CS 197 Computers in Society

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CS 197Computers in Society

• Computing Devices

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Today

• I see teams. I would like links from people to
  teams.
• Any questions on the wiki?
• We'll go for a short tour of campus IT facilities
  today.
• Expect a short quiz at the end of class.
• I see a team making a news presentation next
  Thursday

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Reading for Tuesday

• Since we're looking at the "Nuts and Bolts" of
  computers we'll keep the reading in the Wikipedia.

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News Presentation

• Let's talk about the 100 laptop!
• What is the goal of the OLPC project?
• What sort of countries are they targeting?
• Does this project address instructional software?
• What will they do about lack of power in rural
  areas?
• What will they do about lack of internet access?

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OLPC

• What were the basic technical challenges of the
  100 laptop?
• Is there any direct evidence that laptops will
  improve the educational systems?
• Intel has a 400 laptop does the price
  difference between 100 and 400 matter?
• Intel focuses on teachers instead of students
  why?

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OLPC

• Can students handle this level of technology?
  Should they?
• What sort of hardware do these machines contain?
  What are they missing?
• How much power does this machine consume?
• What is "Constructionist Learning"?
• Why did the Indian government reject OLPC?

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Quotes

• If part of their rationale is that it will
  revolutionize education in various countries, I
  dont think it will happen, and they are naïve
  and innocent about the reality of formal
  schooling.
• If you are going to go have people share the
  computer, get a broadband connection and have
  somebody there who can help support the user,
  geez, get a decent computer where you can
  actually read the text and you're not sitting
  there cranking the thing while you're trying to
  type.

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Quotes

• Our view is that systems cannot require
  professional administration at a local level we
  could not deploy quickly on this scale and have
  sufficient expertise if this were required.
• Open Source tools are a way to let the Global
  South develop their own knowledge economies.
  Microsoft want to restrict the greatest profits
  in the knowledge economy to already established
  software corporations like them. By installing
  their programs on these laptops they hope to
  create market domination and vendor lock in.

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Discussion

• Is investment in education more important than
  other needs of third world children?
• Is placing laptops directly into children's hands
  superior to building schools or libraries?
• Does this project force western values on
  children in developing nations? Will this be a
  form of cultural imperialism?
• Will the lack of infrastructure (power and
  internet access) prevent this from being
  effective in the poorest nations?
• Will these computers be used by their intended
  audience or will they be stolen or sold on the
  black market?

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Information Storage

• Storing information is as important as processing
  it.
• This all started with written language

• Important ideas
• Precise relationship between spoken and written
  languages
• Ability to make a perfect copy of a document
• A medium (clay, paper, ) is used to preserve
  information over time

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Organizing Information

• Given a large collection of information, how do
  we find what we need?
• Alphabetical ordering
• Dewey Decimal System
• Indices
• Long before google, people needed to find things
  in information collections.

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Mechanical Access

• A large information repository is much more
  useful if it can be accessed quickly via
  mechanical means.
• Punch cards predate computers (by a long shot!)
  and were used to store and process large volumes
  of information.
• A key insight was that alphabetic information can
  be processed as if it is numeric

Herman Hollerith patented a system in which
needles sensed the presence or absence of holes
in a card. This converted information into
electric impulses. His machine was used for the
1890 census What company did he start?
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Storage Media
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Assessing Storage Technology

• Read/write or read-only
• Latency (time it takes to find what you want)
  (time)
• Transfer rate (how fast you get the information)
  (bits / second)
• Capacity (bits)
• Cost / bit ()
• Error rate (errors / bit)
• Durability (time)

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An Aside

• Measuring the size of information
• A bit 0/1 a single piece of information
• A byte 8 bits 1 alphabet character
• Megabyte 1,000,000 bytes
• Gigabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes
• Terabyte 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

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Back in the day

• When I was starting out in the computer biz, an
  RK05 was seriously cool

Data Transfer Rate 0.1 MBsecond Latency
70mS Capacity 2 megabytes Cost 8000 (1074)
(about 1/5 of a house) Media 99 / disk
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Organizing Information

• The organization of information is no longer
  mechanical its now done with software. A
  program that manages larges collections of data
  and finds things for you is a database. (Or
  maybe google).

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Transmitting Information

• Moving information from one place to another was
  simply a matter of moving some sort of media
  through a transportation network.
• But many of the issues are still the same
• Addressing how do you tell the system where to
  send the information?
• Payment how are you charged?
• Packaging how do you have to encapsulate the
  information?
• Speed how long does it take to deliver?
• Identity how can you be sure who send something?
• Errors how can you tell if a message was
  delivered?
• All of these issues are still here!!!

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Electronic Message Delivery

• The telegraph is the ancestorof the Internet
• Issues
• Electronic encoding ofmessages
• Relaying messages toward a destination
• Wireless / wired communication

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Communication and Computing

• Nowadays, we cant imagine computing outside the
  context of the Internet.
• Without connections to other computers, our
  computer is of little use!
• Yet the integration of communication into the
  computing world is a very recent thing.
• Well talk a LOT about the Internet later

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Technologies

• How do we move information?
• Ethernet
• Wireless (radio)
• Fiber-optic cable

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Assessing Communication

• Latency
• Communication rate
• Error rate
• Distance
• Privacy

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Interfacing

• Getting (electronic) information from or to the
  real world is another BIG part of computing.
• The first big breakthrough was a loom controlled
  by punched cards.

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Interface Technology

• The big idea here is converting between
  electronic representation and human sensing for
  audio and video objects.
• Other interface technology includes pointing
  (mouse), typing (keyboard), and even GPS.
• Well come back here later.

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The Real Stuff

• Let's take a short tour of campus IT.

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Babbages Insight

• Instead of programming a computer mechanically,
  use the storage to encode the program.
• That is, instead of building a machine to
  accomplish just one task, build a general machine
  that could be programmed to do any task (a
  stored program computer).
• The same data that a program manipulates can also
  be the program that controls the machine.

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Logic Gates

• A Logic Gate is the basic unit of computational
  processing.
• Lets talk about what a logic gate does.

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Moores Law

• Lets jump into the Wikipedia for this

http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore27s_Law
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Business vs Defense

• Two original applications of computation
• Military specialized calculations artillery
  tables, code breaking, radar and sensing systems
• Business simple calculations on large data
  sets accounting, billing, census, document
  software
• Each application domain led to different sorts of
  computers

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Progress Hardware

• Special purpose devices (calculators)
• Programmable devices (looms)
• Von Neumann machine (general purpose computer)
• Faster and faster hardware (design hasnt
  changed!)
• Bigger and bigger storage devices (finding
  information gets harder)
• Networking computers talking to computers

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The Big Trends

• Computers are getting faster, smaller, and
  cheaper
• Communication is becoming pervasive
• More and more interactions will take place via
  computer
• Your toaster will probably have a computer in it
  soon
• Computers are still not simple to use in many
  application areas
• Computers raise many big issues in society that
  have not yet been addressed
• Everyone needs to be able to use computers and
  understand how they should or could be used
• Nobody understands all of the risks as computers
  become more pervasive