G12 assignment

Read the following topic and discuss it with your teacher and classmates. The technical terms described in this article have to be used later in commenting on other articles. They are universal in IT usage.

Topic 1: Social and Ethical Issues on IT
The widespread use of IT raises questions about social and ethical issues that shape the world today. Students should become familiar with all the social and ethical issues described in this section. (1)In this way students can examine social and ethical issues that are raised when IT systems are used in a range of areas. (2) The use of IT is likely to bring both advantages and disadvantages,(3) both costs and benefits, and students should study the impact of IT in a critical way. (4)It is important that examples are drawn from the local, national and global level.
1.1 Reliability
Reliability refers to the operation of hardware, the design of software, the accuracy of data or the correspondence of data with the real world. Data may be unreliable if it is entered incorrectly or if it becomes outdated. For example, a medical record that becomes dissociated from the patient it refers to becomes unreliable. The reliability of machines, software and data determines our confidence in their value.
1.2 Integrity
Integrity refers to correspondence of data with itself, at its creation. Data lacks integrity when it has been changed accidentally or tampered with. For example, a hacker might change driver license data resulting in arrests of innocent people.
1.3 Security
Security refers to the protection of hardware, software, machines and networks from unauthorized access, alteration or destruction. Security measures include restricted access to machines and networks and encryption of information. The degree of security of information systems determines society’s confidence in the information contained in the systems.
1.4 Privacy and anonymity
Privacy is the ability of individuals and groups to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about themselves is shared with others. At its extreme, privacy becomes anonymity, which might be called for in some contexts but is dangerous in others. For example, discussion of a delicate subject might require anonymity, or at least privacy. On the other hand, anonymity could also conceal the perpetrators of criminal, terrorist or computer hacking acts.
1.5 Authenticity
Authenticity means establishing the user’s identity beyond reasonable doubt. Authenticating the user is crucial in many situations, particularly in business and legal matters. A simple example of authentication is user login onto a network. A more advanced example would be the use of encrypted digital signatures in a business transaction.
1.6 Intellectual property
Intellectual property includes ideas, discoveries, writings, works of art, software, collections and presentations of data. Copyrights, trademarks and patents legally protect intellectual property, but easy and accurate duplication methods made available by IT can undermine such protections. On the other hand, the same methods create opportunity for inexpensive dissemination of information.

Read this article and comment on it. Answer the questions.

Topic 2: The economic value of information by Kent Harvath
Since computers and internet developed a wide informational system, much information than ever has been available on internet. Though most of the information is free here, it is reasonable that in such environment, there are people who try to make money out of information on internet, creating a market for information on internet. There had been market for information on books, but internet has made it easier to access information and increased the number of information accessible, and therefore greatly affected the market for internet and the economic value of information. Some people consider this information economy to be the next phase of economy following hunting, agriculture, and manufacturing economy.The market has now been entirely on internet. They advertise the product on internet. The customers look at it on a web page. They order it through internet and the purchased information is sent completely as data, many times called e-book. There also are numerous articles that charge money to read. The value of information has increased for both business people and customers. Information is now a profitable product. It is also suitable for earning money because the production cost is almost zero. It does not cost to duplicate the information because it is purely data, and there is no need to hire workers. This not only increases the profit, but also decreases the risk which is not a problem if it does not sell well. The fact that the price of e-books are actually high (above $10.00) regardless of low cost suggests that the demand is high as well. ebook pricesThus, these people involved in the internet market for information benefits from this increase in economic value of information. The people who suffer from this are people involved in old market of information such as books. Due to the law of substitutes, the demand for books results decreased by the increase in demand for e-books.One social issue that may occur by the increase in economic value of information is that economic value of other products may lower. Despite the increase in economic value, information itself is useless in many circumstances. It can not substitute for food, stationary, houses, or any other things that form the basis of our living. Since it is easier and much more efficient to earn money by information on internet, many businesses would concentrate on information, and the competition for other field would be less and incentive to innovate would be lowered in that area.Though this internet market on information seems to be very efficient, there are problems that could occur within it. One problem is anonymousness. It is easier to deceive people. Much information could be plagiarized information. Also, in many cases, advertisement on the web page makes the information look to be really useful, and the price may be very expensive, but the information itself is really poor. The problem here is unreliability. So many things are unclear on internet that these social and ethical problems arise. Due to the fact that the information economy is just in the stage of development, there still aren’t many laws that regulate these problems yet.Another ethical problem that arises is black markets of information. An example would be a list of e-mails sold. It could be a list of e-mails of people who are interested in certain things and people buy it to send advertising mails. Or it could be a list of e-mails of not intelligent people who got tricked by some information product which is purchased by people who intends to trick people. Anyhow, the development in informational network also encourages this kind of trade as well.Thus, the economic value of information has increased due to development of computers and internet.


Questions:
1- What impacts information is going to have on life today in society relying on information retrieved from internet?
2- What did you like or dislike most in this article?
3- Which type of business do you expect to flourish in the future? (use your imagination and your creativity to invent something new in any type of business or non business market)
4- Do you think you will have your own business or work on the internet in the future?

Read the following article and comment on it. Answer the questions:

Topic 3: Use of appropriate search engines by Dwarkesh
In this international world of global information, the Internet and especially a search engine is what drives a person everyday. It helps a person develop and create his information with the ease of a “search” button on a webpage. This convenience has created dependence for ever-ready information on their fingertips. The problem is as people start taking this convenience for granted; some Search engines such as yahoo and Ask.com take advantage of this market need and therefore don’t really do their best to satisfy with their very best quality.

How to look for search engines according to your need:

Choose a search engine, directory or library in accordance with the kind of search you are doing and the kind of results you are seeking. If you are looking for a Web site, information that might be contained within Usenet; Academic articles that may only be retrievable with gopher; Determine your aims: Do you want a specific hard-to-find document on an esoteric subject, or general information on a broader topic; Do you need to search the entire Web, or is what you are seeking likely to be found on a number of sites, or only the most popular sites? In making your choice, determine whether the information you are looking for is likely to be in a page's title or first paragraph, or buried deeper within the document or site. Use a search engine's advanced features, if available, and read the help files if you are unclear about its searching procedure.

Choosing search terms and syntax:

Enter synonyms, alternate spellings and alternate forms (e.g. dance, dancing, dances) for your search terms. Enter all the singular or unique terms, which are likely to be included in the document, or site you are seeking. Avoid using very common terms (e.g. Internet, people), which may lead to a preponderance of irrelevant search results.Determine how your search engine uses capitals and plurals, and enter capitalized or plural forms of your search words if appropriate. Use a phrase or proper name if possible to narrow your search and therefore retrieve more relevant results (unless you want a large number of results). Use multiple operators if a search engine allows you to do so. If you receive too many results, refine and improve your search. Pay attention to proper spacing and punctuation in your search syntax.Until now Google is the best Search Engine there is as it is meeting the market needs in the best possible way. Yahoo and Microsoft are making their best effort to compete Google, nothing but that. They do not provide users with good relevant search results to increase their information.

Use of appropriate search engines by Aditya

Search engines are an easy way for a person who is attempting to navigate the internet to do so with a significant level of ease. An appropriate search engine is one which uses relatively advanced technology to search pages and return results based on a customer’s input. The customer is not necessarily paying.There are a few search engines apart from Google. Go to Wikipedia and type in search engines in the search box for this information. One such search engine which uses advanced technology related to ranking pages is AskJeeves.The issues are those related to ease of use for the customer and brand loyalty.Google has gone to extra lengths to do this with its Page Rank Technology. This technology emerged when the Google guys met at Stanford. They eventually decided that they’d follow their own path. Eventually, they found investors who had faith in them. It returns results based on the number of times previous users have gone to the site and also according to the number of times or usefulness that Google considers it to have.The stakeholders in this case are both Google and the customers of Google’s various products such as Google Sketch up Pro and Google Earth. People will begin to gain faith in the Google brand and purchase more of their products. The customers save lots of time and hence find the efficient solution to navigating the Internet.The disadvantage for Google is that it can lose its loyalty very easily if it rolls out even one bad product. This is a very high risk business and basically only has to do with Google’s or a search engine’s business situation. The impact is basically global because the Internet is accessible in any area of the world.

Questions:
1- What are your current needs when using internet?
2- Which search engine suits best your needs? Explain why?
3- List at least 5 of the searching techniques you find most useful. List 5 searching techniques you newly learned.
4- What is the added value of Google on the other search engines?
5- Describe in brief what Google is. Give a brief idea how the company worked to be the best search engine worldwide. Find the price of the Google Company on a stock market website.

Need reference websites (1) for Comparison between Google and the other search engines (2) history of Google Company and how it works (3) searching techniques


Topic 4: Social consequences of addiction to the Internet by Oliver
The Internet is an endless tool to waste countless hours of time. The Internet is a medium that provides games, social networking (Facebook), chatting (MSN, Yahoo!), emailing (Hotmail, Gmail) gambling, etc. While many of us feel it’s perfectly fine to be spending so much time on the Internet, we could be in the early stages of what is called Internet Addiction disorder.Online games are becoming a very popular use of the Internet. Many sites provide free, addicting Flash and Java games that can be played on any computer with a working Internet browser. There have been cases of where people have died playing such games. In June 2005, a child died due to parental neglect, as the parents were heavily addicted to internet games. This issue of addiction has become so prominent that the People’s Republic of China has begun regulating the hours of playtime their citizens can have with the game. Although the ethics of regulation from the People’s Republic of China is questionable, definitely something should be done about game addiction.Another popular Internet phenomenon falls under the name of Web 2.0. Web 2.0, a term coined by Tim O’Reilly, refers to a new generation websites that strongly encourage collaboration between users. Social networking sites such as Facebook are now becoming increasing popular for teenagers to be a part of. Teenagers are now spending increasing amounts of time developing their personal Facebook page, as opposed to paying attention to school work. A similar but less recent phenomenon is chatting. Chat programs such as MSN and Yahoo have also become a distraction for teenagers from their academic duties. As well most of the companies now, when recruiting a new employee, they go to the internet and information from their personal websites as Facebook. And many employee were not accepted in the jobs they applied to, due to the personal information they posted on internet innocently when they were a teenager. This information affected lately their carriers. Similar problems were detected when some bad minded people copy and pasted pictures from teenagers and made changes on it. Then they used it the blackmail them later by sending them by emails to their employer, husband and wife, parents, friends, university ….As people being spending more and more time on the Internet, so does the tendency for them do develop Internet Addiction Disorder. If you begin developing symptoms of Internet addiction such as skipping social activities to surf the Internet or beginning feeling withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety attacks and psychomotor agitation (lol), you may need to seek help. Surprisingly, there are actually rehabilitation clinics to deal with Internet addiction, which may come in greater need in the near future.

Social consequences of addiction to the Internet by Andrew

Internet addiction is the new problem these days. There is always someone that’s online and doing something that’s related to the internet. For example people play games, typing an e-mail to a friend, calling friends over the internet using skype, others are using an instant messaging service over the internet and there are other things that I am not allowed to mention on the topic. People spend hours using the internet because it is such an addictive thing. Over the internet you are almost allowed to do anything that you can imagine…other than meeting a person in real life, though you can set up dates and meeting points. The main source of people being addicted to the internet these days are all the games that are available to anyone who have access to the internet. Some games are more addicting than others of course but that depends in the player. These games can be addicting to people who like to have a different selection of fantasy based guns to take people out. There are different multiplayer modes such as death match where you are your own team and you try to score the most points in the game by looking for other players to kill.There are many other aspects of the game that attract the players to buy the game and pay for it every month or so using their credit cards. Some of these game has had made people loose their friends because the person plays it for so long he is like the character he has created in the game. The eye site of the person lowers just by staring at the screen for too long a day and not getting any other range from an object and so the eyes change to look at an object that is close to the face. This game has even caused people to loose their jobs. Also the game has even caused people to go to court for playing too long and having to have their game play time reduced. Some people even get divorced from playing these game too much for not paying enough attention to their partner. Game addiction mainly causes people to loose their friends, parents, wives and husbands, children… It also can loose your job, but of course you still got your job in the game…It mainly depends on how much you are addicted to the game. This addiction is not only restricted to internet but also spider solitaire, cards games, or network games etc… Their effects are similar.

Questions:
1- Summarize in your own words the problem.
2- What are the effects of these types of addictions?
3- Give your point of view.
4- What do you suggest to do for an addicted person?
5- Are you addicted to such type of IT misusage? Did you overcome your problem how? If not how do you think you will overcome it?
6- How do you think parents should deal with their kids if they have such a problem?

Topic 5: Read the following article on “Violence and video games”.


http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/274065/violence_and_video_games_the_thoughts.html

Questions:
1- State in your own words the problem and its impacts.
2- If you have the responsibility of raising a kid (yours, your brother or sister, a relative…), how far would you let your kids spend time on these types of video games?
3- According to your own point of view, who is responsible for the violence increase in teens’ attitude? (Analysis is recommended: it is a combination of factors and not only one.)
4- What do you suggest to overcome this problem? From your own point of view, is it possible to overcome it completely or at least minimize its effects? Suggest a solution.