As computational technology has grown over the last several decades, it has come to play an increasingly greater role in our modern lifestyle. What was once limited to a select few (e.g., wealthy corporations, electrical engineers, scientific researchers, etc.) is now a commonplace commodity that nearly everybody uses and relies upon to one degree or another. Today's technology is ubiquitous. From the smart phone in your pocket to the cash register at your neighborhood store to the traffic signals at a nearby intersection, the products of computer science are everywhere. Everything around us collects, stores, and/or manipulates digital data to record information, compute results, and make decisions about how things should work. We cannot escape the influence of digital computing in our everyday lives. As computing becomes more pervasive and individuals integrate it into their daily lives, we grow increasingly dependent upon this technological resource. More and more of our infrastructure, whether it is banking, shopping, medical records, communication, or basic utilities like electricity and water, is being built around and optimized to rely upon computational technologies.
As computational technology has grown over the last several decades, it has come to play an increasingly greater role in our modern lifestyle. What was once limited to a select few (e.g., wealthy corporations, electrical engineers, scientific researchers, etc.) is now a commonplace commodity that nearly everybody uses and relies upon to one degree or another.
Today's technology is ubiquitous. From the smart phone in your pocket to the cash register at your neighborhood store to the traffic signals at a nearby intersection, the products of computer science are everywhere. Everything around us collects, stores, and/or manipulates digital data to record information, compute results, and make decisions about how things should work. We cannot escape the influence of digital computing in our everyday lives.
And that has had a profound impact on the ways that societies function and has altered the ways that individuals behave and make decisions. The influence of computational technology is so pervasive that people increasingly take it for granted, especially younger individuals for whom this technology has always existed.
One of the goals of this course has been to open your eyes to many of the computational influences that surround you and show you how to harness the capabilities of these tools and resources.
The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us. — Clifford Stoll
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergei Brin launched Google, an online search engine that was driven by the PageRank algorithm (named after Larry Page) that the two had developed while students at Stanford University. While Google was not the first search engine on the Web (at least a dozen popular search engines were developed in the half decade before Google), it was the first to use the relative connectedness of webpages to rank and prioritize search results, an approach that quickly built Google into one of the leading sources of online search. Google's success has been further cemented by the verbification of its name. Today, in popular language, to look up answers online is to "Google it."
The very fact that people routinely turn to search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or even Siri whenever they have a question about something is a testament to the power of search and the value it adds to our lives. Before the Web, information was not as readily available to the mass public. Much of the knowledge and information that society possessed was either private, undocumented, or locked up in books buried in a local library. Immediate access to diverse ideas and resources was not instantaneously accessible anywhere to the degree that it is today. And search engines, like the Dewey Decimal card catalog system of libraries, provide an efficient interface for indexing and finding obscure and relevant bits of information.
The easy access to any and all types of information has profoundly altered individuals' behaviors, especially when it comes to learning. If there is anything a person might want to learn about or any skills that they might want to develop, the Web has made the tools and resources needed to acquire that knowledge readily available to anyone who is interested. But while online search has increased the amount that we can know, it has also reduced the amount that we need to know. No longer is there a need to learn and remember infrequent details. If there is anything important that you need to know later, you can "just Google it."
As computational technology has grown over the last several decades, it has come to play an increasingly greater role in our modern lifestyle. What was once limited to a select few (e.g., wealthy corporations, electrical engineers, scientific researchers, etc.) is now a commonplace commodity that nearly everybody uses and relies upon to one degree or another.
Today's technology is ubiquitous. From the smart phone in your pocket to the cash register at your neighborhood store to the traffic signals at a nearby intersection, the products of computer science are everywhere. Everything around us collects, stores, and/or manipulates digital data to record information, compute results, and make decisions about how things should work. We cannot escape the influence of digital computing in our everyday lives.
And that has had a profound impact on the ways that societies function and has altered the ways that individuals behave and make decisions. The influence of computational technology is so pervasive that people increasingly take it for granted, especially younger individuals for whom this technology has always existed.
One of the goals of this course has been to open your eyes to many of the computational influences that surround you and show you how to harness the capabilities of these tools and resources.
The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us. — Clifford Stoll
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergei Brin launched Google, an online search engine that was driven by the PageRank algorithm (named after Larry Page) that the two had developed while students at Stanford University. While Google was not the first search engine on the Web (at least a dozen popular search engines were developed in the half decade before Google), it was the first to use the relative connectedness of webpages to rank and prioritize search results, an approach that quickly built Google into one of the leading sources of online search. Google's success has been further cemented by the verbification of its name. Today, in popular language, to look up answers online is to "Google it."
The very fact that people routinely turn to search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or even Siri whenever they have a question about something is a testament to the power of search and the value it adds to our lives. Before the Web, information was not as readily available to the mass public. Much of the knowledge and information that society possessed was either private, undocumented, or locked up in books buried in a local library. Immediate access to diverse ideas and resources was not instantaneously accessible anywhere to the degree that it is today. And search engines, like the Dewey Decimal card catalog system of libraries, provide an efficient interface for indexing and finding obscure and relevant bits of information.
The easy access to any and all types of information has profoundly altered individuals' behaviors, especially when it comes to learning. If there is anything a person might want to learn about or any skills that they might want to develop, the Web has made the tools and resources needed to acquire that knowledge readily available to anyone who is interested. But while online search has increased the amount that we can know, it has also reduced the amount that we need to know. No longer is there a need to learn and remember infrequent details. If there is anything important that you need to know later, you can "just Google it."