CLASS TASK

Sir Tim Bernes-Lee, the inventor of the www

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Where were you when you invented the WWW?I was working in a physics laboratory called CERN. CERN is in Geneva, Switzerland. At CERN, people study High Energy Physics. That is the physics of the really, really small particles – particles much smaller than atoms. If you want to investigate really small things, you need enormous machines called accelerators. That’s what they have at CERN.

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What made you think of the WWW?

Well, things were very frustrating in the past. There was different information on different computers, but you couldn’t get all the information with just one computer. People at CERN came from universities all over the world. They brought all kinds of computers with different types of software. Sometimes you had to learn a different program for each computer. So I wrote some programs to take information from one computer system to put it in another system. And then I thought “Can’t we connect all these different information systems and make just one imaginary information system? Everybody could read the same system.” And that became the WWW.

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Was it easy to invent the WWW?Actually inventing it was simple. The difficult part was to persuade everybody to use the same system. It’s incredible that so many people now use it.

Why do you always say everything is simple?Well, because it is, basically. I want you to know that you too can make new programs which create new, fun ways of using computers and using the Internet. The only limit is your imagination. All good computer programs are simple inside.

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WIKIPEDIA

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When you look for information about almost any subject on the Internet, one of the most common places you’ll find it is on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia in the world and the ninth most popular website in the world. It’s the most popular reference work on the Internet.

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It was started in 2001 by two Americans: Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

However, the encyclopedia isn’t written by them. It’s written by thousands of people around the world. Their original idea was to create an encyclopedia in the traditional way by asking experts to write articles. But after one year, they only had 22 articles.

Then came across ‘wikis’. ‘Wikis’ are websites that allow visitors to add, take away or change content. The idea of normal people sharing information is a central philosophy of the web and now also of Wikipedia. The idea became to create the first people’s encyclopedia, written by normal people for normal people.

After just two weeks with this new philosophy, they had more articles than in the first year!

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At the moment, 1,700 articles are being added every day. Articles have been written by hundreds of thousands of people.

The word ‘wiki’ comes from a Hawaiian expression, ‘wiki-wiki’ meaning ‘fast’. One of the most important things about Wikipedia is that it can change very quickly if necessary. When important events happen in the world, Wikipedia articles change sometimes from one second to the next.

Wikipedia is like the Internet because it doesn’t have just one home.

There is a small office in Florida, USA, and also one room in California and another room in Poland. Articles have been written in 253 different languages. The five languages which have the largest editions of Wikipedia are: English, German, French, Polish and Japanese, in that order.

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MP3 Players at school. Yes or no?

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Lots of students take MP3 players to school to listen to music at break times. And usually with new MP3 players, you can watch music videos or films too. But some uses of MP3 players are not quite so innocent.

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Some students download formulas and other information onto their players. Others use them to record answers before na exam and then listen to them during the exam. Others download their own notes onto their MP3 player and then put them in the ‘song lyrics’ text files. And of course it’s one of the teachers’ jobs to stop this cheating. To do this, they have to keep up to date with new technology. That’s because students who cheat are always looking for new ways to cheat without their teachers realizing it.

So, are schools right to stop students taking MP3 players to school?

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Some students say no. They’re angry because they say that they used to listen to their MP3 players to listen to music to relax before exams, not to cheat. They don’t see why they should suffer just because some students use them for the wrong reasons. Others say that the students who cheat are always going to cheat, with or without an MP3 player. That are also some schools that disagree with stopping the use of MP3 players. That isn’t because they want students to be able to use them for listening to music. They want them to use MP3 players to learn.

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Some schools have started preparing educational material for MP3 players. Students can read, watch and listen to this material in any place and at any time. This helps them and motivates them too. It’s clear that technology is not always bad. It can be used in highly productive ways too.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ALL THAT? WHAT DO YOU USE YOUR MP3 PLAYER FOR?

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A clumsy ship cuts off the web for 75 million people

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Just one ship was responsible for breaking an essential submarine cable that connects the Middle East and India with the rest of the world via the Internet. This has left 75 million people with only limited access to the Internet.

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The accident was caused on Wednesday by a ship in bad weather near the coast of Egypt, close to Alexandria. Since then, there have been terrible problems with phones and the Internet in countries including India, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. It has been a problem for approximately 70% of users there.

Experts say that this shows that our global communications network is very fragile. ‘People don’t know that all these things go through cables under the sea,’ said an expert in communications. ‘In general, the Internet uses real, physical connections, not satellites.’

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These expensive cables go in long lines around the world, carrying millions of conversations all at the same time from one country to another.

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One expert said that this week’s accident should make governments understand that they must spend more time and energy to protect essential communications such as mobile phones and the Net. ‘We must protect them from natural disasters or from terrorists. ‘It would be very easy to attack global communications’, said the head of security and terrorism at the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai. ‘The important thing isn’t building great new technology. The important thing is to protect it.’

One of the cables that was broken this week is called the Sea-Me-We 4. It is one of the most important information lines between Europe and the East. It goes in a continuous line from Germany to Singapore and connects 32 different countries. It took three years and cost an incredible 500 million pounds to put the line in place. 

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