世新大學九十一學年度碩士班招生考試試題

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資訊傳播科技學系碩士班

專業英文

 

※    考生請於答案卷內作答

注意事項：1. 考題共有3題，滿分100分。

          2. 第1-2 題請以中文作答，第3題以英文作答。請把握答題時間。

 

1.      Please refer to the article in Appendix 1. What is the major debate between Hendler and Shneiderman? What is your opinion? (文章的主要辯論內容為何？您各人看法如何？)

2.      Please refer to the article in Appendix 2. What are Drucker’s predictions for the future society? Do you agree or with his points? Why? (Drucker  對人類社會未來的發展有何看法？您個人是否同意？理由為何？)（30％）

3.      Please briefly describe your statement of purpose with 100-150 words in English. (請以100-150字簡述您的讀書計畫)（40％）

 

Appendix 1: James Hendler and Ben Shneiderman on the Next Generation of Interfaces

Source: Annual Meeting Coverage. ASIST 2001 Plenary Debate. By Steve Hardin

 

James Hendler is former chief scientist of the Information Systems Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He can be reached at hendler@cs.umd.edu. Ben Shneiderman is professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He can be reached at ben@cs.umd.edu. Steve Hardin can be reached at libhard@cmi.indstate.edu.

What should the future Web look like? How do we get there? To what extent should the Web mimic human behavior? Two experts squared off on these and other issues before several hundred audience members during the closing session of the ASIST Annual Meeting in Washington on November 8, 2001.

Organizers billed the session as a debate between Dr. Ben Shneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and also the founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory; and Dr. James Hendler, former chief scientist of the Information Systems Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Both men presented their ideas on "The Next Generation of Interfaces: Responsibility and Control," and discussed their differences with each other and with the audience. ASIST President-elect Trudi Bellardo Hahn moderated the session.

Shneiderman began his presentation by saying that we'll build cognitively comprehensible systems, giving us a sense of mastery, control and satisfaction. In the process, we'll take control for the results of our decision. He envisions systems that are "affectively acceptable." But he hastened to add they would not be adaptive, autonomous and anthropomorphic. He said anthropomorphic designs persistently fail.

The scientific approach, he said, extends beyond "user friendly" systems. We want to specify users and tasks, predict and measure, he said, and focus on the future of Web use. There are three directions we need to consider:

Shneiderman wrapped up by listing some of his disagreements with Hendler:

Shneiderman finished his presentation with a quote from Thomas Jefferson about his desire to see knowledge so widely disseminated that it reaches beggars as well as kings.

Hendler began his part of the session by noting Shneiderman wants a Web that's social, but that he didn't talk about how someone could build it. Speaking as a technologist, Hendler said the Web works reasonably well for single document texts or for finding sites based on single document texts, but it can't integrate information from multiple documents. For example, he said it would be great to create custom traffic reports from a variety of sources, such as cameras, databases and statistics. He does that on the Web now by organizing information from lots of sites. But he wants the Web to do it for him. As it stands now, the Web will never really get any better. Given the exponential growth of the Web, information retrieval technology needs to get an order of magnitude better just to keep the same level of quality, he said.

 

We need agents on the Web, Hendler said, and here's why:

Hendler said he wants the computer to go beyond text. Instead of just giving him the weather, he wants the computer to tell him what satellite images are available, when they'll be updated and how much they'll cost. He wants a Web of context and meaning.

Web ontology, Hendler said, is a step in the right direction. The Web has no major organizing principle; it allows anyone to author and publish, and that arrangement allows the Web to grow arbitrarily large. We need a distributed way, he said, to provide organizing terms and terminologies and deploy them on the Web. We need pages marked with machine-readable terms, term-to-term (schema to schema) machine-based translations, and the ability to extend the ontologies for each domain.

Hendler acknowledged this vision will make a lot of bad things worse. He's worried about who's collecting the information. He added he did a search on the number of cows in Texas and found a site that says all the cows have been replaced by aliens. But those people need to be able to play, too – the Web, he said, still needs to be the Web.

Shneiderman characterized Hendler's vision as "wishful thinking." He reiterated his call for user studies. He said using the term agent in conjunction with the user interface is a problem, because people are different from machines. Hendler's analogy of the travel agent is an error, Shneiderman said. We need to focus on responsibility and trust, and trusting a computer agent doesn't substitute for human-human trust. Humans are responsible, he said; machines aren't.

Hendler responded that he doesn't want to mimic human behavior on the Web, any more than he wants to build an airplane that mimics the way birds fly. Humans represent a terrible model for the Web. He agrees with Shneiderman that you can't "trust" a machine the way you "trust" a human – but he doesn't have any other term to use to describe the concept.

At this point, Hahn invited the audience to join in the discussion. In response to one comment, Shneiderman asked when agents violate copyright, who's responsible? Hendler said the idea is to let a number of different approaches co-evolve; the best survive. Shneiderman said he agrees with that, but language matters: when you use the term agent, it's misleading. Hendler responded that if Shneiderman will tell him there are no bad interfaces, he'll admit there are bad agents.

After another member of the audience noted that at some level, there's no disagreement between Shneiderman and Hendler, Hendler responded that we need to discuss how we move forward with the Web. He said he and Shneiderman differ on their approach to co-evolution. He believes the technology changes your ideas on how you use it, and that change changes the technology you use. Shneiderman said he agrees with the concept of co-evolution. But he also wants a balance in which 50% of the development funding is spent on human behavior and 50% on technology. Hendler said he thinks the real debate between him and Shneiderman is where the points are set to obtain the best trade-offs.

Appendix 2:The next society

Source: The Economist. Nov 1st 2001. by Peter Drucker.

(http://economist.com/surverys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=770819)

 


Tomorrow is closer than you think. Peter Drucker  explains how it will differ from today, and what needs to be done to prepare for it
    The new economy may or may not materialise, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us shortly. In the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, this new society will be a good deal more important than the new economy (if any). It will be quite different from the society of the late 20th century, and also different from what most people expect. Much of it will be unprecedented. And most of it is already here, or is rapidly emerging.

In the developed countries, the dominant factor in the next society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth in the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation. Politicians everywhere still promise to save the existing pensions system, but they—and their constituents—know perfectly well that in another 25 years people will have to keep working until their mid-70s, health permitting.

What has not yet sunk in is that a growing number of older people—say those over 50—will not keep on working as traditional full-time nine-to-five employees, but will participate in the labour force in many new and different ways: as temporaries, as part-timers, as consultants, on special assignments and so on. What used to be personnel and are now known as human-resources departments still assume that those who work for an organisation are full-time employees. Employment laws and regulations are based on the same assumption. Within 20 or 25 years, however, perhaps as many as half the people who work for an organisation will not be employed by it, certainly not on a full-time basis. This will be especially true for older people. New ways of working with people at arm's length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organisations, and not just of businesses.


The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman empire. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important—and highly divisive—issue in all rich countries. It will cut across all traditional political alignments. Economically, the decline in the young population will change markets in fundamental ways. Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people. The homogeneous mass market that emerged in all rich countries after the second world war has been youth-determined from the start. It will now become middle-age-determined, or perhaps more likely it will split into two: a middle-age-determined mass market and a much smaller youth-determined one. And because the supply of young people will shrink, creating new employment patterns to attract and hold the growing number of older people (especially older educated people) will become increasingly important.


Knowledge is all

The next society will be a knowledge society. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. Its three main characteristics will be:

•Borderlessness, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money.

•Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education.

•The potential for failure as well as success. Anyone can acquire the “means of production”, ie, the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win.

Together, those three characteristics will make the knowledge society a highly competitive one, for organisations and individuals alike. Information technology, although only one of many new features of the next society, is already having one hugely important effect: it is allowing knowledge to spread near-instantly, and making it accessible to everyone. Given the ease and speed at which information travels, every institution in the knowledge society—not only businesses, but also schools, universities, hospitals and increasingly government agencies too—has to be globally competitive, even though most organisations will continue to be local in their activities and in their markets. This is because the Internet will keep customers everywhere informed on what is available anywhere in the world, and at what price.

This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers. At present, this term is widely used to describe people with considerable theoretical knowledge and learning: doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, chemical engineers. But the most striking growth will be in “knowledge technologists”: computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals. These people are as much manual workers as they are knowledge workers; in fact, they usually spend far more time working with their hands than with their brains. But their manual work is based on a substantial amount of theoretical knowledge which can be acquired only through formal education, not through an apprenticeship. They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as “professionals”. Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social—and perhaps also political—force over the next decades.


The new protectionism

Structurally, too, the next society is already diverging from the society almost all of us still live in. The 20th century saw the rapid decline of the sector that had dominated society for 10,000 years: agriculture. In volume terms, farm production now is at least four or five times what it was before the first world war. But in 1913 farm products accounted for 70% of world trade, whereas now their share is at most 17%. In the early years of the 20th century, agriculture in most developed countries was the largest single contributor to GDP; now in rich countries its contribution has dwindled to the point of becoming marginal. And the farm population is down to a tiny proportion of the total.

Manufacturing has travelled a long way down the same road. Since the second world war, manufacturing output in the developed world has probably tripled in volume, but inflation-adjusted manufacturing prices have fallen steadily, whereas the cost of prime knowledge products—health care and education—has tripled, again adjusted for inflation. The relative purchasing power of manufactured goods against knowledge products is now only one-fifth or one-sixth of what it was 50 years ago. Manufacturing employment in America has fallen from 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to less than half that now, without causing much social disruption. But it may be too much to hope for an equally easy transition in countries such as Japan or Germany, where blue-collar manufacturing workers still make up 25-30% of the labour force.

The decline of farming as a producer of wealth and of livelihoods has allowed farm protectionism to spread to a degree that would have been unthinkable before the second world war. In the same way, the decline of manufacturing will trigger an explosion of manufacturing protectionism—even as lip service continues to be paid to free trade. This protectionism may not necessarily take the form of traditional tariffs, but of subsidies, quotas and regulations of all kinds. Even more likely, regional blocks will emerge that trade freely internally but are highly protectionist externally. The European Union, NAFTA and Mercosur already point in that direction.


The future of the corporation

Statistically, multinational companies play much the same part in the world economy as they did in 1913. But they have become very different animals. Multinationals in 1913 were domestic firms with subsidiaries abroad, each of them self-contained, in charge of a politically defined territory, and highly autonomous. Multinationals now tend to be organised globally along product or service lines. But like the multinationals of 1913, they are held together and controlled by ownership. By contrast, the multinationals of 2025 are likely to be held together and controlled by strategy. There will still be ownership, of course. But alliances, joint ventures, minority stakes, know-how agreements and contracts will increasingly be the building blocks of a confederation. This kind of organisation will need a new kind of top management.

In most countries, and even in a good many large and complex companies, top management is still seen as an extension of operating management. Tomorrow's top management, however, is likely to be a distinct and separate organ: it will stand for the company. One of the most important jobs ahead for the top management of the big company of tomorrow, and especially of the multinational, will be to balance the conflicting demands on business being made by the need for both short-term and long-term results, and by the corporation's various constituencies: customers, shareholders (especially institutional investors and pension funds), knowledge employees and communities.

Against that background, this survey will seek to answer two questions: what can and should managements do now to be ready for the next society? And what other big changes may lie ahead of which we are as yet unaware?