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AP CSP Big Idea 5
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Beneficial and Harmful Effects 🌍
- Tech impacts society: Can be both positive (education, health, communication) and negative (privacy loss, job automation, misinformation).
- Ethical dilemmas: Automated decision-making (e.g., self-driving cars) raises moral questions.
- Environmental cost: Tech consumes energy; AI models can have large carbon footprints.
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The Digital Divide 🌐
- Access inequality: Based on income, geography, language, etc.
- Local/global issue: Exists in both developing and developed regions.
- Solutions: Government funding, nonprofit outreach, community Wi-Fi, refurbished tech donations.
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Computing Bias ⚖️
- Source of bias: Comes from biased data, human assumptions, or lack of diversity in training sets.
- Consequences: Inaccurate or unfair systems (e.g., hiring, facial recognition).
- Fixing bias: Address during:
- Pre-processing: Balance datasets
- In-processing: Adjust model behavior
- Post-processing: Analyze output for bias
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Crowdsourcing 🤝
- Definition: Gathering help/data from large groups of people (often online).
- Examples: Wikipedia, Zooniverse, Duolingo, Kickstarter.
- Benefits:
- Fast data collection
- Community involvement
- Scalable problem-solving
- Distributed computing: Using many devices to solve large problems (e.g., SETI@home).
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Safe Computing 🔐
- PII: Data that can identify you (SSN, name, email, etc.)
- Online threats:
- Phishing (fake emails/sites)
- Malware
- Security tools:
- Strong passwords
- Multi-factor authentication
- HTTPS encryption
- Cookies: Track user behavior; may raise privacy concerns.
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Legal & Ethical Concerns ⚖️
- Intellectual property:
- Copyright: Legal protection
- Creative Commons: Permissions for reuse
- Software licenses:
- MIT: Very permissive
- GPL: Requires sharing changes
- Apache: Allows commercial use
- Ethics: Don’t copy code without credit. Respect licenses. Be transparent about data usage.