Digital Technology Merit Badge

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduction Replaces Computer MB You probably know more than me about the latest technology, Old Fart! Simple Rules: Scout Oath & Scout Law.
• #3: Blue Card should be filled out, legible and signed by your scoutmaster. Blue Card is your admission ticket…should be filled out, including my information. You should have a workbook printed out and filled out to the best of your ability.
• #4: Who read the pamphlet? The Workbook is NOT required, but highly recommended. When I checkoff requirements, I will need to look at what you have written. Cyber Chip – Requirement #1 Should already be done! If it has not, make sure it is before February.
• #5: Our troop has used a Tech Chip for years. We don’t clip corners…like cub scouts might for their Widdlin’ Chip…we take it. Must be re-learned by teaching it to other scouts using the EDGE method. Every year.
• #6: Different Level depending on your grade. Must be recharged every year. BSA is embracing technology. Teaches internet safety. We won’t be covering it…you should have already earned it.
• #7: Emphasis is on Brief. Requirement says “Discuss” not “listen” so you need to engage. If you do not participate, you will not complete this requirement, or others that require similar actions. Much more fun to look to future advances….
• #8: Abacus, or counting frame, is a calculating tool that was in use centuries before the adoption of the written modern numeral system and is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia and Africa. Logarithms were introduced by John Napier in the early 17th century as a means to simplify calculations. They were rapidly adopted by navigators, scientists, engineers, and others to perform computations more easily, using slide rules and logarithm tables. Tedious multi-digit multiplication steps can be replaced by table look-ups and simpler addition because of the fact—important in its own right—that the logarithm of a product is the sum of the logarithms of the factors: log_b(xy) = log_b (x) + log_b (y), provided that b, x and y are all positive and b ≠ 1. Slide Rule: a mechanical analog computer. The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but is not normally used for addition or subtraction. Pascaline, invented by Pascal, was primarily intended as an adding machine (The First Calculator) which could add and subtract two numbers directly, but its description could, with a bit of a stretch, be extended to a "mechanical calculator, in that at least in principle it was possible, admittedly rather laboriously, to multiply and divide by repetition.
• #9: The Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom, invented by Joseph Jacquard, that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns. The loom was controlled by a "chain of cards", a number of punched cards, laced together into a continuous sequence. Charles Babbage designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed. Difference Engine No. 2, built faithfully to the original drawings, consists of 8,000 parts, weighs five tons, and measures 11 feet long. George Boole developed logic that allows thoughts to be expressed in mathlike terms. AND, OR, NOT. Still used today in code.
• #11: Census every 10 years…by 1880 over 49 million people…took 7 years to complete. Herman Hollerith developed a punch card machine; every person had a card with various data on it.
• #12: general purpose electro-mechanical computer that was used in the war effort during the last part of World War II to break the German Enigma Code Machine.
• #13: first electronic general-purpose computer. It was digital and capable of being reprogrammed to solve "a large class of numerical problems“ Rumors/ legend is that the Philly lights would dim when it was powered on. 5 million hand soldered joints. Used for hydrogen bomb research.
• #14: Transistors, much smaller than vacuum tubes and 1,000 times faster.
• #15: Next breakthrough…Integrated Circuits! AKA microchip. Which led to CPUs, all the integrated circuits onto one chip…made the personal computer possible.
• #16: This computer was one of the first "home" computers ever made, it was sold as a kit, but for additional money, you could buy one fully assembled. It had no keyboard, the "program" had to be entered with the switches located on the front panel of the "computer", and as it didn't have video output (yet), the result was displayed via LEDs. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff created BASIC for the Altair, and formed…Microsoft Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple, and in 1977 released the Apple II, the first color computer.
• #17: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff created BASIC for the Altair, and formed…Microsoft. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple, and in 1977 released the Apple II, the first color computer. Original IBM Microsoft computer was $3,000, over $7,500 in today’s dollars. First Apple II was around $1,300. In 1980 you have the IBM Personal Computer being released which combined with their licensing model that allows "clones" kick starts computers on user desks "decentralizing" IT outside of the datacenter. It also leads to computers at home. Grandparents: Mechanical cash registers / mechanical adding machines. Then digital calculators limited functions (+/-*%). Data delivered to them via "greenbar reports" printed on impact or maybe dot matrix printers. Later some interaction with dumb terminals. IT was centralized in the computer room, only used at work. Parents: Personal computers on desks at work. Personal computers at home were mostly used stand-alone. You carried data to-from work via 1.44MB floppy diskettes. If you wanted to go "on-line" you used dial-up modems to services like AOL or CompuServe. Later we get connected to the internet...
• #18: "Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
• #19: "Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
• #20: Zeros and Ones
• #21: Memory - sometimes confused between RAM vs Storage SSD have replaced HDD
• #22: Numbers you can’t even comprehend.
• #23: 35 years…64x more data, almost weightless, relatively cheap.
• #24: The original design would have been cool…only those who had earned the merit badge would be “in the know”…too bad it couldn’t be produced. Wonder why another symbol wasn’t selected when the original wouldn’t work? What might have been a good symbol to represent this merit badge?
• #25: Get up, and walk for 10 seconds…How many steps did you take? How many steps to walk around Earth? Well lets do math here. The circumference of earth is 24,901.55 miles. In feet that is 131,480,184'. If a regular person takes a step of approx 2 feet, then it would take a person 65,740,092 steps. That means you could walk around the Earth over 304 times in 10 seconds! How fast for could a computer hike the Appalachian Trail. It’s 2,168.1 miles long, which means 11,447,568 feet. 5,723,784 steps, means a computer could hike the AT 3,494 times in 10 seconds…still not really comprehendible…how about in one second. A computer could hike the AT about 350 times in one second. It takes us 5-7 months to do it once! We could do it 350 times in somewhere around 175 years! It takes about the same amount of computing to answer one Google Search query as all the computing done -- in flight and on the ground -- for the entire Apollo program, all 11 years, 17 mission program!
• #26: The amount of computing power in things like ENIAC compared with a new computer, even something like a super cheap calculator. You're talking about numbers that are millions and trillions of times different, which we can't comprehend. As an example, IPv4 vs IPv6, there aren't even enough IP4 addresses to give out one to each Chinese person, let alone the rest of the world. But there are enough IP6 addresses to give a few million to each grain of sand on the entire planet.
• #27: What will the future be like? Chromebooks, Cloud computing…already here.
• #28: Wearables to monitor your health, virtual reality projections, sensors everywhere to monitor things (temperature, weather, YOU), Internet of Things, IPv6, biological/digital hybrid systems, Quantum computing, non-binary logic, optical circuits, expansion of the surveillance state, drones, RFIDs or facial recognition to monitor your movements, data mining to "profile" you (by corporations and the gov.), general loss of anonymity, increased dependence on computers.
• #29: What will the future be like?
• #30: Can you imagine this?
• #31: You either need to participate or write down your answers. You must actively engage to complete this merit badge.
• #32: Text is entered by humans or could be scanned using Optical Character Recognition. doc, docx, and PDF are not really text files. They're in a binary format. Sound is sampled. A simple analog sine wave is sampled into digital form. Pictures are divided into cells and each one represents a lightness and color value. Videos are not necessarily a series of pictures; almost none are. They are a set of key frames (pictures) followed by a serious of change data to that picture. New pictures are provided when A) a significant change in the picture occurs (scene change) or B) periodically to ensure the change data hasn't drifted. You see this when a video is horribly out of sync in certain blocks of the data; the change data and the key frames have gotten out of sync.
• #33: The "restored" block for Lossy should be the same size as the original but speckled with 'holes'. A 3 minute song run through an MP3 encoder is still 3 minutes long but the fidelity of the sound is reduced to make it smaller. The higher the sampling rate the better the quality but the larger the file.
• #34: Left is the original; Right is a lossy compressed version of same sound file.
• #35: You might not be able to see the difference in the butterfly or the mountain, but the kid’s face is easy to see the loss in quality.
• #36: A digital scale, useful, accurate. Made better with a wireless connection to the internet, so you can track your weight without remembering to write it down.
• #37: Mr. Hand? The first cell phones were useful. We were no longer tied to the home or a cord. We could make calls from the car or anywhere close to a cell tower. How that first cell phone has changed…we carry around mini-computers now, capable of things not even imaginable when I was a kid (back when dirt was invented). Word you may not know, and your kids certainly won’t (Long Distance Bill)
• #38: other similarities? other differences?
• #39: Networking allows devices to communicate with each other or the outside network. Sharing data, sharing devices, monitoring (e.g. baby monitor), the router's NAT & firewall services protect the home devices from the outside net. Besides the ethernet, you can also have a bluetooth personal area network (PAN).
• #40: A possible diagram of a home network. What else could be there? Wireless printer? Security cameras? Bluetooth?
• #41: An office network could look like this. What else could be on an office network?
• #43: An application can start out with a white-board or story board set of ideas or sketches. Details are added to the design until the "story" of what the software should do is complete. Then the diagrams or sketches would go to a software developer who writes the instructions for the application using "source code". Source code are instructions for the computer that are in a human-readable format. The source code is sent through a "compiler" which verifies that the source code followed the correct syntax (coding rules) and translates the source code into "object code" which the computer can use to execute the instructions.
• #44: Word, part of the Microsoft Office suite, professional version $400! LibreOffice Writer, open source, FREE! Google Docs, also FREE, and cloud-based. You will use that for Requirement 6.
• #45: I grew up with Pong, Asteroids and Pac-Man. Today, the gaming industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. You certainly know much more about Games than I will ever know. What do you play? Why?
• #46: What utilities do you use?
• #47: Here’s one of my favorites…because of Photoshop and other photo editors, we can no longer trust any photograph! Ever. Unless you took it, you can’t trust it.
• #48: Google’s free Picasa.
• #49: iMovie for OSX
• #50: YouTube editor, Power Director, Final Cut.
• #51: Often included in “free” software.
• #52: First line of defense is using your own brain. Don't click on stuff. If you get a note from a friend, does it look like something he would send? Backup your data! Don't use IE. Use Firefox and turn off Java Script with "No Scripts" plug-in. Much more diligent in checking SSL certs than Chrome.
• #53: We’ll cover A. B & C need to be done at home.
• #54: Not sure how much detail they want here but you could include things like the router doing DHCP Client and Server functions, Network Address Transversal, and packet routing. Public vs. local IP addresses. WAN vs LAN. Another key concept is DNS name resolution.
• #58: Research and print out 3 examples of a campfire program or court of honor. If you are close to Eagle Scout, you might want to focus on an Eagle Court of Honor, as you should be planning this on your own!
• #59: https://dev.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ Great site for checking a security certificate. Run google.com through it and let me know what score Google gets? Think it is an A? Why not?
• #60: Hacker may have installed his certificate and is waiting for you to log in.
• #62: Two Factor Authentication or Multi Factor Authentication Good digital citizenship, taking care of your data, your security
• #63: Two Factor Authentication or Multi Factor Authentication Good digital citizenship, taking care of your data, your security
• #64: You must do THREE and you must share your work with me. Please use Google Docs. If you can’t for some reason, you can use a USB drive, but you might not get it back.
• #68: Would you want to include any of the parts from the anti-software patent movement? Touch on the topic of "patent trolls"? How about referencing a broken patent system that grants patents for obvious things like Amazon's one-click checkout or sliding screen contents using your finger?
• #70: fines and penalties Software theft is a serious matter. If you or your company get caught copying software, you may be held liable under both civil and criminal law. If the copyright owner brings a civil action against you, the owner can seek to stop you from using its software immediately and can also request monetary damages. The copyright owner may then choose between actual damages, which include the amount it has lost because of your infringement as well as any profits attributable to the infringement, or statutory damages, which can be as much as $150,000 for each program copied. In addition, the government can criminally prosecute you for copyright infringement. If convicted, you can be fined up to $250,000, sentenced to jail for up to five years, or both. Appeals court approves $675,000 fine for student who illegally downloaded 30 songsRead more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/appeals-court-denies-piracy-penalty-plea/#ixzz3O0L9KBV6 Follow us: @digitaltrends on Twitter | digitaltrendsftw on Facebook
• #71: Do you want to include anything on "copyleft", GPL, or Creative Commons? It's possible to get compensation for your "intellectual effort" without using copyright protection.
• #76: You might want to add something on cleansing the drives before disposing the computer equipment. Protect yourself by getting rid of your data with something like Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) which wipes the entire drive.
• #78: Zero Export Recycler’s Mount Holly Springs  The Computer Barn Carlisle e-Stewards – Every Staples
• #79: Zero Export Recycler’s Mount Holly Springs  The Computer Barn Carlisle e-Stewards – Every Staples
• #80: Use rechargeable batteries