Big Ideas 5.1 and 5.2:

Big Idea 5.1 Beneficial and Harmful Effects Class Discussion Notes

  • Drones
    • Benefits:
      • Drones can be used as a hobby or form of entertainment
      • They can be useful in search and rescue
      • they can also be used to take pictures and videos
    • Harmful Effects:
      • They can be used to spy on people
      • They can be used to commit crimes
      • There is also a possibility that they can be hijacked and be used for evil purposes
  • ChatGPT
    • Benefits:
      • We can learn a lot about different topics from ChatGPT that we might not be able to get from Google
        • ChatGPT finds information that is more specific to your request than Google
      • ChatGPT can be a useful tool if you don’t understand what something is and want a general understanding of what it is
    • Harmful Effects:
      • The easy access to information gained from ChatGPT can lead to misuse
        • Students can use ChatGPT to cheat on assignments and get answers to questions that they should be coming up with themselves
        • We can claim work created by ChatGPT as our own
      • It’s possible for the AI to find inaccurate information from a source that is not credible
  • Dopamine
    • Positives:
      • Occasional dopamine can be good as it makes us feel good and happy
    • Negatives:
      • Excessive dopamine can result in addictions
        • Addictions can take over and ruin your life
        • Example of Addiction and Excessive Dopamine:
          • Anthony Rosner, who was 17 years old, had an addiction of playing World of Warcraft
          • This addiction let to him neglecting his schoolwork, relationships, health, and even his hygiene
      • Constantly releasing dopamine can also reduce the pleasure gained from an activity

Big Idea 5.1 Beneficial and Harmful Effects Reflection

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

  • Simulations:
    • Beneficial: Simulations are beneficial because they allow us to use previously collected data to simulate possible outcomes for something.
    • Harmful Effects: In some cases, simulations might not account for every detail which might create a crucial miscalculation in the results (very rare).
  • Smartphones:
    • Beneficial: Smartphones are beneficial because they are portable and they provide us with easy access to a lot of information.
    • Harmful Effects: One harmful effect of smartphones is that they can be addicting. With the numerous apps created solely for the purpose of entertainment, it’s very easy for one to get addicted to their phone. Especially with the rise of social media, more and more people are glued to their phones.
  • Social Media:
    • Beneficial: With social media, people can meet and make friends online and stay connected with their friends.
    • Harmful Effects: Like I mentioned before, social media is very addictive. Many people have an uncontrollable urge to constantly check their phone for notifications from social media platforms. Social media can also take away from real in person relationships when people are always on their phones.

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

Dopamine issues are absolutely real and are a big problem. Problems with dopamine are affecting countless people around the world. For example, Anthony Rosner, who was 17 years old, had an addiction of playing World of Warcraft. He spent up to 18 hours a day, every day playing this game. This went on for nearly 2 years. This addiction led him to neglect his schoolwork, relationships, health, and even his hygiene. We can see that in this person’s case, this dopamine issue resulted in a negative impact on Rosner’s studies and success in high school.

Big Idea 5.2 Digital Divide Class Discussion Notes

  • Some religious groups choose not to use technology
  • Poorer or rural areas may not have much access to technology
  • Even in San Diego county alone, there are distinctions in many categories between the Northern and Southern population
  • During distance learning, many schools did not have access to technology making it hard to teach with social distancing
  • Some countries may have different or restricted access
    • For example, China often restricts access to certain services
  • Disadvantages of not having access to technology:
    • People without much access to technology would not be able to keep track of the current events happening around them
    • These people would also not have access to the abundant information available on the internet
    • Without technology, these people also wouldn’t be able to communicate with other people over long distances

Big Idea 5.2 Digital Divide Reflection

1. How does someone empower themself in a digital world?

One can empower themselves in a digital world by learning as much as they can from technology and implementing what they learned in their lives. For example, if you are interested in being a programmer and want to pursue that as a career, you can make use of the internet and learn about what coding is about and how to do it. In our digital world has given rise to many opportunities and it’s important that you take some of these opportunities and learn more about different topics.

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

Someone that is empowered can help someone that is not empowered by showing how useful and great the internet is. If someone does not believe in long term gratification and the benefits of learning more to be more successful and happy in the future, then it’s important that you explain these benefits. In Del Norte, we have the option to take any class and join any club or other extracurricular activities we want. We can take advantage of this and encourage people to challenge themselves with classes they take and try different extracurricular activities.

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

In my opinion paper does not limit digital empowerment. In fact, paper can be a great tool for digital empowerment because it’s more efficient to make diagrams and visual projects on paper because of how fast and easy it is. A barrier present at Del Norte that blocks digital empowerment is can be how many sites are restricted. Even though this is not a very big problem and actually provides more good than harm, it can be frustrating when you are trying to learn more about something and the website you go to is blocked by the school. Overall, it is evident that there aren’t many barriers to digital empowerment because digital use is growing with each coming day.

5.1 and 5.2 Canvas Questions

1. Think of three beneficial effects of your projects based on 5.1 Unit

  1. Our project offers the user with a list of buildings with their pictures and descriptions about them, so people can decide where they want to travel to based on which building they want to visit.
  2. Our project will make it easy for the user to plan their vacation to visit a famous building as we have many features that will accommodate for the user’s every need.
  3. Different users who speak and understand different languages will be able to use our site with our translator.

2. Think of a potential harmful effect of your project.

There aren’t really any harmful effects of our project, but a drawback is that the user can’t actually purchase the tickets for their flight on our site. Our website’s purpose is only to help the user plan for their flight.

3. 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?

Internet blockers at school are useful because they restrict students from going to sites that they shouldn’t be or aren’t related to school. Internet blockers can also protect students from malicious sites that want to steal information. These internet blocker can also be disadvantageous as there might be some sites that aren’t bad and might be useful to students that are blocked. The lack of admin password on lab machines at school can be advantageous as it’s easier for admins to get access the computers without having to type in a password. This easy access to admin permissions without needing to know a password makes it easier for unauthorized people to tamper with these admin permissions in ways that could harm the school.

4. What concerns do you have personally about the digital divide? For yourself or for others.

I wouldn’t face many problems with the digital divide because I don’t have many problems with my access to technology. I have all the technological resources I need to learn more about different topics and have access to all the other benefits of having technology. For others, however, who might not have as much access to technology, it will be hard for them to do much in a world that is mainly focused on technology. In this day and age, it’s crucial to have access to technology.

Big Ideas 5.3 and 5.4:

Big Idea 5.3 Computing Bias

Intentional or Purposeful bias (Crossover Group Up, 10 minutes)

  • TikTok is usually used by and marketed towards younger ages
    • It attracts younger ages through the way the short videos capture the attention of these kids
    • Also, the music and bright colors also help to captivate these audiences
  • Facebook is often used by older users as it is used more for communication rather than entertainment
  • People use facebook to share their life with others and learn about what others are doing and it’s not as addicting as Tiktok
    • TikTok is made to be addicting to young users with the way it recommends videos in a particular way that makes users want to watch more and more
  • Even though this addiction that TikTok can cause is harmful to the user of the app, it is what makes the company a lot of money

  • Since this app can be harmful to its users, I believe that it should be corrected and made to be not as addicting

  • Virtual assistants might have female voices because they are perceived as more trustworthy, soothing and pleasant
  • Also, these voices might be used to attract male audiences
  • In these ways, this is definitely good business and had definitely helped these companies that create these virtual assistants
  • I also don’t believe that the overuse of female voices in virtual assistants is harmful

Are HP Computers Racist?

I believe that the owner of the computer did not think this was intentional. I hypothesize that this happened with improper testing. I think that the majority of the testers of the camera were white and the camera wasn’t tested by enough darker people to recognize them as people. To produce a better outcome, a wider range of people should be tested, so the camera would be able to detect everyone. It’s imperative that this problem is corrected because this can cause a lot of problems and harm. It can even be emotionally hurtful as some people might question their humanity.

Big Idea 5.4 Crowdsourcing

What is Crowdsourcing?

  • Crowdsourcing is the practice of a lot of different people contributing information for a task or project
  • An example of crowdsourcing is different people contributing different information that comes together in a Wikipedia page

Evidence of Crowdsourcing

  • Wikipedia is a major example of something that uses crowdsourcing
    • Wikipedia works with many people contributing information on a single topic and this information coming together to form an article
    • Sometimes this information can be inaccurate because even people who are inexperienced and not credible can add information to the page
  • For crypto currency, the 3 step validation of exchanges of money provided by 3 different miners is an example of crowdsourcing
  • For COVID data, different places can contribute their data about all the different aspects of this topic

Obtaining Data via Crowdsourcing

I mostly use APIs from RapidAPI because we learned about that last trimester. We learned about an API that contained COVID data and we learned how to convert the data into json format. For this project, I have also used 2 APIs (one to convert a city’s name to its latitude and longitude coordinates and the other to use the latitude and longitude coordinates to find the nearest airport). In this project, I learned how to parse through the 2 APIs to get the data I am interested in.

With Github, we can see other student’s projects and see how they did certain things. For example, if someone highlighted something in their blog and I wanted to know how they did it, I could find their blog on Github and see how they did it. With this, it’s possible to not only learn from the internet, but from other students as well.

5.4 Hacks

1. CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?

A crowdsourcing idea that we can use for CSP could be creating a big project with everyone inputting their own features. Since everyone in CSP know how to code at least something, we would be able to get many inputs and the project would come together well. Also, if people need help with the part of the project they are working on, they can ask another student for help. For our project, we can ask people about some buildings they want to visit so we can include them in our list of famous building and descriptions for them.

  1. What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing?

The previous crowdsourcing project I mentioned probably wouldn’t be better with the entire school, because inexperienced people might contribute work that makes the project worse. It’s better for people who know what they are doing to contribute rather than people who don’t. Since the idea I wrote about in the first question isn’t related to CSP, we can ask anyone from Del Norte about famous building they want to visit.

  1. What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week.

At Night at the Museum, all of the pieces of our project would have come together. We can ask someone to input their current location and where they want to visit (based on the location of the building they want to visit). Then, with the Google API, we can show them their current location and their destination on a map. This will probably impress the teachers during finals week.

Big Ideas 5.5 and 5.6:

5.5 Hacks

  1. 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.

Since public repositories on GitHub are often used for sharing open source software, GitHub displays license information to help users get information about open source licenses and the projects that use them. It’s important for anyone who is creating a public repo to always update the right license. There are many different license types listed. Some examples include: Academic Free License v3.0, Apache license 2.0, GNU General Public License, Open Software License 3.0.

  1. 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.

I understand the need for patents and intellectual property rights - companies spend years and a lot of money on research and development to come out with products and solutions. The companies need to pay the salary to their employees as well as turn a profit - so protecting their work with royalty is necessary.

Open Source community is extremely vital for us to be able to build on top of each other’s work. This way everyone doesn’t need to re-invent what has already been thought of and developed. It helps students like me, other software developers who don’t have a lot of resources, etc. I would also like to be a contributor to the open source community in the future.

I learnt about so many different type of licensing options in this class - some which are completely open to use and distribute, others which have restrictions on derivative work, and so on. Common permissive licenses include the MIT License, Apache License, and BSD License. Popular copyleft ( method using which you can modify the software or documentation and distribute it back to the open-source community ) licenses include the GNU (General Public License) and the Mozilla Public License.

  1. 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.

My personal blog used the Apache license 2.0 license. I was able to figure this out because it’s the information about which license my blog is using is located in the “LICENSE” file. It seems that this is the default license used.

In our CPT project, I have added a new LICENSE file and I selected MIT as the license. I looked on the internet and found that MIT is the most popular license used on GitHub. It is very simple and it gives users express permission to reuse code for any purposes.

5.6 Hacks

  1. Describe PII you have seen on project in CompSci Principles.

In my personal blog fastpages project, PII such as my name, school, and classes I am taking are listed. In our group project (RECS), the only example of PII is our names. These examples of PII are probably won’t cause me any harm if others find this information.

  1. What are your feelings about PII and your personal exposure?

I don’t share a lot about my PII. I don’t use social media and therefore don’t share any personal information to the public. However, later on I might create social media account, but I will make sure not to publicize any information about myself that I wouldn’t want people to find out (like my phone number, address, and date of birth).

  1. Describe good and bad passwords? What is another step that is used to assist in authentication.

Good passwords are long and include different cases of characters, numbers, and symbols to ensure that the password can’t be cracked easily. It’s best to use a computer generated password (softwares such as Keychain) because these are designed to be strong. Sometimes multi - factor authentication is used to verify your identity by using multiple methods of authentication (such as a passcode, a key, a fingerprint).

  1. Try to describe Symmetric and Asymmetric encryption.

Symmetric encryption is when one key is used to encrypt something and decrypt it. Some examples of these are AES, DES, and 3DES. Asymmetric encryption allows users to encrypt information using shared keys. Some examples of asymmetric encryption are RSA and DSS.

  1. Provide an example of encryption we used in AWS deployment.

An example of encryption we used in AWS deployment is AES-256. This is another example of symmetric encryption that uses a 256-bit secret key for encryption and decryption

  1. Describe a phishing scheme you have learned about the hard way. Describe some other phishing techniques.

Personally, I haven’t fallen victim to any phishing schemes. However, I have seen several phishing emails claiming - that I have won a contest and I need to enter my information to collect the prize money, or that there is a package waiting for me which I never ordered, or that my insurance has expired and I need to renew it. It is important that we scan the emails and the address it is being sent from before clicking any links or giving out any PII in such links.