Technology and media choice affect the way that we perceive
-Name one affordance that a scroll has that a bound book does not have.
-Name one affordance that a book has that a scroll does not have.
-Name one affordance that a document on the WWW has that a bound book does not
have.
-Name one affordance that a bound book has that a document on the WWW does not
have.
-The WWW has many advantages and some disadvantages. One advantage is that a
correction to a document can be made once and that change will be available to everyone
on their next viewing. What is the downside of this advantage?
-Most bound books are intended to be read from front to back in a linear manner. Name
one that is not intended to be read from front to back in a linear manner.
-New media and new technology take time to be adopted. Over time, as they develop
their own usage conventions and vocabularies, they follow an relatively predictable path.
Before they develop their own usage conventions and vocabularies what is typically done
to ease their adoption?
-Two central organizing themes for media are time-based and page-based. Name one
media that is uses time as its central organizing theme.
-When considering the social ethical aspects of technology one group claims that
technology is neutral and that it is the human usage that defines it as either ethical or
unethical. But countering this, sometimes new technology can force the accepted rules to
be re-evaluated. Name one formerly accepted practice or accepted prohibition that the
introduction and use of the cell phone changed.
-----------------------------------------------------------Numbering systems
-What is the next number in this sequence if you are counting in binary (base 2)?
00, 01, ?
-What is the next number in this sequence if you are counting in hexadecimal (base 16)?
...09, 0A, 0B, 0C, 0D, 0E, 0F, ?
-What is the next number in this sequence if you are counting in base 5?
00, 01, 02, 03, 04, ?
-----------------------------------------------------------Discrete & continuous real world phenomenon
-Is the number of ants in an anthill an example of a discrete or continuous real world
phenomenon?
-Assuming that we are not working at the atomic level, is the height of a wave in the
ocean an example of a discrete or continuous real world phenomenon?
-To model a discrete phenomenon that is found in the real world should the phenomenon
be counted or measured?
-To model a continuous phenomenon that is found in the real world should the
phenomenon be counted or measured?
-The process of converting a continuous phenomenon into discrete data so that it can be
modeled in a computer is called sampling. To be able to first model this continuous
phenomenon and second store it in a computer you must record both the sampling
frequency and what else?
-In the process of playing back a continuous phenomenon that has been sampled and
stored in a computer what is one simple method that is used to recreate the continuous
phenomenon from the stored data?
-What does the Nyquist rate say about how frequently one should sample continuous data
in order to be able to faithfully reproduce it later?
-While sampling more frequently than the Nyquist rate produces a more high fidelity
representation of continuous data, what is the downside of doing this practice?
-We listened to Fields of Gold performed by Eva Cassidy in class and discussed how to
produce a CD quality recoding the sample rate was 44,000 samples per second and that
each sample was stored as two bytes (16 bits). Uncompressed the recording should be
about 26 megabytes in length.
-If, rather than Eva Cassidy, you wanted to produce a CD of music that dogs could hear
but humans could not, what would have to change?
-If we believed that frequencies of sound above the range of normal human hearing could
nevertheless affect those frequencies that we could hear and we wanted to capture this
through sampling, what about our sampling method would have to change?
-Telephone systems are produced to be economical yet still provide decent reproduction
of the human voice. To achieve this economy rather than transmitting the full range of
frequencies that humans can hear (20 to 22,000 cycles per second) the phone companies
restrict the phone transmission to 2,000 cycles per second. Does this explain why music
sounds so crappy over the phone? Why?
-On film or in video the frame sampling rate is fixed. Sometimes that sampling rate
causes things in the scene to exhibit retrograde motion. What appears to be happening
when watching this film or video?
-What are two different sampling artifacts that can appear when reproducing under
sampled (too few samples) continuous data?
-For the sake of argument, assume that the gradient shown below was sampled and that
each sample is stored as 8 bits (one byte) resulting in 256 shades of gray.
What would this look like if each sample were stored as 2 bits rather than 8 bits?
-If this diagram represented the disk drive of a computer where the black rectangles
represent occupied memory locations and the white rectangles represent available,
unoccupied memory locations would you say that this computer’s memory has been
recently defragmented?
Network
-ADSL, cable modem, satellite and dial-up 56k ISP connections are all asymmetric
internet connections. What does asymmetric mean?
=The internet has both server and client programs. Is the browser that you use to access
websites on the internet (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Navigator) a client or a server?
-The IP address is used by the internet to route traffic from one end to another. Most
servers have fixed IPs. Most home computers are connected to the internet via an ISP that
utilizes DHCP. What does that say about your home computer’s IP?
Bitmapped and vector graphics
-Bitmapped graphics and vector graphics have very different internal models. This
affords them very different advantages and different disadvantages.
-If you were going to make an animated short film which would you choose and why?
-Converting this internal model to an external model is also different for bitmapped
graphics and vector graphics. For which of these graphics models is this conversion more
computationally demanding? Why?
-For which of these graphics models does the contents of the graphics affect the file size?
Why?
-Which is the more difficult conversion? Bitmapped to vector or vector to bitmapped?
Why?