BIG IDEA 5: IMPACT OF COMPUTING · CHEAT SHEET
Impact of Computing — the one-page version
Every key term and every exam tip from the 6 topics in this big idea. Print it, fold it, read it on the bus.
5.1Beneficial and Harmful Effects
- Computing innovation
- a device, system, or app that uses a program as an essential part of how it works
- Intended effect
- an impact the innovation was designed to produce
- Unintended effect
- a consequence not planned by the creators, which can be positive or negative
Tip: Options that are absolute — "only beneficial," "has no negative effects," "all users are affected the same way" — are almost always wrong. The correct option acknowledges that effects vary by group and that unintended consequences exist.
5.2Digital Divide
- Digital divide
- the gap between those with reliable access to computing and the internet and those without
- Digital literacy
- the skills needed to use computing technology effectively
Tip: The digital divide is about access, not attitude. Options describing people who "choose" not to use technology are distractors. And it's not only an international issue — a question set entirely within the US can still be about the digital divide.
5.3Computing Bias
- Computing bias
- systematic unfairness in a computing system's outcomes toward certain groups
- Training data
- the data used to build a system's behavior; unrepresentative data produces biased results
Tip: Look for the source. If the scenario mentions training data, the bias came from the data. If it mentions who was on the team or what they assumed, it's design. Options claiming bias can be eliminated by "using more advanced algorithms" alone are wrong — you have to address the data and the assumptions.
5.4Crowdsourcing
- Crowdsourcing
- gathering input, work, or funding from a large group of people, usually online
- Citizen science
- scientific research that relies on public volunteers to collect or analyze data
Tip: If a scenario involves many members of the public contributing data or effort over the internet toward a shared goal, the answer is crowdsourcing (or citizen science if it's research). Don't confuse it with distributed computing — that's machines sharing work, not people.
5.5Legal and Ethical Concerns
- Intellectual property
- creative work or inventions to which a person or organization holds rights
- Copyright
- legal protection of a creative work that restricts copying and reuse
- Creative Commons
- licenses that let creators pre-authorize specific kinds of reuse
- Open source
- software whose source code is freely available under a license permitting use and modification
- Plagiarism
- presenting someone else's work as your own
Tip: "No license" does not mean "free to use" — it means default copyright. Open source and Creative Commons both grant permissions; they don't remove copyright. On ethics questions, the correct answer usually recognizes competing interests rather than declaring one side simply right.
5.6Safe Computing
- PII
- personally identifiable information — data that can identify an individual
- Multifactor authentication
- verifying identity with two or more categories of evidence: know, have, are
- Encryption
- converting data into a form unreadable without a key
- Symmetric encryption
- one shared key encrypts and decrypts
- Public key encryption
- a public key encrypts; only the matching private key decrypts
- Certificate authority
- a trusted organization that verifies a site's public key via a digital certificate
- Malware
- software designed to damage a system or gain unauthorized access
- Virus
- malware that attaches to programs and spreads when they run
- Phishing
- tricking people into revealing information through fake messages or sites
- Keylogging
- secretly recording a user's keystrokes
- Rogue access point
- a fake wireless network set up to intercept traffic
Tip: Vocabulary questions dominate here. Phishing is the person being tricked; keylogging is the keystrokes being recorded; a virus spreads by attaching to programs; a rogue access point is a fake network. For encryption: symmetric = one shared key; public key = a public lock and a private unlock. And multifactor means different categories, not just multiple steps.