A study by USC found 21 percent of adult Internet users with children believe the kids are online too long, compared with 11 percent in 2000. Still, that is less than the 49 percent who complain their kids watch too much TV. About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades have not gone up or down since they got Internet access. 47 percent of the adults say they have withheld Internet use as a form of punishment. Banning television is still more popular, reported by 57 percent of adults surveyed.

The study, meanwhile, found that although only 27 percent of cell phone owners use them for text messaging, photo transmitting and other non-voice functions, the figure grows to 54 percent among those 18-24 and 45 percent among those under 18.  The study has been conducted most years since 2000. Over that time, researchers have seen Internet use grow to 78 percent, from 67 percent. Access at home increased to 68 percent, from 47 percent. In one of the few surveys to look at why people are offline, the study found the lack of a working computer most often to blame. Of the 22 percent of Americans who do not currently use the Internet, more than a quarter are former users who dropped out.

What’s interesting about these findings is the large gap between young people and older people when it comes to internet usage.  Americans 66 and over remain the most disconnected, with only 38 percent online. For all other age groups, at least 74 percent are online, with penetration hitting 99 percent for those 18 and under, likely because most U.S. schools now have some form of Internet access.

 Also, those who use the internet are doing it longer than they have just 6 years ago.  On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000.  37 percent of home users still have dial-up accounts, compared with 26 percent for high-speed cable modems and 24 percent for DSL.  11 percent of users go online through mobile devices not necessarily exclusively  averaging two hours a week.   We are online now more than we ever have been and  that is a fact of life and  it looks like parents will just have to deal with that fact.  As long as children are getting their work done,  it shouldn’t be a big deal if kids are online for several hours a day. 

This  different way of teaching IT has  taught me plenty and I feel like I can apply my IT knowledge to the actual real world now.    The  FLAG labs  were useful and I had a fun time doing it with a  group that I got along with very well.  The Snyder book and the Garson book were both useful and  taught me a lot about  policy and the general nuts of bolts of IT.  The Garson book and its discussion papers allowed me to take some controversial positions that became the focal point during one of the classes  and I really liked that and thought is was great and rather funny.  Overall,  I  was pleasantly surprised with this class and  enjoyed going to it each week.  It was not a normal IT class and that is what I really liked about it.  I applaud GSPIA for allowing some instructional freedom when it comes to a class such as IT.  A little creativity  with  a class that could otherwise be mundane and boring is what was needed and I think what has been done with this class is a good idea and I hope it continues in the future.   I’m glad I signed up for the class, because I ended up  having a good time and learning a great deal.

According to this article , almost half of teens use an instant messenger program, which is more than twice the amount of adults.  Here are some more of the  findings that the poll discovered about adults and young people and their “IMing” habits.

According to the AP-AOL poll:

Digital multimedia is all around us today and Snyder helps to  make the nuts of bolts of  digital multimedia easier to understand in this chapter.  I personally have a ton of mp3s so I am interested in how they work and are kept  on my machine.   As I learned,  digital compression is the way to reduce the number of bits needed to represent the information.  By computing special functions on the digital audio compression, it’s possible to remove these waves without harming the way the audio sounds to us.  This is the compression used for mp3s.   Mp3s typically get a compression ration of more than 10:1 which means that the number of bits is reduced to less than a megabyte to represent.  What this means is mp3s are popular for internet transmission due to its low bandwidth requirements. 

Also, I have always wondered how digital images and video works as well.  Snyder taught me about  JPEG compression which means changing the representation in order to use fewer bits to store or transmit information.  I also  learned what JPEG meant as well.  I use that term when describing  pictures on the internet, but until I read this chapter I had no clue what it exactly meant.  What it means is “Joint Photographic Experts Group”  a nickname for an International Standards Organization theam that guides the development of digital representation of still photographs.

Along with JPEG, I learned about MPEGs which I again I knew about, but didn’t know how they worked.  MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group of the International Standards Organization and does the same thing as JPEGs.    MPEGs are compressed in each frame. but then “interframe coherency” is  used and  MPEG compression only has to record and  transmit the differences between frames.   This amounts to huge compression, so MPEGs only need moderate amounts of bandwidth.

Overall, I learned plenty of new ideas from this chapter.  I  actually know what JPEG and MPEG stand for and understand the point of them now.  I have a better understanding how these items are stored on my computer and how I can send them as files and how I can view  or listen to them.  This was a  informative and enjoyable chapter.

 Psiphon was released last week and could be the thorn in the side of governments that already monitor Web activity of its citizens.  “It does conflict with some sovereign states’ values, but there are competing legal norms at work,” says Ron Deibert, Director of the University of Toronto’s Citizens Lab. Recently and over the past few years,  human rights groups have accused    the usual suspects (China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Egypt) of clamping down on unfettered internet use, by blocking websites linked to or operated by opposition or independence groups.  Human Rights Watch says there is a misconception that the internet will make people free.  This is not true and is evidence by the blocking of certain websites  in certain places (Wikipedia in China). 

How does this program work?  According to Ron Deibert, it works by first allowing a person in a country like Canada that does not censor internet content  to set up a user name and a password for a person in a country that does (China here once again).   The Canadian user then passes the information to the Chinese usser who would log on to the Canadian’s computer and effectively use it as  a server to browse the internet without being censored.  The web traffic is encryptic and secure, therefore making tracking of the source and usage extremely difficult. 

 Overall, this sounds like a good program and it can be useful for those people that are being censored in certain countries, but this program could be considered illegal.  If somewhere were to get caught using this program consequences could be dire.  As I blogged about several times before, it is important for countries to allow free speech and free speech is the internet.  The usual suspects listed above have continually blocked the internet and certain sites from its citizens and that is censorship in its purest form.  I like this program and it appears to work and be useful, but countries and Human Rights organizations need to continue to work to allow a free and unfettered internet.  Citizens of these countries deserve this basic right to free speech.

I have to admit, this was one of those chapters that I just could not  completely comprehend.  There were certain parts that made sense and others that still completely puzzle me.   The part about digitizing was interesting, because it showed the difference between everyday digitizing and digitizing with IT.    Digitizing with  a telephone number, social security number, etc is done with digits 0-9 while IT digitizing can be done with basically anything including numbers and symbols.  In IT,  programmers have adopted the symbols and have shortened the names to be more like the numbers.    For example, exclamation point can be shortened to be “bang” while asterisk can be  “star.”  By doing this, the advantage of brevity held by the numbers is no longer the case.

 The next item that I learned about and found to be very interesting was the part about  “PandA Representation.”  PandA is the name used for the two fundamental patterns of digital information based on the presence and absence of a phenomenon.   A key property of PandA representation is that fact that it is black and white.  The phenomenon is either present or its not and the logic is either true or false.  With PandA, the formulation is discrete and there is no possible way to transform one value into the other, there is no gray area.  PandA is a a binary system because it has two and only two parts (present and absent).  As I learned, present and absent aren’t necessarily essential to digitizing so other words such as “black and white” or “on and off” can be used. 

 The final part that interested me and taught me something was how memory works in a computer.  Memory in a computer is arranged in a very long sequence of bits.  This is places where a phenomenon can be set and detected.  The illustration equating memory to a sidewalk was a good way to make this idea a little easier to understand.    A sidewalk made  of a strip of concrete with lines across it forming squares swept clean is the starting point.  A stone on the sidewalk corresponds to 1 and the absence of a stone corresponds to 0.   The sidewalk becomes a sequence of bits.  The sidewalk memory can encode information just like the computer memory.  These bits can be set to write information into the memory and they can be sensed to read the information out of the memory.  The way to determine what is stored at each position is quite simple.  First check whether the phenomenon is present or absent, if it is then it is a 1, if not then it is a 0.  This is actually pretty simple and now I have a better understanding about that.

Finally, I learned why “byte” is spelled with a “y” instead of an “i.”  Werner Buchholz, the inventor of the word and the concept used a y because “We needed a word for a quantity of memory between a bit and a word.”  This would be bit and after bit comes bite, but it has a y so a typists couldn’t accidentally change “byte” to “bit” by forgetting to add the e at then end.  No single letter change to byte can create bit.  Now that is pretty cool, I always wondered why the “y” was there!

Here is the link to the article:  http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/17/china.internet.ap/index.html

The easing of a ban on the popular online encyclopedia in China was short-lived.  Barely a week after Wikipedia viewers were able to access the Web site — after a year-long ban — they reported Friday that it was blocked again in several parts of China.

Chinese Web surfers and free-speech advocates had earlier welcomed the apparent lifting of a ban on the English and Chinese versions of the site that provides free information written and edited by its users, although skeptics had voiced fears the end of the ban would be temporary.  This is troubling and it appears like China is again trying to curtail  freedom of speech rights of its citizens.   Citizens were ecstatic that  Wikipedia was active again and available to those who had internet access. 

“It was great news for us,” said Yuan Mingli, 33, a software engineer in Shanghai who has contributed articles on computer science and Chinese historical figures to the site. “China’s Internet users are not different from other countries’ users. Wikipedia is a very important source of information for us.” It wasn’t immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information Industry did not immediately respond when contacted for comment Friday.

China is worried about the freedom that Wikipedia allows its users to exhibit and that again appears to be why it is shut down.  The Communist government still rules  with an iron fist in the country.  The government has waged a battle to control the anarchic Internet and filter the information Chinese can get. Police employ an array of measures, from sophisticated filters and detection software that hunts for sensitive words to having officers monitor Web traffic.  As a result, surfing the Web in China is a very different experience from that in much of the world. Because almost anyone can add to and edit listings in Wikipedia, the site is famously freewheeling, addressing sensitive topics that pose a challenge to Beijing’s control.

The blocking doesn’t come as much of a surprise to many.   Experts had earlier expressed skepticism over the Chinese government’s unannounced lifting of the ban on the popular site, saying it could be only temporary.  “It’s great to see Wikipedia unblocked, though in China an unblocking is probationary: it might be blocked again in a day, a week, or a month,” Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said earlier. 

In the context of a politically censored environment … Wikipedia becomes … also a place to engage, to debate, to share information and to spread information otherwise being forbidden,” said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.  China  and its communist regime has blocked this valuable resource again and this is quite troubling.  It appears like this ban will be in effect for a long time now, which is not good news for the global community or the Chinese people.

I had absolutely no idea what the process of debugging was before I read this chapter. As I learned, debugging is the method of figuring out why a process or system doesn’t work properly.  Debugging is usually applied to a computer or communications system, but they techniques are the same whether the systems are business, mechanical, etc.   I learned that debugging normally relies on logical reasoning, but there are certain principles and strategies that should be used for debugging.  There is debugging every day life, which is just  basically troubleshooting everyday problems and trying to come up with effective solutions.  

The next strategy to debug that I learned about was debugging in IT, which is obviously important since that is the focal point of our class.  Debugging an IT system is different, because wrong data or  wrong configuration might have been entered incorrectly.  This is easy to fix and  if corrected, the system should work again. Of course, there is another possibility  and this is a logical design error.  In IT  terms, this means an error in software that may or may not be known.   In software such logical errors are possible and users have to be aware that they may not be using a correct working system.   Along with this principle in debugging, I learned we can use the computer to debug.  This is not easy, because some of the errors are internal to the computer and we have to know how to get there to fix the problem.    The best way to find out the problem is to bypass the error with an alternative approach called a workaround.   These are essential especially with commercial software. Bugs in commercial software are usually not fixed until the updated version is released, so that is why a workaround is needed.

 This  was interesting and I learned a great deal about debugging.  The recap of debugging was useful and helped to provide some salient points for future reference.   Snyder makes a few key points that are helpful.  When debugging, it is important to make sure you can reproduce the error and determine what the problem is.  Along with this, it is important to eliminate the obvious causes and divide the process by separating out parts that work from the part that doesn’t.  Finally, Snyder suggests when reaching a dead end, we should reassess information, ask where we might be making wrong assumptions or conclusions then step through the process again. While doing this, we should make predictions about what should happen and verify that predictions will be fulfilled.  Overall, this was a helpful chapter and now I know more about debugging.

The main page of the Chinese Wikipedia page is up and running and searches for apolitical terms come up.  Searches for  “Tiananmen Square” are still blocked along with other anti-government material.  The Chinese Communist regime routinely blocks anti-government websites and articles online and it is still unclear why Wikipedia is working again in the country.    The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not know why or acknowledge Wikipedia’s return, but did say the country backs internet usage by its people and has 123 million users, which makes it the second largest internet market in the world. 

The Communist regime regulates the content of the web according to its laws and does censor what it deems sensitive information.  Reporters Without Borders believe the revival of Wikipedia shows China’s pragmatism, because it cannot be an international trade partner and be a member of the business world without doing online business.    Even though  Wikipedia was banned,  a small group of Chinese communities could use a proxy or other items to gain access.  Analysts believe the reason the Chinese were against Wikipedia was due to its content, but more importantly its open editorial process which could quickly mobilize communities of people to create more content that could be threatening to the government.  Wikipedia is up and running again and hopefully it stays active, because China cannot suppress useful sites like Wikipedia.  China must continue to become a more free and democratic society and having sites like Wikipedia is key to this happening now and in the future.

This chapter was very interesting, because it brings up the question that most people have when it comes to computers–can computers think?  This answer is not definitive, but it is fairly easy to see that computers can do plenty and are pretty smart, but the person operating the machine must also be competent. One of the defining moments of computers “thinking” came when Deep Blue, an IBM computer defeated World Chess champion Garry Kasparov.  Engineers considered this a win for computers and programmers.  Programmers were able to use game trees and configure the computer to look as many as 50 moves ahead.   

When Deep Blue took on Karparov, it could compute over 200 million board moves per second.  Kasparov did defeat Deep Blue in the first match, but Deep Blue was improved and got its revenge in 1997 by defeating the Chess champion.  Deep Blue’s win does not mean computers are smarter than humans, but it did show what a massive database of knowledge could do and achieve.    Deep Blue knew what to do, but as many like to point out, the machine is chess specific.  It could not do any other functions.  Computers can only be as smart as though who program it and Deep Blue showed a computer can defeat a human, but it was isolated to that one event.

 Along with the epic Deep Blue/Kasparov battles, I learned about the major different between Macs and PCs and outmoded computers.  Obviously, Macs and PCs are completely different as fair as design goes, but they are also very different when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the operating system as well.  Macs andPCs have a different combination of instructions that are encoded differently.  These differences are not fundamental, but they are different when it comes to booting up and running the necessary programs and locating files on the hard disk.  The real difference between a Mac and a PC is that the operating systems do things very differently.  The customer software used to run these machines both operate completely differently in a Mac and a PC.  Macs and PCs are both easy to use and both of them can operate some of the same software, but there are fundamental differences.  It is up to the user to decide what is the best computer and operating system for them. 

Finally, I learned about why people consider some computers to be outmoded.    Speed is the main different between old and new computers.  New, faster software doesn’t mean a new computer is needed, a little patience will do the trick.  People normally give two reasons why they think old computers are outmoded.  The first is the hardware and software is not compatible with older machines and the second is software vendors simply don’t support older machines and people are forced to upgrade machines to go with the upgraded software.  Normally, it isn’t necessary to get new machines, because older machines will work, but many do it simply to save time and use the faster software.