Collegeboard 5.3 & 5.4

Intentional or Purposeful bias Group Discussion

“What age groups use Facebook” vs “… TikTok”? What does the data say? Is there purposeful exclusion in these platforms? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?

• People who use Facebook are generally 24 to 35
• People who use TikTok are generally 13 to 17
• Younger individual tend to use Tiktok more than Facebook
• There is no purposeful exclusion because anyone can download the app and use the social media. It is not harmful,.
• Having age separation is harmful for business because the company can target a larger demographic and could be corrected to bridge the ideological gap between old and young.

Why do virtual assistants have female voices? Amazon, Alexa Google, Apple Siri. Was this purposeful? Is it harmful? Should it be corrected? Is it good business?

• Virtual assistants have female voices because females are seen as more gentler and women’s voices are able to be articulated more clearly.
• I don’t think this feature is harmful, however, the action could be corrected to be more equitable.
• The business can be corrected so that during setup, the user can choose between women and male voices.

Talk about an algorithm that influences your decisions, think about these companies (ie FAANG - Facebook, Amazon, Apple,Netflix, Google)

• Social media, such as TikTok, will recommend a video that will fit your liking on your For You Page. This influences my decisions because their may be certain ads or videos that will pique my interests and make me waste more time on social media. Ads that cater to my liking will make me want to purchase more goods.

HP computers are racist

Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional?

• no
• The guy doesn’t seem to think this was intentional. He found it humorous.

How do you think this happened?

• The people that tested the computer were probably all white. The team that created the program was not diverse enough to detect all the flaws in the program.

Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude?

• This is harmful because it excludes people from using the functions of the computer. However, this was not intended to be harmful or exclude people.

Should it be corrected?

• THis should be corrected so that all people will be able to use the application.

What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome?

• When developing a second version, I would hire a more diverse team so that more point of views can be expressed and more problems can be fixed.

5.3 Reflection

Computer bias is is a very important issue because algorithms developed sometimes can unintentionally exclude people, especially people of color. This should be a problem that could be fixed by including more point of views and having a diverse team. In the Trimester 2 project my team is working on, we are creating a period tracker. We previously did not have any male members a part of our team but now we have a new addition, which could help us decrease coding bias for a demographic that would typically not use a period tracking app.

Crowdsourcing Group Discussion

We have all experienced Crowdsourcing by using external data through API’s, namely RapidAPI. This data has influenced how we code and shown possibilities in obtaining and analyzing data. Discuss APIs you have used.

• Data in APIs are accessible to many people. Thus, everyone can query the data and use it in any project they are making. Everyone who is using and API is obtaining the same data but can be analyzing things differently. The data is useful as one person can benefit the whole computer science community through this.

We have all participated in code Crowdsourcing by using GitHub. Many of you have forked from the Teacher repository, or exchanged code with fellow students. Not only can we analyze GitHub code, but we can obtain profiles and history about the persons coding history. What is the biggest discovery you have found in GitHub?

• My biggest discovery on GitHUb is that you can find anyone’s account or code as long as it’s public. This has been useful when I want to be a lazy coder and just copy someone’s (such as Mr. Mort’s) code. It is also useful to see other people’s development process through their issues, which can help me model my project after.

Kaggle datasets for code and science exploration. The avenue of data points us youtube or netflix channels. Analyzing crowd data helps us make decisions. Exam top 10 to 20. Did you see anything interesting?

• The top 10 or 20 datasets on kaggle don’t collectively follow a specific theme, but relevant to social trends and seems like what people are most often searching up on the website.

Hacks

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

• A crowdsource idea that is interesting is creating an evnrionment such as stack overflow, where people can give suggestions based on what the issue a person had in their code. In class, we have a stack overflow system on slack, where people can give input and suggestions on people’s code who have errors.

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

• For the Del Norte whole, crowd-sourcing can be done through gathering student suggestions for school improvements. Since we can always improve things going on around school, people can create a survey and comment on how we can improve Del Norte, whether it be in environmental efforts or general anti-bullying efforts. This way, several point of views can be expressed and things can be addressed.

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

• For our project, we can collect data that counts the number of males and females interested in our project. Because our project is about periods, I would assume that more females and less males would be interested in our project. Thus, with this data, we could then see how we could improve the app to possibly include a greater male audience.
• As a computer science class, we could see what genres of websites each group created and how many people visited each to see what kind of website is the most interesting to the parent population.