Exam 17: Managing Information

Moore's law refers to the prediction that the cost of computing will drop by 50 percent every 2 years as computer-processing power doubles.

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 ____.

Association patterns are also called sequence patterns.

____ is the process of discovering unknown patterns and relationships in large amounts of data.

Moore's law accounts for the rapid increase in power and reduction in both size and price of computer equipment over the past 35 years.

Briefly distinguish between knowledge and information.

Discuss the issues, advantages, and risks associated with using information to gain or maintain strategic advantage.

To properly secure data and data networks, a manager should use all of the following EXCEPT ____.

For the purposes of data mining, ____ patterns are just the opposite of association patterns.

Which of the following are included in intranets?

Just a teaspoon too much or too little of a single ingredient can turn a great cake into a mediocre cake. The ability to know just how much to add, how long to stir, and how the cake should smell when it is cooked is a skill that a long-time baker would have. Through the use of ____, others can capture this specialized knowledge.

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.

Pioneering differential refers to the strategic advantage that companies earn by being the first in an industry to use new information technology to substantially lower costs or to differentiate a product or service from competitors.

The data used in data mining typically come from ____ that store huge amounts of data that have been prepared for data mining analysis by being cleaned of errors and redundancy.

The goal of an executive information system is to provide information that is accurate, complete, relevant and ____.

What does it mean when someone says that an organization protects its information? Why it is important to do so? What are the basic steps to properly securing data and data networks?

Intranets are ____.

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.

Define data mining. Briefly describe the two general approaches to data mining.

In today's hypercompetitive business environments, capital (i.e., money) is still more important than information for business success.