Big Idea 5.1 - Beneficial and Harmful Effects

  1. Grammarly
    • Benefits:
      1. Can help with editting someone’s paper
      2. Can identify grammar and spelling issues
      3. Enables students to have a better piece of writing
    • Harms:
      1. Students may become too dependent on Grammarly
      2. Students don’t try on grammar and spelling - use Grammarly to fix it
      3. People start to use only Grammarly to write essays - not their own original thoughts
  2. Phones
    • Benefits:
      1. Enable people to text and call each other from long distances
      2. Source of entertainment - YouTube, games, apps, etc.
      3. Source of information - the Internet
    • Harms:
      1. Not good for health - posture issues and bad eyesight
      2. Causes addiction - less sleep, texting and driving, etc.
      3. Can ruin relationships, causes concentration issues, less physical activity
  3. Robots
    • Benefits:
      1. Can do many jobs humans can’t - especially those involving hard labor - and makes jobs safer
      2. Very intelligent - can figure things out and calculate things
      3. Generally reliable and can complete jobs quickly
    • Harms:
      1. Can replace human jobs - leading to poverty and unemployment for some
      2. Can become dangerous - may malfunction - or intelligence may become too much
      3. Hard to make and code - depletion of resources to build strong robots

Dopamine issues:

  • Dopamine issues are real - Many kids are addicted to games or social media, and are always on either phones, computers, PCs, or gaming consoles.
  • For a few kids, these issues impact their studying and success in High School
    • They can’t focus in school
    • They don’t do homework, and instead, play games and post on social media
    • Social media also creates stress as desire for likes and followers can create anxiety and depression
    • Gaming and social media can also lead to cyberbullying in toxic online communities
  • These don’t affect my personal studying and success in High School
    • Although I play games, I don’t play as much as others and I am not addicted
    • I use few social media platforms, and mainly for texting. I don’t care about followers, posts, or likes.

Big Idea 5.2 - Digital Divide

Digital Empowerment:

  • Someone can empower themselves in a digital world by gaining knowledge about devices and how they work
    • They can also buy devices such as TVs, phones, tablets, and computers (if the devices are affordable and available)
    • Not all people can empower themselves, though, because of multiple causes:
      1. They may not have the money to buy devices
      2. They may not have the opportunity to learn more about devices
      3. There may be nore available devices or learning because the place they live in is demoderinzed
  • Someone that is empowered can help someone that is not empowered in a multitude of ways:
    1. Buy them devices
    2. Give them opportunities to learn more about devices
    3. Give them financial/digital aid
    4. Teach them about devices and how to buy one
  • At Del Norte, students can start fundraisers to raise money to buy devices - phones, computers, printers, etc. - for those who cannot afford them and do not have access to them on a regular basis
  • There are barriers blocking digital empowerment:
    • Places such as Third World Countries generally do not have as much access to devices compared to countries like the U.S.
      • This is not just an issue of money, but availability and access
      • These place does not even have this type of technology nor are there opportunities for people to learn more about technology
    • Even in “rich” countries, barriers still block a few from digital empowerment:
      • Generally, these are issues of money
        • People don’t have the money to buy devices or learn more about them
      • Often, there are other priorities for these people:
        • Rent, housing, food, jobs, tranportation
  • There are such barriers in Del Norte, but not as apparent
    • There are a few kids who probably don’t have the ability to buy devices because their parents do not earn enough money

Big Idea 5.3 - Computing bias

Intentional/Purpose Bias - (TikTok vs Facebook, etc.):

  • Generally, older generations use Facebook while younger generations use TikTok
    • Causes advertisement bias - Facebook tries to attract older customers while TikTok tries to attract younger customers
      • This is because they both know who their audience is
    • This trend is most likely to be caused by the types of platform
      • Facebook is more informational and includes articles while TikTok is more entertainment
        • Younger people want entertainment - may also be the fact that younger generations have shorter attention spans
    • This trend is not harmful and there is no reason for it to be corrected
      • Doesn’t create any sort of stereotypes or damage society
  • There are a variety of reasons that virtual assistants like Alex and Siri have female voices
    • One is the idea that men have a bigger presence in management and facilitation, while women just have a helping role
    • Another is the idea of mothers, and female assistants can “take care” of users
    • Another is similar to the idea of nurses - generally people think of nurses as women because it reassures them
    • This should be corrected because it is harmful to society
      • Backs up the stereotype that women are subordinate to men and women only have helping roles in society
        • This stereotype may be applied to society
    • There is now male virtual assistants but the default is still female
      • Even if the default became male, the idea that men are dominant and primary may become prominent instead of the idea of men being in management
  • There are multiple algorithms that influences the decisions of users
    • Algorithms based on the user’s previous data
      • In Netflix, it recommends new TV Shows and Movies based on previous ones you watched
    • Algorithms based on all users’ data
      • In Netflix, it gives the most popular shows and movies currently
      • In Google and Amazon, the most popular websites and products are shown

Racist Computer:

  • This aspect of the product is probably not intentional because there is no reason for the makers to specifically exclude black people
    • If there was, then the product probably wouldn’t have made it into the markets
  • This probably happened due to lack of efficient testing
    • If creators tested the camera using multiples ethnic groups, races, demographics, etc., then this mistake would have been discovered and debugged properly
    • This leads to the question - how could testing be better?
      • The camera can be set up in public places - such as banks, ATM’s, security stores, etc., and see how it reacts to different people and locations
      • More people can be used as test subjects
  • Even though this wasn’t intentional it is still harmful and should be corrected
    • Gives the idea of skin color a bad meaning
    • Racial stereotypes
    • Can also cause security problems
      • If the camera can’t detect certain people, it may not do what it is supposed to do

Big Idea 5.4 - Crowdsourcing

Crowdsource idea for CSP:

  • A possible idea for crowdsourcing could be a poll or a survey that evaluates maybe the class or the lessons
    • This could be initiated in the environment by having links in the APCSP website
    • Teachers can also tell students about it
  • Another idea is the friendly sharing of code - kind of like what GitHub and RapidAPI enables users to do
    • Maybe there can be a time in class where people can go around sharing ideas and code - enables some to gain new insight

Del Norte crowdsourcing:

  • Polls and surveys can be set up to evaluate certain things
    • Amount of homework and studying, self appreciation, mental health, sports, campus spirit/community, etc.
    • This can be implemented by having posters with links and qr codes around campus
      • Teachers can also send links to students
  • Students can also be asked series of questions - interview style - around campus randomly
    • Can be asked questions about campus community, mental health, how they feel about coming to school, how welcom they feel, etc.

Project improvement with crowdsourcing:

  • We can maybe have a poll/survey on the project for users to evaluate out project
    • Users can be asked what they like about the website, what can be improved, etc
  • We can also see how many users sign in and which aspect of our website they like the most
    • This data can be used to see what parts of the website should be fixed
  • We can also use GitHub or other sources of code sharing to see how other groups implemented certain aspects
    • We can use inspiration from these ideas to improve ours

How could data be captured at N@TM?

  • Polls/Surveys can be used to capture data
    • Feedback on N@TM as a whole
      • How the artworks were, how the environment was, etc.
    • Feedback on certain classes
      • Ceramics, drawing and painting, 3D Animation, Studio Art, CSP/CSA
    • Feedback on our project
      • What was good, what was their favorite part, what was bad, what could be improved

Big Idea 5.5 - Legal and Ethical Concerns

Types of Licenses:

  • Open Source MIT License:
    • Allows code to be used freely
    • Making and distributing closed source versions
    • Authors get credit
      • Credit can be as simple as including the author’s name
    • Closed source means GitHub project can be private
  • Open Source GPL License:
    • Lets people do virtually anything with users’ project
      • Distributing closed source versions are not allowed
    • GitHub project must be public for open source Summary of Discussion:
  • Copyrights can be both good and bad
    • It is good for creators because others can’t just copy their idea and implement it into their own thing
    • It can be bad for users because it may be hard for users to access certain things like books and movies because of copyright
  • A license provides legal guidelings for use and distribution of software
  • There are many legal and ethical thoughts
    • There are websites to bypass the legal licenses but this is unethical and illegal
    • The only ethical way is to do it the legal way License for our Repository
  • My individual FastPages
    • GPL License
      • It is just a simple fastpages, so I don’t want users to be restricted.
  • Frontend Team Repository
    • MIT License
      • I would like users to be able to access the website and do different things with it, instead of being limited in the amount of tasks they can do
  • Backend Team Repository
    • MIT License
      • Users should be able to use code as a reference and gain inspiration

Big Idea 5.6 - Safe Computing

  1. There are a lot of PII I have seen in CSP
    • Names, emails, usernames, accomplishments - many are from GitHub and people’s personal fastpage
    • People also sign in to various things, such as our own project, using their name and email, maybe even phone number
  2. I think that some PII is good to post while many others are very harmful to post
    • Things like names, emails, accomplishments (Linkedin), schools attended, etc. are good to post because people get to know more about you while you don’t expose yourself to dangerous things
    • Things like phone numbers, address, drivers license, etc. are in the middle, as they can be harmful but are not necessarily always harmful to post
    • Things like your SSN, you tax records, your banking information, important passwords, stocks, credit cards, passports, etc. are dangerous to post because other people can manipulate and use them to their advantage
  3. Good passwords are ones that are long, memorizable, and include letters (both upper and lowercase), numbers, and special characters
    • Passwords that fit the criteria above can still be bad if used repeatedly for multiple sites without changes
    • Bad passwords are also shorter, easy for people to guess (i.e. password), don’t include a variety of characters, and are obviously connected to the user (name, birthday, etc.)
    • Another step used in authentication is multi-factor authentication
      • These connect another device to the currently used device - i.e. a phone - and users have to use a verification code that have been texted or emailed through the other device
  4. Symmetric encryption is a type of encryption where a single key is used to encrypt and decrypt the information/data
    • Asymmetric encryption is a type of encryption where a different key is used to encrypt and decrypt the information/data
  5. An example of encryption we used in AWS deployment is SSH keys on GitHub
    • They enabled us to use and write data on GitHub
  6. A phishing scheme I learned about the hard way was a faulty link that replaced a single character - for example the APCSP website is nighthawkcoders.github.io but they link they gave could be nighthawkcoder.github.io - no s at the end of nighthawkcoder
    • Some other phishing techniques can include
      • Invoice phishing - scammers tell you that you have an awaiting invoice from a trusted company
      • Payment phishing - scammers ask you to provide credit card information while acting as a trusted company
      • Download phishing - phishers email a faulty file to download that can steal your information when you download it