Friday, November 5, 2010

Mid-Term Exam Grades

I gave exams back on Tuesday, November 2. Here is now I calculated the final score.

I took all of the raw scores, which were out of 181 points, and averaged them. The average was 116, which was about 64%.

From that average I found the standard deviation to be about 33. For more on this means, read the wikipedia article.

Now I "binned" all of the students' grades. If a student was within one-half the standard deviation either above or below the mean, that person was put in the "B" bin. If the student was above a half-standard-deviation above the average, that student was put in the "A" bin. Maybe this will be clearer as a list.

Standard deviation is s. The student grade is g. The average is v.

  • g > v + s --- A+ ---- 98-100

  • v + s/2 < g < v + s --- A --- 90-97

  • v - s/2 < g < v + s/2 --- B --- 80-89

  • v - s < g < v - s/2 --- C --- 70-79

  • v - 2s < g < v - s --- D --- 60-69
  • g < v - 2s --- below -- 50-59
Within each bin the grades were scaled to fit the final score range of that bin. For example, all the grades in the "B" bin ranged from 104 to 129. That is a range of 25 points. I re-mapped that range to the range of "B" class final scores, which is 80-89, with this simple formula:
(g-104)/24)*9)+80

I repeated this with all the bins, and that is how you got your grade. The final distribution was:
  • 7 A+
  • 11 A
  • 24 B
  • 6 C
  • 2 D
  • 5 below
Any questions, come see me. If you think you've been mis-graded, come see me. I know of one question where I misinterpreted some student's answers. If you think you got it right but scored abysmally on one section, it might be you.



Thursday, October 28, 2010

Viruses & Malware

Continued the Dark Side slides through cookies.

Talked about the different types of malware. Viruses can be classified by how they gain access to a system, and what they do once they're in.

Ways to get in:
  • Trojan horse
  • worm
  • root kit
What they actually do (not a complete list):
  • wabbit (massive self-cloning to clog system)
  • Adware
  • Spyware
  • Zombie - Botnet
Just realized I did NOT talk about zombies and botnets in the 202 class.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Starting Security

All technology, including the internet, was designed and built by people for the use of people. This idea should always be remembered when dealing with internet security.

What is security? Protecting things of value. What has value? Anything we give value to. Recall the WoW kid and his non-understanding parent.

We did the "Dark side of the internet" slides up to Tiger Woods.

All nefarious acts on the internet have two categories: technical and social.
Recall the graph of "how to contact the person:" there were three branches: legit, tech hacking, and social engineering.

Technical (or straight hacking) defeats systems to obtain information or carry out the ill-intended deed. Social engineering is executing a con: tricking someone into giving something up. All false internet activity falls somewhere in the space defined by those two.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Topics for Mid-Term

definitions of terms
client/server model
server-/client-side processing
DNS
Server/Local copies
history of the internet
IP addresses
Binary
Size of data
HTML
CSS
hex colors
web browsers

Monday, October 18, 2010

Thursday October 14th:
Went over the turnin procedure for the website. We then had a nice revisit of binary number representation, converting between binary and decimal.

Tuesday October 12: No Class for Columbus Day

Thursday October 7th:
Worked on websites, I believe.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

BIg Website Project

September 30 we introduced the big website project. The requirements are here: http://91-113-f10-ms.wiki.uml.edu/WebsiteProject

October 5 we worked on the project in-class, with the goals of
  • 2 pages, linked together
  • CSS file created and set up

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Week 4: Mechanics and Downloads

We've done IP addresses, in that we know they identify computers on a network. We've looked at DNS, the domain name service that connects the name (uml.edu) to a number (129.63.1.11). This week, we asked the question "why do IP address numbers go 0 to 255?" The answer required learning about binary numbers.

Binary is the two-state representation of numbers inside a computer. For more references on binary numbers, look online. Try http://www.mathsisfun.com/binary-digits.html or http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-from-Decimal-to-Binary

We can now convert a base-10 decimal number into and out of base-2 binary representation.

This week we also learned about WinSCP, a program that lets us transfer files between the web server and our local machine. New concepts were introduced:
  • local vs. server copy
  • images
With WinSCP and a text editor (like jEdit or notepad++), we can edit our webpages locally on our computers, then upload them to server or all to see when we're ready.