Tech Lite Quiz

1.

• Health care pros make the right decisions in lung cancer cases only about 50% of the time while this partnership between IBM and WellPoint is accurate in its decisions over 90% of the time. One reason for this success is that it was able to ingest tens of thousands of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s (renowned cancer center) patient records and histories.

• Now headed by Manoj Saxena, which entity that became popular in 2011, is this?

• IBM Watson

2.

• Meaning ‘world’ in several languages such as Arabic, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili and Turkish, it’s a game engine created by KirmaanAboobaker while working at Crytek

• A modified version of the engine is used for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game

• Critically acclaimed games such as Far Cry 3 and 4 also use this engine

• What’s the word?

3.

• Who’s the only CEO to have been featured on the cover of Vogue?

• Really, it’s not that hard!

• Marissa Mayer

4.

• Xkcd strip explaining what?

• Instagram terms of use circa 2013

5*.

• ___ has laser cup ventilation, base layer technology and central thermoregulation. It has enhanced stretchability and moisture releasing properties. Each one is made from 33 recycled plastic bottles. FITB.

• Indian cricket team’s world cup jersey

6.

• This is a description from HowStuffWorks.com:

• A piston fires. The next piston fires at 315°. There is a 405° gap. A piston fires. The next piston fires at 315°. There is a 405° gap. And the cycle continues.

• What is being described?

• The Harley Davidson – Potato Potato sound

7.

This law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines:

A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

Which is the law being talked about?

Metcalfe’s Law

8.

• Gillian Jacobs (who portrays Britta Perry in the series Community) directed a video titled “The Queen of Code” which tells the story of Grace Hopper, a rear admiral in the US Navy.

• A programmer on the Harvard Mark 1 and UNIVAC, she encouraged programmers to share common portions of programs. By 1949, programs contained mnemonics that were transformed into binary code instructions executable by the computer. Admiral Hopper extended this to create the world’s first what?

• She created the world’s first compiler, the A-O

9.

• This is a technique in which a signal generated with a particular bandwidth is deliberately spread in the frequency domain. These signals are difficult to intercept because an eavesdropper may have difficulty intercepting a transmission in real time if the pseudorandom sequence is not known. Also, these are highly resistant to fading and narrowband radiation.

• It was widely used in World War II and later in WiFi, CDMA and Bluetooth.

• What technology? (contd)

• This was co-invented by actress for which she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. The actress, often promoted as "world's most beautiful woman“ is remembered for her role in the first love making scene in movies (in the 1933 film Ecstasy).

• Identify the actress.

• Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum

• Hedy Lemarr

10*.

• Patent for?

• Nike AirMAG / Back to the Future shoes

11.

• The Cortex is a 3d printed version developed by Jake Evill. He invented this because of the problems he faced when wearing the existing solution, primarily the itching involved. This involves the scanning of an affected part of the body with a hacked Kinect.

• What is this meant for?

• Cast for fractures that is lightweight, washable, ventilated and recyclable

12.

• Alfred W. Fielding and Mark Chavannes invented this but did not know what to do with it. Hence they advertized it as a must-have interior decoration for the hip generation. This, as a wallpaper never took off. But somehow they convinced IBM that this would be best for the packaging of the IBM 1401. What is this, which has an electronic version in Japan called Puchipuchi?

• Bubblewrap

13.

• Snake

14.

• Inspiration for?

• Y U No meme

15*.

• In 2013, Syrian rebels fired mortar shells at government forces, which goes against the company X’s recommendations that state that its product could lead to death if used with armoury

• A year or so before this, X was ridiculed for forbidding some of its customers from using their product to build nuclear or chemical weapons among others

• For 6 months after its release, it was illegal (quite ironically) to use a product by X for the sole purpose it was launched to serve

• Apple• iPad

• iTunes EULA

• Safari for Windows

16.

• In July 2006, brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive started a company in California

• Their mother is the twin sister of the woman shown on the next slide

• The woman shown is a dietician/nutritionist who has run her own nutrition business for over forty years in eight cities and three countries and is also a professional model. Her New York magazine cover won best magazine cover in the USA

• The depicted woman’s son is (arguably) more famous than her. ID the son.

• Elon Musk

17.

• In the year 2000, the IgNobel Award for Computer Science was presented to Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona

• His software uses complex algorithms that detects speed, motion and force on the keyboard to disable it when something happens. Niswander says ‘The difference between normal human typing and …… typing is not that ….. type gibberish’

• FAQs from the website:• Q: Does ____ work on Windows Vista?

A: Yes! • Q: Does ____ work on Windows 7?

A: Yes! • Q: Does ____ work on Windows XP?

A: Yes! • Q: Does ____ work on Windows 2000?

A: Yes!

• It does not have an Ubuntu/Mac version

• What does his software detect?

• Cat typing

18.

• What is this mark found on DSLRs?

• Film plane mark or focal plane mark

• Sometimes photographers may want to know the exact location of the sensor/screen and hence the mark

19.

• Upon the discovery of ‘the most adorable bug’ in the Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi Foundation Head of Communications Liz Upton said “you can take your naked Pi 2 in the sunshine for a picnic or take it to a rave, and it’ll be perfectly solid. Just don’t take it on the red carpet at the Oscars.”

• Which physics principle explains why it occurs?

• Photoelectric effect

• It crashes when you take a photograph of it

• Very high-intensity light bursts "confuse" the WL-CSP package component and cause the core voltage to drop.

20*.

• His father was an expert on the Tamil language while his mother’s father was the chief engineer of the Madras Railway Company. He was conceived in Orissa in 1912.

• In one of his papers, he proposed a theory of morphogenesis, or how identical copies of a single cell differentiate, for example, into an organism with arms and legs, a head and tail. 60 years after his death, experimental results have been found to validate his theory.

• Who is this?

• Alan Turing

21.

• Tomohiro Nishikado spent over a year (1977-1978) to get the hardware right. But he was not able to get this as fast as he wanted because of the number of objects. When he explained this problem to others, they told him that it wasn’t a bug, but a feature.

• What feature?

• Space Invaders speeding up because of the lesser number of objects on the screen

22.

• Ogaki Kyoristu Bank of Japan will introduce ATMs that use palm scanners in place of cash cards, it said Wednesday. The bank said the new machines will allow customers to withdraw or deposit cash and check their balances by placing their hand on a scanner and entering their birthday plus a pin number. They announced the new ATMs with the slogan “You are your cash card.”

• According to the bank, what was the reason for introducing this new technology?

• Many people lost all forms of identification in the earthquake/tsunami

23.

• Identify this (left) positive gain amplifier which uses this (right) circuit developed in 1891.

• Who, as a part of his master’s degree thesis, figured out how to make this with a stable output amplitude and low distortion (a pretty important breakthrough)?

• He, along with his batch mate at Stanford University founded a company which made high precision versions of these.

• Wein Bridge Oscillators

• William Hewlett cofounded HP with David Packard.

24.

• In the Futurama episode “The Honking”, Bender visits a castle and sees the digits 0101100101 written in blood on the wall. Bender is more confused than spooked, but when he sees the digits reflected in the mirror as 1010011010 he is immediately terrified.

• Why would Bender be terrified by this?

● If you translate the mirrored sequence from binary to decimal you recover the number of the beast '666'

25*.

• This is a chip receiver from a UNIVAC key punch. What phrase in computer programming comes from such garbage collection artefactsof early computers?

Answer

• BitBucket

• Finals in a bit