Excel Project

The intent of this MS Excel project was to familiarize each student with the basic, as well as some advanced, functions and the set-up of this application program. It did not only make me understand how to use MS Excel functions to perform calculations, but also showed me how I am able to display data more efficiently and effectively so that it is easier to understand (i.e. by the usage of Pivot Tables, a concept I was familiar with already, but which is a great tool that I needed several times in my life as a student already; hence, I know it will be very helpful to know how to apply this in my future job in the business environment). Moreover, I learned how to adjust several settings so that I can print the Excel worksheets, which I created, more efficiently. (This was always a problem for me at my home university since I was not aware of the fact that you actually have a lot of discretion in determining how to print out your Excel worksheets!)

All what I learned was brought to me by applying a scenario in which I am pretending to be a person working for a large fitness center, that demands certain analysis tasks from me to test the effectiveness of one particular training program. The data I was provided with contained information for 500 different persons and listed age, sex, and 21 heart measurements (from time 0:00 to 20:00, which consists of a 15 minute workout and a 5 minute cool-down phase). This raw data had to be processed to calculate a maximum heart rate, a target heart rate, as well as the highest heart rate achieved by any individual. These numbers then were taken to further determine whether the individuals reached their target heart rate and by what percentage their heart rates increased on average. Furthermore, I had to create two Pivot Tables, to determine how many individuals actually reached their target heart rates and how it was split between females and males. The second Pivot Table sorted the average percentage increase of the heart rate according to gender and age groups (this is displayed in the table below). ALl in all, this was a very interesting project and it showed me how to apply the concepts learned in the lectures.

Week 9 - Clear

This week's content dealt with Microsoft Excel and how to use it. I thought this was a very value-adding activity to have in a course. However, as I am just an exchange student and I have to use MS Excel from the first day of my academic career on (which now dates back to 2007), I knew all the presented features of MS Excel that were presented in the lectures already. Regardless of this fact, I found a "refreshment" of my MS Excel skills a very nice thing to do.

A concept that I already used at my home university many times is that of the "Pivot Table". A Pivot Table is basically a tool that eases looking up data by making it possible to summarize desired information and then display it more clearly on a separate sheet (which is then the Pivot Table). Amongst other things, you can sort, total, and count the data in your "raw data" sheet. Its ability to simply drag and drop different data fields into the Pivot Table is what gave the Pivot Table its name. This tool is very helpful as you can extract the data relevant to you from a large set of raw data and see different relations more quickly (i.e. you could tell Excel to determine how many Females or Males respectively have bought a certain amount of a special product in the last year).

I think the concept of Pivot Tables is a very important one in today's business environment as the ability to create these tables will ease the interpretation of huge data sheets significantly.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_table

Week 7 - Clear

This week's topic was about "Operating Systems and Utility Programs". It was a very interesting one for me, as I as Mac user, got to know that I am even strongly discouraged to conduct disk defragmentation, as I did before with my PCs that used the Windows OS. However, disk defragmentation is a very helpful and even necessary activity every person using a Windows OS should conduct, in order to optimize the speed and utilization of the computer and its disk.

Disk Defragmentation

Every time, when we store anything - a program, a file, or whatever - on a Windows PC, or every time when we re-arrange something and put a file into another folder, programs being uninstalled, information is being added or deleted, gaps form on the disk. Files may even be split/fragmented to fit on the disk. Though the computer still knows, that the data is on the disk, it takes the PC a lot more time and power to find the separated parts of a file and put it together again to be able to display it to the user, who asked for that file. The question now is: what does a disk defragmentation program do? Here is a little example:

Just imagine a book shelf in your room. You put some books on it, next to each other, so that there are no gaps. Then, after a while, you remove a few (let's say 3) very small books from this shelf. These books are creating 3 small gaps in your row of books in your shelf. So, if you bought a new book, and you would like to put it into your bookshelf, and you see that it is too big to fit into the small 3 gaps that were created in your book shelf when you removed the other 3 smaller books, what do you do?

There the necessity for the disk defragmentation program becomes clear:

You need to re-arrange the books in the shelf, so that only one large gap remains, in which you can put your larger book. So you do not have to split your larger book into smaller parts, to fit it into your shelf, but you can just put it into the shelf as one whole book.

If you now substitute "book" with "file" and "book shelf" with "disk", you should see how disk defragmentation works. All in all, it makes you use your computer's disk more efficiently, what saves you and your PC time and power.

Now, as a Mac user, you are strongly discouraged to use any kind of disk fragmentation: Macintosh itself uses a system to optimize disk usage, so any kind of manual defragmentation activity would counter Apple's optimization efforts, which would definitely not result in better performance after the defragmentation.

So Apple users: keep your hands off of disk defragmentation programs!

Source: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-disk-defragmenter.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_defragmentation

Week 6 - Clear

The topic of weeks 5 and 6 furthermore included a description of different scanners. I thought the most interesting and important scanner method is the "RFID" technology. Increasingly, companies like American Apparel use this to improve their business processes, productivity and operations (the link on "American Apparel" is a very interesting video about how this clothing manufacturer utilizes RFID, I can just recommend to watch it! :) ).

RFID is the short form of "Radio Frequency IDentification". It describes a technology where small electronic information tags are being transmitted wirelessly between a "tag" and a "reader". The tags do not need any power, as those are passive devices, whereas the reader or scanner needs to be powered. It is a very easy to use but also more expensive technology (as compared to Bar Codes). However, it makes life a lot easier: One need not anymore directly point on the bar code (or in this case the tag), but only the approximate direction is enough.

This technology is a huge advancement! In the retailing sector it finds great application, as well as in shipping industries, even in credit cards (in 2006 major credit card companies started to put RFID tags into credit cards so you do not have to swipe them through any credit card reading device anymore) and also to automatically pay tolls on roads.

Sources:

http://www.ibmd.averydennison.com/solutions/american-apparel-rfid.asp

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-rfid-tag.htm

http://www.ibmd.averydennison.com/solutions/rfid.asp

Web 2.0 Tools Project - Update "Feedback"

In my opinion, this project was a very fun and value-adding activity to engage in. I enjoyed it a lot! I liked especially the fact that we were given a free choice about what we want to present about ourselves and that, through this project, I got in touch with so many different tools and applications that I have never used before (i.e. GarageBand, iPhoto). So I learned a lot during this project, too, what is going to be very helpful in my future since technology and the ability to use it is of utmost importance nowadays.

I used the tool "vuvox", which was awesome! I actually thought about doing another collage for my "Study Abroad Blog" that I am also writing so that my friends and family back home in Germany know, what I am doing and what they are missing here ;). This tool allows me to include music and pictures, cut the important parts out of these pictures, put different songs into my collage and many more things. The only problem I encountered was that somehow I was not able to include a video in my collage as always, when I loaded it up, the vuvox tool said "Media Encoding Error". I contacted the customer service team, but unfortunately I did not receive any answer or solution to this difficulty yet. However, I decided that the video is not the most important part as I could also tell my story with pictures.

What was especially value-adding about this project is not only the fact that I am now able to use some media-applications on my Mac better, but I also learned how to actually structure my work better and more efficiently, as well as how to adhere to the copyright laws discussed in the first week of this course. Consequently, I think that not only my awareness of copyrights increased a lot through the actual application of the learned laws, but I also significantly improved my ability to use new software and plan my time, which are important capabilities for my future life in the business environment.

So, it would be so great if you could watch my collage that I am so excited about and give me as much feedback as possible - not only through comments underneath my vuvox collage, but also through the poll that is located on the right side of the Web 2.0 Interaction Method page. Furthermore, to guarantee better visibility and readability, I recommend to enlarge the screen of the tool (there is a "fullscreen" button on the bottom bar of the tool) or to go directly to the Web 2.0 Tool Story page and watch the enlarged version there.

Enjoy watching it and I hope I can encourage you to not only travel to the places that I show you on my collage but also to use this awesome vuvox tool for any future projects!

Valerie Wagner

P.S.: Do not forget to comment and evaluate my story ;)! Thank you a lot!!!

Update: Feedback

Unfortunately, I did not receive as much feedback as I hoped to receive for my project. After all, I have to attribute it to my late submission of the link to my story, I guess. However, the one comment I got (thank you Alexander ;) ) was very positive, though I have to admit, that it was mainly due to this excellent tool, that my collage looks like it does. My online poll was also not really participated in, as I suspect a score of 100% "Loved it!!! 8-)" out of two (!) evaluators, is not really a reliable indicator for how people actually liked my collage.

Regardless of these facts, it was such a lot of fun to do this collage and I am proud of my work, so I could not wait to show it to family members, friends and publish it on my personal blog, which I created for my study abroad here in the US. All people, who actually saw this collage were really enthused about my project (I hope, they were not subjectively but rather objectively evaluating my project ;) ). So after all, I had a lot of fun, and even when nobody of this course actually looked at my collage (except for Alexander ;) ) I enjoyed it a lot!

Take care,

Valerie Wagner

Links:

Web 2.0 Tool Story

Web 2.0 Interaction Method

Web 2.0 Interaction Method

Week 5 - Clear

The topic that seemed most interesting to me this week deals with the processor "Intel Core 2 Duo". I am actually about to buy me a new MacBookPro, so this week's topic came at the perfect time for me! As I want to have a MacBook that perfectly fits my needs (and I guess even more my wants, so I am more or less not properly following the buying advice as proposed by Mr. Olson), it is very important to me to actually be able to evaluate just by myself which computer qualifies best. However, I always thought that you only compare the processor of your computer with the Gigahertz number stated behind (or better included in) the name of the processor. Now I know better:

Gigahertz

Gigahertz (GHz) is basically a description of the clockspeed of a computer, which means that the faster the computer's central processing unit's (CPU's) clock can tick per second, the faster the computer can process data. GHz is composed of "Hertz", which describes

the frequency, and "Giga" stands for "billion". Thus 1 GHz equals 1 billion cycles or ticks per second. However, in order to compare the capabilities of different processors, it is not possible to only look at the GHz information. Instead, one must first watch whether the processor uses the same CPU type!

Processor

A processor of a computer is basically what facilitates executing instructions and thus using programs. Nowadays, mostly multi-core processors are being used, which means that there is one chip with two or even more separate CPUs and thus more work can be done by the computer in a shorter timeframe.

The one Apple currently builds into its new MacBooks is the above mentioned "Intel Core 2 Duo" processor. So in order for me to decide which kind of MacBookPro I would like to have, I chose the one with the "Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz" as this is the processor, which certainly satisfies and already somewhat exceeds my need to be able to handle several programs at the same time, play music, store a lot of data etc. Again, it is such a great timing, that I now actually understand how to actually compare these processors (as I was focused only on design, weight and size of the computer before). So, I deemed this topic to be a very important and also very interesting one that all people of this technology generation should be aware of!

Source: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-ghz.htm

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-clock-speed.htm

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-dual-core-processor.htm