The first quiz will be given in class on Monday, October 7. It will count for 8% of your final grade for this course.
The quiz will cover the reading from the first week of classes; 9 Algorithms that Changed the Future, chapters 1, 2, and 3; The Filter Bubble, introduction and chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7; material on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that we covered for labs 1 and 2.
The quiz will consist mostly of factual questions that can be answered with a word, a sentence, or in some cases a paragraph. Questions might include, for example: definitions of terms; facts about important events or trends; identification of important people; the policies and technologies used by companies like Facebook, Google, and Acxiom; and the main ideas behind specific algorithms. For HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I might ask you to write some simple code or say what a given piece of code does; I might give you the source code of a web page or part of a page and ask how it will look in a Web browser.
Here are some terms and ideas that you should be familiar with:
From Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy:
original meaning of the term "hacker"
role of the Tech Model Railroad Club
IBM "hulking giants" vs. interactive computing
using computers for music, as calculators
the hacker ethic:
the Hands-On Imperative
information should be free
mistrust authority
judge hackers by ability not age, race, gender, credentials
From Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky:
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
origins of Wikipedia
wiki
difference between the failed Nupedia project and Wikipedia
unmanaged division of labor: everyone decides on their own what to do
From You are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier:
the Internet destroying opportunities without creating many new ones
the difficulty of making a living from music on the Internet
From "Trurl's Electronic Bard," by Stanislaw Lem:
Lem's view of what it takes to make a poetry machine
the effect of the poetry machine on human poets
the ultimate fate of the poetry machine
From 9 Algorithms That Changed the World, by John McCormick:
algorithm
how search engines work: indexing, searching, ranking
indexing algorithms:
store word locations
searching for an exact phrase
metatwords
PageRank
hyperlink trick: rank pages based on how many pages link to them
authority trick: rank pages based on which pages link to them
random surfer trick: rank pages based on how long a random surfer will spend there
From The Filter Bubble, by Eli Pariser:
Google's personalization of search
Pariser's conservative friends get filtered out by Facebook
the idea of the filter bubble
dangers of the filter bubble for democracy and citizenship
"Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of
view, but instead we're more and more enclosed in our own bubbles."
collection of personal info by Acxiom (on average 1,500 pieces of data)
targeting of ads, use of personalization for ad targeting
the problem with "Like": we don't necessarily "like" what we need
the filter bubble is new because it's invisible and you don't choose to enter it
Nicholas Negroponte vs. Jaron Lanier:
Negroponte: Embedded intelligent agents will personalize everything for you.
Lanier: That will be evil; they will have a shallow view of you,
and they will really work for advertisers not for you.
origins of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos looking for something to sell on the Net
Amazon's recommendation system: collaborative filtering / machine learning
Google started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as nonprofit, academic project
click signals
why Google wants you to log onto Google
effect of the Internet on the newspaper business
bloggers vs. reporters
who produces the news, originally, and who will pay for it?
why exposure to a variety of news is important for democracy
disintermediation
the Big Board at Gawker media, and how Gawker decides what to report
"Hello World" programs
the attraction of programming: perfect, controlled worlds with clear rules
Robert Moses's bridges and how architecture creates and enforces social policy
code is law: how code creates and enforces social policy
advertar
the future of personalization: environments respond to our personality and mood
the future of face recognition
the Internet of Things; ambient intelligence
RFID: tracking everything
Web site morphing
augmented reality
Bill Joy: "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us"
Jaron Lanier's question: For whom do these technologies work?
About HTML, CSS, JavaScript
how the web works with clients [i.e. web browsers] and servers
request/response (client sends a request for a page, the server responds)
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
aspects of web design: content (HTML), style (CSS), and programming (JavaScript)
HTML:
tags
headlines (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>); paragraphs (<p>); and lists (<ul> and <li>)
images: <img src="mypic.jpg">
links: <a href="url">text of link</a>
buttons and clicks: <button onclick="func()">Click Me!</button>
CSS:
the <style> section of a web page
rules such as: h1 { color: red; background-color: yellow }
JavaScript:
variables
assignment statements
calling functions
the alert function; for example: alert("Hello World")
defining functions
using id's in tags; for example: <img src="pic.jpg" id="image3">
document.getElementById("theID")
changing an image src; for example: document.getElementById("image3").src = "foo.jpg"
Graphics:
the (x,y) coordinate system on a canvas
filling and stroking
graphics.fillRect(x,y,width,height) and graphics.strokeRect(x,y,width,height)
graphics.fillCircle(x,y,radius) and graphics.strokeCircle(x,y,radius)
graphics.strokeLine(x1,y1,x2,y2)
setting the color with graphics.fillStyle and graphics.strokeStyle
setting the width of strokes with graphics.lineWidth