5.1 Beneficial and Harmful Effects:

  • Drones:
    • Benefits:
      • smaller flight vehicles that don’t have the requirement of carrying heavy stuff
      • Fun recreation
      • helps get photos in places humans can’t easitly reach
      • potential delivery
    • Harms:
      • can be used for illegal deliveries
      • can be used for terrorist and military war purposese
      • can be used to spy on people with cameras
      • may interfere with other flying vehicles, animals, and nature
      • could interfere with other things by crashing into them
  • Video Games/ Social Media
    • Benefits:
      • allows people and kids to connect easier
      • people can see what’s new in the world instanty
      • connects people across grat distances
      • in some cases, can save time and resources to meet physically
      • provide entertainment
      • breaks from reality
    • Harms:
      • Can lead to depression
      • competition for followers
      • everyone seems to have a better life than you
      • wastes time
      • misinformation
      • screen damages eyes long term
      • video games can be extremely addicting
      • can cause violence in kids

My 3:

  • Hacking
    • Benefits:
      • Allows for tech support to help people acess their resources
      • helps government track down dangerous criminals
      • helps teach kids how to AVOID being hacked
    • Harms:
      • Scammers can use it to acess your credit information and take your money
      • Hackers can use it to get your presonal information and threaten you or others with it
      • It can beused by governments to start wars and acess other countries’ things
  • YouTube:
    • Benefits:
      • entertaining
      • good break when used sparingly
      • provides people a job
      • some videos teach you concepts you may need revision on from school
      • helps with home improvements and/or DIY projects
      • good tips and tutorials
    • Harms:
      • VERY distracting
      • thumbnails and titles are misleading
      • misinformation
      • Fake scenarios made for videos to amaze you
  • Self-Driving Cars
    • Benefits:
      • Can reduce human error if perfect
      • reduce human stress on the road
      • Can lead to breakthroughs with improvements(e.g. deliveries)
      • Cool concept
      • less work needed to go from point A to point B
    • Harms:
      • If not implemented properly, can be catastrophic
        • death, injury, destruction
      • Could remove jobs from uber drivers and delivery workers
      • Makes people more lazy
  • Our CPT project - Theee Arcade:
    • Benefits:
      • can reduce stress with a fun game
      • provides escapism
      • presents users with a challenge
      • lets multiple people play and stores their results for healthy competition
    • Harms:
      • Can get very distracting for people trying to do work
      • unhealthy competition can fighting could occur over who did better on a game
      • can get people addicted and on a screen for a very long time

Dopamine Issues:

  • I would say that these issues are definitely real. There are many things that can distract a person from school, health, and relationships, but video games are a major one. I’ve seen people who are very addicted to video games. I’ve never really played, and when I have, I’ve been really bad at video games, so I’ve never had this problem. However, something which distracts me a lot is youtube, and a lot of times when doing work, I get distracted by youtube, and lose sight of the task at hand

5.2 Digital Divide:

Reflection:

  1. In a digital world, one can empower themself by using all the technology at their hand to good use, and use coding or other technology to create somehting beneficial to everyone, weather it be something simple like a game or small invention to help people, or something complex like a website to help people or a machine.
  2. An empowered person can help someone who is not so lucky by involving them with their projects, or getting them started on new projects that they will like. They can also tell them what worked best to empower them so that the other person can use those suggestions to empower themselves.
  3. Something which may be blocking digital empowerment at DNHS is all of the websited blocked ont he wifi. While blocking websites like games or innapropriate sites make sense, I don’t see the purpose in some of the blocked websites that I have come across. For example, once I came acoss a periodic table site that was blocked. Another example is once I needed to research a part for robotics to see if it would work, but the company website was blocked. While I 100% understand blocking discord, it makes communication a hastle, and people use texing, snapchat, or vpns anyway.
  4. In my opinion, digital divide is an issue, but not one that isn’t easily overcome by people being more open and sharing their resources with others

5.3 Computing Bias:

Crossover Group Up:

  1. Tiktok is generally used by younger audiences, while facebook is mostly used by the older generation. Younger generations tend to have shorter attention spans, and it takes much less time to watch a 30 second tiktok video than read articles or watch long videos on facebook. In these platforms, I don’t believe that they are purposely excluding a group of people, as obviously, the more people they attract, the better for the company. However,t he website fromat tends to cater to a specific group of people. I don’t think this is a huge issue to be corrected, but maybe having another social media platform that mixes elements from both and can attract people of any generation would allow more and differnt people to communicate and connect.
  2. There are two ways to look at virtual assistants having female voices. The most obvious way is to think that this was a sexist decision, as women are seen generally as assistants to people, helping them out with tasks rather than doing it themselves. However, it can also be seen as women having a more soothing voice as compared to men, due to their natural caring motherly instince. Whatever the case, this was not done by people who thought about the above and wanted to purposely put down or uplift women. Rather, a female voice was probably liked the best by test audiences for the voice assistants, so it was set as the default. Whatever the case, I do not believe that this is harmful, and the voice can always be set to the user’s liking.
  3. FAANG:
    • Facebook: Facebook is known for having a lot of ads. These ads often pop up ont he facebook market place, where anyway the user is probably looking to buy somehting.
    • Amazon: In a similar way, amazon places ads everywhere, and also lends itself and specifically makes the prouducts that they want you to buy more accessible. Amazon and its users also have a lot of bots to artificially inflate the star ratings and add fake reviews.
    • Apple: iphones and other apple prouducts work best when connected with each other. For example, airpods work best with apple phones, you can connect all your apple devices and text on mac. You can also have special connections with other apple users, such as airdrop, gamepigeon, and faster/more abilities with texting.
    • Netflix: netflix often gives you recomendations based on what you previously watched. This can often keep you in a shell of what you usually like, and prevent you from exploring all the content there is, by takin Netflix’s recomentations.
    • Google: Google is often influences by websites which pay them more. A website or ad can pay google to be at the top of a search, even if that website contains viruses, or isn’t as related to the topic. Google also knows what you search, and can use that to give you relevant ads for things you may like.

      As Pairs:

  4. The owner of the computer seems to think that the AI was intentionally racist, and couldn’t detect him due to that. He was yelling at the screen, and specifically claimed that the developers did this because he was black.
  5. In actuality, however, this most likely happened due to an error with testing. For an AI to work as well as possible, it needs a lot of training data from all different places, and it was likely that the AI was only trained with caucasian or lighter skinned faces, and therefore didn’t realize that the man’s face was a face.
  6. This was probably not intended to be harmful or exclude, but was a creator oversight into the situation
  7. Thie should 100% be corrected, and it would be a pretty easy fix to, just training it with more different kinds of faces
  8. I would bring in people and use images of people from around the world for better results.

Summary:

Computing bias is usually not intentional, but often it can lead to harmful results, even if unintended by the creator. If it is intended, people need to be wary of it and make sure not to get caught in a trap of falling for the website’s tricks. An exxample I can think of for the first case is google translate. Often, in languages without gender specific pronouns, it will stereotype the sentence based of common gender stereotypes, rather than including both male and female pronouns. For example, if you enter, “He/She is a firefighter” in a nother language, it will return “He is a firefighter”, but it would return she if you said maid or something similar.

5.4 Crowdsourcing

Crossover Group Up:

  1. I used a wikipedia API that I found from the interned for my Scrum project from trimester 1. Our group used this API to get data for our academic organizer. We were able to get data from wikipedia to display it on the website. Our group also used a memes api from RapidApi for one of the assignments during the first trimester, to get memes from. I’ve also created 2 different kinds of APIs for countries, one with infor for each country, and another which was just a list of countries. Lastly, I’ve used a couple of APIs in non-school projects.
  2. The biggest discovery that I have made in github is looking at the commit history of both my classmates and both Mr. Yeung and Mr. Mort. I found out how hard different friends work, and what results that leads to, including exploring what work that others do to achieve their grades, helping me understand what is really required to get a certain score.

Hacks:

  1. A crowdsource idea is to survey all of the APCSP students on their opinion of the class, what they could do better, and general questions on how they are doing for the PBL project.
  2. I don’t believe that my project specifically can benefit from crowdsourcing, as it is just a game, and doesn’t need user data. However, the arcade as a whole may be able to get a review, or a leaderboard ranking, and somehow implement crowdsourcing that way.
  3. At N@TM, I plan to send a google form to each one of the people who come and take a look at our project, and get a review, as well as project glows and grows, to change over the next week before the final submission

5.5

Blog Post Reflection:

    • The use of GPL (General Public Licensing) software can void the rights to charge for patents and software.
    • Qualcomm, a company that makes money on patents, has lawyers analyzing all code produced to ensure compliance with licenses and to protect their ability to charge royalties.
    • An author needs to determine a license when adding or selecting one on GitHub. Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal waives copyright, while the MIT License allows the use of code freely but requires credit to the author. \
    • The GPL License lets people do almost anything with the project, but distributing closed source versions is not allowed.
    • Companies must comply with the terms of licenses and cite sources.
    • Creative Commons software is free but individuals and companies must figure out techniques and business models to use it according to the license.
    • Red Hat is an example of a company that gave away its Linux distribution under GPL license, but established a business model around buying support agreements.
    • Qualcomm figured out how to mix Patent and GPL businesses.
    • Creative Commons and Open Source are free terminologies but businesses need income to survive.
  2. I think that it’s good that people can claim a right to their own IP, and prevent others from using it without credit/permission. However, liscenses can often prevent others from creating truly amazing things, that in no way mean to claim the original creator’s work as their own.
  3. License: MIT License

Copyright (c) [2023] [GamesArcade]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

5.6 Safe Computing

Blog Post Reflection:

  1. Any kind of personal information that you probably dont want to be on the internet, like name, adress, birthday, SSN, IP adress, or more can be considered PII. PII specific to APCSP is whenever we had to write our names or other information in the beginning of the class, or anything from github, because so much information about a person can be found on github.
  2. I think that PII is important for a person to keep safe, or else if others find it, it can get a person into big trouble or in danger.
  3. Good Password: %^&*GYGYTGycjhyeyg Bad Password: Chinmay123 other authentification steps are PATs, I am not a robot, and forgot password questions.
  4. Symmetric encryption is when all words have the same decryption key, while assymetric encryption is when each code has a different decryption key.
  5. Encryption in AWS deployment is using SSH keys.