Exam 16: Managing Information in a Global World

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

In today's hypercompetitive business environments,capital-that is,money-is still more important than information for business success.

Although firewalls can protect personal computers and network services connected to the corporate network,people away from their offices who interact with their company networks via the Internet face a safety risk. Which of the following technologies has proven to be a viable solution to this problem?

European privacy regulations are more lax than U.S. privacy regulations.

Through which of the following can a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals access information about its sales and share new product information with drug store chains?

Michelle is the owner of a large chain of successful department stores. One reason for her success comes from the supply chain system. When a customer purchases an item from a store,the supplier is able to know immediately if the safe stock level has been reached. If it has,a shipment of product is sent immediately and directly to the store. This allows Michelle to dedicate more space to retail and less space to storage. What technology enables Michelle to have such a supply chain system?

Narrative 16-1 Take a look in your purse or wallet-do you see an Air Miles card You and about 10 million Canadians have one. They can be used at stores including Shell,Sobeys,Rexall,and others. They work by recording your purchase history and uniquely linking it to your Air Miles program number. You can redeem the points you acquire for rewards in various forms. -Refer to Narrative 16-1. For which of the following would Air Miles use firewalls?

Kroger used infrared cameras to count the number of customers in its stores and waiting at checkout registers. Which of the following characteristics of information does this best represent?

Which of the following generates ASCII text in the process of capturing information?

Which of the following is an example of a security problem that may threaten data and data networks?

Why is knowledge important?

The term data mining refers to the process of discovering unknown patterns and relationships in large amounts of data.

Why are intranets growing in popularity?

What happens to create a data cluster?

In which type of data mining does the user simply tell the data mining software to uncover whatever patterns and relationships it can find in a data set?

What is first-mover advantage?

According to which of the following rules will the cost of computing drop by 50 percent as computer-processing power doubles every 18 months?

The two basic methods of capturing information are continuous and periodic.

Narrative 16-1 Take a look in your purse or wallet-do you see an Air Miles card You and about 10 million Canadians have one. They can be used at stores including Shell,Sobeys,Rexall,and others. They work by recording your purchase history and uniquely linking it to your Air Miles program number. You can redeem the points you acquire for rewards in various forms. -Refer to Narrative 16-1. Where would the information Air Miles collects be stored?

Narrative 16-2 For more than a century,the city of London,England,has had the worst traffic in Europe. Half the time is spent at a standstill,and the average speed is 9 mph,down from 12 mph in 1903 when traffic consisted of horses and carriages. To improve traffic,London's mayor has imposed a "Congestion Zone" fee of £5 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 enter the zone but don't pay are fined from £50 to £125. First,688 cameras were used in 203 locations to take accurate pictures of vehicles entering the zone. In general,the cameras are only 90 percent accurate in reading the licence plate numbers on the cars. But with 688 cameras in total,multiple pictures are taken of each car,and partial pictures of licence plates are matched with complete pictures,with the former discarded and the latter retained. Next,the pictures from the cameras are sent via a dedicated fibre-optic cable to an "image management store." An "image management store" is basically a huge farm of networked,redundant servers. If one server goes down,multiple backup servers run live with the same data. Doing this was needed because the city anticipated processing one million pictures a day. Once the pictures are snapped,transported via fibre-optic cable,and placed in the "image management store," the next step is "reading" the licence plate in the picture,converting it to readable text,and matching licence plate records stored in government databases. Transport of London uses software that scans digitized documents into ASCII text and then matches and compares multiple pictures of the same licence plate. For example,imagine that a licence plate is 12345678 and that the congestion cameras get three partial pictures-12345,34567,and 5678-and one complete picture,12345678. The software has to interpret that all four pictures were of the same vehicle;then,it has to select the last picture,12345678,not the partial pictures,when converting the picture to text. Finally,once the licence plate is converted to text,its number is then matched with an existing licence plate in a government database. At that point,"Congestion Zone" charges are linked with whoever owns the vehicle. -Refer to Narrative 16-2. 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 licence plates are matched with complete pictures,with the former thrown out,and the latter retained. What would the cumulative store of all the photographs be classified as?