LESSON 1: THE INFORMATION AGE

INTRODUCTION

 Information is a “knowledge communicated or obtained concerning a specific

fact or circumstance.” (Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary)

INFORMATION AGE

 Defined as “period starting in the last quarter of the 20th century when
information became effortlessly accessible through publications and through
the management of information by computers and computer networks”
(Vocabulary.com, n.d.).

 Means of conveying symbolic information (e.g., writing math, other codes) has
evolved.

 Also called as the Digital Age and the New Media Age.

TIMELINE OF THE INFORMATION AGE:

 3000 BC - Sumerian writing system used pictographs to represent words.

 2900 BC - Beginnings of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
 1300 BC - Tortoise shell and oracle bone writing.
 500 BC - Papyrus roll was used
 220 BC - Chinese small seal writing was developed.
 100 AD - Book (parchment codex)
 105 AD - Woodblock printing and paper was invented by the Chinese.
 1455 - Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press using movable metal
type.
 1755 - Samuel Johnson’s dictionary standardize English spelling.
 1802 - The Library of Congress was established.
- Invention of the carbon arc lamp.
 1824 - Research on persistence of vision was published.
 1830s - First viable design for a digital computer.
- Augusta Lady Byron writes the world’s first computer program.
 1861 - Motion pictures were projected onto a screen.
 1837 - Invention of the telegraph in Great Britain and the United Sates.
 1876 - Dewey Decimal system was introduced.
 1877 - Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated high-speed photography.
 1899 - First magnetic recordings were released.
 1902 - Motion picture special effects were released.
 1906 - Lee DeForest invented the electronic amplifying tube (triode).
 1923 - Television camera tube was invented by Zvorkyn.
 1926 - First practical sound movie.
 1939 - Regularly scheduled television broadcasting began in the US.

 1940s - Beginnings of information science as a discipline.

  1945 - Vannevar Bush foresaw the invention of hypertext.
 1946 - ENIAC computer was developed.
 1948 - Birth of field-of-information theory proposed by Claude E. Shannon.
 1957 - Planar transistor was developed by Jean Hoerni.
 1958 - First integrated circuit.
 1960s - Library of Congress developed LC MARC (machine-readable code).
 1969 - UNIX operating system was developed, which could handle
multitasking.
 1971 - Intel introduced the first microprocessor chip.
 1972 - Optical laserdisc was developed by Philips and MCA.
 1974 - MCA and Philips agreed on a standard videodisc encoding format.
 1975 - Altair Microcomputer Kit was released.
- First personal computer for the public.
 1977 - RadioShack introduced the first complete personal computer.
 1984 - Apple Macintosh computer was introduced.
 Mid 1980s - Artificial intelligence was separated from information science.
 1987 - HyperCard was developed by Bill Atkinson recipe box metaphor.
 1991 - Four hundred fifty complete works of literature on one CD-ROM was
released.
 January 1997 - RSA (encryption a network security software) Internet
security code cracked for a 48-bit number.

TAKE NOTE:

 Starting in 1960s and 1970s - it was difficult to collect and manage

information.

 1980s - Richard Wurman called it “Information Anxiety”

 1990s - information became the currency in the business world.

Some facts about information age on the article “The Truths of the
Information Age’’ by Robert Harris:

 Information must compete.

 Newer is equated to be truer.

 Selection is a viewpoint.

 The media sells what the culture buys.

 The early word gets the perm.

 You are what you eat so is your brain.

 Anything in great demand will be counterfeited.

 Ideas are seen as controversial.

  Undead information walks ever on.

 Media presence creates the story.

 The medium selects the message.

 The whole truth is a pursuit.

COMPUTER

 The greatest contribution in the information age to our society.

 It provides us an easy access to different information we needed.
 It is an electronic device that stores and processes data (information).
 It runs on a program that contains the exact, step-by-step directions to solve a
problem (UShistory.org, 2017).

TYPES OF COMPUTERS

1. Personal Computer
- it can be changed and customized in settings.
- store or personalize your computer just by changing its setting.

2. Desktop Computer
- small version of computers.
- it is located in a particular or permanent spot.
- most desktops offer more storage, power and versatility than their portable
versions.

3. Laptops
- it is more portable than your personal and desktop computers.
- it is essential thing to those office people.
- are commonly called notebooks.

4. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)

- a full screen object and touchscreen at the same time.
- are typically smaller than a paperback, lightweight, and battery-powered.
- Example: Cellphones and Tablets

5. Server
- refers to a computer that usually provide network services to other
computers.
- it usually boosts with powerful processor, ton of memory and large hard
drives to support the other computers.

6. Mainframes
- huge computers that can fill an entire room.
- is used by a large firm that processes a million of transactions every day.
 - The term “mainframe” was replaced as enterprise server.
- Some supercomputers are single computer systems, most comprise
multiple, high-performance, parallel computers working as a single system.
- Examples: Computers in NASA or PAGASA

7. Wearable Computer
- involve materials that are integrated into small objects or places.
- performs common computer applications such databases, email, multimedia
and schedulers.
- Examples: Smartphones and Smart watches

THE WORLD WIDE WEB (INTERNET)

CLAUDE A. SHANNON

 American Mathematician who was considered as a "Father of Information

Theory".

 He worked at Bell Laboratories at the age 32.

 He published a paper proposing that information can be quantitatively

encoded as a sequence of ones and zeroes.

INTERNET

 is a worldwide system of interconnected networks that facilitate data

transmission among innumerable computers.

 it was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense.

 In the early days, the internet was used mainly by scientist to communicate
with another scientist.

 The internet remained under government control until 1984 (Rouse, 24).

 Speed was the early problem used by the Internet users.

 Fiber-optic cables - allowed for billions of bits of information to be received

every minute.

 Companies like Intel developed faster microprocessor.

SERGEY BRIN and LARRY PAGE

 Directors of research project

 Built a search engine that listed results to reflect page popularity.

 They launched their company in 1998.

 Google is now the world’s most popular search engine, accepting more than
200 million queries daily.

NEW FORMS OF COMMUNICATION

 Electronic mail or email was a suitable way to send a message to fellow

workers, business partner, or friends.

 Internet service providers like America Online and ComputerServe set up

electronic chatrooms.

 ‘’Surfing the Internet" became a pastime in and of itself.

CONSEQUENCES:

 The current Information Age has spawned its owned breed of wealthy
influential brokers, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Apple's Steve Jobs to
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

 Internet created a technological divide that increased the gap between the
members of the higher class and lower class.

 The unregulated and loose nature of Internet allowed pornography to be

broadcast to millions of homes.

 Cyberbullying and crimes in various forms are rampant.

APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

 Bioinformatics - the application of information technology to store, organize,

and analyze vast amount of biological data.

 1986 - The development of consolidated formal data was initiated also known
as SWISS-PROT protein sequence database.
  Computers and software are widely used for generating these databases.

Some of the software tools which is handy in the analysis include:

 Blast - used for comparing sequence

 Annotator - an interactive genome analysis tool

 GeneFinder - tool to identify coding regions and splices sites.

 The sequence information generated by human genome research, initiated in

1988 has been stored as a primary information source for future applications
in medicine.

 If the data is compiled in books it would run into 200 volumes of 1,000
pages each. Reading alone would require 26 years working around the
clock.

 Complete human genome sequence

– formally announced on 26th of June 2000.
- involved more than 500x1018 (500 million trillion) calculations during
the process of resembling the sequence alone.

 Bioinformatics from the pharmaceutical industry’s point of view is the key

to the rational drug discovery.

 Pharmacogenomics
- new area in pharmacology
- potential targets for drug development are hypothesized from genome
sequence.

 Molecular Modeling – has become faster due to the advances of computer

processors and its architecture.

 Plant biotechnology - bioinformatics is found to be useful in the areas of

identifying disease resistance genes and designing plants with high
nutrition value.

HOW TO CHECK THE RELIABILITY OF WEB SOURCES?

1. Who is the author of the article/site?

2. Who published the site?
- Check the domain name of the site.
Examples:
.edu = educational
.com = commercial
.gov = government
.org =nonprofit

3. What is the main purpose of the site? Why did the author write it and why did the
publisher post it?

4. What is the intended audience?

5. What is the quality of information provided on the website?

EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE WEB SOURCES

1. AFA e-Newsletter (Alzheimer’s Foundation of America newsletter)

2. American Memory
- the Library of Congress historical digital collection.

3. Bartleby.com Great Books

- collection of free ebooks including fictions, nonfictions, references, and verses.

4. Chronicling America
- search and view pages from American newspapers from 1880-1992.

5. Cyber Bullying
- free collections of e-books from ebrary.
- additional reports and documents to help better understand, prevent and
take action against this growing concern.

6. Drug information websites:

 National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus
 Drugs.com
 PDRhealth

7. Global Getaway; World Culture & Resources

8. Google Books

9. Googlescholar.com
10. History sites with primary documents;

 AMDOCS - documents for the study of American history

 Avalon Project - documents in law, history and diplomacy (Yale Law School)
 Internet Modern History Sourcebook - Colonial Latin America
 Teacher Oz’s Kingdom of History

11. Illinois Digital Archives

- provides collections of materials related to Illinois history.

12. Internet Archive

- a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

13. Internet Archive for CARLI digitized resources

14. Internet Public Library

15. ipl2
- merger of Librarians’ Internet Index and Internet Public Library.
- may include the “Literary Criticisms” page which can be found after clicking
on the “Special Collections” link.

16. Librarians’ Internet Index

17. Making of America

- a digital library of primary sources in American social history.

18. Maps
- from the University of Texas at Austin collection.
- Includes historical and thematic maps.

19. NationMaster
- a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare
nations.
- a vast compilation of data fro such sources as the CIA World Factbook, UN,
and OECD.

20. Nursing Sites

 AHRQ
 National Guidelines Clearinghouse
 PubMed

21. Project Gutenberg

- the first and largest single collection of free electronic books.
- 20,000 ebooks are currently available.

22. Shmoop
- literature, US history, and poetry information written primarily by PhD and
masters students from top universities like Standford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale.

23. StateMaster
- unique statistical database
- allows to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states
using various primary such as the US Census Bureau, the FBI, and the
 National Center for Educational Statistics.
- uses visualization technology like pie charts, maps, graphs, and scatter plots
to provide data.

24. Virtual Reference

- selected web resources compiled by the Library of Congress.