Exam 15: Managing Information

Data mining is the ____.

Unsupervised data mining can be used to recognize ____ patterns.

Which of the following are included in intranets?

City of London For over a century, the city of London, England has had the worst traffic in Europe. Drivers spend half of their time not moving in their vehicles, and the average speed is 9 mph, down from 12 mph in 1903 when traffic consisted of horses and carriages instead of cars and trucks. To improve traffic, Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, imposed a "Congestion Zone" fee of £8 (about $13)per day for any vehicle that enters the eight square miles of central London between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. on weekdays. Drivers who come into the zone but don't pay will be fined any where from £60 ($96)to £180 ($290). The Transport for London and the consultants it hired broke the project into several different steps. First, 688 cameras were used in 203 locations to take accurate pictures of vehicles entering the congestion zone. At each camera site, a color and a black and white camera were used for each lane of traffic that was being monitored. In general, the cameras are only 90% accurate in reading the license plate numbers on the cars. But, with 688 cameras in total, multiple pictures are taken of each car, and partial pictures of license plates are matched with complete pictures, with the former tossed and the latter retained. Next, the pictures from the cameras are sent via a dedicated fiber-optic cable to an "image management store." Fiber-optic cables were needed because they're the biggest and fastest "pipes" available for sending data from one place to another. The lines were also dedicated so that the system was completely closed and secure. If other systems or networks went down, the congestion zone network would be unaffected. An "image management store" is basically a huge farm of networked, redundant servers. If one server goes down, you've got multiple backup servers running live with the same data. A huge farm of network servers was needed because the city anticipated processing a million pictures a day (again, remember that multiple pictures are taken of the 250,000 cars entering the zone each day). Once the pictures are snapped, transported via fiber-optic cable, and placed in the image management store, the next step is reading the license plate in the picture and then turning that image into readable text that actually matches license plate records already stored in government databases. Transport of London uses software that scans digitized documents-in this case, digital pictures-into ASCII text and then matches and compares multiple pictures of the same license plate. For example, imagine that a license plate is 12345678 and that the congestion cameras get three partial pictures (12345, 34567, and 5678)and one complete picture (12345678). The software had to be able to know that all four pictures were from the same vehicle, and then it had to know that it should use the last picture (12345678)and not the partial pictures when converting the picture to text. Finally, once the license plate was converted to text, the license plate number would then be matched with an existing license plate already recorded in a government database. At that point, congestion zone charges are linked with whoever owns the vehicles. Refer to City of London. What basic method of capturing information does the City of London use to identify and fine automobile drivers that enter the city's "Congestion Zone"?

A table showing the order frequencies as well as the average dollar value of the orders of different segments of a catalog retailer's market would be an example of ____.

WWYD Delta Airlines lose bags. They need to handle thousands of bags per day and then rush them to connecting planes or baggage carousels. The challenging logistics, however, don't make up for the impact of delays on passengers. In all, 31 million bags are delivered late worldwide each year. In the U.S., seven people per 1,000 passengers, or roughly one per plane, don't get their luggage on time, and they file 7.5 million mishandled baggage reports a year. Over the last decade, the three largest airlines, American, United, and Delta, have been the worst. Delta is 30 percent worse compared to the best airlines. Second, 28 percent more bags are delayed today compared to a decade ago. No wonder passengers are frustrated, especially when charged a handling fee for checked bags. Nothing like paying extra to have the airline lose your bags, especially when Delta brings in $952 million a year in bag fees! Passengers are beginning to realize that bag fees bring in much more than the cost to deliver bags, so they have every right to expect Delta to do a better job delivering bags. After all, if Amazon can send emails and texts notifying customers when their orders leave the warehouse, arrive at their local airports, and are delivered to their homes, then why can't Delta do the same thing with luggage that's supposed to never leave the airport? Delta Airline's historically poor job of handling baggage is clearly related to Delta trailing its competitors in the use of information technology to track and manage baggage handling. While Delta catches up with its competitors in terms of high-tech baggage handling systems, it is the first airline to offer real-time tracking of passengers' bags. Not unlike tracking an Amazon shipment, Delta's real-time tracking allow passengers to know precisely where their bags are from check-in, to the flight on which they're loaded, to the baggage carousel where they're hopefully waiting. Passengers receive a tracking number for each bag and can track its whereabouts using their smartphones. Should a bag be delayed, that tracking number is easily entered into baggage claim forms on Delta's website. The challenge for airlines such as Delta, which have begun or are considering self-tagging systems, is not capturing information or processing information, but protecting information. All airlines use bar codes on boarding passes, either printed from your home computer or from the check-in kiosk at the airport. An increasing number of airlines, including Delta, now send electronic boarding passes containing bar codes via email to passengers' smartphones to be scanned in place of bar codes on printed boarding passes. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA)says that paperless boarding passes are more secure "and will prevent fraudulent paper boarding passes that could be created and printed at home." Why? Because instead of physically examining a printed copy of a boarding pass, TSA agents will scan the bar code on the electronic boarding pass to ensure its validity at the checkpoint. Passengers will still be required to show photo identification so officers can validate that the name on the boarding pass matches the name on the ID. Refer to WWYD Delta. When its agents require passengers to present identification, TSA is protecting the information encoded on the boarding pass using the technique of:

Which of the following statements about data mining is true?

Because they are inexpensive and easy to use, ____, which convert printed text and pictures into digital images, have become an increasingly popular method for capturing data electronically.

The two major types of data mining are ____.

Protecting information is the process of ensuring that data are reliably and consistently retrievable in a usable format for authorized users but no one else.

Jupiter Communications An entrepreneur developed Kibu.com as an online fashion magazine for girls between the ages of 13 and 18. The messages from Kibu's advertisers were tailored for and intriguing to a teenage audience. Revenue came from companies that sponsored various channels and features on the site, such as the Fashion Channel. Kibu had a loyalty program, the kPoints xChange, which gave site visitors an incentive to communicate with the site and its sponsors. Each time they did, they earned points that could be exchanged for merchandise such as CDs, movie tickets, or beaded jewelry. Visitors who filled out surveys could win one of the 10,000 Kibu Boxes. Box recipients got still more points if they went to the Box Channel and filled out forms telling one to three of the participating companies how they liked the products inside. By September 2000, however, the site closed, and its founders returned the remaining start-up capital to investors. Refer to Jupiter Communications. An individual's unprocessed response to a Kibu survey would be an example of ____.

The first airline that used technology to allow passengers to buy their plane tickets and reserve their seats online had a first-mover advantage.

Most ____ work by using a collection of "if-then" rules to sort through information and recommend a course of action.

The three methods of tracing products through a distribution system are paper records, bar codes, and radio frequency identification tags. Which of the following statements about the tracing of products is true?

Have you ever purchased a book or CD on Amazon.com and noticed that as soon as you put your selection in the shopping cart, you were offered a series of other items that people who made the same purchase as you did also bought? This would be an example of ____ data mining.

____ are a hybrid of executive information systems and intranets.

Bar codes and document scanners are common methods of electronically capturing data.

City of London For over a century, the city of London, England has had the worst traffic in Europe. Drivers spend half of their time not moving in their vehicles, and the average speed is 9 mph, down from 12 mph in 1903 when traffic consisted of horses and carriages instead of cars and trucks. To improve traffic, Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, imposed a "Congestion Zone" fee of £8 (about $13)per day for any vehicle that enters the eight square miles of central London between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. on weekdays. Drivers who come into the zone but don't pay will be fined any where from £60 ($96)to £180 ($290). The Transport for London and the consultants it hired broke the project into several different steps. First, 688 cameras were used in 203 locations to take accurate pictures of vehicles entering the congestion zone. At each camera site, a color and a black and white camera were used for each lane of traffic that was being monitored. In general, the cameras are only 90% accurate in reading the license plate numbers on the cars. But, with 688 cameras in total, multiple pictures are taken of each car, and partial pictures of license plates are matched with complete pictures, with the former tossed and the latter retained. Next, the pictures from the cameras are sent via a dedicated fiber-optic cable to an "image management store." Fiber-optic cables were needed because they're the biggest and fastest "pipes" available for sending data from one place to another. The lines were also dedicated so that the system was completely closed and secure. If other systems or networks went down, the congestion zone network would be unaffected. An "image management store" is basically a huge farm of networked, redundant servers. If one server goes down, you've got multiple backup servers running live with the same data. A huge farm of network servers was needed because the city anticipated processing a million pictures a day (again, remember that multiple pictures are taken of the 250,000 cars entering the zone each day). Once the pictures are snapped, transported via fiber-optic cable, and placed in the image management store, the next step is reading the license plate in the picture and then turning that image into readable text that actually matches license plate records already stored in government databases. Transport of London uses software that scans digitized documents-in this case, digital pictures-into ASCII text and then matches and compares multiple pictures of the same license plate. For example, imagine that a license plate is 12345678 and that the congestion cameras get three partial pictures (12345, 34567, and 5678)and one complete picture (12345678). The software had to be able to know that all four pictures were from the same vehicle, and then it had to know that it should use the last picture (12345678)and not the partial pictures when converting the picture to text. Finally, once the license plate was converted to text, the license plate number would then be matched with an existing license plate already recorded in a government database. At that point, congestion zone charges are linked with whoever owns the vehicles. Refer to City of London. The City of London located 688 cameras in 203 locations to take accurate pictures of vehicles entering its "Congestion Zone." Multiple pictures are taken of each car, and partial pictures of license plates are matched with complete pictures, with the former tossed and the latter retained. The cumulative store of all the photographs would be classified as ____. Once the pictures of individual cars were matched and the irrelevant photos tossed, ____ was created.

Data mining typically splits a data set in half, finds patterns in one half, and then tests the validity of those patterns by trying to find them again in the second half of the data set.

Why is information strategically important for organizations?