Binura Gunasekera

Health and Safety Guide for Laptop Users

As an IBT student at North Park, learning how to work with efficiency and care is essential to being successful at North Park. How do you work with efficiency and care? Here are two answers, one for parents and one for students. A student can be efficient when they try not to leave things until the very last moments prior the due date. This is a very common habit however; it is very unhealthy when some thought is given. Many students will disrupt their normal resting routine and break their sleep patterns. Not only is this so, but, many students will stay seated for a very long time on these days. Not only do most IBT students spend approximately 4hours on their computer on the normal day, however, when they go home they expose their mind to social media. This MASSIVE waste of time will at least expend one hour of a persons time. In addition to this there are students who play games as well. All this time spent staring at a laptop can be harmful to your eyes and body. On top of this there are many homework assignments that are assigned everyday guaranteed. A student will try to procrastinate and last-minute everything and thus fail to maintain their healthy active lifestyle. To expand on the point of harmful to your eyes and body, the body is affected heavily by the way you sit at your desk (if you students even sit at desks whilst working). There is a way an individual is supposed to sit at a desk while working. This is called ergonomic sitting. What is this? Well, ergonomic sitting is the healthiest way to sit. It reduces strain in many parts of the body. It requires your feet to be flat on the floor, a 90 degree back to leg angle, 90 degree forearm-top arm angle, and your eyes to be slightly looking down at your monitor (20degree angle, also refer to last link and image. Now there is much more to this however those are the basic points, many injuries can be a result of the way you sit. They include, lower back pain, eyestrain, sore wrists (I am currently suffering from this) and much more. As anyone can reckon, every single person that will be coming here, will not be sitting this way. Most people are hunched over and staring right at a very bright screen. However, just because someone sits ergonomically at their desk, doesnt mean it is healthy to stay seated for 10-11 hours. Studies even show that people who sit for more around 11hours each day have a 40% more chance of dying than people who sit from 4-8. This is a very dramatic increase of death chance just from a mere three bonus hours of sitting at a desk. Aside from death, it allows foods to be unused and be stored as fat. Many students dont bother exercising either. Whatever happened to You NEED to play, and hour a day!? However going back to the topic how does this relate to efficiency? Many people when trying to procrastinate and do something last minute are obviously stressed out and take more breaks

Binura Gunasekera in between their work session. Say they need to type an essay that takes 2hours; this person would take around 5. The problem is your concentration is being taken over by boredom and stress that you need to occupy yourself with something else. This something else can be as simple as a snack or playing a game and of course the most common one, checking your Facebook for 5 minutes. As a parent, the best way to help your child out is to always check in on what their school is introducing. This can include tests, assignments that need to finished etc. This is crucial because, then a parent can take the responsibility of splitting set task into parts and making it much more manageable. For example: There is a ten page report that you must do, the parents responsibility is to take 15 minutes of their day back from work to organize the students work for them (into equal parts, and no not two halves). This way the student can set a goal as to, what should be finished when. This way the student will have a healthy sleep cycle that is not flying all over the place and be finished with their work in advance. This extra time they have before the due date should be used to edit their works to even more so enhance the quality of their assignments. Another tactic to help your children stay ready for school is to; always check on what they are doing in their free time. Why? Well many students make the mistake (yes it is a mistake) of going on to social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. The environment to which teenagers are exposed to on these websites is very awkward and inappropriate. Due to the air of these websites students will often have the habit of behaving in similar ways and using vulgar language to communicate in and out of class. Many students will also post inappropriate content onto these websites. These things can never be retrieved once it has been put out there, thus once you make a mistake it will come back someday to haunt you. There are several stories of people applying for jobs and being unable to get jobs (despite their being very successful) because of their history on social media. That is right, employers check these things before hiring someone. However, it is not just these horrendous social media websites that are engraving mature content into the innocent minds of children but the movies as well. There are countless students who watch adult rated content without their parents consent. This is ridiculous and can leave horrible scars on a childs life. Moreover many games that students play in the current time such as GTA V or Call of Duty have very mature content inside of it. Both are Rated M games. This means that a person should not be exposed to games of this nature until they are 17. These games have lots of cursing, gore, and in GTA V there is even prostitution. So, please parents check in on your children every now and then and help them. Thank you very much for reading this article.

Binura Gunasekera

Staying Safe Online Cyberbullying

This section is extremely important. If you dont read the two pages prior at least read this. Cyberbullying is a massive problem for all people that live in this world. Whether you are a girl or boy, or a teenager or adult it does not matter. This can push someone on the verge of committing suicide. 1 in 10 children tell their parents that they have been a victim of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying happens when an individual decides to post something negative or derogatory to someone else. This can include an embarrassing video, or picture or even an edited picture. These pictures can be posted on social media hotspots to which many school peers can view this false content. These posts can demoralize children and make them less social, and much less socially accepted. Everyone is self-conscious all the time, they want to please others and not to be thought bad of. This is applies to every single thing a person does varying from, what they wear, their jokes and anything they say or even how they look physically. There are two ways to stay safe online. Never trash talk anyone or post any derogatory images or text directed to anyone. This is how you remain a civil person. If you post any filth about someone, you just look a massive scumbag, unless you are that popular person at school. Why do these popular people get away with everything? Well people do not dare to oppose what they say, it all breaks down to what people think about you. If you say the clique leaders dress is hideous, then you will be ridiculed. However what if you get trash-talked? The best way to handle this is to talk to an adult about this and get some help. Once again everyone has problems with this. What does this break down to again? It breaks down to what people think about you. Many students are scared to be called a snitch or a wussy. These are just terms used by the foolish high-school community. However simply put, they are words that refer to a tattle-tale and a scared person. Back to the point, when students do not report to someone of higher authority, this problem will persist for a very long time, perhaps their entire high-school life? If only it was just for your high-school life. These nasty posts about you are things that youve said can never be permanently eradicated from the cyberspace realm. Thus, these things can be seen many, many, many years after it has been posted. Take the Star Wars Kid for example. The video that his friends posted of him using a golf ball collector as a lightsaber, was posted on YouTube. After a lawsuit it was demanded that it was taken off YouTube. What happened afterwards? Was the legacy of the Star Wars Kid eradicated? No, it wasnt sadly. The video can still be seen whenever you wish to on YouTube. Why is this, wasnt it deleted? Of course the video maker clearly deleted it, however someone who thought it was hilarious could have taken it

Binura Gunasekera and edited it. There are many examples of this all over YouTube. There is even one where there is a trailer using him. So think before you post and always inform an adult if you run into a problem on the internet. Here is a very nice acronym which should be taken into thought prior to any posts. Never give any explicit pictures to anyone, let alone posting. This is actually the number one rule to safety on the internet. If the popular girl at school hates you, I highly doubt that she would give your pictures and address to a pedophile, most likely she would threaten you with this picture. When you post something on the internet as stated above it cannot be retrieved form every person on the Earth, ever. Therefore if you post something that is well not normal and reveals any sort of private areas they can be accessed by everyone in the world. Why is this? Well lets say you took a nude picture of yourself and posted it on your Facebook. Now lets also say you have your settings set to have nobody aside from specific people such as your friends see these pictures. These friends have access to your nude pictures and can do whatever they wish with them. Yes you had your settings set perfectly secure, however the people whom have access to this trash can post it wherever they wish. These kinds of pictures appeal to many kinds of people who you never want to meet (cough cough* pedo). However there is one more point to this topic, it is directly giving these pictures to someone. This is very insecure and just as stupid as well but, in a sense it is much better than the previous choice. In this procedure you give away these explicit pictures to just one person and they make the choice that will decide your future. Take Amanda Todd for example. This was an extremely moving and tragic story. She was essentially a lone wolf who had no friends. She was desperately looking for friends online through webcam and such. Whilst her, what was supposed to be wonderful friend finding journey, she met a certain individual. This individual was very flattering and somehow convinced Amanda to show him a nude picture of herself. Sure enough though reluctantly, she sent him a picture. That picture was what ruined her life, and slowly dragged her to her inevitable death. After having received the pictures from Amanda, he blackmailed her and told her to put on a show for him. She declined, and as a result her nude picture was everywhere on Facebook. No matter how many times she moved schools, her one mistake came back to push her down to the depths of sadness. She was beaten, used for sexual favours and then eventually pushed into suicide. Chewed up, spit out and trampled on. This is the life that leads for those who cant keep private parts private. Once you lend this picture to someone, its their decision if they want to give that picture over to their buddies, and it suddenly becomes their decision if they want to hand this picture over to other people, with much worse intentions.

Binura Gunasekera

A message to parents: To make incidents like these happen to a minimum amount, it is a must that you take the initiative and leadership to check in on your childs Cyber Status every now and then. Why is this crucial? This is necessary to keep your children safe from predators on the internet. This is also essential to ensure that your child is not being an internet jock. Which simply put means, a bully on the internet. Everyone should refrain from using derogatory phrases and MOST DEFINITELY refrain from spreading any private images. Do not interpret this message in a different way than intended, no do not stalk everything your children do, just monitor what they do every now and then.

A message to students: Do not be a loser on social media. Just because you are behind the screens of your laptops, does not mean that it is permitted to post filth directed to any individual. This mentality will help you to not get beat up in school. What if it was me? This is something that nobody ever thinks of when they post something or say something. Also if one person is getting harassed on the internet and you are just sitting there and typing lol, omg in the comments, then please do not breed, at all. It does not help to stand there and read the drama feed. Go and tell an adult immediately, what would you do if it was you? If some loser was harassing you and all the bystanders were doing was laughing at what the bully was saying. Help someone out, and inform an adult. Thank you for reading this article.

Worms, Ponies and Viruses

The world is becoming more and more advanced every day. This includes security systems, people, technology, software, hardware and sadly, viruses. As security systems and patches become more and more effective, viruses must find ways around these massive walls to get into other peoples computer. There are three different types of malicious software that can intrude your computer. The first piece of malicious software, being a worm. A worm is something that gets into your computer after having sleuthed passed your security system and corrupts all kinds of stored data. What a worm does that none of these other examples do are, travel into other devices that are linked to the infected device and corrupt their data as well. This is devastating if the computer that gets effected is connected in a network. In addition to this, if this computer that is infected gives any files over to any other device via anything, the retrieving device will become infected. The second type of malicious software is a Trojan horse. What does a Trojan horse do? Well it disguises itself as harmless software or a random software and sneaks into your PC. What

Binura Gunasekera happens right after that is the person that executed the program (Trojan Pony is an executable program) can get full control over your device and corrupt all sorts of data. The final kind of malicious software that I will talk about is called a virus. A virus is essentially the same thing as a worm aside from the fact that it does not spread onto other devices unless a file transfer is made. Viruses can hitch a ride on software you download, or it can sneak past your firewall. Quite obviously any one of these three things getting into your PC can really suck. Therefore you must take lots of precautious action to prevent the malicious software from intruding your PC. Here are three tips that can help you stay safe from worms, ponies and viruses. When opening any E-Mail attachment, ALWAYS scan it for viruses. This is a very common way for viruses to enter your computer. This is a very common way because, you never second guess your friends. If your friend sent you and e-mail saying Funny video watch this and it had an attachment, you wouldnt think your friend put in a virus in that attachment. This is obviously because your friend wouldnt do that anyways, its because their computer is infected and they gave you an infected file. So always scan your attachments. Always keep your patches up to date. This is crucial to keeping safe on your computer. Patches are pretty much self-explanatory. They patch any holes in security systems or fix any bugs and mistakes that are present in the programming. Therefore, if your patches are not up to date, viruses can easily get access into your PC files without any trouble. This is because your firewall is weak and outdated by the ever progressing viruses that are out there. To stay on top in this game you must keep everything updated including your patches and your security systems. The last tip to staying safe from viruses and such are to always keep your virus scanner up to date. In addition to keeping firewalls and patches up to date, keep your virus scanner is just as important. This is because you are relying on your virus scanner to aid your firewall in detaining these (if you will) criminals. If you are using a ghetto virus scanner to try find high-tech modern viruses, the viruses will just get right past. Thank you for reading this article.

Binura Gunasekera

Citations + Bibliography
(Visit these links for more info on all the subtopics)
For more information on Amanda Todd, visit this link: Suicide of Amanda Todd." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 27 Mar. 2014. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd> For more bullying statistics visit this link: Cyber Bullying Statistics." - Bullying Statistics. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2014. <http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/cyber-bullying-statistics.html>. For more information on the Star Wars Kid visit this link: Star Wars Kid." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar. 2014. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Kid> For more information on THINK visit this link: talinorfali." talinorfali. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. <http://talinorfali.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/social-media-awareness-t-h-i-n-k-the-acronym-that-stoodout/> Picture Citations: A Simple Acronym For Encouraging Digital Citizenship." TeachThought. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2014. <http://www.teachthought.com/technology/a-simple-acronym-for-encouraging-digital-citizenship/>. Menu." Say Be And. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014. <http://saybeand.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/why-soinsecure/>. Office Chairs : How to reduce back pain, Top Six Guidelines for Office Chair Setup." MebelKart Blog. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014. <http://blog.mebelkart.com/office-chairs-how-to-reduce-back-pain-top-sixguidelines-for-office-chair-setup/>. Top disease-spreading airports in the U.S.." SmartPlanet. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014. <http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/rethinking-healthcare/top-disease-spreading-airports-in-theus/9588?tag=nl.e660>. Temple Sinai, North Miami Beach, FL - Jacobson Sinai Academy." Temple Sinai, North Miami Beach, FL - Jacobson Sinai Academy. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014. <http://www.tsnd.org/education/academy/>. For more information on ergonomics please visit this website: http://www.workriteergo.com/ergonomics/overview http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=a00261 information on GTA V and its content visit this link: http://www.esrb.org/ratings/synopsis.jsp?Certificate=33073 information on job terminations through online presence on social media visit this link http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/26/fired-over-facebook-posts_n_659170.html of Ergonomic Sitting and more information on ergonomic sitting.

For more For more Here is a diagram

http://blog.mebelkart.com/office-chairs-how-to-reduce-back-pain-top-six-guidelines-for-office-chair-setup/