Question: What are your own strategies and insights about how to learn best? And, how are they similar or different to the ones that you just heard about from other students?
Answer: I think that having a good night's sleep is crucial to being able to focus in class and I agree with the person who decided to go to bed earlier. I also believe that reviewing your class notes and asking for help when you don't understand something are also very important to learning and retaining information.
Question: Recall when you built your information sending device. Why did we decide to send a message as a sequence of two options rather than modifying our devices to represent more options?
Answer: We decided to send a message as a sequence of two options because it would be easier to understand. It would be more difficult for the other partner to remember all the different combinations for four possible answers rather than two possible answers.
Question: How would you explain a number system to someone who had never seen numbers before?
Answer: I would explain a number system as a series of symbols that represent different amounts of something. The symbols can be placed together in different orders to represent different amounts.
Question: Two schools are merging and to adapt to the increased size of the student body, the school is changing its system for keeping track of all student IDs from a system that uses 4-bit binary numbers to one that uses 8-bit binary numbers (AKA 1 byte). Which of the following best describes what effect this change will have?
Answer: The 8-bit system will be able to represent sixteen times as many values as the 4-bit system.
Question: Each time we add another bit, what happens to the amount of numbers we can make?
Answer: Each time we add another bit the amount of numbers we can make increases.
Question: How many bits would be needed to count all of the students in class today?
Answer: There are 20 students in class todays so that would require 5 bits.
Question:
What are the similarities and differences between the binary and decimal systems?
Answer: A binary system represents information using only 1 and 0 while a decimal system represents information using digits from 0 to 9.
Question: Modern car odometers can record up to a million miles driven. What happens to the odometer reading when a car drives beyond its maximum reading?
Answer: When the car drives past beyond its maximum the odometer will overflow because there won't be enough space for it to continue counting.
Question: When using bits to represent fractions of a number, can you create all possible fractions? Why or why not?
Answer: You cannot create all possible fractions because some fractions would be too large to be represented in bits.
Question: What is an examle of abstraction in your everyday life?
Answer: An example of abstraction from my everyday life is a microwave. I use it almost every day but I am not completely sure how exactly it works internally. However I am quite confident that I know how to use it.
Question: Which of the following would result in a better digital approximation of an analog black and white image?
Answer: Decreasing the size of each sample square, thus increasing the number of samples taken.
Question: Which statement about analog and digital images is true?
Answer: Sampling an analog image more frequently produces a digital image with a better representation.
Question: What is the most important quality of lossless compression?
Answer: The data is transformed to usually make it smaller. It can always be re-constructed back to the original.
Question: An author is preparing to send their book to a publisher as an email attachment. The file on their computer is 1000 bytes. When they attach the file to their email, it shows as 750 bytes. The author gets very upset because they are concerned that part of their book has been deleted by the email provider
If you could talk to this author, how would you explain what is happening to their book?
Answer: I would tell the author that some parts of the book are being compressed so that it takes up less space, the data is not being deleted and it can always be reconstructed back to its original form.
Question: You’ve been given a new cell phone with a 2 gigabyte data plan. You plan to use your phone for text messages, images, video, and music. Which of these categories are best compressed using lossless compression? Which of these categories are best compressed using lossy compression? Why?
Answer: Images, videos and music are best compressed using lossless compression because no information can be lost, while text messages are best compressed using lossy compression because the quality isn't the top priority.
Question: How is a Creative Commons license different from a regular copyright?
Answer: It allows your work to be shared, reused, and remixed to help spark more creativity.
Question: As a reminder, in the warm-up we saw this scenario:
Imagine you were using some of our pixelation tools to create an image and you posted it online for your friends to see - but, a week later you find out someone took that image and put it on a T-shirt that they’re selling for $10 each.
Now that we understand Copyright, what would need to change in order for the scenario from the warm-up to be okay?
Answer: You would need to claim that that image is yours beforehand so that it would be protected by copyright.
Question: Many museums have digital catalogs of their collections. What are the potential benefits and harms of creating these digital catalogs?
Answer: The benefits are that all of the museums information can be accessed easily in one place, a harm of this would be that someone can use the information on the catalogs for malicious purposes.
Question: Why should we care about information being represented digitally? How does this impact you personally?
Answer: We should care because when information is represented it can be accessed easily by many people and different people would use the information they find in different ways.