Bob Carlton reminds me to some statistics I’ve seen floating around the Web from time to time. I don’t have the references for these, so I’m not going to rely on them, but I’ll put them here in case I ever want to come back to them (possibly to bolster a case for the Disseminary).
⊕ 28 million Americans have used the Internet to get religious and spiritual information and connect with others on their faith journeys.
⊕ 25% of Internet users have gotten religious or spiritual information online at one point or another. This is an increase from survey findings in late 2000, which showed that 21% of Internet users - or between 19 million and 20 million people - had gone online to get religious or spiritual material.
⊕ More than 3 million people a day get religious or spiritual material, up from 2 million that was reported last year.
⊕ George Barna Research notes, "By the end of the decade, 50 million Americans will seek to have their spiritual experience solely through the Internet, rather than at a church; and upwards of 100 million Americans will rely upon the Internet to deliver some aspects of their religious experience.
⊕ The Vatican notes that the Internet, "offers people direct and immediate access to important religious and spiritual resources-great libraries and museums and places of worship, the teaching documents of the Magisterium, the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and the religious wisdom of the ages. (II. 5)"
The first claim seems fair enough, especially if we make me reserve my cavils about the category of “spiritual information” until later. The second shouldn’t surprise anyone; presumably the original 21% still counted, and in the interval between the first and second surveys, 4% of internet users who hadn’t sought out ”religious or spiritual material” had done so. The third claim seems high, given the numbers reported above; presumably a lot of users get “spiritual material” every day, and others never do.
As to George Barna: the claim seems so ill-formed as to make it unlikely that it comes directly from the Barna group. I have big complaints about Barna, but he surely ought to sense that the idea of “hav[ing] their spiritual experience solely through the internet” raises all sorts of what-does-that-mean flags. What may pass as spiritual experience in my life has not always involved church; sometimes general solitude, sometimes contact with my dearest friends, sometimes with the majesty of creation — but even as pro-Web as I am, I don’t have a vague idea what it would mean to have a spiritual experience online, nor am I sure about “deliver[ing] some aspects of their religious experience” online.
But all of these are liable to impress granting agencies, so I should track them down and figure out a way to cast them in prose that doesn’t make me flinch.
Posted by AKMA at March 26, 2003 03:51 PM | TrackBackSource on the first 3 is http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=53
Posted by: bob at March 26, 2003 05:04 PMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Edith at January 13, 2004 02:16 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Meredith at January 13, 2004 02:16 AMEach Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.
Posted by: Paul at January 13, 2004 02:16 AMWhen a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Posted by: Gillam at January 13, 2004 10:23 AMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Simon at January 13, 2004 10:24 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Martin at January 13, 2004 10:24 AM