CMN 150V S20 Midterm (1-5) comprehensive test prep exam questions and correct detailed answers|

The digital revolution - correct answers 1-02: What paradigm underlies "computational science"? In the late 1980's, 1% of all technologically stored info was digital, and now 99% is digital - correct answers 1-02: Which is true about the world's info storage capacity? Many times from the Earth to the Sun - correct answers 1-02: If we would take 5ZB of info and store it in books, how far would the pile reach? Each 2-3 years, as much is added to what we have accumulated since the very beginning - correct answers 1-02: What does it mean that the amount of technologically stored information "doubles" every 2-3 years? More people document social reality nowadays - correct answers 1-02: What changed in the announcement of the papacy from 2005 to 2013? less - correct answers 1-02: The DNA of all human cells stored ____ info than digital technology in 2014. Every time we (life) came up with a new way of processing information, a major transition happened - correct answers 1-02: What do evolutionary theorists say about the "Major Transitions in Evolution?" Society as a whole has become indispensably dependent on digital technology - correct answers 1-02: From this social evolutionary perspective, the digital and the biological are merged when: The other one is about how digital tech changes society and this one is about how digital tech changes knowledge production - correct answers 1-02: What's the difference between his two online courses? A small number of interrelated variables - correct answers 1-04: The first wave of scientific advancements focused on: Averages of many (rather unknown) variables - correct answers 1-04: The second wave of scientific advancements focused on: Complexity is modeled with simple averages of a small number of interacting variables - correct answers 1-04: Which of the following statements is NOT true? What we here called problems of: Societies contain more than 2-3 variables and are too complex to be modeled with aggregate averages - correct answers 1-04: Why is it limiting to study society with the dominant scientific methods from the 19th and 20th century? Networks of people and their tech - correct answers 1-05: When doing social science, we study what level of abstraction? At each of these levels, new rules/laws "emerge" that can be studied - correct answers 1-05: How and in reference to what did he use the word "emergence"? (pyramid of sciences) An ant colony called "Aunt Hillary" (a collective intelligence "emerging" from many levels (think science pyramid) originally from ants) - correct answers 1-06: Who does the Anteater communicate with in this metaphor? (referring to social emergence) How predictable social patterns emerge from a bunch of individual free will - correct answers 1-06: What baffled philosophers like Kant and sociologists like Durkheim? The intention of the individual and collective intentions of society - correct answers 1-06: What was a main distinction made by both economists like Smith and political scientists like Rousseau? The distinction between: More of something (quantitative difference) can at some point create unexpected emergent phenomena (qualitative changes) - correct answers 1-06: What did the eminent social scientist Karl Marx mean when he talked about what others called the "basic metaphysical principle of Dialectics"? How society emerges from individual parts - correct answers 1-06: All different kinds of "social science" disciplines are fundamentally interested in: He made empirical observations and from there, developed ideas - correct answers 1-07: What was the main approach toward science adopted by Charles Darwin? He developed theory, not based on empirical observations, but on ideas and first principles - correct answers 1-07: What did Albert Einstein do in 1905 and 1915? Einstein worked on a problem with few variables (E=mc^2) and Darwin on one with average tendencies of many observations - correct answers 1-07: How do Einstein and Darwin's methods relate to the "very short history of science" of three consecutive waves that we had reviewed? The digital evidence you leave behind with a digital interaction - correct answers 1-07: What is the so-called "digital footprint" or "digital trace"? Data = Analysis = Ideas - correct answers 1-07: How do you approach science through induction? A directed bet - correct answers 1-07: Loosely speaking, what term can you use to explain what a hypothesis is? Deduction - correct answers 1-07: The method that Albert Einstein spearheaded in the work on relativity by going from mathematical theories over hypothesis toward observable phenomena is called: Induction - correct answers 1-08: The scientific approach going from empirical evidence ("statistics") to theoretical framework ("on digital development") is called: Intuitive ideas, even those in bestselling scientific books, can be wrong if not corroborated with data We have developed he knowledge how couples can increase their chances of staying together for a lifetime Divorce rates are high not because relationships are a mystery, but because people usually don't implement what science has found out about them - correct answers 1-08: What were the takeaways from this anecdote (on predicting divorce)? (check all that apply) Examining the logical interrelationships among some collection of verbal statements or thoughts - correct answers 1-09: With tongue-in-cheek ("jokingly"), the unconventional name of "glass of red wine theorizing" is used here to characterize a very common way to deduce hypotheses in the social sciences which is: Starting from visionary ideas and then collecting empirical data to test the ideas with hypotheses Starting from an intellectual conversation with leading experts and then formulating hypotheses - correct answers 1-09: Which approaches are here informally/jokingly called "glass of red wine theorizing"? (check all that apply) Many scientific results cannot be repeated - correct answers 1-09: WHat is the so-called "replication crisis"? It's on top of a hierarchy of emergence that subsumes other science disciplines - correct answers 1-10: Why did we say that social science is the most complex of all sciences? Is this the best way to produce knowledge? Is this the best model of something? Is this mathematical equation correct? - correct answers 1-10: Formally, the "Entscheidungsproblem" asks if an algorithm exists that can answer if something is universally true or not. What could we also ask it? (check all that apply) Is it possible to automate the decision if something is true or false (Entscheidungsproblem) - correct answers 1-10: What did David Hilbert ask? It's not possible to find a consistent system with only true statements (Incompleteness Theorem) - correct answers 1-10: What did Kurt Gödel show? With mobile phone trace data - correct answers 1-11: How did Monrovia quickly fill out their population map? The group of people here is not necessarily representative of all husband/wives/boy-/girlfriends - correct answers 1-11: What does "sampling issue" mean? (What could be wrong with drawing conclusions from the okcupid digital footprint data?) The numbers will form a vertical line from top to bottom - correct answers 1-11: What does the okcupid graph (a man's age vs the age of the women who look best to him) look like for men? The group of people here is not necessarily representative of all men - correct answers 1-11: What could be wrong with drawing such conclusions from this digital footprint data (regarding men's preference on okcupid)? True - correct answers 1-12: True or false: Your happiness can be influenced by the happiness of a distant friend of a friend Education - correct answers 1-12: Eyeballing this group (red pants, education, having a computer): can you see a characteristic that goes together with having a computer (on average)? Without tracking social networks, we miss an important aspect of how it works - correct answers 1-12: The main point of this example (red pants, education, having a computer) was: The network structure of society can reveal insights to make social interventions more efficient - correct answers 1-12: What was the key insight in this study? (simulations of spread of infectious disease within elementary school) Natural Language Processing (NLP) - correct answers 1-13: When computer programs are used to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data, this CS and AI subfield is generally referred to as: We often understand an aspect of reality when building machines that deal with it - correct answers 1-13: What was the point of talking about flying machines? He promoted the idea to cooperate with machines in chess - correct answers 1-13: What did the Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov do after losing to AI? Data is always from the past and by itself cannot predict future dynamics different from the past - correct answers 1-14: We know that big data analytics provides a powerful and promising tool for the social sciences, governments, and businesses. It is however no panacea. What is an ultimate limitation to the power of big data? More of the same doesn't always have the same effect Sometimes with more time patterns suddenly change Linear extrapolation of some process often does not work Just like more cooling suddenly converts water into ice, social processes can have unexpected tipping points - correct answers 1-14: What do we mean when we say "more is different"? (check all that apply) We'll have 8 bunnies on the left, but only 4 bunnies on the right - correct answers 1-14: What happens if both of the island of bunnies (each with 2 bunnies, island capacity is 4) on the left-hand side double again? Social processes are often non-linear, which makes it extremely hard to see change coming The challenge of non-linear tendencies will not be quickly solved Almost all patterns are non-linear patterns Often, linear extrapolation of data doesn't capture social dynamics - correct answers 1-14: What have we said about non-linearity? (check all that apply) Models are a simplification of a reality that is way too complex to capture fully - correct answers 1-15: What is one of the reasons why all scientific models must be wrong? The self-interest of private business is best prepared to protect the common good (basically Adam Smith) - correct answers 1-15: What was the "solid edifice" that "broke down"? Free markets are the best way to organize economies and regulation does not work - correct answers 1-15: What was the ideology of the world's most powerful manager of money world wide for the 20 years between 1987 and 2006? Social science models shape our thinking and can lead to bad outcomes, even with the best intentions - correct answers 1-15: What is the main takeaway from the Alan Greenspan example? 100 * 1.025 * 1.025 * ... = 100 * 1.025^10 = 128 = grew by 28% - correct answers Blumenstock 1: The population in countries with low human development grows at about 2.5% per year. If you start with a population of 100 people in such country, how much has your population grown after 10 years? Mobile phones and satellites - correct answers Blumenstock 1: In developing countries, the most commonly used 'digital footprint' data is: