Final Exam:
10:15am - 12:15pm, Thursday, May 15, St. Thomas Hall 360
You are allowed to refer to two 8.5" × 11" sheets of
paper during the exam.
As for exam contents, you should study the web pages to which
there are links below under the headings Notes on Videorecordings
and Lecture Notes. If the page regarding data representation
has been updated by noon Wednesday (with the addition of a short
section on image representation, as discussed in class last Wednesday),
you will be responsible for it. Otherwise, you will not be.
In addition, be sure to read the following sections of the textbook:
- Chapter 12: What information about me is routinely transmitted
when I use the Web?
- Chapter 12: What information about me is routinely recorded
when I use the Web?
- Chapter 12: What are cookies?
- Chapter 12: How secure is information transmitted through
the Internet? Specifically, be aware of the fact that,
under HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), data (such as
that entered into a web form by a user) is transmitted
"in the clear" (without being altered in any way) whereas,
under HTTPS (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol), data is
encrypted before being transmitted (and hence must be
decrypted by the receiver). The latter provides more security
for a user who is providing sensitive information such as a
credit card number or loginID/password.
- Chapter 13: pages 345-353, in which several questions about
search engines are posed and answered. The main points are
that a search engine (e.g., google.com, yahoo.com) works by
maintaining a huge index (a computerized version of what is
at the back of a textbook) that maps terms to web pages (or to
their URLs) (just as a textbook index maps terms to page
numbers of pages in which they appear).
This index is constantly being updated through the use of
web crawlers, which are programs that constantly
surf the Web (following links from web page to web page)
in search of new web pages or changes to existing ones.
When a user enters a query (comprised of a collection of
terms) to a search engine, it searches the index for the
terms in order to find relevant web pages. How those
pages are ranked can be based upon a number of criteria,
as discussed on pages 352-353 of Walker's book.