WEALTH AND IT’S RELATION WITH SOMEONE’S HAPPINESS

Can money buy happiness? It is a kind of open ended question which can be read in almost every novel. You may not believe that money can buy someone’s happiness. But in fact, many rich people are happy with their lives. You can see them in television or read their activities in the internet or magazines. On the other hand, less prosperous people can only buy their primary needs with their money. They can not enjoy their lives because of low income. In my opinion, wealth has strong relation with someone’s happiness because people can buy anything, can go anywhere and can help other people with their wealth.

Buying anything is one of the advantages from people who have wealth. People can buy not only primary needs with their money, but they can also buy valuable goods. People who have wealth, can wear branded clothing and accessories. They can buy them form stores abroad, such as Singapore, Hongkong or United States. The price of the goods is not a problem for them. Especially people have income over 50,000,000 Rupiah in every month, buying branded clothing make them very proud. Beside buying branded clothing, prosperous people can buy apartment, condominium and  town house. Although apartment or condominium have high price, they can buy them with their money. Buying apartment can make them richer too, because it can be an investment for them. Having apartment also shows that they have wealth. Then, prosperous people can buy luxurious transportation such as sport car or motorcycle. They can use that for their transportation in daily life. They drive sport car to go everywhere, ride motorcycle and go touring with their sport motorcycle community. By buying these things, people feel happier.

To enjoy their life and relax their soul, people can go anywhere using their wealth. They can visit tourist area around the world. There are many tourist area that people can visit in every country. Borobudur temple or Chinese Great Wall are some of tourist areas that prosperous people can visit in the world. They can see great architectures in the past, and they can buy merchandise from there. Beside tourist area, people can also visit beautiful island in every country, for example, Bali and Hawaii are the most popular islands for tourist. So, prosperous people can visit Bali or Hawaii to enjoy beautiful scenery in beach. Then, prosperous people can visit beautiful places, such as Dieng or Alpen Mountain. They can see beautiful scenery from nature. They can watch sunrise in the morning, or enjoy clean air. Although going everywhere  needs much money, they are willing to spend their money to be happier in their life.

Helping other people is one of the main task for human being. We must help each other, and prosperous people can do it easier because they have much money to help others. Prosperous people can give money for less prosperous people. They can give financial capital for less prosperous people to start business. When disaster is attacking some area, prosperous people can donate some food or goods for disaster victims. And then, they can help to donate their money to make temporary home. Besides that, prosperous people can give scholarship for outstanding student from less prosperous people. They can send outstanding student to continue studying, locally or abroad. Helping other people is not making prosperous people as popular people. Prosperous people can help others to make their soul happy. Because they can be good people, and they can use their money for kindness.

In short, wealth has strong relation with someone’s happiness. So, people must be work hard to get wealth and they can be happier in their life. If they have wealth, they can go anywhere, buy anything and help each other. For prosperous people, they can help other people to reach a wealth. They can make the next generation more prosperous.

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SNAPSHOT OF THE INTERNET

(1) 1980s

Internet-compatible computer networking started in West Asia and North Africa like many other parts of the world with BITNET, CSNET, FIDONET and UUCPNET among other computer networks in 1980s [Chon 2013]. These four networks interoperate with the Internet through email service, but not other services.

According to the article, “BITNET Overview” by BITNET Network Information Center in 1990, the following six countries in West Asia and North Africa had BITNET nodes in 1990 [BITNET 1990]; Egypt, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Turkey. CSNET was available in Israel along twelve countries in other parts of the world since mid-1980s. UUCPNET was available in Egypt, Israel and Lebanon, and FIDONET was available in Israel, Jordan, Turkey and UAE according to International Connectivity Table, Version 16 – 1997.6.15 [Landweber 1997].


(2) 1990s

The First Developing Country workshop was organized by CNR-CNUCE with RINAF Project in 1991 with 13 countries including Turkey and some African countries during Copenhagen INET [Abba 2011; Chon 2015]. This was the beginning of the Internet proliferation among many other developing countries in the world.  In the following year, the Developing Country Workshop was organized by the Internet Society with the following countries in West Asia and North Africa along many other countries around the world for the week-long training prior to INET’92 in Kobe; Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Syria and Tunisia.

Eventually, many countries in West Asia along over 100 countries in the world participated some of the Developing Country Workshops in 1990s [Chon 2015].  The workshop participants, in turn, were instrumental in developing the Internet in their countries in West Asia like all other regions of the world. Telecommunications service providers in West Asia started to pay attention to the Internet in 1990s, and became the first Internet service providers along other service providers in many countries in West Asia. According to Arab Region Internet and Telecommunications Summit in 2001, the following countries in West Asia had the first Internet in their countries in 1990s [ITU 2001b];

 1993  Egypt with Egyptian University Network

 1995  United Arab Emirates (UAE) with Etisalat

 1996  Jordon with Global One Communications

 1997  Syria with Internet Pilot Project

By the end of 1997, the following countries in West Asia and North Africa had the Internet according to International Connectivity Tables [Landweber 1997]; Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen.

With the Internet in 1995 or earlier in Palestine as well as the Internet Pilot Project in Syria in 1997, all countries in West Asia were connected to the Internet by 1997 [Palestine 2014]. Libya may be the last country in North Africa with the Internet connection as it has 10,000 Internet users in December 2000 [Internet 2015].

One remarkable development in late 1990s was the first regional Internet exchange in West Asia.  Dubai-based Emirates Internet Exchange (EMIX) was developed by Emirates Telecommunications Corporation in 1998 with connectivity to Asia, Europe and USA [ITU 2001b].

(3) 2000s

With all countries in West Asia started using the Internet in 1990s or earlier, the Internet users started rapid growth in the first decade of the 2000s.  According to InternetWorldStats.com, the user growth of West Asia in 2000-2010 was 1,825.3% compared with the world average of 444.8%, and the Internet penetration in 2010 was 29.8% compared with the world average of 28.7% [Internet 2015].

(4) Regional Internet Organizations
 

Various regional Internet organizations were established in the first decade of the twenty-first century including the following;

Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) launched in 2010
EUMEDCONNECT for Mediterranean research networking launched in 2001
Internet Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (IGMENA) launched in 2012
Arab Internet Governance Forum (IGFarab) launched in 2012
Middle East Network Operators Group (MENOG) launched in 2007

Organization of Islamic Cooperation – Computer Emergency Response Team (OIC-CERT) launched in 2011
Middle East and Adjoining Countries School on Internet Governance (MEAC-SIG) (2104 in Kuwait, 2015 in Tunis)

Additionally, the following regional Internet organizations covers West Asian countries as their members;
Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD)

RIPE Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC)

(5) Cyber Security

Many countries in West Asia and North Africa have national cyber security organizations including Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) which is also called Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT)  The following national CERTs belong to Organization of Islamic Cooperation – Computer Emergency Response Team (OIC-CERT) which covers three continents; Africa, Asia and Europe.;
Egypt               EG-CERT
Iran                  Ir-CERT

Jordan             NCSCM

Libya               Libya-CERT
Morocco         maCERT
Oman              OCERT
Saudi Arabia   CERT-SA
Syria               ISC
Tunisia            tunCERT
Turkey            TR-CERT
UAE               aeCERT
 

Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is another organization addressing cyber security around the world.  The following national CERTs and other CERTs are members of FIRST;

       Egypt               EG-CERT
       Israel               CERTGOVICL, ILAN-CERT
       Morocco         maCERT
       OMAN           OCERT
       Qatar               Q-CERT
       Tunisia             tunCERT
       UAE                ADPCERT, aeCERT, du SIRT, ETISALAT-CERT

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SMARTPHONE

The first mobile phones were developed in 1970s and 1980s, and evolved to smartphones in 2007 with announcements of iPhone with iOS from Apple, and Android OS from Google. Its precursors include i-mode from NTT DoCoMo in 1999, and Prada from LG in 2006.

The smartphone became very popular almost from the beginning in 2007, and it was taking over desktop and laptop computers as the primary access device to the Internet in 2010s especially among developing countries due to its low cost despite its small screen size from 3 to 6 inches. Almost all Internet applications were modified to accommodate the smartphone in 2000s.

Tablets were also developed in 2000s with the same operating systems as the smartphone and larger screen sizes ranging from 6 to 12 inches, but without telephone function. They are increasingly replacing laptop computers in 2010s.

We anticipate the smartphone to be the dominant Internet access device in the coming decades, and it is the driving force for proliferation of the Internet from 3 billion Internet users in the world in 2013 to 7 billion in 2020s. Other access devices such as the tablet and computers would be the complimentary access devices in the coming decade.

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RESTROPECTIVE

The Internet user population was around 4,000~5,000 with over 66 nodes in 1980. The number of nodes increased to 250 nodes in 1983 after the transition from NCP to TCP/IP at ARPANET took place on 1983.1.1 [Hauben 1998; Postel 1981]. The Internet user population had grown to over three billion by 2015.

The Internet services cover almost every aspects of human activities by now, and the Internet is becoming a critical global social infrastructure. The Internet has started to connect devices in addition to human and we expect a trillion devices to be connected to the Internet by 2020s in addition to around seven billon users. Unfortunately, we have not solved the fundamental weakness of the Internet, security problems.

Asia has over 50% of the global Internet users now, and plays a major role on the Internet industry along USA now [Internet 2011; Alexa 2013]. Unfortunately, Asia has not played major roles in either of technical community and academic community of the Internet including the Internet standardization, the Internet governance, and the Internet research publications.

Asia finally started to lead the global Internet community through the mobile Internet service including mobile messaging services. Many of the mobile messaging services were developed and serviced in Asia including WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk in addition to Viber. They are increasingly becoming a new platform replacing WWW and the traditional Social Networking Service, and new services based on the mobile messaging services are being developed.

We hope to see Asia to contribute fair share on the Internet including research and development and governance among others in the coming years. We started to write Asia Internet history, but we ended up to write an Internet history from an Asian perspective due to the fact that there are no good recording of the international collaboration of the global Internet development including International Academic Networkshop (IANW) in 1980s, and Interntional Network Conference (INET) and Developing Country Workshop in 1990s. Additionally, we covered all regional Internet histories of the five continents as well as many subregional Internet histories including Arab states (West Asia and North Africa) and the Pacific Islands in addition to many local Internet histories in Asia.  We hope these efforts encourage many to write more comprehensive regional, subregional and local Internet histories in the coming years.

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ONLINE EDUCATION

(1)  Open and Free Access to Web Content

The Internet had a major impact on the research community right from the beginning. It promoted the exchange of preprints and reprints and speeded up communication among researchers, referees and publishers. Its impact on education was slower. The World Wide Web protocols and the development of search engines triggered the generation of content on the network and its wide-spread sharing in the early nineties. The first decade of the twenty first century saw an enormous explosion of Web content, including what was designed to be available for open and free access.

The above-mentioned developments of new technology and paradigms for the creation, sharing and utilization of information and knowledge have to be viewed in a historical context. The ferment that has been created has been compared with the one created at the time of Renaissance when new paradigms, such as universities focused on creation and sharing of new knowledge, created an intellectual revolution.

While the focus of this book is on Asian developments, it is necessary to start with a broader look at the origin of a few major developments. Open Access Journal Publishing was one of the first efforts in the direction of open web content [Laakso 2011].  The Open Software movement [Opensource 2015] was another one.  These two were soon followed by the Open Course Ware movement, and MIT’s OpenCourseWare effort was a pioneering effort in this area [Abelson 2007].The growth of the Wikipedia typifies the rise of free and open Web content that has high credibility. The creation of online forums for discussion starting with Usenet [Lueg 2003] was another development that supported learning over the Web. Workers in the field of information technology, as well as others in a variety of fields such as medicine, benefitted immensely from online discussion forums to gain knowledge and skills. The special feature of these forums was their putting “humans in the loop”, enabling learners to tap the knowledge of informed colleagues by asking questions. As an Asian example in content creation, India’s efforts in making a large collection of educational materials available for engineering education have been described elsewhere [Krishnan 2015].
 

(2)  Early Work on Online Courses

 It is also worth taking note of some developments related to online education that predated the Internet and the open knowledge movements. The Wikipedia article on the history of virtual learning environments [Wikipedia 2015] provides well-researched information and references.
 

(3)  Development of Access Devices

Internet access by students requires the proliferation of low-cost and easy-to-use access devices. The One Laptop per Child (OLTP) project initiated at Media Labs, MIT raised a lot of hopes. Many education specialists including Warschauer and Morgan Ames have criticized it as an attempt to solve complex problems in education with a mainly technological approach [Warschauer 2010]. The tablet computer will easily turn out to be the long term winner as the practical access device for students though designers and manufacturers have usually thought of them as multi-purpose devices; not as devices with education s the primary purpose.

Asian manufacturers such as Samsung and Lenovo have been active in manufacturing and marketing access devices such as tablet computers. [Wikipedia 2015d] mentions the introduction of the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, in September 2010. This should be compared with the introduction of the iPAD in April 2010 [Wikipedia 2015b]. Researchers in educational technology in Asia, for instance [So 2008], had carried out early work in using new developments in access devices for education.

The spread of the smart phone continues unabated. In many countries such as India, the number of users who can potentially access the Web through the cell phone is significantly larger than those who can use a landline for the purpose. However, it terms of usability as an Internet access device, particularly in education, the tablet or its small screen version called the phablet[1] appears to be superior to the smart phone. The rapidly declining price of the low-end tablets gives rise to the hope that device cost may not be a major problem in future. An interesting feature of tablets is that they usually depend upon a WiFi connection for Internet access. This raises the possibility that schools and public libraries can make WiFi access free on their premises for students.

Wireless solutions need not be limited to the school or classroom. A Nepali social entrepreneur has been very successful [Nepal 2015] in using the unlicensed part of the spectrum to create a backbone for some rural areas of his country. A similar wireless solution to providing access to the Internet in rural areas has been demonstrated in India earlier [Raman 2007].
 

(4)  Language of the Web

A large fraction of the Web’s educational resources continue to be in English, despite the tremendous need of the vast majority of students in the world, particularly at the high school level.   [W3Tech 2014] indicates that 55% of the websites on WWW are in English; no Indian language covers even 0.1% of the websites. Compare this with the need.  Statistics on the readership of newspapers show that only 19.7 million out of 1222 million Indians read English newspapers. School statistics show government schools carry the main educational responsibility outside the big cities, and that they largely use regional languages (not English) as the medium of instruction. Therefore, almost all information a citizen finds necessary needs to be made available in Indian languages. However, a variety of problems have delayed the growth of adequate content in Indian languages for access over the Web. The author’s direct experience does not enable him to generalize these comments to the rest of Asia, but surely the problems are not uniquely Indian.  A detailed discussion on the “Language of the Web” can be found in [Ramani 2015].
 

(5)  Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

A course named “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” led by George Siemens of Athabasca University and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council in 2008, has been recognized by the relevant Wikipedia article as the first MOOC run in the world [Wikipedia  2015c]. It was attended by 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba, as well as over 2200 online students from the general public who paid nothing.

It is appropriate to call MOOCs as a very promising development on the Internet scene. They have raised a lot of hopes and expectations, but it is too early to say if MOOCs will fulfil their promises in the form in which they are currently available.  However, we should not under-estimate the probability that the MOOCs movement could cause an educational revolution. Online education will not replace all other education, but it will have its own place. It is worth discussing some of the key factors that are shaping the evolution of MOOCs.
 

(6)  Economics

Tying up education with full time commitment for something like four years, on-campus residence, etc. has made it expensive and beyond the reach of many. Technological developments could lower the cost of education and facilitate life-long learning, learning on demand and part-time learning. MOOCs are promising for this cost reduction and for providing greater flexibility in education. A MOOC does, however, cost a lot more to create and offer in comparison to one-time classroom instruction. In addition to the faculty and staff time that goes into the production of video and other course materials, a large team of teaching assistants are involved in grading assignments and tests. Significant professional effort goes into producing, operating and maintaining automatic grading systems to carry whatever evaluation load they can carry. Educational materials used in MOOCs are not permanent assets, and need to be updated fairly regularly. The saving grace is that the underlying technology makes it possible to distribute the costs over a large number of learners. Consider a MOOC that costs a million U. S. dollars a year to operate, but serves 20,000 students a year. The cost per student is remarkably low!
 

(7)  Subsidies

The low cost/student ratio of MOOCs very often triggers a government response, in the form of paying for the whole cost of MOOC related projects. This results in the student having no “skin in the game” and leads to high drop-out rates. Subsidies do have a place, particularly when public goods are created, but they have to be used judiciously.
 

(8)  Evaluation

Evaluation is essential to all serious learning. The learner needs it more than anyone else, to have a sense of progress in a course. The technology of graders is, therefore, a significant contributor of value in the context of MOOCs. It enables thousands to take online tests and know the results immediately, and to get information on what they did right and where they went wrong. However, many academics prefer not to limit themselves to fully automated evaluations. Some use peer evaluation, for example requiring the course participant to evaluate three others’ submissions immediately after submitting his own.
 

(9)  Certification

A degree is usually a ticket to a job. Employers rarely have the time and expertise to evaluate applicants thoroughly and are, therefore, dependent on degrees from Universities. MOOCs cannot easily offer certification, particularly at the level of university degrees. They rarely employ proctored evaluations that lead to confidence in certification; instead they depend on honor codes and issue certificates which are less valuable as a result [Times 2013]. Combining MOOCs with proctored evaluation is not impossible as an Indian experiment [NPTEL 2015] demonstrates.
 

(10) The Honor Code

It is known that institutions that use an honor code system do promote a greater level of academic integrity among their students [McCabe 2002]. However, the use of honor codes in the context of MOOCs presents us with an entirely different context. An interesting research question deals, therefore, with the possible use of technology to promote adherence to an honor code in online learning.  Algorithmic comparison of the results of an online test taken under the honor code with the results from a proctored test is possible. This makes the use of a mix of proctored tests and simple online tests a highly desirable mode of evaluation. It could even give credit to the inferred adherence to an honor code. The significance of such techniques could go beyond the improvement of online education! 

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