5.3 Computing Bias

Intentional or Purposeful Bias

  • I don’t think the exclusions in social media were originally purposeful, however they have grown to become so. Facebook tends to have an older age group than tiktok because those are the types of users who were drawn to those apps. As the audience of a media site becomes more of one demographic, the site is going to cater to that demographic in order to stay relevant

  • I think it is purposeful that virtual assistants have female voices because if you think of it from a biased standpoint, female voices are generally softer and more attractive to a general audience. We also tend to listen to female voices more than male ones because we are used to the voice of a mother and also used to women being of service in a society. I googled it and the real reason for female computer voices is due to a larger database of female voices, but this is likely due to the above reasons as well.

  • Spotify is an algorithm that can influence my decisions by recommending podcasts and new artists for me based on what it knows I have already listened to. I usually find this helpful because I get more specific recommendations than those that the general public my age would want.

HP Computers are Racist

  • I don’t think this was intentional as it would affect the image of the company if it came into light that it was, and purposefully excluding black users would reduce the profit that the company could make

  • I think this happened because they only used white people to test the face-tracking program, so the computer does not know how to track the face of someone with different features.

  • I think that it should be corrected for maximum efficiency and to serve a larger consumer group. This can be done by using black test subjects and including them in whatever database is used by the computer to perform the face-tracking.

5.4 Crowdsourcing

CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?

  • A crowdsourcing idea could be having students blog their errors to the csp site so that we can learn from them

  • Many students (myself included) already blog common errors that they make when we do projects, so doing this could help those who have the same errors

What about Del Norte crowdsourcing? Could your project be better with crowdsourcing?

  • Our project could definitely be better with crowdsourcing because we could gather data on the features of our program that benefit high schoolers the most

  • This could help us add ingredients, diverse recipes, and other things that we did not think of when first constructing our site

  • Also very useful with helping develop our user interface, we could see how to make it more teen-friendly

What kind of data could you capture at N@tM to make the evening interesting? Perhaps use this data to impress teachers during finals week.

  • At N@tM we could have a text entry box where people suggest changes that would benefit our program

  • This could include cuisines, features, and even just ingredients that we are missing