FAQ: How Big is the Internet?
There are several companies who attempt to measure the Internet's usage: ClickZ, Cyberatlas.internet.com, Statmarket.com, Nielsen Ratings, Office of the CIA, Mediametrix.com, comScore.com, eMarketer.com, Serverwatch.com, Securityspace.com, and the Computer Industry Almanac. These groups use custom techniques of polling, electronic tallying of server traffic, web server logging, focus group sampling, and other measurement means.
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Official Google Blog: We knew the web was big...
We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
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How Big is the Internet?
Assessing the size of the Internet is a somewhat difficult proposition, since it is a distributed body, and no complete index of it exists. What we mean by asking how large the Internet is also plays into how we answer the question. Do we mean how many people use the Internet? How many websites are on the Internet? How many bytes of data are contained on the Internet? How many distinct servers operate on the Internet? How much traffic runs through the Internet per second? All of these different metrics could conceivably be used to address the sheer size of the Internet, but all are very different.
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How Many Pages Are There On The WWW?
Cyveillance.com , a business intelligence gathering firm, attempted to count the pages on the web. They then published a white paper called Sizing the Internet. Using their proprietary Net SapienT Technology to survey the extent and growth of the web, they estimated that there were 2 billion unique, publicly accessible pages on the Internet in July of 2000. Additionally, they found that 7.3 million unique new pages were going on the net each day. In the same paper, Cyveillance predicted that there would be 4 billion publicly available pages on the Internet by early 2001. Cyveillance emphasized that their technology was able to estimate growth, an improvement over just taking a static snapshot. Their results indicted that the Internet was growing dynamically and had yet to peak. Cyveillance's most recent statistics indicate about 6 billion web pages are on the public web.
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IUB Writing Tutorial Services Pamphlets
Each pamphlet deals with a specific writing situation. Most pamphlets are available in html and pdf versions.
“How to Use Evidence”: html, pdf
“How to Write a Thesis Statement ”: html, pdf
“Paragraphs and Topic Sentences”: html, pdf
“Personal Statements and Application Letters”: html, pdf
“Plagiarism: What It Is and How To Avoid It”: html, pdf
“Proofreading for Common Surface Errors”: html, pdf
“Proofreading for Spelling Errors”: html, pdf
“Taking an Essay Exam”: html, pdf
“Using Outlines”: html, pdf
“Writing Book Reviews”: html, pdf
“Writing Resumes and Cover Letters”: html, pdf
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JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
This research explores student perceptions of course quality and instructor effectiveness in a hybrid MPA distance learning program. The MPA distance learning program under analysis utilizes a synchronous computer software program for 21 hours of instruction per course, an asynchronous computer software program for 21 hours of instruction per course, and six hours of on-campus in-person instruction per course.
Survey data from students who have completed eight (8) courses in this distance learning program (repeated samples n = 90) will be compared to the evaluations of students who have taken the same courses from the same instructors in the on-campus program (n=100).
The purpose of the research is two-fold. First, the research will determine if there is a significant difference between the perceptions of course quality and instructor effectiveness between students in the distance learning program and students enrolled in the on-campus program. Second, the research will explore student satisfaction with the use of the synchronous and asynchronous computer delivery methods. It is anticipated that students will express satisfaction levels with course quality and instructor effectiveness equal to, or exceeding, the satisfaction levels expressed by students in the on-campus program.
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Moving Teaching and Learning with Technology (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT
Information technology has been an important part of higher education since the development of the lantern slide in the mid-1800s. However, occasions in which the academy has been transformed by technology are rare. Viewed in a historical perspective, these occasions can be considered as a series of three epochs: the online public-access catalog epoch; the personal computer, Internet, and web epoch; and the enterprise systems (ERP, CMS) epoch. Certainly, developments are continuing, but for most colleges and universities, these three epochs no longer represent technological frontiers. Looking forward, those of us in higher education are now focusing our attention on technology applications for teaching, learning, and research—or what can be viewed as the epochs of teaching and learning with technology, and cyberinfrastructure. In this commentary, I’ll be confining my comments to teaching and learning.
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Semantic Web Technologies – has their time come in education? : Notes from the Future
As JISC has recently announced an open call of funding for a study on Semantic Web technologies in teaching and learning we thought we’d use this opportunity to provide a bit of an update on Semantic Web developments.
The JISC call seeks to fund a study which looks at pragmatic aspects of the actual use of semantic applications in real world scenarios. The successful applicant will review a number of case studies of real-world teaching and learning scenarios and look at the potential for use of semantic technologies. The key question they are asking is: “Can you convince us that semantic technologies offer one potential solution to some real problems?”
in list: SemanticWeb CaseStudies
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Aduna - News & Events
September 23, 2008
Research, done by MarketCap in cooperation with Aduna, shows that more than 60 percent of companies with over 200 employees, intend to invest in a project that uses semantic technology (Web 3.0) within a year's time.
Almost 10 percent already uses semantic technology, or has already defined a semantic technology project. The fact that 60 percent of the companies plan to invest indicates an enormous increase of the use of semantic technology in the coming 12 months.
Companies abound in information, but only a tiny amount is used by managers, either because most of the information is not visible or connections are not, or cannot be made. This is the situation mid-2008, but with the rise of semantic technologies this will change drastically in the coming years. More and more information will come to light and it will become easier to judge its usefulness.
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The Effect of Distant Audiences on Students' Writing -- Cohen and Riel 26 (2): 143 -- American Educational Research Journal
Audience considerations play an important role in the development of text by experienced writers but are often nonexistent in the writing of school-age children. The lack of audience awareness found in school writing may index the slow development of the social-cognitive skills necessary to conceptualize different audiences or it may result from the decontextual approach to writing that is prevalent in classrooms. This study examined the quality of students’ writing in two audience conditions: to their teacher for a term assessment and to a distant peer audience to share ideas. Seventh-grade students wrote two compositions on the same topic, one addressed to peers in other countries via a computer network and the other to their teacher for their semester grade, counterbalanced for order effects. In both conditions, there was significantly higher ratings of the papers written to communicate with peers than those written to demonstrate skill in writing. The findings suggest that the development of functional writing environments to contextualize students’ work can lead to improvements in the quality of students’ classroom writing.
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Positivism & Post-Positivism
Let's start our very brief discussion of philosophy of science with a simple distinction between epistemology and methodology. The term epistemology comes from the Greek word epistêmê, their term for knowledge. In simple terms, epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge or of how we come to know. Methodology is also concerned with how we come to know, but is much more practical in nature. Methodology is focused on the specific ways -- the methods -- that we can use to try to understand our world better. Epistemology and methodology are intimately related: the former involves the philosophy of how we come to know the world and the latter involves the practice.
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Semantic Networks
This document concerns the management of the output of insight generators, the software agents utilized in the insight generation systems. The solution to managing these reports involves the automatic creation of a repository for all materials generated by various insight generators; this repository allows the user to navigate through this continually growing space of marketing reports, gaining new insights about the relationships between items of interest and adding new insights in the process. The goal of the system is to make all marketing information and insights generated by the man/machine interaction available to the user, so that there is a convergence towards a "conservation of information". To use a geometric metaphor, the goal is to make the user equidistant from all information at all times, as illustrated below.
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Poisoned Pot Roast?: Plastic Storage Containers Also Contain Bisphenol A: Scientific American
According to The Green Guide, a website and magazine devoted to greener living and owned by the National Geographic Society, the safest plastics for repeated use in storing food are made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE, or plastic #2), low-density polyethylene (LDPE, or plastic #4) and polypropylene (PP, or plastic #5).
While the vast majority of Tupperware products are considered safe, for example, some of its food storage containers use polycarbonate (plastic #7), which has been shown to leach the harmful hormone-disrupting chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) into food items after repeated uses.
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Education best practice or malpractice
Other researchers have found that the human brain will “downshift” to more primitive structures when under stress. Goleman (1995) referred to this as a “neural hijacking.” When under stress, the brain is programmed to respond in two ways: fight or flee. In times of perceived or real danger, it makes sense that the brain would resort to simple, basic patterns of self-preservation; however when the brain is hijacked, it is at the expense of critical and careful thought.
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MSF Perspectives
The learning environment in the BRC is characterized by high challenge and low threat, and learning occurs in a context of relaxed alertness, a situation that arises when a student is motivated in a non-stressful environment - proven to enhance learning. A few critics suggest that this environment, in which students are more relaxed, less stressed, learn vital skills earlier and have fewer crashes during training, is evidence the new curriculum is less rigorous. Indeed, to the uneducated eye, especially one that focuses on what the instructor does instead of what the students are doing, the teaching-learning dynamic in the new curriculum may appear on the surface to be too simplistic.
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Second Psychophysiological Study of<br /> Out-of-the-Body Experiences in a Selected Subject at Charles T. Tart Home Page and Consciousness Library Online. For Transpersonal Psychology, Parapsychology, Consciousness, Hypnosis, Psi, Mindfulness.
Relaxed alertness is accompanied in many people by the alpha rhythm, a rather regular, sinusoidal rhythm whose frequency varies from about 8 to 13 cps, although in a single person the frequency is relatively constant. As a person becomes drowsy, this alpha rhythm breaks up, clusters of it becoming less and less frequent as they are replaced by a stage- 1 drowsy pattern. Consciousness waxes and wanes with the alpha rhythm, although it is impossible to say clearly at exactly what point consciousness is lost
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