Reference no: EM133772648

Assignment:

1. Should the Arpanet be considered a Cold War technology? If you think it should, provide two examples from the Abbate reading for why it should be considered a Cold War technology and one reason it should not. If you don't think it should, provide two examples from the Abbate for why it should not be considered a Cold War technology, and one reason it should. Your answer should be a total of 5-8 sentences.

2. Based on "The Secret History of Women in Coding" identify two reasons why women were particularly successful as coders from the 1950s to the 1970s (1-2 sentences each). Then identify two reasons why women were increasingly excluded from coding after the 1980s (1-2 sentences each).

3. Virginia Eubanks ("A Child Abuse Prediction Model Fails Poor Families" argues that the AFST (Allegheny Family Screening Tool) disproportionately targets poor families. Identify a specific feature of the algorithm that causes this to be the case. Describe it in 2-3 sentences, including a quotation from the Eubanks article. Finally, state whether you think these flaws in the algorithm could be corrected with better programming, or if you think residents of Allegheny County would be better served by relying on human workers (1-2 sentences).]

4. Do engineers have an ethical obligation to address biases within algorithms that discriminate against people on the basis of their race, gender, class, or religion? Is this true even if those biases are based on widespread social prejudices that do not originate in engineering (such as when Safiya Noble describes search engine results that sexualize African American girls based on many people making those searches) or in cases where removing the bias might lose the company the engineer works for money? Why or why not (3-6 sentences)