Sharing Is Life: Technology

Effects of Technology: Benefits and Harmful Effects

Sergei September 21, 2017 Comment

Technological progress has not touched all people in the same way. Some countries have made more use of new technology than others. And technology can have both benefits and harmful effects.

Benefits

Mass production has made more manufactured products available. This has made life easier for more people. Machines have reduced the labor involved in manufacturing. Robots relieve people from boring or dangerous work. Technological advances have also resulted in better medical care. This enables people to live longer and healthier lives. Improvements in agriculture have increased food supplies.

Improvements in transportation allow people to travel farther and faster than ever. Improvements in communications enable people to speak across thousands of miles. Ideas and information instantly spread around the world.

Harmful Effects

Harmful effects often accompany developments in technology. For example, the automobile has allowed faster transportation. But it has also led to many highway deaths.

Mass production and automation have eliminated jobs for many people. New jobs in high-tech industries require complex new skills. Workers without these skills must be retrained. Or they must be satisfied with lower-paying jobs.

Other changes in technology have harmed the environment. Automobiles and airplanes pollute the air. Manufacturing pollutes the air and water. Mass production uses up natural resources. And mass consumption has created huge amounts of trash.

But technology can also help solve these problems. For example, materials can be recycled. This preserves natural resources. Technology can also provide better ways to limit pollution. The challenge is to make sure that the benefits outweigh the harmful effects.

Major Developments in Technology

Sergei September 21, 2017 Comment

Developments in technology are closely linked to changes in society. Early people hunted animals and gathered wild plants for food. Stone tools made by such people about 1 million years ago provide the oldest evidence of technology. Early people also learned to use wood, bones, skins, and other natural materials. They learned to control fire. This provided the warmth needed to live in cold climates.

Some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, people began to farm and raise livestock. This provided a more reliable food supply. People began to settle permanently in villages. They gradually learned to build houses. They began to weave fabric and make pots and baskets for storing food.

In time, the discovery of ways to make and use metals led to better tools and weapons. The development of the wheel made it easier to travel. The invention of writing brought changes in communication and knowledge.

The ancient Greeks and other Mediterranean people developed many laborsaving devices. These included the waterwheel and the pulley. The Chinese invented paper, cast iron, the wheelbarrow, gunpowder, and the compass. They had a method of block printing before A.D. 900. The use of movable type and the printing press began in Europe in the 1400s. It made books available to more people.

The Industrial Revolution began in Europe in the 1700s. It was a time of rapid change. Textiles and other goods began to be produced by machine rather than by hand. Large factories were built to house the machines. Many people moved from rural towns to cities to find work in the factories.

Factories began to use assembly-line and mass-production techniques. They produced goods faster and in greater quantities. Mass-produced items cost less. More people could afford to buy them. Today many factories are automated. That is, machines rather than people control the equipment. And computers control many kinds of complex machines.

The past one hundred years have brought an explosion of technology to every field. Technology has even allowed people to leave Earth and make use of space. And by unlocking the secrets of the nucleus of the atom, people have developed new sources of energy and powerful new weapons.

Science versus Technology, High Technology, and Technological Change

Sergei September 21, 2017 Comment

"Technology" refers to the methods people develop to satisfy their needs and wants. All people have the same basic needs. Among them are food, shelter, education, good health, and safety. Beyond these basic needs, they have wants, such as video games and cell phones.

Technology is concerned with ways of making and doing things. It touches nearly every aspect of life. It affects the foods you eat and the ways you spend your free time. Some fields have advanced rapidly because of developments in technology. These fields include agriculture, industry, medicine, transportation, and communication.

Science versus Technology

The terms "science" and "technology" are often confused. This is largely because much of modern technology is based on science. In simple terms, the concern of science is "why." The concern of technology is "how." But the relationship between the two is more complex. Some technologies depend heavily on science.

Technologies used in the electronics industry are examples. Technologies used to make items such as furniture depend much less on science. Sometimes entire sciences arise from technologies. For instance, powered flight led to aerodynamics. Primitive metalworking led to metallurgy.

What Is High Technology?

The term "high technology" describes the use of the latest scientific advances to make products and materials. It is often used in the shortened form, "high tech." Genetic engineering, robotics, and electronics are high-tech fields.

Technological Change

Over the centuries, people have greatly improved their lives through technology. Shelter has improved from caves to houses. Food supplies have increased as people have developed better ways to plant crops and raise livestock.

Some changes in technology result from earlier developments. For example, early automobiles were often uncomfortable and unsafe. New technologies were developed to solve these problems. They included ways of building better and smoother roads, better tires, and so on.

Sometimes change in one area of technology leads to change in others. Advances in military aircraft were carried over into commercial aviation. The military developed radar to spot enemy aircraft. Now it also helps control air traffic at busy airports. The pace of technological change has greatly quickened in modern times. Technology itself is largely responsible for this faster pace of change. It has brought improvements in communication, transportation, and methods of production.

Search Engine Basic: Definition, How It Works, and History

Sergei September 21, 2017 Comment

A search engine is a computer software program that enables a user to find information in a database by searching for indexed keywords. A search term may include one or more words and may employ Boolean operators ("and," "or," "not") or other coding.

Search engines are the primary means of finding information on the World Wide Web and other portions of the Internet. Web search engines employ "spiders". These programs travel the Internet in search of Web pages. Spiders gather such information as a Web page's title, contents, and linked Web sites. They also capture terms included in metatags -the portion of the page's HTML coding where the author may add words to describe its contents.

Information culled by spiders is put into an index and matched to keywords. The creation of the index may be completely automated, or it may be done in part by hand. The index may accept submissions from site authors for inclusion among search results.

Competing search engines may provide different results for the same search term. This is because they send out spiders at different times and because they employ different algorithms to prioritize results. Reflecting the importance of Internet searches to e-commerce, many search engines allow advertisers to purchase listings at the top of search results, or to run text advertisements matched to search terms.

The first search engine, Archie, was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage at McGill University. Predating the World Wide Web, Archie employed anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to archive Internet file addresses.

Throughout the 1990s, several search engines, most created by individuals or small groups, appeared and were predominant until their technology or business model was surpassed. Yahoo!, developed in 1993, popularized human-made Web indexes.

Google was created in 1998 by two Stanford University students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. By 2003 it was responsible for approximately three-fourths of all Internet search traffic. Google's rapid rise owed to its algorithm, which pushed to the top of its results Web pages linked to by other Web pages.

Accounting for about two-thirds of the searches conducted as of early 2014, Google continued to dominate Internet searching. Other popular search engines include Yahoo! and Microsoft's Bing, but no other search engine accounts for more than 20% of the searches executed.