Exam 17: Managing Information in a Global World

Unsupervised data mining is unethical.

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

Narrative 17-2 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 the Narrative 17-2.What basic method of capturing information does the City of London use to identify and fine automobile drivers who enter the city's "Congestion Zone"?

Peter used a photocopy of a sales report to capture the information into his computer so that he could make changes to the report using his word processing software.What enabled Peter do this?

What is the term for the direct electronic transmission of purchase and ordering information from one company's computer system to another company's computer system?

A cosmetics manufacturer could learn from analyzing data that teenage girls who buy more than six bottles of nail polish monthly also like to dress up their pets to match their outfits.(The manufacturer might want to use this information to develop a line of pet nail polish.)Which kind of pattern would be identified by these survey results?

Colin has been hired by a restaurant chain for a co-op term.The restaurant owner wants Colin to take the sales results from each day for each location and create organized reports.The owner wants to make decisions but at the moment does not have the results in a form he can understand.What form are the sales results in that Colin will use to create organized reports?

Kevin is hired by a fast food restaurant to determine why sales have started to decrease.Kevin finds that 30 percent of orders include something toasted.There is just one toaster that creates a bottleneck.Lines of cars build up at the drive thru service.Kevin sees potential customers driving in toward the restaurant turn away and go to a competing restaurant.What has Kevin discovered?

Which patterns can unsupervised data mining be used to recognize?

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.

Which term is best used to define pages listing all of the felony crimes perpetrated in New York during the last decade?

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

What is first-mover advantage?

Assume that,as a member of the student governing body at your college or university,you have unlimited resources to tackle a challenge that has been posed to you by students,some faculty,and the administration at your school: develop a database that will allow students to identify the quality of instructors before signing up for their courses.Using this challenge as a running example,differentiate between raw data and information,and identify and discuss the characteristics and costs of useful information as they apply to this challenge.

Why are intranets growing in popularity?

Baseball management was trying to uncover matches and relationships in the data it had on first-time patrons who purchased box stadium seats.It discovered that its sales increased by almost 100 percent in those seasons when it held an open house prior to the opening game and allowed people to see the box seats and examine the view of the stadium from those seats.Which pattern did the management discover,in terms of data mining?

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 an inexpensive solution to this problem?

Recalls are a fact of life for the food industry according to a senior vice-president of a large Canadian supermarket chain.What technology should this company use to identify the location of products in its warehouse that have been recalled?

Describe the two critical steps that can be used to ensure that an organization's data can be accessed only by authorized users.How does biometrics relate to this process?

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.