SPECIFIC ISSUES IN STS

THE INFORMATION AGE

LESSON OBJECTIVES

01 02 03
At the end of this able to: considered in
lesson, the students • define Information Age; checking website
should be • discuss the history of sources.
Information Age; and
• understand the factors
that need to be
INTRODUCTION

The different areas of

Despite our gains due to
Highly modernized, nowadays, as society have been
the growing development
automated, data-driven, evidenced by how influenced tremendously
of information technology,
and technologically information could be such as communication,
the rapid upgrade of
advanced- these best transferred or shared economics, industry,
information also has
describe our society quickly. health, and the
disadvantages.
environment.
 LIFE IS ACCOMPANIED BY ENDLESS TRANSMISSION ACCORDING TO WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY INFORMATION AGE IS DEFINED AS A “PERIOD
OF INFORMATION THAT TAKES PLACE WITHIN AND INFORMATION IS “KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATED STARTING IN THE LAST QUARTER OF THE 20TH
OUTSIDE THE HUMAN BODY. OR OBTAINED CONCERNING A SPECIFIC FACT OR CENTURY WHEN INFORMATION BECAME
CIRCUMSTANCE.” EFFORTLESSLY ACCESSIBLE THROUGH
PUBLICATIONS AND THROUGH THE MANAGEMENT
OF INFORMATION BY COMPUTERS AND COMPUTER
NETWORKS”

INTRODUCTION
 INTRODUCTION

• The means of conveying symbolic information among humans

has evolved with increasing speed.
• It is also called the Digital Age and the New Media
Age
because it was associated with the development of computers.
• James R. Messenger who proposed the Theory of Information
• Age in 1982, “the
Theprimary Information
factors Age
driving thisis anew
true new
age age forward
based upon
are
the interconnection of computers via telecommunications”.
convenience and user-friendliness which create user
dependence.
 TIMELINE OF THE
INFORMATION AGE
 Year Event
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 were used
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

HISTORY 1455
the Chinese
Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press
using movable metal type
1755 Samuel Johnson’s dictionary standardized English
spelling
1802 The Library of Congress was established
Invention of the carbon arc lamp
1824 Research on persistence of vision published
1830’s First viable design for a digital computer
Augusta Lady Byron writes the world’s first
computer program
 Year Event
1837 Invention of the telegraph in Great Britain and the United
States
1861 Motion pictures were projected onto a screen
1876 Dewey Decimal system was introduced
1877 Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated high-speed
photography
1899 First magnetic recordings were released

HISTORY 1902 Motion picture special effects were used

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
 Year Event
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 For hundred fifty complete works of literature on one CD-ROM was
released
January 1997 RSA(encryption and network security software) Internet security
code cracked for a 48-bit number)
In his article “Truths of the information Age” (n.d.),
Robert Harris detailed some facts on the
Information Age.
• Information must compete.
• Newer is equated with truer.
• Selection is a viewpoint.
• The media sells what the culture buys.
• The early word gets the perms.
• You are what you eat and 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
COMPUTER

Computers are among the processes data

most important (information).
contributions of advances • It runs on a program that contains directions to solve a
in the Information Age to the exact, step-by-step problem (Ushistory.org,
society. 2017)
• A computer is an electronic device
that stores and
TYPES OF COMPUTER

Personal Computer (PC) Mainframes- these are

• Desktop Computer • Server- provide network huge computer systems
• Laptops services to other computers. that can fill an entire
• Personal Digital Assistants room.
(PDAs)-touch screen for user
input • Wearable Computers
THE WORLD WIDE WEB
(INTERNET)
 • Claude E. Shannon- started the origin of the
Internet
THE WORLD • An American Mathematician who was considered
• as the “Father of Information Theory.”
WIDE WEB • He worked at Bell Laboratories and at age 32,
(INTERNET) published a paper proposing that information
can be quantitatively encoded as a sequence
of ones and zeroes.
 • The Internet is a worldwide system of
• interconnected networks that facilitate data
• transmission among innumerable computers.
THE WORLD • It was developed during the 1970s by
the Department of Defense.
WIDE WEB • In early days, the internet was used mainly
(INTERNET) by scientists to communicate with other
scientists.
• The Internet remained under government control
• until 1984 (Rouse, 2014).
 • Sergey Brin and Larry Page- directors of a Stanford
research project, built a search engine that listed
THE WORLD results to reflect page popularity when they
• determined that the most popular result would
WIDE WEB • frequently be the most usable.
• The researchers launched their company in 1998.
(INTERNET) • Google is now the world’s most popular search
engine, accepting more than million queries
daily.
 THE APPLICATION OF
COMPUTERS IN SCIENCE
AND RESEARCH
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

• Bioinformatics- the application of information technology to store,

organize, and analyze vast amount of biological data which is available in
the form of sequences and structures of
• proteins- the building blocks of organisms and nucleic acids-the
• information carrier (Madan,n.d.).
• Early interest in bioinformatics was established because of a
• need to create databases of biological sequences.
• The human brain cannot store all the genetic sequences of organisms
and this huge amount of data can only be stored, analyzed, and be
used efficiently with the use of computers.
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

• Computers and software tools are widely used for generating these
databases and to identify the function of proteins
• model the structure of proteins
• determine the coding (useful) regions of nucleic acid
sequences
• find suitable drug compounds from a large pool
• optimize the drug development process by predicting possible
• targets.
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

• Some of the software tools which are handy in the analysis include
• BLAST (used for comparing sequences)
• Annotator( an interactive genome analysis tool)
• GeneFinder (tool to identify coding regions and splice sites)
• The much-celebrated complete human genome sequence which was formally
announced on the 26th of June 2000 involved more than 500 million trillion
calculations during the process of assembling the sequences alone.
• This can be considered as the biggest exercise in the history of
• computational biology. (Madan, n.d.)
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH

• From the point of view of pharmaceutical industries,

Bioinformatics is the key to rational drug discovery.
• It reduces number of trials in the screening of drug compounds and in
identifying potential drug targets for a particular disease using high-power
computing workstations and software like Insight.
• In plant biotechnology, bioinformatics is found to be useful in the areas of
identifying diseases resistance genes and designing plants with high
nutrition value. (Madan, n.d.).
HOW TO CHECK THE
RELIABILITY OF WEB
SOURCES
The Internet contains a vast collection of highly valuable information but
it may also contain unreliable, biased information that mislead people.

• The following guidelines can help us check the reliability of web

• sources that we gather.
• Who is the author of the article/site?
• How to find out?
• Look for an “About” or “More About the Author”
• Does the author provide his or her credentials?
• What type of expertise does he or she have on the subject he or she is writing about?
• What type of experience does he or she have?
2. Who published the site?

• How to find out?

• Look at the domain name of the website that will tell you who is
hosting the site. Ex. Lee College Library website is:
http://www.lee.edu/library. The domain name is “lee.edu.” This
tells you that the library is hosted by Lee College.
• Search the domain name at http://www.whois.sc/. The site
provides information about the owners of registered domain
names.
• Do not ignore the suffix on the domain name(the three-letter
• part that comes after the “.”) Ex. .edu=educational,
• .com=commercial
3. What is the main purpose of the site? Why did the
author write it and why did the publisher post it?

• Who is the intended audience?

• What is the quality of information provided on the
•website?
• Timeliness: When was the website first published? Is it
regularly updated?
• Does the author cite sources? Just as in print sources, web sources
• that cite their sources are considered more reliable.
• What type of other sites does the website link to? Are
they reputable sites?
• What types of sites link to the website you are evaluating? Is the
• website being cited by others?
 EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND
RELIABLE WEB SOURCES
1. AFA e-Newsletter (Alzheimer’s Foundation of America newsletter)
2. American Memory- theLibrary of Congress historical digital
collection.
3. Bartleby.com Great Books Online- a collectionof free
e-books
• including fictions, nonfictions, references, and verses.
5. CyberBullying- a free collection of e-books from ebrary
4. Chronicling America- searchand view pages from American
additional reports and documents to help plus
prevent
better and
• newspapers take
from action against this growing concern.
1880-1922. understand,
 EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE WEB SOURCES

.Drug Information websites:

• National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus
• Drugs.com
• PDRhealth
.Global Gateway: World Culture & Resources (from the Library of
Congress)
8. Google Books
9. Googlescholar.com
0. 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
EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE WEB SOURCES

•Illinois Digital Archives

• Internet Archive
• Internet Archive for CARLI digitized resources
• Internet Public Library
• ipl2- a merger of Librarians’ Internet Index and Internet Public Library.
• Librarians’ Internet Index
• Making of America-a digital library of primary sources in American
•social history.
•Maps-from the University of Texas at Austin collection. Includes historical and thematic maps.

•NationMaster- a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. It is a vast compilation of data from such
sources as the CIA World Factbook, UN ans OECD.
 EXAMPLES OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE WEB SOURCES

20.Nursing sites:
• AHRQ (www.ahrq.gov)
• National Guidelines Clearinghouse (www.guideline.gov)
• PubMed (www.nlm.nih.gov)
21. Project Gutenberg- the first and largest single collection of free electronic
books with currently over 20,000 e-books available.
22.Shmoop- literature, US history, and poetry information written primarily by PhD
and masters students from top universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and
Yale.
23.StateMaster- a unique statistical database which allows you to research and
compare a multitude of different data on US states using various primary
sources such as the US Census Bureau, the FBI, and the National Center for
Educational Statistics.
24.Virtual Reference-selected web resources compiled by the Library of
Congress.
THE END
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