Post brief answers using complete sentences to the following questions.
What is a bit and what does it mean to say that "it's all just bits"? (Koan 1) Give examples of the things today that are stored in bits?
Answer
Bits are 1s and 0s, just like our internet search histories, our credit card transactions, our location based on phone usage, etc.
Describe, in your own words, Moore's Law.
Answer
It is the concept that circuits double in capacity/processing power every year.
Someone offers you a summer job and offers you two pay rates: (1) $10 per hour for 40 hours per week for 30 days or (2) One cent on day 1, two cents and day two, four cents on day three and on (doubling each day) for 30 days. If you were trying to make as much money as possible in 30 days, which pay rate would you choose? What does this illustrate?
Answer
I would take option two, as the exponential increase would allow for more money to be had as it doubles each day.
Give an example of how the digital explosion is "neither good nor bad" but has both positive and negative implications.
Answer
Many of the positive aspects come in the ease with which we can now communicate, interact, and create things using digital technology, but many of the negative aspects are that it has happened so quickly that laws, ethics/morality, and general guidance/instruction has not been able to catch up, leaving legal loopholes, exploitative hackers, and haphazard plagiarists to persist.
"Advances in computing have generated and increased creativity in other fields." Comment on this statement. Do you agree? Can you give an example to support (or contradict) it?
Answer
I believe that advances in computing have generated and increased creativity in some fields but may have limited creativity in others. For instance, it has had an incredibly positive impact in the field of entertainment, making the industry more accessible to many people who would otherwise never had access to it. On the other hand, it has had a stifling effect in the field of education, where it has become to easy for students to search for others' work rather than think and learn for themselves.