Internet vs. World Wide Web

[ShackledNation]

There is an important distinction between the two that I never really thought about. This article talks about it here:
HowStuffWorks "Internet vs. World Wide Web"

So another way to think about it is to say the Internet is composed of the machines, hardware and data; and the World Wide Web is what brings this technology to life.

Just interesting stuff that we never really think about.

 

[waltky]

Mebbe is why Granny don't remember so good anymore...

Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study
16 July 2011 - The collective memory of the internet may make us simply remember less

Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests. Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers. When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

The researchers say the internet acts as a "transactive memory" that we depend upon to remember for us. Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory "is an idea that there are external memory sources - really storage places that exist in other people". "There are people who are experts in certain things and we allow them to be, [to] make them responsible for certain kinds of information," she explained to BBC News.

Co-author of the paper Daniel Wegner, now at Harvard University, first proposed the transactive memory concept in a book chapter titled Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships, finding that long-term couples relied on each other to act as one another's memory banks. "I really think the internet has become a form of this transactive memory, and I wanted to test it," said Dr Sparrow.

Where, not what

The first part of the team's research was to test whether subjects were "primed" to think about computers and the internet when presented with difficult questions. To do that, the team used what is known as a modified Stroop test. The standard Stroop test measures how long it takes a participant to read a colour word when the word itself is a different colour - for example, the word "green" written in blue.

More BBC News - Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study

 

[cbirch2]

Yes. The WWW is just a set of HTML files on computers all over the world accessed via HTTP on port 80. Every time you display a web page all your doing is opening a file on another computer and interpreting the content.

The WWW runs on the internet, which is the entire connection of computers all over the world running different protocols like TCP, UDP, FTP, SSH, etc, etc.