HW #1 QUESTIONS.doc

Telecom Processes & Policy: Spring ?10 Homework 1 Name:________________________________________ This assignment is due Monday, Feb 1st at the beginning of class. This is open Google, open book, open notes, open everything. You may talk to your classmates or other people about the questions and ideas for answers, but you must state underneath the answer for that question everybody you talked to or worked with on that question, and your answer must be your own (both in terms of the writing, and the underlying ideas of the answer must be ideas that you at least contributed to). You can email questions directly to me ( HYPERLINK "mailto:ortizj@rutgers.edu" ortizj@rutgers.edu ), if I can answer them I'll answer. I'll have to decide how to answer without giving the answer away. This assignment is worth 2 (maybe 3) points of your class participation grade. You must answer all 3 questions. Your answers to each question should be five sentences minimum. You'll get 0 points if nothing is turned in, 1 point just for attempting to answer, 2 points if you give an excellent answer, and 3 points if your answer includes some insight or idea that surprises me. #1: There are two important concepts (actually, there are many, but these are two of the most important ones) that we can learn from Claude Shannon: (1) The purpose of communication is to affect the behavior of the receiver, and (2) the information capacity of a channel is quantitatively equivalent to the receiver's uncertainty of the signal that will be received. What does this have to do with what we talked about in class? Provide an example (not from class). #2: What do Internet censorship and Metalica's music have to do with each other (other than that both of these things keep getting worse)? You can relate some concept in music to TCP/IP filtering and talk about interactions between multiple layers of abstraction. Or you can discuss Metalica's advocacy against pirated music and Napster, and how Digital Rights Management is or is not a form of censorship. This question is open ended but your answer needs to be serious, silly answers will not be accepted. #3: The 20th century marks the move away from an industrial era to an information society. Specifically, Americans moved toward the consumption of information goods. The 21st century is seeing a similar trend toward the production and usage of information services. What do you think will be the next trend within this information economy?