SCITECH TOPIC 8

SPECIFIC ISSUES IN STS

(1) THE INFORMATION AGE

LESSON OBJECTIVES

• At the end of this lesson, the students should be able to:

• Define Information Age;

• Discuss the history of Information Age; and

• Understand the factors that need to be considered in checking website

sources.

Introduction

• Highly modernized, automated, data-driven, and technologically advanced- these

best describe our society nowadays, as evidenced by how information could be
transferred or shared quickly.

• The different areas of society have been influenced tremendously such as

communication, economics, industry, health, and the environment.

• Despite our gains due to the growing development of information technology, the
rapid upgrade of information also has disadvantages.

• Life is accompanied by endless transmission of information that takes place within

and outside the human body.

• According to Webster’s Dictionary information is “knowledge communicated or

obtained concerning a specific fact or circumstance.”

• Information is a very important tool for survival.

• Information Age is defined as a “period starting in the last quarter of the 20 th

century when information became effortlessly accessible through publications and
through the management of information by computers and computer networks”
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• 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
Information Age is a true new age based upon the interconnection of computers
via telecommunications”.

• The primary factors driving this new age forward are convenience and user-
friendliness which create user dependence.

TIMELINE OF THE INFORMATION AGE

HISTORY

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 the Chinese

1455 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press using movable metal type
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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

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

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

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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

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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 RSA(encryption and network security software) Internet security code

1997 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.

1. Information must compete. – there is a need for information to stand out and be
recognized in the increasing clutter.

2. Newer is equated with truer. – we forgot the truth that any fact or value can endure.

3. Selection is a viewpoint. – choose multiple sources for your information if you want to
receive a more balanced view of reality.

4. The media sells what the culture buys. - In other words, information is driven by cultural
priorities.

5. The early word gets the perm. – the first media channel to expose an issue often
defines the context, terms, and attitudes surrounding it.

6. You are what you eat and so is your brain. – do not draw conclusions unless all ideas
and information are presented to you.

7. Anything in great demand will be counterfeited. – the demand for incredible knowledge,
scandals, and secrets is ever-present; hence, many events are fabricated by tabloids,
publicists, or other agents of information fraud.

8. Ideas are seen as controversial. – it is almost certainly impossible to make any

assertion that will not find some supporters and some detractors.
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9. Undead information walks ever on. – rumors, lies, disinformation, and gossips never
truly die down. They persist and continue to circulate.

10. Media presence creates the story. – People behave much differently from the way
they would if being filmed when the media are present, especially film news or television
media.

11. The medium selects the message. – television is mainly pictorial, partially aural, and
slightly textual, so visual stories are emphasized: fires, chases, and disasters.

12. The whole truth is a pursuit. – the information that reaches us is usually selected,
verbally charged, filtered, slanted, and sometimes, fabricated. What is neglected is often
even more important than what is included.

COMPUTER

• Computers are among the most important contributions of advances in the

Information Age to society.

• A computer 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 COMPUTER

1. Personal Computer (PC)

2. Desktop Computer

3. Laptops

4. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)-touch screen for user input.

5. Server- provide network services to other computers.

6. Mainframes- these are huge computer systems that can fill an entire room.

7. Wearable Computers
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THE WORLD WIDE WEB (INTERNET)

• Claude E. Shannon- started the origin of the Internet

• An American Mathematician who was considered as the “Father of Information

Theory.”

• He worked at Bell Laboratories and at age 32, 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.

• It was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense.

• In early days, the internet was used mainly 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 results to reflect page popularity when they determined that the
most popular result would frequently be the most usable.

• The researchers launched their company in 1998.

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

THE APPLICATION 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.
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• 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.

• 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.

• 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.)

• 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.).
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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.

1. 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?
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4. Who is the intended audience?

5. 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- the Library of Congress historical digital collection.

3. Bartleby.com Great Books Online- a collection of free e-books including fictions,

nonfictions, references, and verses.

4. Chronicling America- search and view pages from American newspapers from
1880-1922.

5. Cyber Bullying- a free collection of e-books from ebrary plus 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 Gateway: World Culture & Resources (from the Library of Congress)

8. Google Books
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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

12. Internet Archive

13. Internet Archive for CARLI digitized resources

14. Internet Public Library

15. ipl2- a merger of Librarians’ Internet Index and Internet Public Library.

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. It is a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World
Factbook, UN ans OECD.

20. Nursing sites:

• AHRQ (www.ahrq.gov)

• National Guidelines Clearinghouse (www.guideline.gov)

• PubMed (www.nlm.nih.gov)
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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.