I finally completed the term paper and in the process learned a good deal of information regarding AJAX.  It's more prevalent in many popular sites that millions of users frequent and I for one never knew that it was AJAX I was using!  Some of these sites include Google Maps, YouTube, Flickr, and many others.  Right now I'm looking into learning some AJAX code so I can implement it into some of my future projects.  Hopefully it won't be too challenging.