GPR stands for guaranteed packaged received. It is a way to achieve assurance from online shopping. It will have a huge impact to the people who usually have a hard time when receiving packages. People will receive an address perfect for their orders. Once an address is approved the person will have the opportunity how to receive their packaged which can be either delivery or pick up. Through the app, they have access to pick up their package whenever they want as long, they desire. It works also for people who tend to travel a lot who do not have a set schedule to have their packages delivered. This service comes with a $10 monthly fee and it can automatically connect to your email, so it grabs your orders quickly with no hassle. People will have the reinsurance of their package being delivered. There would be no more packages being turned away for wrong information. Unlike your Amazon Lockers or UPS Lockers, packages will be delivered to a secure home no matter the size and weight. Plenty of people will benefit from this app. Elderly people who unfortunately do not have help such as a helping aid can have the packages delivered to them. People who do not have a stable home, for example, those who are unfortunately are in shelters need a place to send their stuff. Then residents living in neighborhoods that do not have a doorman or theft is in occurrence. Due to COVID-19 plenty of people lost their job, one can even get paid for using their home as an address for people to deliver their packages and holding the packages or get paid to deliver the packages. During this pandemic the number of online shoppers rose to 60%. Everyone should get what they paid for no matter what, delivery Carriers have a tendency of damage packages or misplaced packages. According to a 2019 study by Cluth, plenty of people want to do online shopping but are scared of getting packages lost or damaged since that as well has rose to 51%. Then in the reading by Business Insider, New York City is one of the major cities that has 15% of online shopping packages that never make it to the shoppers. As well as 25 million dollars lost on goods and services. In the article by KENS 5, there is this thing called delivery schemes, in which people will go by as shipping carriers like FEDEX or UPS and text the person to notify them of their upcoming packages. In this case it is fake, FEDEX and UPS released a letter saying to no believe those text message it is just a new way to steal packages.  I have found a similar website that does what GPR is delivering. It is called Manhattan Mail Room, where one pays a low as $30 for a mailbox per month but it is not available all the seven days of the week and it is only during business hours. Unlike Manhattan Mail Room all GPR just needs is an contact information and proof of identity no hassle for extra documents such as proof of address.

https://pr.to/189TMO/

FIND YOUR SMILE

It’s been said that “laughter is the best form of medicine” and I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment; which is why the concept of my final is an app called Find Your Smile, a humor app used to combat the start of a depressive episode with comedy and laughter. Studies have suggested that laughter positively affects our mental health by reducing stress hormones and releasing dopamine into the brain. When first using the app, the user would be asked to describe their sense of humor; based on the response, the app will try its best to recommend the appropriate jokes, videos, memes, and forums for their enjoyment. Find Your Smile would pick up on a person’s demeanor and once it notices a drastic change within a few days, the app would spring into action by spamming your device with humorous suggestions. Find Your Smile would also allow users to meet and connect with others that could be experiencing the same issues, insecurities, or hardships as the user- who knows, that user could be that support system that other person needed at the time.  And if the user felt as if their episode was getting worse, then they would be able to chat anonymously with someone experienced in the mental health field for counseling, advice, or just to let everything out, via the app at any time. Should the app notice that there still has not been any improvement in mood, a notification- either text, phone call, email, or all three, will be sent to personal contacts (even if the app is not installed on their phone) that the user communicates with frequently to notify them of the user’s drastic change in behavior and will continue to update those contacts as the app continues to track the user’s mood and demeanor. Upon knowing the user’s state of mind, the app can not be deleted if it believes that the user has fallen further into depression, as a safety measure.  The app functions as a pal network that lends a hand to people that are manifesting and increasing the severity of depression symptoms by helping that person laugh more often or connect to crisis intervention or psych treatment. After all, if apps can measure vital signs then an app should be allowed to track and monitor behavior and activity.

Since the height of COVID-19 there has been a surge of substance abuse and as of September 2020 depression rates have tripled and although there is no evidence of suicide rates spiking during the pandemic, suicide idealization did rise according to an August 2020 article on healthline.com. As the virus continues to plague society, it is expected that mental health issues including depression, anxiety, PTSD, substance abuse, and possibly suicide will continue to rise.  An app like Find Your Smile is a small intervention for those negative thoughts and feelings and helps users discover laughter as a coping mechanism during their depressive episodes and perhaps give users a newfound strength they didn’t have before.  The app also allows for communication amongst all users in a positive and supportive manner, twenty-four-hour availability to speak with a mental health specialist anonymously,  and a notification feature to inform those who are frequently in contact with the user to check on them and intervene before its too late, without those contacts having to download the app.

For those prone to major depressive episodes, an app like this would benefit them greatly as laughter causes changes to the brain. The idea of the app also may seem like an invasion of privacy but if it can help change someone’s mood or even save their life then it may be worth the lack of privacy. 

Although, there is no cure for depression, the goal is to put a smile back on people’s faces and to ensure that their tears are from laughter and not sadness. As the great philosopher Blues Traveler said, “A pocket is no place for a smile anyway…” 

 I wanted to create an app that will help resolve the solid waste pollution seen in the world, Milieu is an app that has the answer to help solve this in any part of the world. Milieu’s purpose is to persuade users around the globe to clean up heavily polluted areas around their city to make their neighborhoods cleaner and more beautiful. 

The app will alert its users once a polluted area has been marked in which the user will appear at the area and take a photo of the marked trash being thrown away. Once the area has been cleaned up, users will mark the now cleaned location and submit their photo as proof before anything else. A Milieu team member will approve the photo if it seems as though everything is in check, once the approval is given the user will receive points for their efforts which can later be redeemed for cash and coupons for small businesses in their area in the future once a lot of points are redeemed. The app was once called CNYC but after a demo and a variety of feedbacks, I decided it was time for an update which resulted in more features, better prizes and best part, it’s now global. The global features allows the app to be used all over the world and not just major cities. We have seen the ways in which the world has drastically changed due to pollution, I believed it was best for the app to be available all over the world which can increase a chance in investors and decrease the pollution rate in the world. As mentioned before, the app now has an added feature, similar to other social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter where we can connect with other people and remain in contact with family and friends, it made sense to add this feature for your neighbors. Milieu now has a profile feed where you can follow and gain followers with other users especially with those that live in the same neighborhood as you. This feature gives users a chance to chat within each other about their neighborhoods cleanliness and allows them to work together to keep everything in check. 

This app is very important because it has potential to reduce solid waste pollution in the city. Pollution is a very heavy topic that has been brought up many times due to the increase in global warming which continues to reduce the amount of life the earth has. But I believe the creation of this app will not only bring people together to make the earth a cleaner place but it also has the ability to restore hope and trust that the world will survive. The app Milieu is the first step into the right direction to make this a possibility while also being fun, users will get to experience cleaning in a new/technological way which hasn’t been seen by many. We will get to make a difference with the simple use of technology.

https://pr.to/RIJ1B0/

Bellow is a PDF of my writing but in IEEE format

Michael Li Final

Bellow, is a link to my project

https://pr.to/BC375A/

My project is a way to allow for other people to feel what other people are feeling during times of hardship. For example, the original concept of the app was based on helping people and animals through natural disasters that destroyed their homes. The second part of the app is to help those whose businesses are near bankruptcy. So a small Business such as Alex’s Toy Store can come to this site and use it to maybe stay a float for a bit longer. Obviously it is more complicated than this but the gist of it is, if a business is near bankruptcy, they can ask their fans for a bit of help. 

They can ask for help in three ways, one way is through donation. People who really love a store might donate to them simply out of kindness. Another way of supporting small businesses is by lending money with zero return. In other words, the lenders are giving money to the business that the business will one day return in one of two ways. Either the business gives the money back or the business gives credit back the lenders can use in their store. The third way and most effective way this app can help is by investing. This way, the lenders can give money to the business and the lenders will have some sort of extra. The reason why I decided to keep this is because this seems to be a win win situation for both parties. The business attracts more people than they would have if they didn’t have a returns option but also, the lenders can make sure their favorite business isn’t going to go bankrupt. 

The people who will use this are everyday people, because it is for everyone. We all go to some type of small business if we know it is a small business or not. So in quarantine, one can search up if their favorite comic book store is going to shut down or not. It can also be used by people who want to make sure their favorite cake store is going to survive. The only people that I think of who will fall through the cracks are very new businesses. They’re the unfortunate losers of the situation because they don’t have any recognition. If I randomly saw a Chipotle store asking for help, I’m gonna think it’s a scam and I wouldn’t want to help. This is despite the fact that it might actually be a new store, it is just hurt by the pandemic.

I did present this to my cousin and asked him what he thought of the project that I specifically told him to picture his favorite store almost closing and how he would feel about it. He told me that he would 100% use this app to help out the stores because it looks like something he could definitely benefit from. He really likes Cheesecake Factory and A LOT of stores closed due to CoronaVirus. This isn’t a small business but it is a good example. Before the pandemic, there were a total of 295 stores, but since the pandemic started, only 187 of those stores are still open for business. My cousin told me that he really liked the idea because now he can pay 100 dollars and have that 100 dollars be worth 100 dollars plus the interest. He said that if he had the app and if it were legit, he would have been able to donate the money and more stores could potentially have been kept open. I never understood what was so great about this place. 

Some people might wonder why this would be successful or how this will do when competing against sites like Patreon or GoFundMe. The Biggest difference is that this app draws everything together that one is involved in. If my cousin donated to both Cheesecake Factory and Economy Candy, there is a feed that allows him to make sure his money is going to great use and to see updates on the store. But there is also the money making aspect of it, Those who invest their money can make a significant return. Places like Patreon and GoFundMe don’t have this part. This app can also rely on ADs to make money and support itself. Kind of like how Youtube forces ADs on the homepage, this app will force targeted ADs based on people’s searches.

This app is really based off of Twitter and twitter does something unique that not many other apps are not as effective in doing- it is live connections. Like twitch, people can join the site and see what the latest games being played are, with twitter, people can log on to see what drama the Beauty Community has gotten themselves into this time. It is fresh and people can interact with the ensuing chaos. They can make their mark in time. As stated by Business News, the creation of the hashtag search made is possible for people to engage themselves in a single situation. If I search up beauty community drama, I would only be surrounded with the drama in the Beauty Community. This is similar to my app in the sense that people are able to interact in real time with other people and businesses. I think that this interaction that made twitter popular would make this app popular. Of course, I don’t know if it actually will.

This is the second part of my project, i am unable to share my first part because i have to pay. Anyway, this is just a continuation and I already share with you guys the first part, Comments and criticism is welcome

Article I used:  https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7488-twitter-for-business.html

One way in which we are becoming interconnected with technology biologically is the way we now rely on our devices to pick up the slack of our own memories; to store them in a database and also remind us. If you were to ask a random person how many of the contacts on their phone they have memorized, it’d be less than 10. Personally, I only know my direct family members’ phone numbers strictly from memory but for everyone else’s number I’ve relied on iCloud to keep that data stored for me. Similar to ‘dry data’ that is mentioned by Eugene Thacker, which are files in a database. He also mentions, “…The greatest achievement of biotechnics would not be the transformation of all life into machines, but the resurrection of life that is perfected biology, more biological than the biological itself, the redemption of biology…” which I think is what the age of AI is for us today; the redemption of biology, and life itself.

Technology has become so essential in today’s world there is no deny how depend we as society has become on the use and advances of technology. If you think about what’s going in the world with the corona virus scientist have claim to have developed a vaccine 95 percent effective in less, then one year. There is no denying that society has reaped the benefits of these technological advances. Technology has played a major part during this time of the pandemic we are able to stay connected with love ones while we quarantine and stay safe I mean during the Spanish flu pandemic can u imagine how hard it must have been to not see or hear from loved ones while trying to remain safe. Each day technology reaches new heights of achievement with an expeditious growth rate that us as humans are having to adapt and grow with these technological advances.

We are becoming more interconnected with technology biologically because we are depending on it as time progresses. We now rely on technology for medicine and there is no possible way we will go backwards, in terms of using passed/outdated technology to help us with medicine. This is how we are interconnected with technology biologically because we now rely on it in terms of our health.

There is obviously no denial that the technology space is growing and will continue to grow over the years. But the way that humans are interconnected technologically is the fact that we have integrated most of the aspects of our lives with technology. The creation of the TV kept us inside our houses and from the movie theatres during the 1950s to the creation of Apple and their list of devices. The IPhone became a staple in our growing society when it came out in 2007. It was interesting to read the article, “An Era of Zoe and Bios? A Conversation with Eugene Tacker” especially with this quote that says “In the end, perhaps we learn that at the core of humanity, to borrow from Žižek, there is something rather “inhuman”; in fact, such a “gap is thus asserted as inherent to humanity itself, as the gap between humanity and its own inhuman excess.”[4]  We might say that we ‘walk the line.’” This quote is interesting to break down because it basically says that we as people tread on this line of humanity and our own accessible values. With the article, “Data Made Flesh” a quote that stuck out to me was “in which notions of “the human” diversify, self-transform, and mutate as rapidly as do new technologies.” This quote is somewhat true because with the advance growth of technology, we as humans try to adapt and grow with these technological progressions.

I think technology is the biggest reason humans can live longer. Because of technology we have the resources and medicine to help cure or help people cope better with a certain ailment they have. For instance how people with missing limbs can have a tougher time than most so prosthetics are there to help them, technology is growing so rapidly that in the near future we might be able to either regenerate certain limbs or create robotic limbs that can make it seem you never had a missing limb (If anyone played Spiderman Ps4 with Otto and Peters research on a arm that would help people with missing limbs, something like that). Ignoring the fact the scientists in that world turn into creatures.

Another example would be right now how doctors and scientists are trying to complete a vaccine on the pandemic that is happening. I think in the grand scheme of things technology is forever expanding to the point it might be scary to some and exciting to others that the limitations of people, animals, etc can be non existent because of technology(i.e humans cant fly- buy a jetpack). I know scientists now are looking at cloning, but what if they are trying to find DNA in animals that can benefit humans. Technology is endless so anything is possible.

I think that the research of genes can be both beneficial to human development but can also be detrimental. For example, the Ted talk specifically talked about very extremes in life- organisms that can live in radiation, sulfuric acids and more significantly, extinctions. With technological advancements, not only are some animals on the brink of extinction saved, but they can also have a few more benefits as well. I can’t help but compare this to GMO (genetically modified organisms). Essentially, certain plants and animals have their DNA changed so that they might have more nutrition than they normally would. Something similar can happen to human beings. If the earth were to be hit with a nuclear warhead, water and land would be riddled with radiation. The current state of human beings can’t really take radiation as shown by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With biological advancements, we could take the DNA of these Archeas (the ones that allow it to survive radiation) and inject into the DNA sequence of our eggs. What is created is a human that is able to sustain radiation. Of course there might need more tests but it is still possible. 

The only downside that I see is that some of these people will have phenotypic differences. GMOs are a foreshadow of this. Some countries have citizens with poor health because their foods are not as nutritious. So biological manipulation of a plant, such as a strawberry, won’t just have potassium and magnesium. With modification, the strawberry might have potassium, magnesium, vitamin D and calcium. Remember, vitamin C and D can help bones but also white blood cells and red blood cells. However, the strawberry might also have a color change. Since vitamins often impose its color on the fruit, adding vitamin C and D might add orange color to it. It might even end up being blue.