FRS 117: Google and Ye Shall Find???

Fall 2007  

Assignment 1

due Friday, September 28 at 5PM


Technical Exercises:

You may turn these in on paper or email your solution to me at aslp@cs.princeton.edu.  If you turn them in on paper, bring your submission to class Wednesday September 26 or to my office in the Computer Science Building, Room 304, by the due date.

1) Characters represented in ASCII  literally have been cast in stone (well, actually brick) in the Princeton University Computer Science Building "gargoyle".  The gargoyle is a bit of fun (no pun intended), but it is important to understand that all information a computer uses is recorded as sequences of bits.  While "bit" stands for "binary digit" and is used to represent numbers, bits are also used to encode lots of other things.  This problem checks your understanding of the ASCII encoding.  The string of  35 bits below represents 5 characters read left to right.  What are those 5 characters? (Use the chart in The Wikipedia entry for American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).)

10001001101111110111011001010100001

2)In Section 2 of "As We May Think",  Vannevar Bush argues that, with some assumptions about miniaturization, "The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox."    Have we achieved this using our digital technology? If not, what fraction of the encyclopedia can we fit;  if so, how many copies can we fit?  Do a rough calculation, but justify your reasoning.  List any information source that you use.  Here is the Encyclopædia Britannica offered on CD or DVD.   Some storage media to consider that you may already own:  digital camera memory (see here and here under "MMCA Solutions- Q1") and USB flash drives (see here and  here ).  Whatever storage media you consider, it must be permanent, i.e. not lose information when power is turned off.


Short Blog entry:

On Wednesday, we discussed privacy, trust and the Patriot Act without a good sense of what the government is really doing.   On September 6, a federal judge struck down part of the Patriot Act dealing with national security letters, and the Associated Press report of that ruling gives some idea of how and how much the government has been using these letters.   Another interesting article is In their own words: Search engines on privacy by CNET News.com.    In your blog entry, discuss briefly (around 250 words, but a little more or less is fine) your thoughts about these privacy issues.  You might consider your level of concern over these privacy issues before beginning this class and whether our discussion and the articles mentioned have changed or supported your view.  You might address the need for further safeguards of individual privacy- in what form by whom?  These are only suggestions.  You are welcome to discuss (and cite) additional sources.  One additional article in which you might be interested is the Newsweek article of January 30, 2006 reporting that Google had refused to hand over data on search terms (even as anonymous searches) requested by the federal government in conjunction with the control of pornography on the Web.  

Please remember your blog is public.  Your entry should be well thought out and clearly written.    You may wish to refer to a brief  tutorial on the use of the blog tool, but it is pretty straightforward .  Note that you may create a "nickname" for yourself.  Your posting will be under your nickname, but I will be able to see who you are for grading purposes.
A.S. LaPaugh Sat Sep 22 00:33:46 EDT 2007  "typo" corrections Sat Sep 22 13:17:29 EDT 2007