Welcome to the Finals

iToons•Written round

•8 tech cartoons with a technology related answer

•Differential scoring• +15 (1-2 teams get it right)• +10 (3,4,5 teams get it right)• +5 (6,7,8 teams get it right)

1Life, the universe and everything else – what acronym?

2What’s blanked?

3What’s being referred to in the circled panel?

4 Not really about waiters refusing to bring you food. What 4 word term?

5Coders should know what’s blanked out?

6What?

7A parody of David Bowie’s famous act with someone. Only first name should do!

8A legend that we might never see or hear from again.Who/what?

Exchange Sheets, Answers

1Life, the universe and everything else – what acronym?

answer...

LHC – Large Halidron Collider

2What’s blanked?

answer...

Cloud

3What’s being referred to in the circled panel?

answer...

FourSquare (checking into places online)

4 Not really about waiters refusing to bring you food. What 4 word term?

answer...

Denial of Service Attacks

5Coders should know what’s blanked out?

answer...

Pointers

6What?

answer...

Wireless

7A parody of David Bowie’s famous act with someone. Only first name should do!

answer...

Bing (Bowie originally sang a Christmas special with Bing Crosby)

8A legend that we might never see or hear from again.Who/what?

answer...

Mars Rover – abandoned on Mars due to technical issues

Clockwise

●16 questions

●Infinite Bounce; +10 on direct and pass

●First Strike on the Buzzer, in writing +15/-10

1Connect the audio clip to a group that recently announced premature retirement after a 50-day fun spree, and explain

answer...

LulzSec – the hacker group that uses the theme from “The Love Boat”. They recently announced they would stop hacking sites after a 50 day period of havoc

2

This 2-word technology, which was mandated in 1990 for all televisions 13 inches or larger in the US, takes its name from the fact that it is not open to viewers who do not choose to activate/decode this technology.

What’s the two word phrase?

answer...

Closed Captioning

3

In the semiconductor and electronics design industry, this term is used for the final result/stage of the design cycle for integrated circuits(ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs).

The origins lie in the early days of PCB design when the ‘artwork’ for the PCB layout was manually embedded on PET film using adhesive elements and a material we most associate with recording media.

What word?

answer...

Tape-Out

4

The concept for it was first proposed in a 2008 design paper, following which V0.1 was announced and released in Jan, 2009 on a cryptography mailing list. In 2010, someone interested in a $25 pizza procured it successfully using this.

As of 2011, Wikileaks, The Free Software Foundation, Freenet, PioneerOne all endorse this while various governments are looking at it without amusement.

What?

answer...

BitCoin – virtual currency that has launched a parallel economy

5

UCLA said “login” but it only got until “lo” at which point Stanford gave up.

What was going on?

answer...

The first letters sent over the Arpanet – the UCLA to Stanford link crashed after the first 2 letters of “login” were typed

6Dave Fischer coined this term in 1994 to describe a 1993 tipping point in the (d)evolution of Usenet when various newbies flooded the group and completely disregarded the culture and the rules that the community had nurtured carefully till then.

The term, which is now a meme, is typically used to describe the feeling when a small select community one was part of for long is opened up to ignorant newbies who soon begin changing the traditions of old.

What term?

answer...

Eternal September from Sep 1993, when AOL opened up Usenet to its user base

7This particular on-screen instruction seen in many operating systems is an artifact from the days of computer programming when compiler output would scroll off screen and had to be paused to be viewed.

However, it caused considerable confusion to early users who would call asking for where something was located.

What instruction?

answer...

Press ‘Any’ Key to Continue

8While installing the Maemo operating system application installer, the installer asks the user to pick between 2 modes: •Choosing the ___ ____ mode the installer allows the user to view and configure system packages whose existence it normally does not acknowledge•Choosing the ___ ___ mode the installer displays only software installed by a user, creating the illusion that system software does not exist on the system

What are the two modes?

answer...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

9Gary Stock, a researcher of odd surfing habits, conceptualized, named and defined the rules of this game making it popular on his website. The game has often been called addictive with winning examples being phrases such as “italianate tablesides”, “drink bimillenially”, “yooper radioimmunoassays” and so on.

One ironic consequence of the whole process is that a winning entry often ends up losing its distinction once its win is publicized.

Name the game and what it is about?

answer...

Googlewhacks – coming up with 2 word search queries that throw up exactly 1 search result

10This iconic book, first published in 1967 is still considered among the most comprehensive historical treatises of a much lesser known field of communications. The author, a journalist, began writing it in 1961 and at one point was asked by the National Security Agency (NSA) to stop getting it published. The only criticism of the book would be that it contains no mention of Turing’s research or the Germans – both of which would become public knowledge only later.

Name book and author

answer...

“The Codebreakers” by David Kahn

11What hobby might this individual have?

answer...

Collecting AOL disks – these have become collectors’ items today after AOL discontinued its mail-ins

12What are these guys doing and why?

answer...

Atari’s ET game failed so miserably the company dumped 5M cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. Fans continue to visit the area to dig up cartridges.

13Connect to something in metallurgy

answer...

All of them are Browser test pages that take their name from the acid test for gold

•Acid1 – Box Acid test for CSS 1.0 pages•Acid2 – Acid test for HTML rendering•Acid 3 – Acid test for Javascript and other Web standards

14

In 2001, a book published discussed the role of a company Dehomag that did business with the Nazis in the 1930s leasing and supplying them with technological equipment that helped record and track Jewish exterminations . Dehomag was an acronym for Deutsche _____ Maschinen Gesselschaft mbH.

What did ‘H’ stand for and what technology did the Germans receive?

answer...

Herman Hollerith German-American inventor of the technology – Punched Cards

15

Designed by Swissman Vestergaard Frandsen, this revolutionary device is only 31 cms long, costs around $5.50 and is 99.99% efficient. It was distributed widely during the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods. Name it.

answer...

LifeStraw – a suction powered water filter

16

When MS DOS was introduced, a certain character on the keyboard which until then was called X, had to be rechristened to Y.

This was because most commands on MS DOS used another character Z that necessitated this change in X to avoid confusion.

Identify X, Y and Z?

answer...

X – Slash (/) which became Y – Forward SlashZ – Backward Slash (\) which is used to navigate the file structure in MS DOS

Audience Questions

A1In 2003, Yoshi, a middle aged Tokyo resident, wrote “Deep Love” about a teenager who engages in subsidized dating in Tokyo and ends up contracting AIDS.

What is his claim to fame?

answer...

The first Mobile Phone novel written via text messages– leading to the birth of a new genre of literature.

A2The Able font typeface has become famous in literature ever since it was used famously inJ K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In which ubiquitous technology banner might you see this font being used?

answer...

Visual Connect

● 12 Visuals, connecting to a theme

● Non-exhaustive

● Points change for every set of 3

●No negatives and only one attempt on the last set

+25, -10

+25, -10

+25, -10

+15, -10

+15, -10

+15, -10

+10, -5

+10, -5

+10, -5

+5, 0

+5, 0

+5, 0

Closing the theme now….

Answer●Acquisitions by Google

– Dodgeball

– Feedburner

– ReCaptcha

– DoubleClick

– Deja News

– Episodic

– Slide.com

– Like.com

– Sage TV

– Aardvark

– Postini

– YouTube

Anti-Clockwise

●16 questions

●Infinite Bounce; +10 on direct and pass

●First Strike, in writing +15/-10

ISO/IEC 7810 defines the physical characteristics for three types of objects:

1. 85.60 × 53.98 mm, and also with additional characteristics, thickness of 0.76 mm and corners rounded with a radius of 3.18 mm

2.The B7 format, 125 × 88 mm

3. 25 × 15 mm

There’s also an additional annex that describes how the last one may be included in the first, but with relief areas around its perimeter, to allow tool-free removal.

What are the three?

1

answer...

1. Credit Cards and ID Cards

2. Passports

3. SIM Cards

It is the big combined graphic in old school video games. The idea was that the computer could fetch a graphic into memory, and then display only parts of it at a time, which was faster than having to continually fetch new images. Today we see a similar use in CSS.

Name this term that also evokes memories of the Spiderwick Chronicles or Artemis Fowl, among other things.

2

answer...

Sprite – also the green fairies in Eoin Colfer’s books.

X today, is significantly more sophisticated, allowing a user to hide large amounts of information within image and audio files. Blindside, Contraband, Courier, and Hide and Seek are some of the tools of the trade.

Y, named after the French for glue and synonymous with an art form, is a new software designed by a Georgia Tech student. Y aids X but with a new political twist included.

Name X and Y, and the working and purpose of Y.

3

answer...

Traditional steganography hides its message as, say, every 20th word in a letter, or as the colour of every hundredth pixel in an electronic image. Sophisticated analysis of such things might, though, notice something odd and thus flag a document for closer examination.

Collage escapes notice by dividing the message into pieces, and then hiding these in electronic files posted to public websites, such as Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

In an experiment volunteers were asked to watch pairs of patterns cross a computer screen-horizontals, verticals, zigzags, checks… some were just plain rectangles. They had to estimate which of the two was travelling faster. In all cases, the two rectangles travelled at the same speed. But the researchers varied the conditions in other ways, without telling the participants. Sometimes both rectangles travelled slowly, sometimes they travelled much faster. The jazzy rectangles also differed. Some were low contrast and some high contrast. The results indicated that participants were not fooled by slowly moving rectangles, nor by low-contrast ones. But fast-moving, high contrast ones did fool them. The same model was used during the World War.

How?

4

answer...

In World War II many Allied ships were painted with dark and light stripes, and other contrasting shapes, making them look a bit like zebra. The idea was to distort an enemy submarine commander’s perception of the ship’s size, shape, range, heading and speed, so as to make it harder to hit with the non-homing torpedoes of the period. ●These had to be pointed not at the target directly but, rather, at the place where the commander thought the target would be when the torpedo arrived. At the time, it was only an educated guess that this so-called dazzle camouflage would work. But now someone has actually tested it and the short answer is that it does work—but not in the way that Allied navies thought it did. Ships move too slowly. Dazzle camouflage might well, however, have a role in protecting faster-moving vehicles, such as military Land Rovers.

The implementation comes in the wake of something so widespread that it costs the hotel industry approximately $100 million in damages. These brands are among those chosen for an optimization initiative through technology, and provide the ability to better control their operating costs and to satisfying the needs of the hotel guests.

How?

5

answer...

Linen-tracking devices to bust thieving hotel guests. Hotels are beginning to use towels, sheets and bathrobes equipped with washable radio frequency identification tags to keep guests from snagging the coveted items.

If this post from earlier this month is anything to go by, it’s quite clear that the popularity is not waning. What is being described?

“In 4-6 grade I would sneak in my favorite every day! the bathroom is an ideal place for doing stuff that takes more than just a buttons. oh and dnt bring babies to school! you know how needy they are really I would suggest only bringing adults to school. recess is an awsome time... TURN OFF THE SOUND! most embarrasing moment? when mine went off in class. if ur in middle-high school like myself? it is a good bit harder you just gotta be sneaky! but if u try too hard you WILL be caught”

6

answer...

Two examples from a series of ads. What for?

7

7

7

answer...

Mimeograph

Henrik Sjödin at the NetWorld + Interop conference in 1993 referred to public accessibility but did not use the specific term X.

Sjödin went on to found the companies Plancom in 1994 (which later became MobileStar, and then the X unit of T-Mobile USA).

In a certain sport, X is a ‘device’ that is based on the electro-magnetic spectrum. The human eye can typically feel such a thing, but not see it.

What is X?

8

answer...

Hot Spot

In internet parlance what is a “sunrise period”?

9

answer...

The term Sunrise Period refers to the period of time at the launch of a new top-level domain or second-level domain during which owners of trademarks may register a domain name containing the owned mark.

The first shot at a domain name goes to registrants with rights on trademarks, geographical entities, … and need to be supported by documented proof.

What is this (describe), and who is it by? 10

answer...

This picture is by Samuel Morse. Yes, he was an accomplished painter!

It directly confronts the problems Morse (an American, 1791–1872) perceived in the New York art scene: a flood of fake European masterpieces on the market and insufficient training for artists. As an antidote, he created an Americanised Kunstkammer featuring himself and others, including his friend the author James Fenimore Cooper, studying, making, and discussing art in a gallery. In effect, Morse brought home the collection of European paintings he thought most vital to the success of American art at large. He began with the Salon Carré at the Louvre (and the Grande Galerie beyond) and stripped it of its installation of modern French paintings and re-hung it as a gallery of Italian Old Masters. He placed himself in profile at centre, training an American student to see the world of art from his perspective.

That portion of it has little use today, but was used in the 1970s on IBM mainframes. It can be traced back to the operator interrupts on the IBM System/370 mainframe computer, which were used to cause the operating system such as VM/370 or MVS to allow the console to give input to the operating system.

What are we talking about?

11

answer...

What are these, and where would you come across them?

12

answer...

Doodles on Piratebay

Named for a prolific contemporary inventor, who held about 500 patents and used profits from his bar code scanner to encourage young inventors, and dubbed the "Oscar for Inventors," it is awarded to outstanding mid-career inventors, who have developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted.

Name this $500,000 award.

13

answer...

Lemelson-MIT Prize

Take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for _________, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products! Streamline your designs to meet production quotas and survive encounters with the sinister threats that plague _________.

What world are you in?

14

answer...

Spacechem, the hugely popular chemistry game

Changing a single bit of data can result in an entirely new pattern. Because of this non-modular nature, they are almost impossible for a human to recognise. This means they are susceptible to hacking. The smaller the size, the less error correction present, and the easier it will be to take a marker pen and colour in a few extra cells to hijack the code. Imagine activists altering a corporate billboard so that when customers snapped it, they were taken to a YouTube video on climate change instead of an ad for the latest SUV. Because they can't be read by humans, it could be a long time before the owners realised the poster had been defaced.

What is being described?

15

answer...

A QR code (specific two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera telephones. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data.

It is space program slang for a passive occupant in a spacecraft, specifically a space capsule. The phrase is generally attributed to Chuck Yeagar, who is shown describing the Mercury astronauts as ____ in the movie The Right Stuff.

_____ is now typically used as a snarky criticism of the current level of manned spaceflight technology, as humans are still travelling as meat packed into primitive metal containers and shipped long distances.

Fill in the blank

16

answer...

Spam in a Can

Theme Time

•Written round

•8 questions with a connected theme; +10 for each answer, no negatives

•Theme in writing; theme points on each slide

Fill in the title of this 1996 book; the term was first used in a New York Times article in 1992 to define “people highly skilled in the processing and manipulation of digital information; wealthy or scholarly techno-geeks.”

+25, -10

In the Star Trek series, Dr. McCoy implants these devices into Kirk and Spock, for tracking purposes, before they beam down to the planet Ekos.

It’s a wireless communications, monitoring, or control device that picks up and automatically responds to an incoming signal.

What’s the good word?

+25, -10

+15, -10It is a web log written for soliciting gifts or

donations, but in a more general sense, written for the sole purpose of asking for something desperately.

What?

+15, -10

A speech in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln. After a research effort in 2004, analysts are unsure whether “it” was just a typo, a mistake, or was the reporter, transcriber or typesetter having a bit of sly fun.

What is the topic of discussion?

+10, -5They are classified as “lossy” – meaning the

ones who lose some quality when the compression happens, and “lossless” – which are typically used for archiving data in a compressed form while retaining all of the information present in the original stream.

What are we describing?

What is being explained?

+10, -5

Vannevar Bush wrote an article in 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly titled, “As We May Think”. Bush envisioned a device in which an individual would compress and index all of their memories, books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility".

This concept influenced the development of early hypertext systems, eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web.

What name did he give it?

+5,0

+5,0The mass production of these in the United

States began as part of the SAGE air-defense system in 1958, connecting terminals at various airbases, radar sites, and command-and-control centers to the SAGE director centers scattered around the U.S. and Canada, over phone lines, and were certified by Bell Labs.

What?

Exchange Sheets, Answers

Fill in the title of this 1996 book; the term was first used in a New York Times article in 1992 to define “people highly skilled in the processing and manipulation of digital information; wealthy or scholarly techno-geeks.”

+25, -10

answer...

Digerati

In the Star Trek series, Dr. McCoy implants these devices into Kirk and Spock, for tracking purposes, before they beam down to the planet Ekos.

It’s a wireless communications, monitoring, or control device that picks up and automatically responds to an incoming signal.

What’s the good word?

+25, -10

answer...

Transponder

+15, -10It is a web log written for soliciting gifts or

donations, but in a more general sense, written for the sole purpose of asking for something desperately.

What?

answer...

Bleg

+15, -10

A speech in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln. After a research effort in 2004, analysts are unsure whether it was just a typo, a mistake, or was the reporter, transcriber or typesetter having a bit of sly fun.

What is the topic of discussion?

answer...

Emoticons

+10, -5They are classified as “lossy” – meaning the

ones who lose some quality when the compression happens, and “lossless” – which are typically used for archiving data in a compressed form while retaining all of the information present in the original stream.

What are we describing?

answer...

Codecs

What is being explained?

+10, -5

answer...

Qubits

Vannevar Bush wrote an article in 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly titled, “As We May Think”. Bush envisioned a device in which an individual would compress and index all of their memories, books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility".

This concept influenced the development of early hypertext systems, eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web.

What name did he give it?

+5,0

answer...

Memex

+5,0The mass production of these in the United

States began as part of the SAGE air-defense system in 1958, connecting terminals at various airbases, radar sites, and command-and-control centers to the SAGE director centers scattered around the U.S. and Canada, over phone lines, and were certified by Bell Labs.

What?

answer...

Modem

Audience, what’s the Theme?

Portmanteau Technology Terms