Tech Lite
Tech LiteThis has 32 questionsIntended for finals, but you can move them to the prelims if we have an overflowIll send the prelims questions a little laterQuestion 0His father was an expert on the Tamil language while his mothers 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 ofmorphogenesis, 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?AnswerAlan TuringQuestion 1Vedanta Desika was challenged to write a thousand verses in one night. He not only aced the challenge with the paduka sahasram, he also hid a lot of gems in the work. Among them are these two shlokas on Lord Ranganatha.The second sloka is in fact, an anagram of the first. When encoded with the standard Katapayadi mapping, the second sloka acts as a key to reveal a solution to a problem often discussed in introductory programming courses.What problem?
AnswerThe Euler Knight problem
Question 2This happens because of a chain reaction that is set up. The dying creatures release a pheromone from glands found all over their body that they are in danger. Their kin come to help with all of them dying and bringing more of the creatures.Why will such a recursive structure bother geeks?
AnswerThis is how ants wreck gadgets. They short out the circuits and they get electrocuted in the process.Question 3There are two reasons why the language C# got its name.What are they?AnswerC# is the note just higher than C C# was seen as an improvement over C++ and hence was (C++)++ . Four + make a #.
Question 4This house you see here is an embassy in Prague. 10 years ago, it witnessed the killing of the Consul General, Michael Lekara Wayid by an enraged Ji Pasovsk. Why was Pasovsk angry?
AnswerPasovsk had lost over$600,000 because of Nigerian 419 scammers and hence took all his anger at the Nigearian Consul General.
Question 5File System Visualiser is a UNIX clone of the File System Navigator, an application that allows for the viewing of a file system in 3d. Built using OpenGL, this represents files (and directories) as cuboids with height indicative of size. It became a little popular in 1993, when what is thought to be an unrealistic Hollywood mockup turned out to have been inspired by FSV. What made FSV popular?Fsn is pronounced as fusion14
AnswerThe its a UNIX system scene in Jurassic Park
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9NgQuestion 6Countdown to Zero Day is a book written by Kim Zetter about the first digital weapon. A good part of the book is about an Iranian Uranium enrichment facility in Natanz and about the Programmable Logic Controllers (made by Siemens) the nuclear centrifuge used. What he describes as the weapon was used to greatly speed up the centrifuge so that it would eventually be destroyed while telling the computer that everything was all right.What was the first digital weapon?
AnswerStuxnet
Over 65% of the centrifuges were destroyed
19Question 7In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the main character is seen using SUBSTR(v.lname,1,1) = 'L'" instead of lname like 'L% in her SQL query, even though the latter is very often faster.What is a possible reason for using the former?
Answer Like creates an index if one is already not present and then searches on the indexSince, the title character does not want to risk the possibility of someone finding out that the system was hacked (by the presence of an index), she uses SUBSTR which checks element by element without using an indexQuestion 8Health 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 Ketterings (renowned cancer center) patient records and histories.Now headed by Manoj Saxena, which entity that became popular in 2011, is this? AnswerIBM Watson
Question 9Gillian 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 worlds first what?Answer She created the worlds first compiler, the A-OQuestion 10Upon 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 itll be perfectly solid. Just dont take it on the red carpet at the Oscars. What was the bug?Which physics principle explains why it occurs?AnswerIt crashes when you take a photograph of itphotoelectric effectVery high-intensity light bursts "confuse" the WL-CSP package component and cause the core voltage to drop.Question 11This self-folding robot made by Harvard and MIT engineers can be printed on composite paper. With the help of a bendable circuit board, it can unfold and become this robot. What inspired this?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M1zNIVGrjMAnswerOrigamiQuestion 12Jordan Mechner borrowed the technique of rotoscoping that he had learned about in his history of cinema class. He had his brother jump and traced his body shape and then digitalized it. What was this for?Video is in http://www.museumofplay.org/blog/chegheads/2014/10/jordan-mechner-collection-documents-revolution-in-game-graphics/Or in https://vimeo.com/53918011 AnswerThe jump in Prince of Persia
Question 13This method was invented by SP Sundaram from Sathyamangalam in 1934.Start with a list of integers between 1 and nFor all n/3>=i>=j>=1, cross out i+j+2ij if its
