NATS 1700 6.0 COMPUTERS, INFORMATION AND SOCIETY Lecture 0: Goals, Methods, Contents, Deadlines, Resources, etc. | Next | Syllabus | Selected References | Home | | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |   Topics This course is part of the Faculty of Engineering and Science's Division of Natural Science's program. Such program is intended to provide each student with a precise sense of what science is: its history, its methods, and its multiple relationships with culture and society. It is also intended to contribute to the teaching of the so-called critical skills: how to read and write, how to ask questions, how to reason, how to integrate the various bits of information into knowledge, and how to cope with the overwhelming amount of information that our society is producing at a faster and faster pace. The first part of the course (approximately one month), will therefore dwell on science in general. What is science is not obvious. We could suggest that science is what scientists do. But scientists come in many different flavors: biologists, astronomers, geologists, chemists, and so on. And what about mathematicians? or physicians? Are they scientists too? If you were to study the original work of all these specialists, you would start doubting that they are all doing the same thing. Their methods are quite different; some of them seem to use only paper and pencil, while others require incredibly sophisticated equipment; and what an astronomer considers evidence or fact may not qualify as such for a chemist. And what about technology? Is it simply the application of science to everyday problems? Does technology require a pre-existing science? Or vice versa? For these reasons, many scholars (historians, sociologists, philosophers, and scientists themselves) have carefully examined the history of science, its assumptions, its methods, its people. It turns out that the answers provided by these scholars are quite diverse and often conflicting, and they have become a matter of heated controversy. We will review some of the major theories about science, beginning with one that is very popular even among scientists: the scientific method. Please note that the existence of such controversies does not imply that science is a dubious enterprise, but simply that science is a dynamic, continuously evolving endeavor which asks that it be judged ultimately in terms of its results. The second part of the course will begin to focus on information and computers. We will first study in some detail the concept of information. What is it? Is it facts or data? Is it knowledge? Why is this word so intimately related to the computer age? We will then look at computing. If you read the writings of Alan Turing, you will find that he often uses the word computer in the sense of a person who carries out computations--perhaps in his head, perhaps on paper. If we look at human history, we discover that the need to compute, to do calculations of various sorts, goes back as far as we can see. Even Stonehenge (about 3000 BC) seems to have served (at least in part) as an astronomical calculator, and the origins of the abacus are lost in the mists of time. In fact, the need to facilitate calculations is recorded in the ancient history of most cultures. Stonehenge We will therefore sketch such history, looking at it in greater and greater detail as we approach the nineteenth century, and of course especially the twentieth and the present centuries. We will describe and discuss the fundamental features of modern computers, and discover that, as early as in the first half of the nineteenth century, Charles Babbage (1791-1871) had already designed the first 'modern' computer. We will also examine the relationship between the onset of the modern computer age and various social and economic factors such as, for example, the Second World War. The third and final part of the course will explore the world ushered by the modern computer, its achievements and its problems. The sometimes inflated promises of artificial intelligence, the profound changes in what has become known as the global information society, the phenomenon of the Internet and the web, the hot, new issues about electronic commerce and trade, education, property rights, privacy, freedom and censorship, security, etc. The course will end with a brief review of the tortuous path we have followed, and a summary of the main conclusions and of the many issues which are still unresolved.   Readings and Resources Throughout the course, links to on-line and off-line readings are provided. Many are simply offered as suggestions. Some are required reading, and are specially marked with a red arrow  . You are strongly encouraged to spend time in the York Libraries, or in any other good library close to you. If you live or work in downtown Toronto, you can also use the Metro Reference Library, the Ryerson Library, the University of Toronto Libraries, etc. If you live elsewhere, send e-mail to the instructor, who will do his best to help you locate a good library near you. Libraries holdings are not just books. There are scholarly journals and good and reliable magazines. Examples of the latter are American Scientist, Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News, etc. Scholarly journals are usually quite specialized and difficult to understand, but you may still browse them, looking for editorials, survey articles, non-technical summaries of the articles themselves, etc. The best advice is for you to physically go to a library and explore. Finally, even if you are an experienced web surfer, you will find    How To Evaluate a Web Source  a very useful summary of good search practices.   Picture Credits: Slinky® Scientific Shindig Last Modification Date: 15 September 2009