History 100 - Western Civ (Science & Society)

For your final blog post, I’d like to invite all of you to tell me what you liked most and what you liked least about the course. You can comment on the readings, the choice of topics, the writing assignments, the use of the blog, my hair style, or whatever comes to mind. I encourage you not to hold back; the only requirement is that you be polite and constructive in your criticisms.

It was a pleasure getting to know each of you this spring. Good luck on the exam!

In his article What is Web 2.0, publisher Tim O’Reily describes what he perceives to be a significant shift in the recent history of the information technology. Born out of the dot-com failures of 2001, the Web 2.0 movement is marked by a set of new successes including Wikipedia, Flickr, Del.icio.us. These new success stories all have at least one thing in common: their fundamentally social nature. As O’Reily explains:

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence.

Please print and read O’Reily’s article from beginning to end. Then pick a popular website or web service that you think typifies Web 2.0 and tell us why it fits the bill according to O’Reily’s definition. (Note: It can’t be something already listed in the article.) To get credit for this assignment you must refer specifically to O’Reily’s text in your answer. Later commenters should feel free to refer to their classmate’s comments in their answers, and you may choose a website or service already chosen by another classmate. If you do so, however, you should be sure to explain your own reasons for choosing it and why or why not you think the people ahead of you made a good or bad choice or gave good or bad reasons for their choices.

At least two arguments have been made about the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on post-war geopolitics. Some have argued that the dropping of the bomb set off a dangerous arms race with the Soviet Union that kept the world on the brink of nuclear holocaust for nearly 50 years. Others have argued that the demonstration of the power of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki deterred the U.S. and Soviet Union from ever attaching each other outright and prevented the Cold War from ever heating up. Where do you come down on this debate? Why?