5.1 - 5.6 Blog Post
5.1 - 5.6 Blog Post
5.1 Blog Post Reflection
Come up with three of your own Beneficial and corresponding Harmful Effects of Computing.
| Type of Computer Feature | Beneficial Effects | Harmful Effects |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming Sites (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) | Easy to access videos, good entertainment, convenient hub for videos and movies | May cost money to get access, sometimes limits account usage, can be addicting or time consuming. |
| Social Media (Twitter, Instagram, etc.) | Easy to connect with people from around the world, can get news quickly, fun to see what other people are doing | Can be addicting, can be harmful to your mental health and self esteem, people may bully you |
| Wiki websites (Wikipedia, Wikihow, etc.) | Good for finding ‘how-tos’, good source of information for essays, archieves information for future use | May have false information, can always be deleted, may be missing information if no one decides to add it |
Talk about dopamine issues above. Real? Parent conspiracy? Anything that is impacting your personal study and success in High School? While it does not affect me much personally, there are plenty of cases where people, especially teens, are harmed by the internet because of negative comments on them or their appearance.
5.2 Blog Post Reflection – Digital Empowerment
How does someone empower themself in a digital world? A person can empower themselves in a digital world by taking steps to protect themselves from possible threats in the digital world. This can mean protecting your information and not posting it on the internet, or by using other services, such as a VPN, to protect your information.
How does someone that is empowered help someone that is not empowered? Describe something you could do at Del Norte HS. Those who are empowered could help by guiding or protecting those who aren’t. They could also teach those who aren’t empowered to become empowered themselves. For example, I could teach someone how to program or to be more confident in themselves and their programming skills, if they believe they are not good at what they are doing. (Not quite sure if this was the right way to answer, but I tried my best).
Is paper or red tape blocking digital empowerment? Are there such barriers at Del Norte? Elsewhere? Yes, things such as paper and red tape do block digital empowerment. Such barriers can be seen in financial differences, where a person cannot acquire a device or otherwise because of financial constraints. This is both prevelent in Del Norte, and outside of it, as this problem can be seen around the world.
Other Questions
Think of three beneficial effects of your projects based on 5.1 Unit. Ease in finding recipes, calculating proportions, and being able to add recipes are all benefits of my project.
Think of a potential harmful effect of your project. A harmful effect of my project could be that it could make users reliant on it for recipe information. (Not really sure if there are any downsides).
Answer with an opinion and learnings so far this year: What are pros/cons on internet blockers at router and lack of admin password on lab machines at school? The pros of an internet blocker include making sure a person doesn’t see something that is not appropriate for them to see, and keeps them from installing things that could harm a person’s device or other devices at the school. One of the main cons is that these blockers also prevents students from accessing some resources, or installing/using software that they may need, especially in classes such as computer science.
What concerns do you have personally about the digital divide? For yourself or for others. Personally, I’m concerned with how the world will go forward. While those with devices are at an advantage, that often leaves people without access or the ability to purchase devices behind. Since devices are starting to become mandatory for purchases or even for education, it could place those without them at an extreme disadvantage. I’m not too worried about myself, but people without devices struggle a lot, and that is worrisome.
5.3 Questions
Write summary/thoughts/conclusions from each of the exercises above. Focus on avoiding Bias in algorithms or code you write. Intentional or Purposeful bias: Google “What age groups use Facebook” vs “… TikTok”? What does the data say? Is there purposeful exclusion in these platforms? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?
Why do virtual assistants have female voices? Amazon, Alexa Google, Apple Siri. Was this purposeful? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business? Virtual assistants may have female voices because women are often seen in a ‘helpful’/’caregiving’ type role, which stereotypically happens to be the role of women. However, this may not have purposeful, as simply choosing the voice that sounded the best would have been the most likely option. This can be a good business move, as it panders to customers when the developers try to choose what they believe would be the most appealing to customers. This may not be corrected, but only if this is truly the case, and the female voice was not chosen because women are seen in service positions only.
Talk about an algorithm that influences your decisions, think about these companies (ie FAANG - Facebook, Amazon, Apple,Netflix, Google) Algorithms on websites such as Amazon are often used to influence customer purchases. For example, Amazon will often show products that are similar to what the user is buying, because they may want to buy similar items. Amazon algorithms are also used to recommend products that other people have bought along with the product you are trying to buy, for the same reason.
Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional? If yes or no, justify your conclusion. I think the owner of the computer may think it was intentional, as he seems surprised that it does not recognize him.
How do you think this happened? This may have happened due to oversight in the program’s coding.
Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude? Should it be corrected? Yes, it’s harmful and it should be corrected, as it causes a divide in the ways the program can be used. It likely wasn’t intended to be harmful, however, and was likely just an oversight in the program.
What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome? More testing and from a wider population would create a much better outcome.
5.4 Questions
Think of a use case for crowdsourcing in your project. In my project, crowdsourcing could be used in development of recipes, as my site has a feature in which users can add recipes to the database.
CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment? Crowdsourcing (if speaking in a general sense) could be used to take results for a survey, such as a customer service survey. This could help with improvements to the project as a whole, as information from others can help make the project better.
What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing? Del Norte crowdsourcing could definitely help with creating more recipes, and improving the site and its functionality. Although crowdsourcing isn’t necessary for the project to function, it does help a lot with creating a good number of recipes that users can access.
What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week. Random recipe data would be interesting to see, as it would take quite a long time to actually implement a whole recipe into the program, instead of just getting portion numbers.
5.5 Questions
When you create a GitHub repository it requests a license type. Review the license types in relationship to this Tech Talk and make some notes in your personal blog. Many licences are very similar, as they cover many of the same things. Patents, copywriting, sharing permissions, private and public use, liability, and warranty are all things covered by these licenses. Licenses can limit how a work is shared and who is able to share it, as well as copyright permissions.
In your blog, summarize the discussions and personal analysis on Software Licenses/Options, Digital Rights, and other Legal and Ethical thoughts from this College Board topic. You are also able to have external deployment. I think licenses are a good thing. As an artist, I know how important it is to have licenses, so someone can protect their work and prevent it from being stolen.
Make a license for your personal (blog) and Team repositories for the CPT project. Be sure to have a license for both Team GitHub repositories (frontend/backend). Document license(s) you picked and why. FYI, frontend, since it is built on GitHub pages may come with a license and restrictions. Document in blog how team made license choice and process of update. For our repository, we would probably use a MIT license. This is because it has many of the same permissions as an Apache license, and it can be distributed more readily among collaborators. It is a simple license, which is also highly rated by others, which is why my group chose it. Applying the license was simple; all I did was click which license I wanted, click submit, and it changed the LICENSE.md file for me, for each repos.
5.6 Questions
Describe PII you have seen on project in CompSci Principles. Some PII I’ve seen on other projects include account creation and score tracking from other Compsci projects.
What are your feelings about PII and your personal exposure? PII may be good for business, but it’s also fairly harmful, as having too much of your information out on the internet makes it easier for people to find you. This can be dangerous, as people may wish to harm you.
Describe good and bad passwords? What is another step that is used to assist in authentication. Good passwords usually have many different characters, 16 or more, and lots of variation in what the characters are. Two-factor authentication is another step that can be used to protect accounts.
Try to describe Symmetric and Asymmetric encryption. Symmetric - A private key to encrypts/decrypts an encrypted email Asymmetric - Uses the public key of the recipient to encrypt the message
Provide an example of encryption we used in AWS deployment. In AWS deployment, we used SSH keys to encrypt our websites.
Describe a phishing scheme you have learned about the hard way. Describe some other phishing techniques. Phishing schemes such as ads that steal information when clicked are one of the things I’ve been phished by. Other techniques include charity donation phone calls that ask for money, but actually just steal money.