5.3

Intentional or Purposeful bias

Facebook vs Tiktok

  • Facebook Age: 25+ (older community)
  • Tiktok Age: 10-25 (younger community)
  • originally exclusion wasn’t purposeful (was popular long ago and continued with that crowd) but now they target the different age groups
  • we generally don’t see the exlusion as harmful, however, it may create different biases between the two generations
  • people may feel more inclined to post/share to others similar to them
  • can target ads towards certain groups (good for business!)

Virtual Assistant Female Voice:

  • purposeful
  • softer, less startling/demanding, more comfortable
  • may be subconcscious bias based on old gender roles
  • harmful since it associates personal assistants as a woman’s job (contibrutes to sexism)
  • we think the default female voice is good for business, especially since it may be more “trustworthy” in our subconcsciousness
  • can correct this: change voice to a male

Algorithm that influences your decisisions

  • apps share “cookies” that dictates what ads/news you see
  • Amazon targets ads towards certain groups to get them to buy more/specific items
  • Netflix targets certain groups to watch shows (ex: teen may want to watch action and an adult may want to watch a documentery)
  • Apple may target groups of people (such as runners or sports players) to buy their fitness watches/other products
  • Google targets ads/certain searches/results towards what you are intrested in based off of what you have searched/read in the past

Are HP Computers Racist?

  • Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional?
    • I think the owner of the computer believes this is intententional. He seemed very passionate about the fact that the computers are racist, and that the software doesn’t work on his darker skin.
  • How do you think this happened?
    • I think that this was a testing error. The lack of diversity in the programming and testing led this mistake to be released into the world. However, I don’t believe they originally set out to be racist.
  • Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude?
    • Yes, I think this is harmful, but was not intended to be. Groups may feel excluded and “not normal”, contributing to the issue of racism and lack of self worth.
  • Should it be corrected?
    • Yes, I think that HP should (maybe already did) correct this issue right away.
  • What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome?
    • They need to test all groups (diverse people working on the project) to ensure it is equal over all groups

Conclusion

There are biases everywere. In technology, in developing, in testing, and there are even biases in our subconcsiousness. They are hard to avoid, however, we can attempt to counteract them by considering how we can incoorporate all (or as many as we can) groups and perspectives. Also, using diversity and our differences for good can be a great thing. It can increase business, make our experiences with technology better, and allow us to be more unique.

5.4

Obtaining Data via Crowdsourcing

  • pro: includes many different perspevtives
  • con: may have incorrect data
  • We have used APIs about Covid data and other facts
  • these APIs may have biased or outdated facts
  • however, there are lots of APIs available from numerous groups/companies
  • Github allows us to to have many recources and to look into people’s backgrounds
  • The biggest discovery I have found in Github was that you can see the repositories and commits that every user has worked on. It is very personal and can show many details

Hacks

  • CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?
    • A crowdsource idea that may be successful in our APCSP enviornment is a group notepad. I take personal notes during lectures with helpful things like vocab and code that we commonly use (like html or markdown syntax). Maybe we could create a notepad that the entire class can access/edit.
  • What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing?
    • Crowdsourcing at Del Norte for our project is a great idea. Since our project is about fitness, we can get data and feedback from lots of different student at DNHS. That way, we can test the project and get more diverse data. (ex: more sports options for the sports workouts page)
  • What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress Teachers during finals week.
    • At N@TM, I could go around asking everyone what sport they play/activities they do to help their fitness. If they did a workout recently, they could log it on our site. Also, they could use our “sports workout” page to input what they do to workout. That way, we have more options for other users to choose from when trying to decide how to workout.