Communication Breakdown for My Generation!

So, with this past week of entries, I thought I would try to bring things together a bit so you might now where I am headed with all of this. Here is one idea...

CERN was working way back when with scientists throughout the world and needed to create a system that helped people interact with each other. The isolation of distance was not allowing people to work effectively and expeditiously. This new means of communication and transfer of knowledge allowed them to get more done, become more successful in their research, learn more about their science, themselves, and others. Since then, the world has quickly become flatter, as described in the book, which I have discussed and referenced numerous times in this blog, "The World Is Flat", by Thomas Friedman.

Through, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen and the development of the internet and the interactive browser, what has been created is a new system of global interrelations between people. New and vibrant means of communication and interaction have developed. Anyone, nearly anywhere is able to discuss nearly anything with someone else. (I say nearly anything, nearly anywhere due to the fact of governmental controls or intrusion, such as China or even the United States.) In fact, numerous people can connect with numerous other people at the same time without leaving their home or office. There are millions of global communities growing due to this fact. People are reaching out beyond the borders and walls that bind them within their country.

Part of the problem I see in America today is that our business communities, and social communities are thriving on this new way of interaction and communication, but our government is falling behind in their understanding and or use of the technology. The old world ways of education are not copacetic to this new means of global community.

How can a teacher even begin to teach the children of the 21st century for the 21st century and beyond, when the children have a more advanced knowledge of technology and its uses as practices? Also, how can a teacher even begin to teach the children of the 21st century for the 21st century and beyond without these same tools that these children already have? We hear that children today do not interact with each other like "back in the day". I disagree! What needs to be understood is the fact that the days are getting longer and the nights are becoming shorter for our world.

My nieces have a Facebook page, just like hundreds of millions of other people throughout the planet have. I found them as I have one as well, GO HERE. This type of website is designed to create community with friends, relatives, and associates by streamlining technology so that one is able to communicate whenever they want, wherever they want, on whatever they want. They have this page connected to their cell phones, blogs, other websites. For the people that don't understand this, they may feel that technology has gotten out of hand and is isolating the new generation to behind a keyboard or cellphone. The debate is that this isolation is not allowing people to connect...

Communication and community is basically who and how many can stay connected on relevant issues for their group. To be able to share needs, necessities, and ideas. We have grown as a specie from a small tribal community to a now global community. Before the telephone, one's community or social circle was defined by how many people one could come in contact with in a few days time, before the news or information or necessity for the connection became irrelevant. Today, we as a global community can stay connected to relevance continuously. These thoughts and ideas can become more relevant or change just as quickly. This emergent process of human interaction must be respected and understood by our governments, as this is obviously what our specie is yearning for and involved in.

When there are people that have created communities of friends and associates with hundreds if not thousands of members in their community you cannot say that people are unconnected.

Have you heard the saying that goes something like, "When you are pointing a finger, how many fingers are pointing back?" If one has done any study with psychology one knows that when someone is accusatory of another the accusations tend to be what the accuser is guilty of themselves. It's much like looking in a mirror...now make that accusation...Change is inevitable, and constant. Not understanding the change is what creates the wrinkles in society. This is also a constant as new and younger generations look for their own voice, to create their own marks in society. It is just that much may seem out of control to those that do not understand or embrace these changes due to the exponential growth of technology and science.

The ideas of force and not cooperation or the isolationism is putting our country at odds with every other country in the world. Remember the mirror? You see, we are reaching an apex, a tipping point in our global society. What is inevitable is a paradigm shift in human relations. The old world interactions will still exist, however will become antiquated quickly. This new style of human relations is traversing the planet rapidly, as it has been doing these past 10-15 years. There has never been anything like this on this planet before. The changes in technology are exponential. The governments still try to govern the old world ways.



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(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs

It CERNtainly all comes full circle...

I CERNtainly find it all a bit interesting. You may have heard of the world's largest hadron particle physics laboratory or what is known in laymen terms as "The Big Collider". CERN Laboratories was founded in 1954. It was the first European collaboration of scientists from numerous countries. It is now a global scientific experiment, located on the borders or Switzerland and France, that has opened their experimental processes recently.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

They sent a particle beam through the system to test it, about a month ago. Due to a few glitches then needed to shut down in order to fix a few magnetic switch issues. They will restart again soon. It simply takes a long time for the 27km tunnel that traverses underground through both countries to warm up to a room temperature for people to be enter it and fix the necessary problems, to then be re-cooled to a temperature of -271C or 1.9Kelvin. This is the temperature that helium becomes superfluid. This simply means that the gas flows with virtually no viscosity which allows for greater heat transfer for the hadron particles to fly at nearly the speed of light. The particle beam is shot through the circular tunnel and floats through the helium effortlessly to finally reach a destination of collision with another particle or solid surface.

What may not be known to many about the CERN organization is that the Internet was invented here. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web in 1990. This is where the www comes from in any internet address. The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. It made it easy and quite cost effective (basically free) for scientist throught the world to send information to eachother. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and thousands of scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system. The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990.

By the end of that year, prototype software for a basic system (BASIC) was already being demonstrated. To encourage its adoption, CERN developed a 'help service' and the now familiar Usenet newsgroups were provided. CERN provided a simple browser, which could be run on any system.

In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. This is known as open sourced software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems. Hypertext, or the http of any internet address, is the computer language which overcomes the use of simple text. This is where multiple links and connections are established and other applications and video may be run on it.

The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991, once again in a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser, developed by the now famous Marc Andreessen. This was the precursor of the Netscape browser.

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratory’s primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed.

In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability’.

By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.

Okay...why I went through this is to show the collaborative efforts that science has taken us to share knowledge and information...FREE!

I will be following this up tomorrow with PART TWO of my study of CERN, Marc Andreessen and their true effects on our global society.



(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs