5.3-Computing bias

Group Activity

Mostly age 25-34 age people use Facebook. Most age 10-19 age people use Tiktok. The data says that Tiktok is more appealing to teenagers and kids than Facebook does. There is a slight exclusion in these platforms as the colorful backgrounds in Tiktok creates the impression that it’s only suitable for young people. It is not very harmful because different age groups tend to use different apps. There is not much harm with one age group using an app more often. However, for example, if an old person uses Tiktok, they might have a feeling of being excluded. It should be corrected because by accomodating all ages it can make everyone have a sense of belonging. It is good business to correct it because then more and more people from different age groups will use the app.

Virtual assistants have female voices because of societal standards, which suggests that females should be of service to males. It is harmful because it puts females at an inferior position to males. It should be corrected in order to prevent people from thinking that gender determines your social hierarchy. However, it is good business as more males use voice assistants, and they tend to prefer female voices over male voices becuase female voices sound more soothing.

The algorithm that helps give you content you often search up influences my decisions. As more and more young people search topics associated with them, it starts to appeal more to younger audiences. This is vice versa with older people.

HP Computers are Racist

The owner of the computer does not think it is intentional because he is making a joke out of it.
I think this happened because when testing the algorithm more white people were used as samples for testing than black people.
This is harmful because some races do not get the same benefits as other races. It didn’t intend to be harmful or exclusive.
It should be corrected so then people of all races can recieve the same quality services.
If I was the owner of the computer company, I would get samples of peoples’ faces from all different races.

5.4 Crowdsourcing

APIs used:

We’ve used COVID APIs
Weather API was used
Jokes API was used
A prototype high scores API was also used in my project

Github discovery: The biggest discovery I found in Github was that a random person starred my fastpages repository. I could then find his profile and discovered that he was a software engineer or something similar.

After examining the datasets on Kaggle, I noticed that many of the databases were related to political and economic issues. There were things about transportation, COVID cases, political elections, etc.

Hacks

One crowdsourcing idea is to develop an algorithm to identify people based on their hand shapes and patterns. It can be initiated by collecting data from people of all races, as well as people with different hand patterns