A10 - Practice Exam

Due Mar 6 by 9:30am
Points 10
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Available after Feb 28 at 12am

Assignment 10: Practice Exam)

(due 930 AM Thursday March 6)

In under two weeks on March 11 we’ll have the first of two exams. The exam is open-book and open-notes, and you can take it whenever you want in a 24-hour period (but for a fixed time of 90 minutes, unless you have a DSP accommodation, which gives you two hours).

This assignment will acquaint you with the types of questions that appear on exams. In the real exam, you’ll be given 10 questions, and you can choose 8 of them to answer. This means you’ll need to answer a question in about 10 minutes after spending some time deciding which ones to attempt. Many of the questions here have multiple parts; a good answer will have a few sentences or one paragraph for each part.

So for this assignment, pretend this is an exam, except that you should try to answer all of the questions instead of just some of them. I will briefly review this practice exam during class on this Thursday March 6, the last meeting before the exam on the following Tuesday. You should also meet with your study group to discuss the practice exam and otherwise prepare for the actual exam. This assignment won’t be graded except in the sense that you will be grading yourself on your mastery of the concepts so far.

And if all this makes sense to you as a practice exam, you should understand why it should take about two hours to do this assignment. If it takes much longer than that, it means that you haven’t mastered all the most important concepts of the course, and you haven’t organized the syllabus readings, the posted lecture notes, and your own notes to use them effectively.

It might make it easier for you if you copy all the text from here, put it in a document, and then edit that document. Make sure your name is on it when you submit it.

ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES

What are three organizing principles that are “generic” in the sense that they can be used to arrange almost any type of resource?
If there are generic organizing principles, why would we ever use domain-specific organizing principles that only work in very limited resource domains?
Why does the order in which the organizing principles are applied to arrange a collection of resources matter? Give a specific example that illustrates why.

THE “DESIGN SPACE” PERSPECTIVE

What are the benefits of taking a “design space” or “dimensional” perspective on organizing system as opposed to thinking of organizing in terms of established categories like museums or libraries?

DESIGNING A LIBRARY

A “library” might be located in a building, but the building doesn’t make it a library. A library is a design pattern for collections of particular types of resources, usually organized according to content-based standards, with the most conventional interaction being “circulation” – that resources can be borrowed and then returned.

Answer these questions to refine your understanding of libraries:

How does a personal library differ from a university research library?
How does a public library in a small town differ from a university research library?
How does the library for a biotech research firm differ from a university research library?

RESOURCE PROPERTIES FRAMEWORK

Apply the Resource Properties framework (intrinsic vs extrinsic, static vs. dynamic) to identify one potential property from each of the four categories for organizing the resources in a bookstore.

Intrinsic static:
Intrinsic dynamic
Extrinsic static
Extrinsic dynamic

THE “SAME TIME”

Two geologists are discussing the Triassic period. One says “it is interesting that dinosaurs were evolving at the same time that the Pangea supercontinent was starting to break apart.”

Physicists devised so-called atomic clocks to create an extremely accurate standard for the time unit we call the second using the fact that a particular transition of cesium electrons takes place over nine billion times in a second. Put differently, we can now say that two events took place at the same time with a precision of one nine-billionth of a second.

Explain these two uses of “the same time” using the concepts of resource abstraction and granularity

PANOVSKY’S THREE LEVELS OF MEANING

Apply the Panovsky “three levels of meaning” framework to describe this building.

Description ("Preiconographic“ or “Primary)
Identification ("Iconographic“ or “Secondary)
Interpretation ("Iconologic”)

PATH DEPENDENCE

What does “path dependence in selection” mean?
What are your three most important criteria for selecting courses to take?
For each criterion, explain whether path dependence can arise when using it and explain how.

CREATING RESOURCE DESCRIPTIONS

Resource descriptions can be created by the creators of the resource, by their users, by experts, by computational methods, or automatically as part of perception.

When is it most appropriate and effective to use creator-created descriptions?
When is it most appropriate and effective to use user-created descriptions?
When is it most appropriate and effective to use expert-created descriptions?
When is it most appropriate and effective to use computationally-created descriptions?

THE MEANING OF “MEAT”

Define “meat” using the template

hyponym = {adjective+} hypernym {distinguishing clause+} (2)

Do plant-based products like “Beyond Meat” or “Impossible Burger” fit into the meat category as you have defined it? (1)
Make an argument for including these products in the meat category, and then revise the definition so that these products are classified as meat (3)
Make an argument for not including these products in the meat category (2)
Some countries require labeling these alternatives as "plant-based" or "imitation" meat.” Explain what this ruling means for the meaning of the meat category using the concepts of “category context” and “category structure.” (2)

ORGANIZING SYSTEM SPECTRA

The concept of the Document Type Spectrum was devised to distinguish different domains or types of documents according to the extent to which their content is semantically prescribed, by the amount of internal structure, and by the correlations of their presentation and formatting to their content and structure

This concept has been used by analogy in several case studies assigned in the syllabus as “the organized crime spectrum” and “the pottery type spectrum.

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Apply this spectrum concept to these two domains by contrasting a highly-controlled system at one end of the spectrum with an ad hoc or very loosely organized system at the other end. BE VERY SPECIFIC WHEN DESCRIBING THE EXAMPLES