Week 20

Big Idea 5.1 - Beneficial and Harmful Effects

Discussion Summary

  • Certain technologies such as UAVs/Drones and OpenAI/ChatGPT may have many benefits, but there can also be many negative effects as well
  • UAVs/Drones have benefits such as search and rescue, aerial photography, hobbies, etc. However, there are negatives such as environmental damage, privacy issues, etc.
  • OpenAi/ChatGPT can be useful and efficient for certain tasks, but there are negatives such as providing false information, promoting laziness, and causing a platform shift for things like Google
  • Games and social media can have positive and negative effects on people
  • Both of them are a good way to stay connected with others or make new friends
  • Both games and social media increase dopamine, making people feel happy, but this can lead to addiction and people may “waste time”, neglect their needs and other activities like self care and school, etc
  • Both games and social media are a hotspot of cyberbullying because the interactions are online
  • Social media is also a projection of peoples best moments and it is really fake, it can cause people to feel insecure
  • Social media is linked with mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, etc

Reflection

Question 1

Come up with three of your own Beneficial and corresponding Harmful Effects of Computing:

  • Enhanced commmunication and access to information -> data security and privacy concerns
  • Increased efficiency and productivity while doing certain tasks -> dependence on technology and loss of tradictional skills
  • Increased convenience and improved quality of life through technology -> widening digital divide and socioeconomic inequality

Question 2

Talk about dopamine issues above. Real? Parent conspiracy? Anything that is impacting your personal study and success in High School?

  • I think dopamine issues above are real. Social media and games are designed to be addicting so they can attract people and keep those people interested. Personally, there have been many times where I feel distracted by social medias such as Instagram and Tiktok and I find it hard to focus on my studies.

Big Idea 5.2 - Digital Divide

Discussion Summary

  • Widening digital divide in today’s society, differerences in computers, internet, or tehcnology in general
  • Factors that contribute to divide include socioeconomic (money) geographic (location, and demographic (education, nationality, religion, and etnicity)
  • Many things, such as education, requires school to provide materials like computers or chrombooks for equity

Reflection

Question 1

How does someone empower themself in a digital world?

  • Someone can empower themself in a digital world by engaging with the digital world. For example, they can participate in online communities and social media, stay informed about digital trends, updates in technology, etc, and they can learn digital skills such as coding, digital marketing, etc.

Question 2

How does someone that is empowered help someone that is not empowered? Describe something you could do at Del Norte HS.

  • Someone empowered could help someone that is not empowered by informing them about certain information about the digital world. For example, someone might wnat to learn more about digital skills but might not know how. I could help teach them some or inform them about certain clubs and classes they could partake in, such as coding clubs, AP CSP/CSA, etc.

Question 3

Is paper or red tape blocking digital empowerment? Are there such barriers at Del Norte? Elsewhere?

  • Digital empowerment is blocked at different levels in different areas of the world or community, depending on how much that certain place as access to computers, internet, technology, etc. At Del Norte, I think the school does a good job at overcoming some of the barriers of blocked digital empowerment by providing chromebooks. However, there are some barriers that block digital empowerment for those who don’t have as much access to technology such as phones.

Week 21

Big Idea 5.3 - Computing Bias

Summary/thoughts/conclusions

Intentional or purposeful bias:

  • Occurs when there is a specific agenda, interest or preference that affects judgment or decision making process
  • Results in distorted or skewed representation of information/data
  • Can have negative consequences for indivudals or groups affected by it

Tiktok and Facebook have different age groups - tiktok is mainly used by younger audiences and facebook older audeinces. This can result in purposeful exclusion on the platforms, for example specific advertisements or content being displayed that appeal to only the certain age group that uses the platform. This is good business, as it keeps those age groups that already use the platform engaged and encourages them to keep on using the app. I don’t think it is too harmful, as they are just trying to do good business and it isn’t really enforcing any harmful ideas. It could even be benefitial, for example, Facebook could display more mature content that would interest the older audience, but if displayed on Tiktok for the younger audience it could harm them.

Virtual assitants such as Amazon, Alexa, and Apple siri have female voices. This could be purposeful, as it could appeal to audiences more, for example people could think that a female voice would sound more comforting or motherly. By making the voices female, it is good business as a female voice is what many are already used to or find comfort in. It could be harmful as it promotes that women are supposed to take on the assitant role, while men are generally in the higher positions ordering women around.

Companies such as Netflix and Amazon have algorithms that influence decisions. They can take previous data and see what you might be interested in, then display it to influence or encourage you into using the app more. For example, they both look at previously looked at or watched and searched up content and displays similar content to you. Also, Netflix even takes that and displays how much you would like something with its percentage match feature so it’s easier for the user to make a decision on what they want to watch.

HP computers are racist? - The HP computers face detection could detect a white person but couldn’t detect a black person. The owner of the computer thinks it was intentional, but it porobably wasn’t. This probably happened because there wasn’t enough data about faces for the face detection to be able to detect certain faces. For example, when testing the face detection device, they could have only tested white people. As a result, the face detetction device couldn’t detect someone who wasn’t a white person. Even if it wasn’t intentional, it is definitely harmful and excludes certain people. To avoid this problem, HP could have tested more people for their face detection device so it wouldn’t exclude anyone, and so they caught the problem before releasing the product.

Why we should avoid bias in algorithms or code we write:

  • Lead to unequal or unfair outcomes
  • Inaccurate or incorrect results
  • Diminish trustworthiness

Big Idea 5.4 - Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining services, ideas, or content by enlisting the services of a large number of people typically through the internet. Many companies use crowdsourcing as a way to gather information, solve problems, or generate new ideas.

Use of crowdsourcing in my project: A crowdsource idea to collect data from the 150 students in the CSP classes could be a google form or other type of form that is assigned through Slack and that all the students can fill out. We could get feedback, suggestions, and comments on our project’s games and other features. This can help improve our projects from the user perspective or help us find solutions to problems.

Crowdsourcing could help our project improve as it gives us multiple perspectives on it, which can help us find solutions to problems and improvements that we can make. For example, the Events and Review databases could be tested and provided feedback by more people, allowing the filter and validation system to be tested more and insured that it is all working. The same goes for the games Wordle and RPG Cat Game, as having more tests and feedback allow for the game to be fully tested to be correct with certain words being filtered out, and ideal for the user. So, crowdsourcing with all of Del Norte with many more students would be ideal.

Week 22

Big Idea 5.5 - Legal and Ethical Concerns

  • 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: There are several types of liscenses, and each is different regarding what they protect and focus on. The ones our team looked at and decided fit our project best is the Open Source MIT liscense. We chose this as it is the most flexible liscense, as it allows our original work to be used as long as we are credited. We want others to be able to use our website and software, as it can provide a framework to others; since our website is a cat cafe, other people looking to make a website for a restaurant, cafe, etc can reference or use our work.

  • 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: Copyright and software licenses can have benfits and harms. Some postives of copyright and liscenses are that owners are rightfully credited for their work. This way, their digital rights will not be violated because stealing and/or misuing their work is illegal. This is important because it is just for the owner of a piece of work that they put time into to create to have a say in where it is being displayed, used for, etc. For example, I’ve seen the stealing and misuse of work, such as art, many times on social media and it goes unnoticed or the owner can’t legally do anything because it isn’t copyrighted. There are also some negatives of copyright, such as exploiting copyright rights, overall limiting the use of referencing or borrowing work and ideas, and more. We can also avoid our work getting stolen and protect it, even with Github, with liscences.

  • 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: Our group is using the MIT liscense, since our website is overall meant to provide a framework for the user/public. See image of our liscense below: This is an image

Big Idea 5.6 - Safe Computing

  • Describe PII you have seen on project in CompSci Principles: Some examples of PII that I have seen in projects in CSP are ones that ask for a name, for surveys, sign ins, etc. For example, in our project, for our events and reviews database, it asks for name, email, and phone number, which is all pretty personal information. Though it is tehcnically a simulation, this reflects real life situations where event and reviews sections ask for personal information in order to make a request/post.

  • What are your feelings about PII and your personal exposure: I feel like there is a lot of PII online and I would want my information to be protected. I wouldn’t want my personal information such as my picture or phone number for strangers, whether they have bad intent or not, to just have access to. For me, since I am still young, when I search my name up there is nothing that comes up for me. However, when I search up adults such as my parents, a lot of information comes up about them, such as their linkedIn or social medias.

  • Describe good and bad passwords? What is another step that is used to assist in authentication: Generally, a good password has complexity(symbols such as * and ^, upper and lowercase letters, numbers), randomness(no spelled out words, no words in relation to you), and length (longer than 8 characters). A bad password is short, simple, and predictable. For example, “password” or your pet’s name. A good password is crucial as it is the line of defense against access to personal information on a computer or other device, account, etc, by hackers and malware. This is why there are multiple steps to authenticate whether the person logging in is the correct person or not a robot. These steps can include sending authentication codes or checks to your linked emails, phone numbers, or devices.

  • Try to describe Symmetric and Asymmetric encryption: Symetteric encyrption uses the same one key to encrypt AND decrypt data. On the other hand, asymmetric encyrption uses two different keys, a public key to encrypt data and a private key to decrypt data.

  • Provide an example of encryption we used in AWS deployment: An example of encryption we used was the key we used with AES-256 encyrption.

  • Describe a phishing scheme you have learned about the hard way. Describe some other phishing techniques: I have encountered many phishing scenes. For example, when I go on certain unofficial or “sketchy” websites, there are several times where my device just pops up a screen that looks like an error message or tells me that my device has a virus. Personally, nothing further has happened with this (yet), because every time I see that I immediately close out of the website, however, the first time I saw it I was a bit worried that my device actually had a problem. Some other phishing techniques are through email and screen-popups to scam and trick people into entering information or paying for something.