Topic 91

Biased information by Sung-Hwan Chun

Biased information is an important fact to consider. An internet is now an important method to get information. Therefore, we have to consider carefully whether it is biased or not. If the information is biased it would deficit the people who are trying to use the information. For example, a boy is trying to research about Koreans, and he goes onto internet to find information about Koreans. He finds a website by someone who wrote about Koreans. Let’s say that the writer was a Korean and he wrote that Koreans are all ugly and stupid.

Unfortunately the boy might believe this biased information and for his research about Koreans, the boy might write that Koreans are all ugly and stupid, which would make the boy get ‘F’ on his research for writing wrong information. Therefore, biased information would be a problem, since it might be wrong, and also it might spread a wrong idea or information.

The effect of biased information is global. If it was used for a small project, it might just end the project a bad grade, but if it was used for important project, like for NASA or war, the effect would be great. It might even result as a death, though it is not likely that NASA or the government would not recognize the information biased, or use the biased information. Similarly, if a person gets knowledge from biased information, it could spread globally by people to people, and soon the whole universe would have wrong knowledge.

To recognize the biased information, we have to read carefully. If the writer doesn’t states with out resource, it has high possibility of being a biased. Also, if the writer states something which should have required resources, but the writer hasn’t mentioned any, then it might be biased information. Some information are easy to recognize whether it is biased or not, and some are hard to recognize. But, generally, if the reader pays careful attention, he can find out whether it is biased or not.

Though readers have to be careful for biased information, I think the writers should not give biased information. Though some might have been done without purpose, and also by mistake, it could give real confusion and mistake to the readers. If the whole internet gives clean, unbiased information, then I think it would help on the etiquette and also on having pleasant internet environment.


Biased information by Tommy

Although internet connections are able to pass a lot of information back and forth, they are not all powerful. Every internet connection is restricted by its bandwidth limit. Bandwidth is the transmission capacity of a communications device, or the amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time.

The main issue associated with this subject is how limiting it is. Applications that communicate a lot with several different computers at once can put a great strain on the computer that they are running on. For example, torrent programs set up connections and download files from many other computers. Quite often, this uses up a lot of bandwidth on the host computer and the person using the torrent program will experience a significant drop in connection speed when using other applications, such as internet explorer.

Extremely popular websites or files that receive a large number of “hits” per day from users around the world may cause server crashes or certain images not to be displayed. People surfing a website that is being browed by many other people may experience slow loading times or sometimes no response at all. Images hosted on image hosts such as Photobucket may not display if too many people view them. Instead, a message saying “Image not displayed due to exceeded bandwidth” is posted.

The ethical issues here are people who deliberately upload large amounts of data in a very short period of time to certain websites. This causes those websites to exceed their bandwidth and become inaccessible to other people. This is especially the case for websites that do not host themselves. Instead, they rely on other hosts such as Geocities or Bravenet. These hosts often put a limit on the amount of bandwidth that sites are able to use. When a site exceeds its allowed bandwidth, it is taken down temporarily.

The problem of programs hogging bandwidth on internet connections can be solved by setting limits to how much bandwidth certain programs are allowed to use, or by simply running those programs at times when nobody else is using them. The problem with setting a limit on bandwidth is that torrent programs may experience slower download rates.

For popular sites that experience server crashes due to too many people trying to access them at once, multiple servers can be set up to help ease the load on individual servers. The file sizes on these sites can also be reduced so that not as much bandwidth will be used when people load a page.

People who deliberately upload large amounts of data for the purpose of crashing a site can be stopped or at least hindered by placing a limit on the amount that can be uploaded at once. Also, the security for many web hosts or servers could be increased so that hackers would have a harder time breaking in and uploading things to exceed the bandwidth. The problem with this is that it would stop people who upload large files for legitimate purposes.

Because resources are limited, the problem of limited bandwidth will always exist. It cannot be extinguished even if connections are upgraded to be able to transfer more data faster, because the data size will also increase to keep up with the faster transfer rates.