cancer is very significant to the existence of the human being. There are many types of Cancer beside lung cancer and colorectal cancer that stated in the article or resources above. I agreed to a certain extent that smoking cause cancer. I saw there are people who smoke can still alive until age of 80 plus and they do not have any health problem when they are smoking for many years. However, the the smoke of the cigarettes is very dangerous for those who never smoke. I agreed the tobacco preventions programs and enforcing laws to keep cigarettes out the hands of kids should be carried out in Singapore also as smoking is bad for your health. We need to practise More and more a good and healthy lifestyle so that we do no need have any health problems or chronic diseases in older days. With these, we can avoid the pain and the suffering of the diseases!. God bless!