Topic 3 (SocScie2)

• Information Age


  Highly modernized, automated, data-driven, and technologically advanced society
• Information could be transferred or quickly in the Information Age
• Different areas of society have been influenced tremendously by the Information Age such as communication, economics, industry, health, and environment
• The rapid upgrade of Information also has disadvantages despite the gains due to the growing development of information technology
• Life is accompanied by endless, transmission of information that takes place within and outside the human body
• Timeline of the Information Age

  • 3000 BC: Sumerian writing used pictographs to represent words
  • 2900 BC: Beginning 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
  • 105 AD: Woodblock printing and paper was invented by Chinese
  • 1455: 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
  • 1824: Invention of the carbon arc lamp
  • 1830s: Research on persistence of vision published
  • 1837: First viable design for a digital computer
  • 1861: Invention of the telegraph in Great Britain and the United States
  • 1876: Motion pictures were projected onto the screen
  • 1899: Dewey Decimal system was introduced
  • 1902: Edwaerd Muybridge demonstrated high-speed photography
  • 1906: First magnetic recordings were released
  • 1923: Motion picture special effects were used
  • 1926: Lee Deforest invented the electronic amplifying tube
  • 1939: First practical sound movie
  • 1940s: Regularly scheduled television broadcasting began in the US
  • 1945: Beginnings of information science as a discipline
  • 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
  • 1991: Four 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
• As man evolved, information and its dissemination has also evolved in many ways
• Information got ahead of us. It started to grow ahead of us at a rate we were unprepared to handle
• Due to the abundance of information, it was difficult to collect and manage them starting in the 1960s and 1970s
• During the 1980s, real angst set in. Richard Wurmen called it "Information Anxiety"
• In the 1990s, information became the currency in the business world. Information was preferred medium of exchange and the information managers served as information officers
• In the present generation, information has turned out to be a commodity, an overdeveloped product, mass-produced, and unspecialized. Soon, we become overloaded with it
• Truths of 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 perm
  • 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 pursuit
• Computer


  An electronic device that stores and process data (information). It runs on a program that contains the exact, step-by-step directions to solve a problem
• Types of Computers


  • Personal Computer (PC)
  • Desktop Computer
  • Laptops
  • Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's)
  • Server
  • Mainframes
  • Wearable Computers
• Claude E. Shannon, an American Mathematician, is considered as the "Father of Information Theory"
• The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected networks that facilitate data transmission among Innumerable computers
• The Internet was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense
• The Internet remained under government control until 1984
• The development of fiber-optic cables allowed for billions of bits of information to be received every minute
• 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
• Google is now the world's most popular search engine, accepting more than 200 million queries daily
• Electronic mail, or email, was a suitable way to send a message to fellow workers, business partners, or friends
• Internet service providers like America Online and CompuServe set up electronic chat rooms
• Companies whose business are built on digitized information have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time
• The Internet created a technological divide that increased the gap between the members of the higher class and lower class of society
• The unregulated and loose nature of the Internet allowed pornography to be broadcast to millions of homes
• Crimes in various forms are rampant because of the use of social media. Cyberbullying is an issue that poses alarm worldwide
• One of the significant of computers for science and research is evident in the field of bioinformatics
• Critics charged that the Internet created a technological divide that increased the gap between the members of the higher class and lower class of society
• Those who could not afford a computer or a monthly access fee denied these possibilities
• Many decried the impersonal nature of electronic communication compared to a telephone call or a handwritten letter
• Protecting children from these influences or even from meeting violent predators would prove to be difficult
• Nowadays, crimes in various forms are rampant because of the use of social media
• Cyberbullying is an issue that poses alarm worldwide
• We need to be aware of the possible harm and damage due to abuse of these advances in the Information Age
• 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 and nucleic acids
• 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
• The SWISS-Page 23 of 34 OT protein sequence database was initiated in 1986 and now has about 70,000 protein sequences from more than 5,000 model organism