week 1

It is interesting to see how much internet usage there is in Asia, compared to the other various continents -- I wonder why there is such widespread internet use there, as opposed to other places. Still, the usage growth from 200-2007 in Africa, which has the second greatest growth (the middle east is first) makes me think from a development perspective that one can perhaps interpret growth in the usage of internet as the underworkings of development processes. The changing nature of computation, first as simple calculation, and now as interaction is also an interesting comparison. At first it is hard to see computation metaphorically as interaction, but it would seem that as technology becomes more distributed and ubiquitous, and the capacity at which high-level calculation can be engaged at becomes a non-issue, the next step is towards interaction -- the human is able to interact freely and widely so as to have broad control over the computers which they are interfacing (in the form of widgets, interactor trees, and event-driven programming). This probably reflects the model view controller paradigm, where the model uses the view to see the changes made through the controller on a ubiquitous level (so it is not just situated a computer, but really with technology embedded everywhere).

Currently I am working on the html assignment and I have learned several different html tags, such as how to bold, break, change sizes, include pictures, link pictures, link text, etc. Understanding the basics of html is exciting, but it makes me think that for a truly aesthetic and user-friendly webpage, one may need to be quite artistic in creating aesthetically pleasing designs, in addition to having knowledge of basic user-interface concepts learned in classes such as 120. This combination, I suspect, along with more knowledge of html programming and other languages, may result in the right recipe for a good, user-friendly website. I am excited to learn the fundamentals of CSS next week.
-takashi