Building Civilization

The World Wide Web is arguably the greatest medium of communication humanity has ever developed; however, is there any great communication going on? Beyond games, shopping, dating, etc., behind mass advertising and revenue maximizing exists an Internet with a more remarkable purpose.

Ubiquity of the Internet in Education

At the turn of the millennium, nearly 95% of youths reported using the Internet for school research; over two thirds used the Internet as their primary source for material. And these numbers are only getting larger. Now, ten years later, this trend has seemed to come of age, and the impact of the Internet on education is undeniable. Seemingly far removed from its origins as an inter-university network, the world wide web can be considered to be returning to its roots. Higher education has finally caught up to and embraced the ubiquity of the internet. It now seems like a far stretch from the 2001 finding that only about half of students had used a Website specifically set up for a particular class. Now, students will be hard pressed to avoid one.

Higher Education Online

The importance of the Internet in higher education is undeniable, not only in helping supplement available material, but also in substituting for it. Online databases such as JSTOR provides thousands of scholarly articles for academics and students conducting research for projects or papers. This free resource, available to most students in higher education represents the universal acknowledgment of the value of sharing information in education. Such free and reliable information sharing is invaluable to the goal of higher education. However, in the last decade, the internet redefined higher education in an entirely different and equally substantial way. One of the most prominent of these resources, released in 2007 by Apple is iTunes U. Expanding the media sharing model to beyond internal networks, Apple’s iTunes U provides universities with the infrastructure to share content with the entire world. Currently, nearly 400 world class universities distribute course content publicly on iTunes U. Whether one wishes to download lectures on psychology from Cornell or brain imaging from Carnegie Mellon University, iTunes U provides university level content available to anybody anywhere.

Expanding the Model

Such innovations are not, however, limited to higher education. In 2006, MIT graduate Salman Khan began his mission to of providing free educational videos directed for students from kindergarten to 12^th grade, covering mathematics, sciences, and the humanities. Now five years later, the Khan academy has over 2700 instructional videos accessed over 90 millions times. The Khan Academy’s goal is to provide “free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” The Academy uses a ground breaking approach that combines intuitive subject building and extensive data collection to track student progress and apprehension. The mechanics of the curriculum focuses on acknowledging actual progress as well as providing a big picture of what the student is learning.

The Khan Academy is not the only example of free, open source education available. Another service, Open Culture, founded in 2006, seeks to provide “high-quality cultural and educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community.” Open Culture provides free audiobooks, online course, movies, language lessons, and ebooks. Whether one wants to watch A Fistful of Dollars, find an introductory German lesson, or take a course on Ancient Greek History, Open Culture provides the resources to do so all for free and all easily accessed online.

Redefining Literacy

While online education has been breaking out in many new and innovative paths, so too have some of the most fundamental mediums through the world wide web. As a mechanism for the dissemination of knowledge, printed text is still an important resource. However, one of the most common problems with printed media is their difficulty of access. The service reCaptcha seeks to change this in an innovated and convenient manner. reCaptcha is a version of the Captcha programs meant to distinguish human users from computer generated responses used to ensure security and authenticity. The purpose of reCaptcha is to take that mundane authentication and verification task and turn it into useful computer power. This system works by asking the user to translate scanned text from books into normal text. Since this task is inherently difficult for computers, the human brain is much more efficient. The goal of the reCaptcha is to develop a system for helping to translate many copies of books that still exist only in print format into computer-understandable text. These texts thus become catalogue-able and searchable through services such as Project Guttenberg and Google Books. This project represents yet another example of how the world wide web is helping to revolutionize how learning and education occurs in modern culture.

Yet another example similar to reCaptcha is Duolingo. Here, instead of translating print media into text, however, Duolingo’s purpose is to translate between different language. Currently, the internet has a great deal of diverse content from many different languages, but often each source is not available in any language other than its original content. Duolingo seeks to change this by gathering the effort of the human intelligence and problem solving. Structured as a language course for people who want to learn a new language, Duolingo works by crowd sourcing translations amongst the participants. Its goal is that through the cumulative efforts of these students, the vast majority of online content can be made readily available for many more languages other than their original one.

From the Ground Up

More recently, projects have begun to focus on even more rudimentary but equally vital subjects. One particular example is the Global Village Construction Set from Open Source Ecology. The Global Village Construction Set project seeks to provide free blueprints for the forty machines necessary to build a self-sustaining civilization from the ground up. Machines such as tractors, drills, and brick makers are made from easy to follow designs that can be made on limited resources. By making these blueprints free and openly available, to project hopes to give smaller, developing economies more economic and financial stability and independence while also reducing material waste.

Where Can We Go From Here?

In the last fifty years, the internet has managed to revolutionize more about our society than arguably any other invention of our time. With it has come the revolution of countless methods and products of day to day livelihood, from communication to commerce to politics. While each instance is an important part of life in the twenty first century, it seems as though its full potential has only begun to present itself. No longer is the World Wide Web a thing of frivolity or novelty. It is, very fittingly, a way of life. Thus, it seems necessary that in this new way of life some of our most basic, yet most important institutions progress along side it. Fortunately, if anything, our society has demonstrated its willingness to adapt and adopt this new medium in some of its most important contexts. The restricting of the educational model to focus on convenience, accessibility, interactivity, and portability Only now in its relative infancy the possibilities are near limitless. Online education provides a model for infinitely scalable and accessible education to millions if not billions of people who would have never had such an opportunity. While we are a ways away from fully supplanting a traditional education, we are certainly at the point of bolstering the ability of a community from the ground up, from tilling the land to lessons on advanced organic chemistry.

Works Cited:

"The Internet and Education: Findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project" Pew Internet & American Life Project.

iTunes U. Apple Inc.

JSTOR. "About."

Khan Academy. "About."

Open Culture. "FAQ"

Duolingo.

"Digitizing Books One Word at a Time." reCaptcha.

Open Source Equality.

Peer to Peer File Sharing

Peer- to- peer file sharing, also known as P2P or in colloquial terms “torrenting”, is something that allows users to download media files ranging from movies to music and to games. This is done by using a P2P software client that has the capability to search for other computers that are connected as well. These connected computers are known as “peers”, which are computer systems that are associated with one another via the Internet. The requirements that a computer needs to join this peer- to –peer set of connections are P2P software and an Internet connection.

The history of the P2P software dates back to the first generation software in 1999, called Napster. Although Napster was eventually shut down, the purpose of it was to be a file sharing program and central server that linked people with files to other people who requested those certain files. The central index server was meant to index all of the current users and search their computers for those particular files. How this worked was when one person searched for a specific file, the server would search for all of the available copies of that file and present them to the user. After this, the files would be transferred between the two users. The main drawback of this was that the files being shared were limited to only music. Since this process occurred on a central server is, Napster was held responsible for copyright infringement and was officially shut down in July of 2001. Then second generation of the P2P software is Gnutella and Kazaa, both user- based models that tried to replicate Napster in creating new ways of sharing files, but not infringe copyright laws. The difference between these services and Napster was that they connected users remotely to each other and allowed users to download files that were only limited to music, but also movies and games. Finally, the third generation that emerged when Napster shut down was BitTorrent. BitTorrent allowed users to connect with more than one other user and download individual bits from these users. Also, BitTorent users voluntarily uploaded their files. The main different between BitTorrent and Napster, Gnutella, and Kazaa was that BitTorrent generated a new network for each and every set of files, instead of creating one large, complex network of files using such things as SuperNodes, servers, or web caches.

As peer- to- peer file sharing has evolved, there are a great number of factors that have played a huge role to the widespread adoption and facilitation of this system. This includes everything from the extensive digitalization of physical media files to the increase in Internet bandwidth and to the increase in capabilities of home PCs to better suit the playing and storing of digitized audio and video files. Now, users are able to reassign either one or more files from one computer to another by the Internet through an assortment of file transfers and file- sharing networks.

Since this is obviously a very controversial issue, there is also a discussion about the economic impact that P2P file- sharing has. Some argue that there have been comparatively few studies although it has been growing lately, but the overall studies of this are small. There are more arguments that because of data and econometric issues, studies so far have produced dissimilar estimates of the file sharing’s impact on album, movie, and game shares. There is a certain study that found that there has been a twenty percent reduction in compact disc sales due to file sharing, but in the large scheme of things, that micro- level data supports a much smaller negative impact of eight percent on sales. By using another econometric process, this same study estimates that file sharing reduces the probability and chances of buying music by thirty percent.

It is unclear and controversial on how the rise of peer- to- peer file sharing has impacted the music industry economically. However, on a global scale, the data shows that music sales dropped from 38 billion to 32 billion from 1999 to 2003. Controversy looms over these figures, while the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing has increased the number of illegally downloaded songs and movies. Studies have shown that people involved in file sharing actually represent better than the average customer. The BI Norwegian School of Management found that people who downloaded music illegally were ten times as likely to pay for songs then those who don’t. KTH researchers argued that the decline in music sales was due to the fact that the music industry was slow to meet the new demand. The decline of music sales can be traced back to when the MP3 file format was introduced, and at the time no legal sites were covering this kind of demand. The study that the KTH researchers did also concluded that the decrease in music sales occurred when the format of MP3 emerged, and there was not any legal attractive website to cover this type of emerging demand. This study also concluded that during the last years in the United States, there has been an increase of Internet access that has correlated to an increase in file sharing, and also an increase of sold music units that count both digital and physical units.

It has been complicated to disentangle the cause and effect relationships among a great amount of different trends, including the increase in legal online purchases of music, illegal file- sharing, drops in the prices of CDs, and the disappearance of many independent music stores. Many studies have found that file sharing economically hurts sales, although not always to the precise degree, this is what the record industry would like the public to accept as true. On the other hand, Another study that analyzed the logs of download on file sharing networks concluded that file sharing had no negative effect on the sale of CDs, and was actually slightly improving the sales of top hit albums. This was then challenged by another study in which it criticized that the other study made multiple assumptions about the music industry that was not correct.

As for the economic impact on the film industry, the MPAA reported that because of Internet piracy American studios lost $2.3 billion in 2005, which represents approximately one third of the total cost of film piracy in the United States. Many commented that this estimate was doubted by commentators due to the fact that it was based on the assumption that one download was equal to one lost sale, and that downloaders would definitely not purchase the movie if illegal downloading was not an alternative. Because of this uncertainty and the private nature of the study, these figures can not be publicly checked for validity, but when the MPAA was lobbying for a bill that would compel universities to be more strict on piracy, it was admitted that MPAA’s figures on piracy in colleges were inflated up to 300%.

In another study headed by the International Chamber of Commerce and conducted by independent Paris- based economics firm TERA, it was estimated that illegal downloading of music, film, and software cost Europe’s creative industries several billion dollars in revenue each year. Additionally, the TERA study forecasted losses due to piracy reaching as much as 1.2 million jobs and 240 billion Euros in retail revenue by 2015 if this trend persisted. Furthermore, researchers applied a ten percent substitution rate to the volume of copyright infringements each year. This rate corresponded to the number of units that could potentially be rated if illegal file share was abolished and did not occur. It is common in countries and regions such as the United States and Europe that piracy rates of one- quarter or more for popular software and operating systems is true.

In the year of 2004 it was estimated that approximately 70 million people actively participated in online file sharing. According to a poll, basically 70 percent of 18 to 29 year olds thought that file sharing was acceptable in some circumstances and 58 percent of all Americans who followed the file sharing issue thought it was acceptable, in at least some cases. In 2006 it was noted that 32 million Americans over the age of 12 had downloaded at least one feature length movie from the Internet. 80 percent of these had done so completely and exclusively over P2P. Out of these sampled, 40 percent felt that it was a very serious misdemeanor to download copyrighted movies off the Internet, by 78 percent thought that it was a serious offense to take a DVD from a store without paying for it. As for more statistics, in 2009, 20 percent of Europeans used file-sharing networks in order to acquire music, while only 10 percent used services such as iTunes,

Of course there are many risks to this in which researchers have examined potential security issues including the availability of personal and private information, bundled spyware, and viruses that can be downloaded from the Internet. The government of the United States has tried to make users more aware of the potential risks that can be involved with P2P file sharing programs. They have done so through the legislation such as H.R. 1319, the Informed P2P User Act. This act states that it is compulsory for individuals to be at least aware of the risks related to peer- to- peer file sharing before purchasing software with informed consent of the user required prior to use of such program. Additionally, the act would let users block and remove P2P file sharing softwares whenever they wanted on their computer, with the Federal Trade Commission enforcing regulations.