Comments to T4.4. Absolute Reference Task

The DSS task with the spreadsheet was done by the majority of the students properly, using the correct formulas connecting one parametric cell (Inflation Rate) to all cells in the Future Cost column and eventually changing Future Profit cells too by changing ONLY ONE Inflation Rate cell.

Do the required reading of Excel tutorial on absolute reference or google any other tutorial on absolute and relative references. Notice that if the formula is done with the use of absolute reference than it can be copied to ALL other cells of the column and the result will still be correct although it refers to same one Inflation Rate cell. If yo do not use absolute reference that you will have either insert 1.04 manually in all cells or the copying from one cell of the same column to other column cells will not work!

Comment on AI

Speaking of neural networks... You all heard that the machine is only as smart as the smarts that man puts into it. Well, this is not true. A huge part of modern AI is dedicated to machine learning, when AI systems can learn and become MUCH smarter than all programmers put together. But... they learn differently and their “smarts” might be different from human. For example,the system charged with keeping water in NYC clean might start adding poison to the drinking water after concluding that the problem of dirty water is in human activity. It means that a bunch of other thoughts and moral judgments should be included in the systems that can potentially harm people.

Another anecdotal case of different ways that AI learns was the failure in DoD project, when the system had to take millions of photos made by American spy satellites and find the tanks on those photos. In the final analysis the system was ably to pinpoint tanks on many photos but NOT SEEING the obvious tanks on others. After a long study of human and computer psychologists of the cause of that failure they found out that the system was taught to understand that there is a tank by using photos done during sunny days. In some forms of AI it is possible to check how exactly the learning goes, what is the logic, etc. But in some forms of AI (like neural networks) nobody knows how the system learns and thinks. You just have to TRUST it. So it turned out that in the case of tank recognition system devised its own way (somewhat inhumane) in deciding if there is a tank there – by the presence of its shadow! Then if on a gloomy day there was no shadow – there was no tank.

SQL Video Lecture

Use the vido lecture on the work with SQL queries here

Our Course, Web 2.0, and Actual Participation Effort in it

Since we are studying the essence and use of information systems in various environments – this course designed to be an example of such system itself, offering students practical experience in such systems in modern online collaborative situations. The multiple feedbacks (remember systems) in my replies, emails, grades, blog posts, as well as other students’ reviews and comments, as well as error messages when you do something wrong in your labs – all serves the purpose of correcting and improving the functionality of this Learning/Training System. In addition you learn to create a variety of small information systems tied up in a bigger conglomerate in your blogs, that include (in addition to your Moodle experience) various cloud services (like zoho), external apps (that are served into your blogs – there was an assignment on doing this), your own models and programs done in spreadsheet and database tools.

But what is important to understand in this Web 2.0 style interactions and user-created content (your research posts) that the effectiveness of such systems is based NOT ONLY on technical implementation of eth multitude of information flows and corrective feedbacks but also on participants’ desire and ability of READING and USING them in a timely fashion (which some students failed to demonstrate). There still is some time left to change this pattern which is seen (in the context of this course) not just as lack of online attendance (checking the changes in the system requiring individual responses), not just as lack of effort (in acting on these feedbacks) but as a failure in understanding of how such systems work and a failure in the meta-lab work and experience which is the PROPER participation in this course-as-a-platform for learning advances.

I advise the students to look at the course, understand its design and work again from the point of view of the newly acquired IS-understanding, which will greatly increase the learning effect for the time spent (bigger bang for the buck J )

MIS and DSS

The main goal of MIS is in allowing you to see (like in those sci-fi movies) the entities of the real world as they really are in all their properties, changing views, angles and focuses as you need to inspect some features closer and some from a bigger perspective. For example, when you walk through the College you actually do not see much beyond the walls, offices, and posters. Once you access the College MIS – you immediately see (supposedly) all involved entites and processes in their normal activities and deviations that have to be notices and corrected. Augmented reality (AR) allows you to combine physical vision with MIS orientation (this is where the research on MIS and AR will be appropriate!).

Decision Support Systems serve not as much as vision enhancers but as enhancers of your abilities of making decisions based on the vision. Human abilities to juggle numbers and keep various relationships among multiple parameters in mind are severely limited. Here come DSS. They allow you to use such tools as scenarios (when you change some assumptions and see what will happen to ALL parts you are interested in by providing formulas of the corresponding relationships), optimization (when the system quickly finds for you the best decision among many possible), and many others. Armed with such tools (especially now available in mobile formats) you become super beings (cyborgs, if you wish, as part human and part systems) far more advanced in your mental abilities than those who doesn’t use special supporting systems. I actually run a special course fully dedicated to DSS where students learn the decision theory (on how to always make best decisions in all situations) as well as how to arm yourselves with simple (and more advanced) DSS dramatically enhancing your decision making abilities and outcomes in all your activities. Recently one student emailed me that he got a job because of this knowledge.

You can use this power throughout all your life experiences no matter what you do and where you work. Although many industrial systems of this kind are very expensive, there are some simple tools (like spreadsheets in advanced forms of use) that already upgrade your abilities significantly. Some of them we are learning in this course. This is kung fu of modern life. The more work and understanding efforts of the material of this week you apply – the more you will get out of it. This is the way to compete with AI allowing the mankind to stay relevant.

A Small Case of E-commerce and E-Business Difference

About 15 years ago I was helping May Corporation to switch to e-Commerce (that was their request). It is a company that owned a bunch of big retail chains (Lord and Taylor, Filene's basement, etc.). They thought that it is just about putting a catalog on the web and allowing customers to shop there. I warned them that it is not what e-commerce is about. It is just a connection cable to the high-volume high-power processes that can either burn the company or make it shine like a light bulb.

In order not to be burned by the high-speed requests and the need to determine the whole supply, production, storage, distribution, and dynamic pricing chain (remember the textbook) the company has to respond to these online requests in fractions of a second (without meetings with all parties – as they used to have) - since customers will not wait at the shopping cart longer than a couple of seconds.  This means not just an e-commerce front catalog but changing the whole organization for e-business. Most of the business processes and decisions had to be done by various information systems and be automated (see Amazon as a very good example) to allow for the necessary speed and volume of decisions (topic of next half-week).

Also, such business will compete with their usual store business done in “brick and mortar” fashion (do the search on “brick and mortar organization”). This is why they needed first to get a totally different understanding of what they getting into and how this will change their highly controlled management pyramid (they were tightly controlling ALL the stores from their headquarters). Basically the whole organization had to be redesigned.  This could be done piece by piece with a very carefully designed steps of systems development in a way that all new parts will not make the already functioning automation break (live update).   

As a result, although developing of an online catalog with the shopping cart is a job for one week for an experienced developer, the whole process of putting the company largely under control of information and decision-support systems took years.

How to edit your posts

I saw that some students wanted to edit the posts but the 5 min of allowing corrections expire. My advice here is to just write an improvement to the original post and post it as a reply to the original post with the note on the top saying that this is a correct version. You can make corrections and improvments until the deadline. This will even look better - seen as an additional effort (some of you are already doing it).