Well I got 12/12
What a terrible survey
A terrifying new quiz has indicated that the state of knowledge among Americans regarding IT topics is abysmally low: but the questions are such as to indicate that even the drafters of the quiz didn't know much. The quiz in question is one from Pew Research, intended to find out "What Internet Users Know about Technology and …
not really internet questions
i don't use failbook and twatter so i can go wrong already with 3 questions
i never was inspired by an i-thingy so what do i care what year it was invented and what does this have to do with internet?
real questions are not really there , just a few
made 9 out of 12
but my real internet knowledge from the beginning up was not tested at all
but what can you expect in an age where almost every kiddo thinks that f.b. is THE internet :(
Exactly - this is the typical worthless trivia drivel game shows care so much to put on display and reward: doesn't matter what it is about as long as it's guaranteed to be useless for making any vaguely important decision about anything. That's what we want people to keep their minds occupied with after all, otherwise some of them might actually start thinking for themselves and asking uncomfortable questions, innit...
"I doubt that there will be a tech crisis because people don't know the date that the first iPhone appeared."
Even people who queued up to buy the first model wouldn't remember what year that was by now... Unless some other significant event happened around the same time.
Seems odd someone's "web IQ" would be based on the knowledge of the past and present CEOs of random tech companies.
I had not heard of Sheryl Sandberg until I read this article, why should I?
And if you had, why should you be able to identify her by sight? The quiz is monumentally stupid and ill-conceived, but those two questions are the worst of the lot. (Not to mention inaccessible to visually-impaired users.)
Pew should fire whoever's behind this particular piece of rubbish. It's that bad. And the statistical analysis presented in the Pew article adds insult to injury, pretending the data captured by this survey means anything at all.
Apparently, I didn't answer the question about twitter, didn't know the one about the Facebook uni (guessed Stanford, Harvard seemed too obvious)
Would have been slightly less, had I not read the article, didn't know the one about Mosaic, also had no idea who the woman was. In my defence, not because she is a woman, but because she works for facebook. I also would probably not recognise the higher ups from many other tech firms.
PDF question also dubious - I'm pretty sure there's at least one e-mail client on some device somewhere which can't send an attachment!It didn't say it had to be readable at the other end, so you could send it as the body, rather than the attachment.
Then again, it's easy to write a mail client which will only take keyboard input (just as some Unix passwd commands only take keyboard input - not command-line redirects) , so couldn't send any file (even a text one).
Then again, it's easy to write a mail client which will only take keyboard input (just as some Unix passwd commands only take keyboard input - not command-line redirects) , so couldn't send any file (even a text one).
Bah. Uuencode it and enter the data by hand. That's what we did in the old days. Not like today's lazy point-and-click users.
No doubt that's what the authors had in mind when they anticipated such objections. Which they surely did, for such a well-crafted study.
Then again, it's easy to write a mail client which will only take keyboard input (just as some Unix passwd commands only take keyboard input - not command-line redirects) , so couldn't send any file (even a text one).
Even systems that take keyboard input from a hard-wired terminal only can send files, although it may take quite a bit of effort, and not all options may be available to Joe Random User. You could for instance UUencode the file, send it to the puncher on the ASR33, start the mail program, read back the punch tape and hey presto, you've got it ready to send. Or even UUencode by hand (the algorithm is not that difficult) and just type the lines as you encode them.
"PDF question also dubious"
What PDF question?
1: WWW vs Internet
2: Twitter vs 140 characters
3: Moore's Law vs transistors
4: Privacy policy vs confidential data
5: First popular graphical web browser
6: Photo of Billy Gates
7: Photo of Sheryl Sandberg (I'm presuming a sandberg would sink a camel if its name was Titanic)
8: iPhone year of release
9: Kilobyte vs megabyte
10: Net neutrality
11: First university on Facebook
12: What does URL stand for
(12/12 - but I only answered number 7 correctly because she was mentioned in the article.)
I wonder if its varying the questions for some reason - perhaps randomly [tries again... same questions], or perhaps if earlier questions are answered incorrectly [tries again, getting them all wrong... same questions].
Odd.
> I wonder if its varying the questions for some reason
Yes, I imagine it is, and it's probably setting a cookie to fix the set that you see. I didn't get a question about where hashtags were used, f'rinstance.
Quizzes like this are like the glossy magazine equivalent: a bit of fun for the participants. If anyone is basing any sort of decisions on the results, they're insane, especially since one could lie in the demographics section. I'd like to see the results for centennarians.
Although, I wouldn't have known who that Facebook exec was without reading this article first.
Given that <1% of respondents got 12 right, I'd say the quiz was pitched at the right level and yes El Reg you're being harsh :)
Given the BBC has to explain what IP addresses are regarding the latest anti-terror bill tells you everything about general internet knowledge.
But why should most people know about IP addresses? It's for the most part hidden and never needed. If it was't for my job, I'd doubt I would know.
Ask someone to find the brake servo in a car or the carbon brushes on a washing machine, you would get equally blank looks, yet they are essential parts of each device, hidden away until they go wrong and you need to either find out yourself and fix or get an "expert" to fix it for you.
Ask someone to find the brake servo in a car or the carbon brushes on a washing machine, you would get equally blank looks
I think that's the point though. This whole "technology" quiz issue smacks of old-timer grease-monkeys complaining about a "cars" pop-quiz which contains only questions about celebrities, upholstery, and release years - nothing about torque, brake servos, hansel sprockets, etc..
get an "expert" to fix it for you
For some reason, no-one expects the car fix to happen in the next 10 minutes ("that's all the time I have") and to be thrown in for free ("make a commercial gesture, here"). This is followed by "what is antivirus"?
Fuck all those people.
This whole "technology" quiz issue smacks of old-timer grease-monkeys complaining about a "cars" pop-quiz which contains only questions about celebrities, upholstery, and release years - nothing about torque, brake servos, hansel sprockets, etc..
Read the Pew article. They're claiming the quiz data measures something called "Web IQ" (already a clear indication it's meaningless, to anyone capable of critical thinking - but so many aren't), and they present various statistical analyses and conclusions. If they're going to take it seriously, they deserve the criticism.
... is for me the most interesting thing about this. As the article points out complete ignorance ought to lead to a 50-50 split so to have more than two-thirds of answers wrong is significant.
I'd love to know if people thought they knew what Moore's law was but were wrong, if they just thought transistors had nothing to do with computers (because they are in old radios?), or what.
Even if they had looked up the answer to this one it is easy to be led astray. If, for instance, you visit mooreslaw.org — a site which certainly sounds authoritative — and the home page is headed "Moore's Law, or How overall processing power for computers will double every two years".
The text then states:
"Moore’s Law is a computing term which originated around 1970; the simplified version of this law states that processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every two years. A quick check among technicians in different computer companies shows that the term is not very popular but the rule is still accepted.
"To break down the law even further, it specifically stated that the number of transistors on an affordable CPU would double every two years (which is essentially the same thing that was stated before) but ‘more transistors’ is more accurate."
So if you don't read very far you will be considerably misled. No wonder people are confused.
At least Wikipedia is more helpful.
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