Lord, we pray for those making international and national decisions about the ‘Information Super-Highway’;
that the whole range of considerations - political, economic, personal, sectional, communal - may be properly taken into account.
Lord, we pray for those setting up and administering national data-banks; we give thanks for the good they can do in co-ordinating information. We remember those who misuse the information they hold.
Lord, we pray for those involved in Research and Development in computers; we remember the power and responsibility they have for making changes in our world and our lives. We remember those who have lost their jobs as a result of new technology.
Lord, we pray for those who have boring keyboard jobs, those who suffer from Repetitive Strain Injury, or eyestrain. We pray for willingness to deal with the causes of such problems.
Lord, we pray for those in small computing businesses; the difficulties they face in chasing creditors; the stress on them, the risks they have to take - perhaps even with their own homes.
Lord, we pray for those who write computer games: some which are used to do much good at school, others to encourage people to gamble, some which are used just to make money. We pray for those who are addicted to computer and arcade games, and for their families; and for those who are anxious about the violence of some computer games.
Lord, we pray for those frightened of computers and other sorts of new technology; those who feel they cannot master using them; those who feel old or who lose their confidence in the face of change and new things.
Lord, we pray that technology may be the servant, not the controller of our lives.
(From ‘Work in Worship’, Peterborough Diocese People and Work Programme)
Consider the following Python code snippet:
Explain why this code will result in an error. How would you modify the code to achieve a similar effect with a list instead of a tuple? Provide the modified code and describe the differences between using a list and a tuple for this operation.
What is the difference between a list and a tuple in Python when it comes to their creation and modification?
What will be the output of the following Python code?
The goal of the following code is to create a new list new_library based on an original library (games_library). However, the code does not work as intended. What is the problem, and how can it be resolved?
You can add a new entry by just specifying it:
{'Sarah': '476-3321', 'Nathan': '351-7743', 'Bob': '123-4567'}Or also change values using the keys:
{'Sarah': '999-9999', 'Nathan': '351-7743', 'Bob': '123-4567'}To delete, use:
| Operation | Description |
|---|---|
| clear() | Removes all the elements from the dictionary |
| copy() | Returns a copy of the dictionary |
| fromkeys() | Returns a dictionary with the specified keys and value |
| get() | Returns the value of the specified key |
| items() | Returns a list containing a tuple for each key value pair |
| keys() | Returns a list containing the dictionary’s keys |
| pop() | Removes the element with the specified key |
| popitem() | Removes the last inserted key-value pair |
| setdefault() | Returns the value of the specified key. If the key does not exist: insert the key, with the specified value |
| update() | Updates the dictionary with the specified key-value pairs |
| values() | Returns a list of all the values in the dictionary |
“For computers to reason about data at all, they currently must reduce all information to bits. Bits are simply 1’s and 0’s, nothing more: the symbol 1 has no inherent meaning, nor does the symbol 0. The origin of the word”bit” was from the 1948 paper by Claude Shannon, who was trying to find a way to represent the theoretically smallest possible unit of information to solve problems of audio compression in telephones. […] All that was left, from Shannon’s perspective, was “pure” information, with no inherent meaning: two symbols with which to represent phone call audio, and anything else in the universe: 1 and 0, strung together in arbitrarily long sequences to represent anything.” Amy J. Ko, “Encoding Information”
“How can we act remotely on little-known events, places and people? Answer: bringing home these events, places and people. How can you do this if you are far away? By inventing means that (a) make them movable so that they can be brought, (b) keep them stable so that they can be brought and carried without distortion, decomposition or deterioration, and (c) are combinable in such a way that, whatever the matter of which they are made, can be accumulated, aggregated or shuffled like a deck of cards. […] The history of science [and technology] is largely the history of the mobilization of anything that can be made to move and embark on a journey home, entering the universal census.” - Bruno Latour, Science in Action, p. 348 and 350
How much are we losing by encoding things as information? Remeber: data is always a selective portrait of reality (full of biases).
Data privacy is a big issue in today’s society, called by sociologist Shoshanna Zuboff as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. To have data about people and things is is to have power and value.
The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. Deuteronomy 29:29
To acknowledge and protect what should be hidden, we need to cultivate a virtuous curiosity.
ARROGANCE: seeking knowledge of things that no one is supposed to know;
NOSYNESS: seeking knowledge that may belong to some people, but not to us;
DISTRACTION: seeking knowledge of things that are not convenient to know at a certain time;
IMMODERATION: wanting to know something with an unhealthy desire (all forms of curiosity are failures of temperance, but this label helps to isolate this specific aspect);
IMPERTINENCE: seeking to know things in a more certain way than one can know, doing violence to the object of knowledge;
SUPERFICIALITY: disrespecting the object of knowledge, being content with a superficial understanding and quickly moving on to something else;
POSSESSIVENESS: delighting not in the object of knowledge, but in the act of knowing it. It resembles, on an intellectual level, the vice of greed.
Furthermore, when we deal with digital information, we are only dealing with past - a frozen portrait of something that happened. To live in interfaces is to live in the past.
“Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with things themselves, man is, in a sense, constantly talking to himself. He has become so involved in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or in religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except through the interposition of an artificial medium.” Ernest Cassirer, “An Essay on Man”