INFSCI 2000
Introduction to Information Science

Extra Point Observations

You can earn up to 50 extra credit points by submitting observations on the readings.  The observations must cover 5 distinct topics from the reading sources, with no more than 2 questions submitted on any one week.  Questions should be posted to courseweb by Monday at 12 noon (12:00:00). Each question will be observation will be graded on a scale of 10 points, based on originality and depth of understanding.  Two sample observations follow.

Sample Observation 1:

Chapter  11, page 145 - The author states, “"Take, for instance, the recent enthusiasm for the World Wide Web. The web provides novel and powerful ways to retrieve information – but retrieving the kinds of information available over the Web, or any information at all for that matter, plays a limited part in most people's lives. Indeed, the Web offers not the slightest benefit to the majority of the earth's population."

I am not sure what the author implies by this. I agree, that a very small percentage of the world population surf the web and get information over the web. But that does not mean the web does not influence their lives. People in Africa with no access to Internet can benefit from the drug produced by collaboration of researchers. The presence of web/email obviously helps the researchers to collaborate, share data and save time to come up with a drug.  Even if the people of Africa do not surf the web, it is surely influencing their lives. I think majority of the people in the world are affected by the presence of World Wide Web - either directly or indirectly.  And I am not too sure what the author means when he says "information plays limited part in most people's life."

Sample Observation 2:

According to the section 6-4-3 Simplified Sign-Ons (p. 183), the author suggested that a handle or an online name is not necessary and it can be eliminated by using an unique memorable password without user name when logging on an account. I think this is an idea proposed in the past when the computing environment is not as complicated as nowadays.

If you don't have a username for your account, you don't have a public-known ID for identifying you. This means when you have some problem with your account, you must provide your unique password to a system administrator to solve your problem; and you don't have your username for public to communicate with you, such as username for instant messaging programs. You might argue with me that a user still can have a username and just sign on the system without typing it. But in this case, the inconvenience for typing username is eliminated, but a trouble for pick an easy-to-remember, but not easy-to-guess, and unique password arises.  I think some people are trying to eliminate almost every procedure as they can, but they don't consider about the cost for changing the habit of users.