CompSci4All

What are the arguments for and against introducing everyone to computing or programming? What challenges will schools face as this CS4All push moves forward? “How can we make sure everyone has a fair shot at success in this new economy?” I think Barack Obama's question is incredibly relevant, and an important one to be posing. His…

PROJECT 3

  What trade-offs are you making when using the cloud? Have you consciously evaluated these trade-offs? What is your justification? Privacy. I have none. Everything I do (more or less) is saved on the cloud. My phone backs up to the iCloud. I store the majority of my files on OneDrive instead of locally on…

Copy right.

From the readings, what exactly is copyright? What are the ethical, moral, economic, or social reasons for granting copyrights? The Tyranny of Copyright?, an article posted in the New York Times magazine, includes a series of what they call "copyright horror stories".  The article goes on to explain how "once a dry and seemingly mechanical…

Automatic (un)employment

  I don't think that we should halt the development of automation technology - I'm all for technological advancement (hence comp sci major). As an engineer, I am always looking for inefficiencies in my work, increasing productivity by writing programs to do work for me, or scripts which can handle repetitive tasks with just the…

Does no one remember I, Robot?

Artificial intelligence is an emerging field within computer science which aims to enable computers to do things that previously necessitated human intelligence. From my understanding, the only difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence strictly speaking is the actor - whether the intelligent being is a human or a computer. Alex Turing of the Turing…

Filter bubble

I feel incredibly fortunate to live in a country where I can use the internet freely, without having to worry too much about online censorship. Searches such as "persecution," "Tibetan independence," "democracy movements," or even "oriental red space time" all produce hundreds of thousands of results in less than a second when I type them…

Corporate Conscience

First, what exactly is the concept of Corporate Personhood and what are its legal, social, and ethical ramifications? Corporate Personhood (noun): the legal concept that a corporation has some of the rights and responsibilities which are allowed to individual human beings. Legally, this makes sense to me. Companies need to be able to enter into contracts,…

Is it all really free?

I feel incredibly fortunate to have been born into a time period when technology is booming, and answers are available in seconds via my personal laptop. Using the internet I am able to freely and quickly access information which previous generations would've had to work much harder to find. I mean, they had to go…

Watching the backdoor

On February 16, 2016, Tim Cook released a message from Apple to the company’s customers. Their letter details Apple’s fielding of a request from the US government which they felt was overstepping their bounds and potentially violating the privacy of US citizens. He said the demands from the FBI to create a new iOS which…

PROJECT 2

What are the most important parts of the guide your group constructed? What do you know now that you wished you knew earlier? What is the best advice or guidance you've received? Jumping into the job search process can be absolutely terrifying. As undergraduate students, we are not given any unsolicited training on the matter.…