Unit 1: Digital Information

Written Responses

Bits and Bytes

Bits have revolutionized how computers work. Their simplicity, easy usability, reliability, and cheap cost made them a great candidate for computers, however, binary also has its issues, it is less efficient at representing large numbers, hard for people to understand, and takes up a lot of space. Binary, like the name, is a form of representation that uses two positions as its units. This is great for computers because binary can be represented as on or off. Instead of having to find other ways to represent more positions, the computer can interpret binary as the presence or lack of an electrical signal, which is a cheap and reliable method. Binary is also very simple, it can easily be represented in ones and zeros. This makes it much simpler than other systems like hexadecimal that eventually have to resort to using numbers to represent place values. However, binary also has many shortcomings. For one, since each place value only increases by a factor of 2, binary is very bad at representing large numbers. Systems like hexadecimal are much better at representing large numbers because instead of increasing by a factor of 2, hexadecimal increases by a factor of 16, making it able to represent larger numbers more efficiently. This can lead to things like overflow errors, where the computer is unable to represent a value because it is too large. Another problem with binary is its readability. Binary can be very long and hard to decode, while common systems like decimal and hexadecimal are shorter and easier for humans to look at. Finally, binary takes up a lot of space. Like we mentioned previously, binary has much fewer positions and also increases slower than other systems. This means that binary will have to use much more space than others to represent large pieces of information like photos or audio clips. All in all, while binary is a great system for computers to use because of its easy usability, its failure to represent large values, difficult readability, and inefficient storage limit its potential, however, hopefully, future innovations can improve this system and its flaws,

Abstraction

Something that I use frequently in my life but don't understand is my refrigerator. While I can confidently place food and know that it's being chilled, I don't actually know how it works and makes the inside cold. Another big thing I frequently use in my life is my pencil and eraser. I can be assured that my pencil will write on the paper and my eraser will remove it, but I don't actually know how the graphite in the pencil can stick, or what part of the eraser causes it to "erase" off the paper.

Date Representation

Data is a big part of the world today, with billions of people using electronic devices, it is important to know how that data is stored. Binary is able to represent things by assigning different conditions to each place value. For example, when representing text, a computer can assign a place value for capitalization or maybe a place value for font size or boldness. This works for images as well, one place value can represent brightness, saturation, shadows, photo quality and also have values that decide the amount of Red, Green and, Blue, the common colors used in computer graphics. Another way computers and binary can represent data is to have preset sequences that correlate to a certain symbol, function etc. For example, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a system that links certain byte sequences to a special character. In ASCII, the sequence 01110000 corresponds to the letter "p". An important thing to note is that with different types of data, the way it is written, order, measured, and interpreted is different. In images and videos, binary might be written out to represent pixels or frames per second while in audio, it made be measured in beats per minute or decibels. Another important way we represent data is in colors. Normally, each of the pixels of a computer are made up of a mix of the colors Red Green and Blue. We can represent the amount of the color as well as brightness, opacity and other factors and the computer will display the result. Colors are labeled based of these values (r,g,b) in decimal, for example, the color yellow would be (255,255,0) in decimal, or #FFFF00 in hexadecimal. We can use this to represent many colors and piece them together to create images and computer interfaces. Computers have greatly evolved and are much better at representing the information we use.

Compression

Lossy and Lossless are two ways that images can be compressed. Lossless compression reduces file size but keeps the original quality, while lossy compression omits most of the unnecessary data and permanently deletes it. Lossless compression is good when the original quality of something needs to be kept. For example, the raw footage of a movie is kept in lossless compression. We used lossless compression during our text shortner activity to abbreviate the text. However, lossless compression takes up a lot of space and is impractical for general use. On the other hand, lossy compression is much more commonly used because it takes up much less space. Lossy compression creates a decent quality image while shortening a lot of the data, making it the optimal compression for most general use cases. However, since lossy compression permanently deletes data, sometimes important information can be lost. Generally, you would want to use lossy compression for things like texting, videos, and images, but for important information like bank notes or ID, you would want to use lossless compression. A lot of the more common photo compression algorithms like JPEG and MPEG use lossy compression. Common algorithms like PNG and GIF use lossless compression, however, they are generally for smaller size photos and clips.

Impacts of Computing

Computing innovations can have an impact that reaches far more than it intended purpose. Things like creative commons, copyright and DMCA are byproducts of a growing problem in the computing world. A creator's exclusive right to their property is a controversial topic that people have debated over for a long time. For example, when the game Fortnite wanted to include popular dances into their game using new animation technology, they didn't expect the repercussions of the original artist suing Fortnite for stealing their intellectual property. We talked a lot about the questions that computing innovation and creative property bring to a creator's right to their work. Without proper protections, creators will feel demotivated to create new inventions, however, on the flip side, this means that people will have a much harder time applying and using these new developments. Despite all this, at the end of the day, computing innovations also have a good impact as well. For example, recent innovations in medical cancer technology, optimizing chemotherapy treatments using AI have saved many lives and had a positive impact on society. Computing innovations are a two-sided coin, on one side are the benefits of new ideas and inventions being made but on the other, the negative effects of people copying or stealing other's work and repurposing it in ways it wasn't intended to be used for.