STAS (LESSON 1)

• 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
• Information


  Knowledge communicated or obtained concerning a specific fact or circumstance
• Information Age


  A 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
• The means of conveying symbolic information (e.g., writing, math, other codes) among humans has evolved with increasing speed
• Information Age


  Also called the Digital Age and the New Media Age because it was associated with the development of computers
• Theory of Information Age


  Proposed by James R. Messenger in 1982, the Information Age is a true new age based upon the interconnection of computers via telecommunications, with these information systems operating on both a real-time and as-needed basis. The primary factors driving this new age forward are convenience and user-friendliness which, in turn, will create user dependence
• 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 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
  • 1755: Samuel Johnson's dictionary standardized English spelling
  • 1802: The Library of Congress was established
  • 1824: Research on persistence of vision published
  • 1830s: 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
  • 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
  • 1975: MCA and Philips agreed on a standard videodisc encoding format
  • 1977: Altair Microcomputer Kit was released: first personal computer for the public, 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 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. Eventually, we no longer kept them to ourselves; instead, we share them and manage them in different means
• Information got ahead of us. It started to grow at a rate we were unprepared to handle
• Because of 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 Wurman called it "Information Anxiety"
• In the 1990s, information became the currency in the business world. Information was the preferred medium of exchange and the information managers served as information officers
• In the present generation, there is no doubt that 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 a pursuit
• Computer


  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
• Types of Computers


  • Personal Computer (PC)
  • Desktop Computer
  • Laptops
  • Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)
  • Server
  • Mainframes
  • Wearable Computers
• Internet


  A worldwide system of interconnected networks that facilitate data transmission among innumerable computers. It was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense
• One early problem faced by Internet users was speed. Phone lines could only transmit information at a limited rate. 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. After talking with family, friends, and other investors into contributing $1 million, the researchers launched their company in 1998. 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. Messages could be sent and received at the convenience of the individual
• Internet service providers like America Online and CompuServe set up electronic chat rooms. These were open areas of cyberspace where interested parties could join in a conversation with perfect strangers
• Consequently, companies whose businesses are built on digitized information have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time; the current Information Age has spawned its own breed of wealthy influential brokers, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Apple's Steve Jobs to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
• 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 were denied these possibilities
• Many decried the impersonal nature of electronic communication compared to a telephone call or a handwritten letter
• The unregulated and loose nature of the Internet allowed pornography to be broadcast to millions of homes. Protecting children from these influences or even from meeting violent predators would prove challenging
• Cyberspace where interested parties could join in a conversation with perfect strangers. "Surfing the net" became a pastime in and of itself
• 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 were denied these possibilities
• The unregulated and loose nature of the Internet allowed pornography to be broadcast to millions of homes. 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 development of a consolidated formal database, known as SWISS-PROT protein sequence database, was initiated in 1986. It now has about 70,000 protein sequences from more than 5,000 model organisms, a small fraction of all known organisms
• The enormous variety of divergent data resources is now available for study and research by both academic institutions and industries. These are made available as public domain information in the larger interest of research community through the Internet and CD-ROMs
• 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, and optimize the drug development process by predicting possible targets
• The sequence information generated by the human genome research, initiated in 1988, has now been stored as a primary information source for future applications in medicine
• The available data is so huge that if compiled in books, the data would run into 200 volumes of 1,000 pages each and reading alone (ignoring understanding factor) would require 26 years working around the clock
• The present challenge to handle such huge volume of data is to improve database design, develop software for database access, and manipulation and device data-entry procedures to compensate for the varied computer procedures and systems used in different laboratories