1. Where can you find information about Nobel Prize? Who get the Nobel Prize this year?
The Nobel Prize in Physics
Charles K. Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"
The Nobel Prize in Physics
Willard S. Boyle and
George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"
The Prize in Economic Sciences
Elinor Ostrom "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons"
The Prize in Economic Sciences
Oliver E. Williamson "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"
2.Go to Encyclopedia Online at htth:library.spu.ac.th Search for the history of automobiles or computer summarize the information you get
In The Beginning…
The history of computers starts out about 2000 years ago, at the birth of the
abacus, a wooden rack holding two horizontal wires with beads strung on them. When these beads are moved around, according to
programming rules memorized by the user, all regular arithmetic problems can be done. Another important invention around the same time was the
Astrolabe, used for navigation. Blaise Pascal is usually credited for building the first
digital computer in 1642. It added numbers entered with dials and was made to help his father, a tax collector. In 1671, Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leibniz invented a computer that was built in 1694. It could add, and, after changing some things around, multiply. Leibniz invented a special stepped gear mechanism for introducing the addend digits, and this is still being used. The prototypes made by Pascal and Leibniz were not used in many places, and considered weird until a little more than a century later, when Thomas of Colmar (A.K.A. Charles Xavier Thomas) created the first successful
mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. A lot of improved desktop calculators by many inventors followed, so that by about 1890, the range of improvements included:
- Accumulation of partial results
- Storage and automatic reentry of past results (A memory function)
- Printing of the results
Each of these required manual installation. These improvements were mainly made for commercial users, and not for the needs of science.
Electronic Digital Computers
The start of World War II produced a large need for computer capacity, especially for the military. New weapons were made for which
trajectory tables and other essential data were needed. In 1942, John P. Eckert,
John W. Mauchly (left), and their associates at the
Moore school of Electrical Engineering of University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high – speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as
ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) The size of
ENIAC‘s numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory.
ENIAC was therefore about 1,000 times faster then the previous generation of relay computers.
ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring
counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (.0002 seconds) read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate “units” of
ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a “route” for the flow of information.
These connections had to be redone after each computation, together with presetting function tables and switches. This “wire your own” technique was inconvenient (for obvious reasons), and with only some latitude could
ENIAC be considered programmable. It was, however, efficient in handling the particular programs for which it had been designed.
ENIAC is commonly accepted as the first successful high – speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and was used from 1946 to 1955. A controversy developed in 1971, however, over the patentability of
ENIAC‘s basic digital concepts, the claim being made that another physicist,
John V. Atanasoff (
left) had already used basically the same ideas in a simpler vacuum – tube device he had built in the 1930′s while at
Iowa State College. In 1973 the courts found in favor of the company using the Atanasoff claim.
The Modern Stored Program EDC
Fascinated by the success of
ENIAC, the mathematician
John Von Neumann (
left) undertook, in 1945, an abstract study of computation that showed that a computer should have a
very simple, fixed physical structure, and yet be able to execute any kind of computation by means of a
proper programmed control without the need for any change in the unit itself.
Von Neumann contributed a new awareness of how practical, yet fast computers should be organized and built. These ideas, usually referred to as the stored – program technique, became essential for future generations of high – speed digital computers and were universally adopted.
The Stored – Program technique involves many features of computer design and function besides the one that it is named after. In combination, these features make very – high – speed operation attainable. A glimpse may be provided by considering what 1,000 operations per second means. If each instruction in a job program were used once in consecutive order, no human programmer could generate enough instruction to keep the computer busy. Arrangements must be made, therefore, for parts of the job program (called subroutines) to be used repeatedly in a manner that depends on the way the computation goes. Also, it would clearly be helpful if instructions could be changed if needed during a computation to make them behave differently.
Von Neumann met these two needs by making a special type of machine instruction, called a
Conditional control transfer – which allowed the program sequence to be stopped and started again at any point – and by storing all instruction programs together with data in the same memory unit, so that, when needed, instructions could be arithmetically changed in the same way as data. As a result of these techniques, computing and programming became much faster, more flexible, and more efficient with work. Regularly used subroutines did not have to be reprogrammed for each new program, but could be kept in “libraries” and read into memory only when needed. Thus, much of a given program could be assembled from the subroutine library.
The all – purpose computer memory became the assembly place in which all parts of a long computation were kept, worked on piece by piece, and put together to form the final results. The computer control survived only as an “errand runner” for the overall process. As soon as the advantage of these techniques became clear, they became a standard practice.
The first generation of modern programmed electronic computers to take advantage of these improvements were built in 1947. This group included computers using Random – Access – Memory (RAM), which is a memory designed to give almost constant access to any particular piece of information. . These machines had punched – card or punched tape I/O devices and RAM’s of 1,000 – word capacity and access times of .5 Greek MU seconds (.5*10-6 seconds). Some of them could perform multiplications in 2 to 4 MU seconds.
Physically, they were much smaller than
ENIAC. Some were about the size of a grand piano and used
only 2,500 electron tubes, a lot less then required by the earlier
ENIAC. The first – generation stored – program computers needed a lot of maintenance, reached probably about 70 to 80% reliability of operation (ROO) and were used for 8 to 12 years. They were usually programmed in ML, although by the mid 1950′s progress had been made in several aspects of advanced programming. This group of computers included
EDVAC (above) and
UNIVAC (right) the first commercially available computers.
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3. What the difference between general book and reference book?
- The distinction between a book and a reference book can be confusing. Some books that you might "reference" are still considered "books" for the purposes of citation.
Reference books are used to find factual information on a subject, and are not usually read all the way through or chapter by chapter. In a K-12 library, reference books are usually located in a special reference collection area, and cannot be checked out. Reference books include dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri, almanacs, atlases, and directories.
As a side note, in APA, the reader must also distinguish between reference books and what are called "annual periodicals." For example, consider a yearbook (which looks like a reference work). Annual periodicals often resemble edited books. To tell the difference, look at the publication's subtitle. If the subtitle changes annually, it should be treated as an edited book or reference work. If there is no subtitle, or the subtitle does not change year to year, it should be treated as an annual periodical.
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4.when do you need to search information from the reference collection?
-When the colection of sources in print electronic from intended to be referred to rather than read. The materials are usually not for loan outside the library
-When events and dates facts and figuer and background
5.What type of referrence collection that you like to use most and Why?
-Dictionary becuase containing information about the words, spelling and eeasy usage.
-Encyclopedia becuase systematic summary of significant of significant knowledge a summary of knowledge of one subject.
