The second test will be given in class on Friday, November 8. It will count for 8% of your final grade for this course.
The test will cover the material that we have read since the first test: Chapters 1 through 4 of Cognitive Surplus and Chapters 6 and 4 of 9 Algorithms that Changed the Future. You are responsible for significant ideas from the readings, not every detail. There might be some very straightforward questions from the handouts and presentations on the class's second papers. The test also covers Lab 3; that part of the test is somewhat cumulative, since you need to remember some of the material that you learned for Labs 1 and 2. Consult the full list of terms and ideas given below.
The format of the test will be similar to the first test. It will consist mostly of factual questions that can be answered with a word, a sentence, or in some cases a paragraph. On this test, I will not ask you to write any JavaScript or other code. I might, however, give you some code and ask you what it does or what it draws.
Here are some terms and ideas that you should be familiar with:
From Cognitive Surplus:
the "Gin Craze" in 18th century London and what caused it
the modern free time problem and how television was used to solve it
how free time represents a "cognitive surplus"
how the Internet and social media can tap into the cognitive surplus
Ushahidi: Kenyan tool to track outbreaks of ethnic violence
lolcats
the difference between communal and civic uses of the cognitive surplus
Dong Bong Shin Ki and protests against America beef imports in Korea
Johannes Gutenberg, movable type, and the flood of books in the 15th century
why after Gutenberg, we still had "professional publishers" and "amateur consumers"
the button marked "Publish": publishing is no longer difficult, complex and expensive
Gutenberg & "Publish" button both lead to more junk, but also more innovation/quality
the means of digital production are symmetrical (produce and consume)
an unlimited number of perfect copies for free
intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations
personal motivations (competence and autonomy)
social motivations (membership and sharing)
the original meaning of the word amateur: doing something for the love of it
the possibility of "tiny global" organizations of people with similar interests
the Z-Boys skateboards: innovation through open competition and cooperation
the Ultimatum Game: innate sense of fairness, willingness to pay to punish unfairness
the Apache Web Server: free, socially produced, large scale
Napster: sharing is natural in a world of unlimited, free, perfect copies
From 9 Algorithms that Changed the Future:
the idea of pattern recognition and how it can be used
the classification problem
the basic ideas of three approaches to the classification problem:
the "nearest neighbor trick" and how it's used to recognize numbers
decision trees (similar to "twenty questions")
neural nets (trying to imitate the way neurons work)
cryptography
encryption
the difference between "shared secret" and "public key" cryptography
[You do not need to know the "paint mixing trick"]
Some terms from the second paper and presentations:
patents
Big Data and privacy
Aaron Schwartz and "hacktivism"
MOOCs
the Technological Singularity
socialbots
hackable cars and the Internet of Things
About JavaScript and web pages:
material carried over from previous labs, including:
id's in HTML elements, and document.getElementById(id)
variables and assignment statements
functions
setTimeout(task,delay)
graphics
new material:
if statements, with or without an "else" part
how the condition in an if statement is used
while loops, using "while (true)"
break statements
using variables for counting in loops
Math.random()
why loops and decisions are necessary to write complex programs