ITI Exam 2 Study Guide

Code

Code

Instructions embedded in software or hardware

Constraints

Regulations that govern behavior; also called regulators

Complex

Interaction between elements of a system

Broad Definition of Technology

that which can be done, excluding only those capabilities that occur naturally in living systems

Humpty Dumpty Definition

who was the master, he or the words. ("We cannot define religion as a coffee pot and expect to make progress investigating the features of religion")

Reportative definition

Report of how people ordinarily use words

Précising definition

Describes the range of application and cut-off points of a word

Definition

Should not be too broad or narrow, circular, figurative, or solely negative

Technological determinism

Technology determines the structure of society and culture

genetic or biological determinism

This claims that what we are is wholly determined by our genetic makeup.

Environmental determinism

Environmental inputs determine individual characteristics

Laplacian determinism

Complete knowledge of the present gives complete knowledge of the future

"if some creature knew everything's position and motion at one moment, then the laws of physics would give it complete knowledge of the future"

Chaos theory

Deterministic mathematics can yield unpredictable situations

contra-causal sense of freedom

acts of free will counter physical cause

Free will

Problem of human choice in relation to determinism

Anticipated consequences

Expected outcomes of actions or projects

Small world phenomenon

Everyone in the world is connected by 6 degrees of separation or fewer

PageRank

Ranking system based on related content

CERN

Birthplace of the Web

DARPA

Agency that catalyzed the Internet revolution

ARPANET

Precursor to the modern Internet

DNS

Domain Name System; System that translates domain names to IP addresses

Routers

Devices that forward packets to different networks

Switches

Devices that connect devices on a single network

Net neutrality

Prohibition of charging fees for higher data priority

HTTP

Protocol for transferring hypertext

Chain of contacts

Connections between people

statistical determinism/soft determinism

there is freedom, but that there also are larger statistical trends that show the future

Compatibilists

attempt to reconcile freedom and determinism

Mind/body problem (Cartesian dualism or causal interactionism)

If these substances are so different in nature, how can one affect the other, how can the non-physical mind affect the body?

Dynamics

Property of changing their state spontaneously, independent of control by a central agent in charge of the system

Intransparence

Some of the elements of a system cannot be seen but can nevertheless affect the operation of the system

Ignorance and Mistaken Hypotheses

Perhaps our model is simply wrong, faulty, misleading BUT we can take steps to reduce our ignorance and increase our understanding

decrease uncertainty in four ways:

Increase knowledge; Combine uncertainties through large scale organization; Increase control of the situation; Slow the march of progress

Argument from perversity

the opposite will happen from that which you claim.

argument from futility

suggests that your action will have no effect on the situation which you are trying to change.

Unintended Consequences to lifeboats

Titanic showed boats needed more life boats but the Eastland capsized BECAUSE of the life boats

Unintended Consequences to WWII

Penicillin output was increased when after WWII, all the pharmecuticals were forced to work together and expand their production

Unintended Consequences that led to Xerox Printers

made by a patent researcher to reproduce patents easier

Unintended Consequences that led to germ theory

Louis Pastuer studied silk worm disease

Project MAC at MIT

A flagship effort in personal computing, which introduced the concept of time-sharing and laid the foundation for online communities and early hackers.

Developers of TCP/IP

Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

"A Series of Tubes"

A series of tubes is a phase that describes the internet in opposing network neutrality. (The internet is a series of tubes and can get jammed up)

Separation of Concerns

Each section addresses a separate concern, a set of information that affects the code of a computer program.

How does the internet work?

TCP/IP protocols are used to send/retrieve information from one computer to another. A request is sent over the network, hitting DNS (domain name servers) along the way to find the target server. The DNS points the request in the right direction. Once the target server gets the request, it can send a response back to your computer.

Bits

data sent over through the internet

Packet process steps are:

DNS query to find out the website's IP address, TCP handshake, TLS handshake, HTTP request, HTTP response

TCP handshake:

Your browser opened a connection with that IP address.

TLS handshake:

Your browser also sets up encryption between a Cloudflare web server and your device so that attackers cannot read the data packets that travel between those two endpoints.

HTTP request:

Your browser requested the content that appears on this webpage.

Rules of the Internet: NetChoice v Paxton

A law about having content moderations for hate speech in Texas

Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

Alice: 0 degrees of separation from alice

Alice's friends: 1 degree

Friends of each of

Alice's friends: 2 degree

Alice's six-degree network?

Linked Information Systems

System that focuses on connections between aspects of the system; Searches using keywords

TBL's Hopes for the Internet

Collaboration with others

Good things for education

Check in with people

Free speech

Open web

Quick responses to crisis

World Wide Web (WWW)

Solve problems with Information Management; Questions can be answered with links / linked data

Inventors of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau

What 4 constraints regulate the dot?

The law, social norms, the market, and architecture

technological system

a complex of hardware (possibly plants and animals), knowledge, inventors, operators, repair people, consumers, marketers, advertisers, government administrators, and others involved in a technology.

universal causality

"every event has a cause"

The issue with consulting the designer or discoverer

the discoverer of an art form or designer of a new system is not the best judge of the good or harm it can cause; but society tends to gravitate towards the designer regardless

major limitation to the correct anticipation of consequences

our state of knowledge

Narcissism of Minor Differences

Two communities very similar but end up fighting due to the TINIEST DIFFERENCES

Informatics as a discipline that focuses on:

People, tech, Interdiciplinary research

HCC as a discipline that focuses on:

A "systems view" including people and computing

Interdisciplinary research

Does technology do anything?

No, technology doesnt do anything! (think of the hammer in class)

They are tools that can be used by HUMANS to do something.

Do autonomous technologies do anything?

Artificial intelligence seems to act like humans BUT even in these apparent autonomous objects, you still need a HUMAN to code the program or build a self-driving car or etc...

Legal constraints

Society's laws that constrain and enable behavior

Social norms

Rules and expectations of society that constrain and enable behavior

Market forces

Financial factors that constrain and enable behavior

Architecture

Design that constrains and enables behavior

Stipulative definitions

Arbitrary choices or stipulations about words

Libertarians

Believers in metaphysically free will

Determinism

the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will.

Unintended consequences

Unanticipated outcomes of actions or projects

Hypertext

Link/connection between texts

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor of the World Wide Web

TCP/IP

Protocol that became the backbone of the Internet

Six degrees of separation

Everyone is connected by 6 degrees or fewer

two standpoints theory,

the solution of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant who claims each individual has a dignity that is of infinite worth.

Integrity has three parts:

discerning what is right and wrong, acting on what you have discerned, saying openly that you are acting on what you have discerned

Albert Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy

fascinating analysis of negative reactions to proposals

argument from jeopardy

claims that your proposal will place in jeopardy some valuable resource

Unintended Consequences to dental health

Teeth are also getting smaller, which in a neanderthal's perspective, would be seen as a regression

origin of the word "bugs"

19th century-tools have evolved into systems and the first people who saw this were telegraphers who found literal bugs lodged inside the system

Birth of the modern Internet

The ARPANET switched to TCP/IP in 1983

Packets

Small sections of a bigger message and each packet has a header that contains data

HTTP Response

browser interpreted the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code contained in the packets to render content

TBL's CERN requirements:

Remote access

Heterogeneity (Data must be accessible from different systems)

Non-Centralization (Does not require central control)

Access to existing data

The Science Behind Six Degrees

hypothesis that everyone on the planet is connected by just a few intermediaries; the principles that apply to social networks, and account for the six-degrees phenomenon, seem to apply to many other kinds of networks as well

TBL's Problems with the Internet

Censorship

Google, Facebook and Amazon can take control over personal data and can lead to loss of privacy

Filter bubble

a situation in which we surround ourselves with information that confirms our pre-existing prejudices

NEXT Machines

Made by Steve Jobs AND used to make the first website

Technology as hardware

technology is tools and machines (i.e. hardware)

Technology as rules

technology involves patterns of means-ends relationships (i.e. software)

Technology as a system

technology is both the combination of an item/skill and the person using/understanding it (hardware + software); machinery alone does not function as technology

Interdisciplinary

The genres and disciplines are able to mix

Technology

The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes by ordered systems involving people, organizations, living things, machines, and productive skills