ITE13 Worksheet 2024-2025 PDF

Republic of the Philippines SOUTHERN LUZON STATE UNIVERSITY Lucban, Quezon College of Industrial Technology WORKSHEET Topic:...

Republic of the Philippines SOUTHERN LUZON STATE UNIVERSITY Lucban, Quezon College of Industrial Technology WORKSHEET Topic: A Very Short History of IT Week No. 1-5 Course Code: ITE13 (LEC) Term 1st Semester Course Title: IT SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL ISSUES Academic Year 2024-2025 A Very Short History of IT It was during the Second World War, and in its aftermath, that major technological breakthroughs in electronics took place: the first programmable computer and the transistor. Yet it was not until the 1970s that new information technologies became widely diffused, accelerating their synergistic development and converging into a new paradigm. These occurred in several stages of innovation in the three main technological fields: microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications. ✓ The transistor made the fast processing of electric impulses in a binary mode possible. This enabled the coding of logic and communication between machines. Semiconductor processing devices—integrated circuits or ‘chips’—are now made of millions of transistors. ✓ The comparatively ‘giant leap’ forward occurred in 1971 when Intel introduced the 4-bit 4004 microprocessor, that is the computer on a chip, and information-processing power could thus be installed everywhere (where the buyer had enough resources, that is). ✓ The observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years is referred to as Moore’s law (named after Gordon Moore). Practically, there was about a doubling of computer processing power every 18-24 months. This will not continue indefinitely due to physical constraints, but combined with developments in parallel processing, computing capacity is still increasing to this day. ✓ Also, greater miniaturization, further specialization, and the decreasing price of increasingly powerful chips made it possible to place them in every machine in our everyday life, from dishwashers and microwave ovens to automobiles. ✓ In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, increasing chip power resulted in a dramatic enhancement of micro-computing power. Since the mid1980s, microcomputers could no longer be conceived of in isolation: they were linked up in networks, with increasing mobility, on the basis of portable computers (and later mobile phones).  ✓ Into the 2010s, storage capacity was so cheap and computing power increased enough, that the time of Big Data commenced, where massive amounts of data are analyzed algorithmically to find patterns. Such data may have been collected on purpose for it, such as the measurements to compute the black hole image and brain scan image analyses, or ‘on the side’ initially and then exploited and collected on purpose, such as online user behavior. Networks toward Social Media This networking capability only became possible because of major developments both in telecommunication and computer networking technologies during the 1970s. But, at the same time, such changes were only made possible by new micro-electronic devices and stepped-up computing capacity. Telecommunications have been revolutionized further by the combination of “node” technologies (electronic switches and routers) and new linkages (transmission technologies). Major advances in opto-electronics (fiber optics and laser transmission) and digital packet transmission technology dramatically broadened the capacity of transmission lines. In the 1960s there was a call to investigate how computers could be ‘connected’ to each other in order to create an environment to enhance computer research. The US Department of Defense, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created the first large computer network in 1969. Further still, different forms of utilization of the radio spectrum (traditional broadcasting, direct satellite broadcasting, microwaves, digital cellular telephony), as well as coaxial cable and fiber optics, offer a diversity and versatility of transmission technologies, which are being adapted to a whole range of uses, and make possible ubiquitous communication between mobile users. Thus, cellular telephony diffused with force all over the world, taking off from the mid-1990s. In 2000, technologies were available for a universal-coverage, personal communication device, only waiting for a number of technical, legal, and business issues to be sorted out before reaching the market. From the late 1980s there was a growth of commercial providers of networks , i.e., the infrastructure. Together with the WWW, this led to a growth of the Web, where now anybody1 could get connected, and the so-called New Economy of tech companies online, such as offering the ability to buy books online rather than only in the bookshop. Data Management toward Big Data While the progress of connecting devices and the Web is one of the success stories, the other one is data management. The first main step in the early 1970s were the relational databases to store data and manipulate them. This was principally to query the data being stored, such as employee data, library records, and the like. The early 1990s saw the rise of data mining: put all the data in a so-called data warehouse — a time- aware database that is slightly differently structured than a relational database— and test hypotheses on that data using association rules and statistics. For instance, with supermarket data. The late 2000s saw a third jump in the data management, combining it with even more statistical techniques and algorithms on much more data. Popular techniques are the various machine learning algorithms. This tracking is done for each visitor, each time. Put differently: it is online user-generated data. This was initially captured with the aim to improve the usability of a site. Now, it’s a business model, especially for the sites that provide so-called “free” services: you pay with your personal data, as they can learn so much about the users as to make profit from it.  SEATWORK: Check your Progress ! A. 1. Briefly discuss Big Data and Machine Learning. _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ B. Instruction: Write your answer on the space provided before the number _____________________1. Focuses on algorithms to achieve good predictions based on large amounts of training data. _____________________2. It refers to the huge amount of data. 3-5. Enumerate the 3 main Technological Fields. 1. ____________________________________ 2. ____________________________________ 3. ____________________________________ A Time of Transition in Communication and Network Usage Some people, such as Castells, claim that a new form of society has arisen through a number of major concurrent social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations. This change is at a global scale, but this does not entail that everyone is participating equally in it: many segments of the population of the planet are excluded from the global networks that accumulate knowledge, wealth, and power. A particular feature of the recent (past 20 years) transformation has been the radical changes in the ways people communicate. The top-down mass media mode has been augmented with, and to some extent replaced by, horizontal digital communication between peers and by what has been called citizen journalism. Castells builds his arguments about this new society around the concept of the Network Society because in all key dimensions of social organization and social practice it is made up of networks. Recent years has seen a lot of research on social network analysis and the understanding of human networks that are mirrored in the social networking sphere, such as cognitive limitations on the number of people one can interact with meaningfully and the notion of ‘hubs’ (some people seem to be very well connected). Digital networks also have shown to overcome traditional limitations, as it is not bound by national boundaries and has turned into a global system. Recent results also indicate that it may lead to radicalization of a special interest group, due to the filter bubble and echo chamber effects. It also must be noted that not everyone participates equally in Castells’ “Network Society” for various reasons, notably resource access (device, network, money to buy data) and, e.g., the tooling interface that may not be localized. This has resulted in a new source of global inequality that was already increased by globalization. Arguments have been put forward that the Internet and the Web exacerbate inequality as well as that they serve as an equalizer. Both are broad-sweeping claims. What do you think? Can you find data to support that opinion? At the time of writing (2019), the answer probably would be ‘it depends’. Transformation of Communication Conscious communication is the distinctive feature of humans and the fast-paced changes in communication technologies has intensified in recent years. This has had a profound effect on society. The Internet is old by computing standards—having started 1969—but it only diffused on a large scale twenty years later, because of several factors: Regulatory changes & privatization in the 1990s; open source software & open protocols; Greater bandwidth in telecommunications and switching capacity; Diffusion of personal computers and local networks;  user-friendly software programs that made it easy to upload, access, and communicate content: beginning with the World Wide Web server and browser designed by Tim BernersLee at CERN in 1990; Rapidly growing social demand for the networking of everything, arising from both the needs of the business world and the public’s desire to build its own communication networks. The number of Internet users on the planet grew from under 40 million in 1995 to about 1.5 billion in 2009 and is estimated at 4.3 billion in March 20192. A lot of research is being conducted to estimate the effects of the changes at an individual and at a societal level. These include effects of reduced human interaction on a person’s development and maintenance of social skills, and the pressures of being expected to have to respond fast when contactable anytime, and others. Democratic Communication It is not only social media users who understand the power of Internet with respect to voicing community issues and engaging citizens. Democratic governments throughout the world have been using ICTs for improving their services. We all know that democratic countries function well when their government officials understand the needs of their constituents and are able to communicate with them easily. Governments make use of ICT for communication. There are three basic areas where ICT is used, which are access to information, transaction services, and citizen participation. For instance, (1) Statistics South Africa (SSA) provides census data through their website, (2) the South African Revenue Services (SARS) allows the submission of tax returns (among other services) through their eFiling service, and (3) Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) developed a mobile application that empowers citizens with the ability to be able to report potholes quickly. These three are examples of the 3 categories of benefits of digital governance. Worldwide Mobile Revolution Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion of increasing capacity of connectivity and bandwidth in successive generations of mobile phones. This has been the fastest diffusing technology in the history of communication. In 1991 there were about 16 million wireless phone subscriptions in the world. By July 2008, subscriptions had surpassed 3.4 billion and is currently estimated at around 4.5-5 billion mobile phone subscriptions. Such numbers have to be considered with caution before assuming 2/3 of the population has wireless access: some people have more than one subscription (e.g., one SIM card for data and one for airtime) and others share their phone with friends and family. Digital Convergence In the 2000s, we have witnessed increasing technological convergence between the Internet, wireless communication, and multiple applications for communicating over wireless networks. This has multiplied the points of access to the Internet. This communication network can exchange anything that can be digitized: texts, audios, videos, software. There has also been a price reduction in the production of certain electronics thus leading to the ubiquity of certain sensors. This has resulted in what is called the Internet of Things. This the ability to have devices such fridges, stoves, etc and traditional machines such as computers to be able to share data. This is particularly important for the developing world because the growth rate of Internet penetration has slowed due to the scarcity of wired telephone lines. In the new model of tele-communications, wireless communication has become the predominant form of communication everywhere, especially in developing countries. Thus, the ability to connect to the Internet from a wireless device is now the critical factor for a new wave of Internet diffusion on the planet. This depends on the building of wireless infrastructure, on new protocols for wireless Internet, and on the spread of advanced broadband capacity. SEATWORK: Check your Progress ! 1. Differentiate globalization and localization. __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ Work and Employment Transformed __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ B. Instruction: Write your answer on the space provided before the number. _____________1. Refers to that what you see in the search engine. _____________2. Defined as a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type or opinions that are similar to their own. _____________3. Is a process of interaction and integration among people. _____________4. Is not the opposite of the term “Globalization” _____________5. Refers to the fact that we no longer need separate communications channels for different media. Work and Employment Transformed In globalizing the process of production of goods and services, thousands of jobs, particularly in manufacturing, have been eliminated either by automation or by relocation to countries where wages are low. Job creation and the increased education of the labor force has resulted in a sustained improvement of living standards in the industrialized world for a number of years, but is stagnant or on the decline recently (past 10-20 years). This is because the level of compensation for the majority of workers has not followed the growth of productivity and profits. To try to compensate for that, more women have entered the labor force. This decrease of the gender imbalance of the labor force has substantially affected the economic foundations of patriarchalism and capitalism. The new job market has seen a parallel growth of highly educated occupations and low skill jobs, with very different bargaining power in the labor market. This dual structure of the labor market is related to the structural conditions of a knowledge economy growing within the context of a large economy of low- skill services, and it contributes to the growing inequality observed in most societies. The Fourth Industrial Revolution Automatization at the workplace can be beneficial to the workers. For instance, not having to do dangerous work anymore and therewith there will be fewer injuries on the job. It contributes to capital and could make a loss-making company profitable, so that the people who work there can keep their jobs. Yet, automatization typically has the consequence of firing employees. Also, if all the automatization in industry continues, it would destroy capitalism, for then it cannot generate the surplus it gets from ‘underpaying’ workers—i.e., their wages are lower than the value they add with their work— as one cannot underpay a robot as it does not have a wage. This raises several questions that have no easy answer. Among others: What to do with the people who will lose their jobs when more and more tasks are automated? Is it ethical to make people redundant due to the software you developed, and are you morally obliged to find alternative gainful employment for the people affected? Whose responsibility is it to mitigate this effect, if anyone? Do you have an idea how to solve capital’s inherent contradiction? These changes—both the general drive toward automating manual tasks in software, like your online registration process at the university as compared to filling in a paper form and handing it over to a human to process it, and by robots3—are expected to very profound in the upcoming years to the extent that it has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or, less glamorous, industry 4.0, is said to be driven by a set of technologies, notably including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). The use of IoT in industry generates lots of data, which is then analyzed with AI techniques to try to make sense out of the generated data. This combination then is expected to make ‘intelligent’ cyber-physical systems that can configure themselves based on the input it receives, adjust its configuration accordingly, and, finally, optimize its operations autonomously as well: see Figure 2. Figure 2: A pyramid architecture of a cyber-physical systems-enabled manufacturing system. This extends also into agriculture, where it is known as precision agriculture to automate farming: sensors collect data about the environment, such as the temperature, humidity, and any pest infestation, and make decisions based on that to manage the plants (e.g., to spray pesticides and to increase or decrease irrigation). Overall, this means that a lot of jobs are set to disappear. While this is a fairly common process, it is unclear where new ones will be created, if they required the skills that people have that were made redundant (probably not), and whether that will be a similar amount of jobs that are expected to disappear in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There are both arguments for excitement and caution regarding the fourth industrial revolution. Whichever way it goes, it is expected to have a major impact on society. Robots Robots speak to the imagination and fear that humans have, and have featured prominently in popular culture. The idea of trying to constrain their use can, perhaps, be traced back best to Asimov’s laws of robotics, which have been debated widely, extended, and made fun of ever since. Some of the main questions of the technology are: What should robots be allowed to do and what not? Why? How to regulate it? For instance, they could be deployed in an earthquake zone to search for survivors in the rubble, which may be too dangerous to do for human rescue workers, or in underground mines to save lives. An issue that has arisen is scope creep in built-in robot features, or: the robot can do more than it was supposed to be doing. New Jobs The network society also may be attributed with job generation. The existence of online jobs may seem to give the individual more control over who to work for and when to work. However, it also replicates the existing patterns we see in the manufacturing sector where the opportunities available to certain individuals are limited. In the manufacturing sector, it is known that proletarians, especially in developing countries, are likely to work for low salaries in sweatshops producing material for large companies. A recent variant is the so-called “sharing economy”, such as Uber and Taxify for a cab ride, where software is used for matchmaking between clients and service providers. Put differently: there is a software platform to support peer-to-peer economic activity, where a percentage of the proceeds goes to the company that developed the software. Societal and economic advantages and disadvantages are widely debated (e.g., [1, 95]) and its effects investigated, including in South Africa. Overall, it does seem to create new jobs, but, as with other areas of the workforce, there is a polarisation of the labour market [6, 14]. Digital Divide The adoption of the Internet and other ICTs have not been uniform throughout the world. This inequality is often referred to as the digital divide. By 2009 rates of penetration reached more than 60% in most rich countries and were increasing at a fast pace in countries with emerging economies. By 2018, it is about 90% in Europe and North America, with Africa trailing at 36% yet having seen about 10000% growth since 2000. Global Internet penetration in 2008 was still at around one-fifth of the world’s population and fewer than 10% of Internet users had access to broadband. However, since 2000, the digital divide, measured in terms of access, has been shrinking. Figure 3: Screenshot with some data about internet access. Top: by region in the world; bottom: a selection of countries in Africa (Source: internetworldstats). This is especially dangerous in the context of rich and poor countries as it creates the notion that rich countries have reached the final destination of information utopia. Furthermore, it may lead to rich countries using poor countries as dumping sites for their old infrastructure, called trashware. These countries may do this to avoid the costs associated with responsible disposal of the infrastructure. As highlighted, the simplistic definition of the digital divide has the potential to imply that there are two distinct groups with a gap between them. In such a scenario, one group is motivated to bridge the divide because ICTs may give people the ability to compete economically. The continued exclusion of disabled individuals, and possibly poor countries, may be seen as useful by some to the functioning of current societies. Developer Biases, Assumptions, and Values The designers of software have certain preconceptions about the users of their software, stemming from implicit assumptions or from what came out of the requirements engineering phase of the software development process. Likewise, developers tend to come with their own expectations about the audience for which they are building software. This phenomenon has been studied by Huff and Cooper ; the authors studied the impact of a designer’s views on educational software for children. They found that designers tend to create gamified tools for boys and learning tools for girls. Interactive Media and Mass Self-Communication The World Wide Web offers a means of interactive communication since the “Web 2.0” that started around the 2000s and that made ‘posting’ content a lot easier than before. A result is that the boundaries between mass media communication and all other forms of communication are blurring. With its diverse range of applications, it is the communication fabric of our lives, for work, for personal connection, for information, for entertainment, for public services, for politics, and for religion. The developments outlined above have now resulted in a different form of communication: mass self- communication (included in Web 2.0). As people have appropriated new forms of communication, they have built their own systems of mass communication, via SMS, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, and the like. File sharing and peer to-peer (p2p) networks make the circulation, mixing, and reformatting of any digitized content possible. This is mass communication, but user-generated content is a very different means of mass communication to what was ever seen before. Unlike traditional broadcast media, anyone can post a video in YouTube, with few restrictions. In most countries everyone is a publisher and there is equal freedom in what is chosen for viewing. A user selects the video she wants to watch and comment on from a huge listing of possibilities. Pressures are of course exercised on free expression on YouTube, particularly legal threats for copyright infringements. There can also be government censorship of content. ICT for Peace and Warfare As we have come across “ICT4D”, there is also an ‘ICT4Peace’, which aims to use ICTs for peace building efforts (that may well include ICT4D elements). This is the context of the United Nations definition of peace building toward the notion of positive peace as compared to only the absence of physical violence. Building explicit bias into a system An area within ICTs that can go either way in praxis, is software development: one can use the technologies for the benefit of society or destruction, but also build bias into it. This was already mentioned in Section 2.4.1 for what may be called implicit bias. It is a different story for explicit bias, where the system’s design is driven by political opinion and political agendas. For instance, you are tasked with the development of database to record the incidences of protests in South Africa. Destructive ICTs Thus far, we have seen a multitude of aspects of the social context of ICTs. They tried either to be positive to society, or have some unpleasant ‘side effects’. There is, however, also a strand of work in computer science and the deployment of ICTs that has the intention to do harm. At the time of writing, there are two popular topics: Information Warfare and Autonomous Weapons System. As one can have the “self-configuration” etc. in cyber-physical systems to bring a new era in industry on could use such theories, methods, and techniques to, say, have a drone self configure to find the target, self-adjust if that target happens to be moving, and self-optimize toward maximizing damage caused by the bomb it drops. SUMMARY: A Very Short History of IT - It was during the Second World War, and in its aftermath, that major technological breakthroughs in electronics took place: the first programmable computer and the transistor. Yet it was not until the 1970s that new information technologies became widely diffused, accelerating their synergistic development and converging into a new paradigm. Big Data has no single definition, but there are either 3 Vs or 5 Vs associated with it: Volume, Velocity, and Variety, to which Veracity, and Value have been added more recently. Machine learning focuses on algorithms to achieve good predictions based on large amounts of training data. The term filter bubble refers to that what you see in the search results of a search engine. Echo Chumber defined as a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type or opinions that are similar to their own. Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among people. Localization is not the opposite of the term “globalization”. Digital Convergence refers to the fact that we no longer need separate communications channels for different media (such as voice, video, text, etc.) because they are all digitized and can share the same connections and platforms. Artificial Intelligence is a branch in computer science and IT that concerns the theory and development of computer systems that can carry out tasks that normally requires human intelligence, i.e., it aims to simulate ‘intelligent’ behaviors in computers. The Internet of Things extends the commonly known Internet infrastructure with connectivity of devices that are not regarded as computers but do have embedded electronics so that they can be interacted with remotely, such as sensors, fridges, and other smart home appliances like a security system. The Three laws of robotics were formulated by science fiction write Isaac Asimov, in an attempt to control humanoid robots in his science fiction novels. They are: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. Web2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasize user-generated content, usability, and interoperability. It is not a technical update but rather refers to an emerging way in which the web is used. The Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is an extension of the web standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and refers to W3C’s vision of the Web of linked data and knowledge. SEATWORK: Check your Progress ! Enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of using robots. __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________