Article 16 and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Good evening. The is the last news post in this class and I would like to dedicate it to the Piracy and Ethics issue. Can you name the piracy acts ethical? Is it beneficial for society? Let's take a look on the article below.

Article 16. The ethics of Piracy.

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/courses/fall00/ethics/papers/bironj2.html

The article covers 2 cases:

1. Case when a pirate sells software for money.

2. Case when a pirate distributes software for free.

Let's examine each of them.

1)

a) Consider someone who copies an application developed by a large company and decides that this product is way over-priced and should be available for a much lower price. So pirate begins creating and distributing copies of the application at their new, adjusted price. The pirate in this case may think they are ethically right for providing the product at a price that they feel it should be sold at. But the fact that the pirate seeks to profit from the piracy seals off any form of ethical argument for their acts.

b) If a company discovers the existence of a pirate who is selling their product and choose not to take action, how do the ethics now apply? Sometimes it is better for the company financially to allow the pirate to continue than to take an action, but does this make the piracy ethically right?Ethically, the company is also wrong because they are allowing the unethical act of piracy to occur when they are able to take action to stop it. Therefore, in a situation such as this, the act of pirating a product is still an unethical act.

2) The second type of piracy is that in which software is obtained freely. Pirates may override whatever form of copy protection exists and distribute a product free of charge. Probably the premier argument for this type of piracy is that the companies aren’t losing anything. But using the effect of an unethical act to justify it is not a strong argument, therefore this case is unethical in terms of piracy.

So when might this sort of piracy ever be considered ethical? There is at least one case that can be shown, where the piracy is not wholly unethical. Many times, when products are pirated and freely distributed, the users are given the suggestion that if they like the software then they should purchase their own copy.

From my point of view piracy like a phenomenon is wrong. But I would like to remind that piracy industry gives much more opportunities for people, who would never use some kinds of software otherwise. It also creates additional working places and sometimes even a tax source for the government. So is it so harmful like big corporations make us to think?

Individual Assignment no. 5 and News Posting combined.

Question:

How did your group make the decisions? What problems did you encounter in the process? Did your group make decisions in a different way than the whole class did? Why? What kind of information system do you need to design to support such a process of negotiation? Provide a simple hardware/software configuration.

Answer:

As the goal of our group was to establish equal amount of points for which students and we did not have real competition among us (no real benefits and reasons to hide information from each other) we decided to cooperate in full. We chose a person, who volunteered to calculate the optimal points distribution among team members and send him all our personal scores by e-mail. As result during our class meeting we had a table with different alternatives available and amount of scores each of alternative gives to the members. One of the problems was that one of our members had to get very low score in orders others could get high. Or all of the students had to get less or more equal low score, what we did not like too. In order to solve the problem we talked to the professor and realized that we were free to change our conditions and share points like we want. From my point of view it does not make sense as in negotiations you always have some conditions fixed and you have operate instead of them with the better possible option for you. In you case everything was flexible. So, finally we pick the option with the highest possible score and shared our points among each of the members equally to get the highest possible score for everybody. I believe we are the only team who made such a decision - to change completely all the frames of the assignment given - the rest of the teams were flexible only inside the limits of the individual scores given. The reason was - additional hint from the professor and our "boldness" in changing all the conditions without fear to lose possible points.

To make such a decision with the use of informative systems you have to have software or system combining: database available with all necessary data; Microsoft Excel or other program allowing you to create a table and sort the data given; e-mail software allowing you to communicate with other members or another method of communication (phone, VoiP, etc).

News Blog:

As an real example of such a system you can see The Mediator software (http://www.mcn.org/c/rsurratt/conflict.html).

The Mediator promises to find the best possible agreements between two people . The real value of this program lies in the realization that different people have their own idea about how important the issues are or how much the issues are worth. It is possible then to find envy-free agreements in which all parties feel as if they've gotten the best deal. This program will allow you to easily enter the areas of conflict, assign preferences for both parties, and automatically calculate the fair, equitable, and envy-free maximization of those preferences. There is demo version available on the web-site to try it.

Personally I am very skeptical in using negotiations software: as real negotiation is all about persuasion and communicating efficiently (voice recognition and visual presence allow to solve each negotiation 3 times faster), but in some easier events (e-bay bidding, etc.) it can be really efficient.

Comments on classes and Article 14.

Good evening! This week we had all our presentations over and as a member of the last team (B) to finish I am glad it is finally done. The problem only is that I cannot discuss minuses or pluses of my work. Regarding Team A presentation I would like to say that it was a great job, full of offerings and serious scientific graphs. The only my offering for it is always to double check whether the scale and experience of the company, which will implement the solution, allows to use what is recommended. It seemed to me that CRM offered was to complicated for small B&B with 8 rooms of facilities.

Article 14. QuickStudy: System Development Life Cycle

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=71151&pageNumber=1

Audio version: http://a1448.g.akamai.net/7/1448/25138/v0001/compworld.download.akamai.com/25137/techcast/computerworld-techcast-sdlc.mp3 or http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4452 (see media player picture)

The article above was very interesting for me as it strengthened the points the professor had mentioned in the class about system development stages. To summarize: system development process changes over times: before it was a writing code for solving a problem or automating a procedure, now it is much more complicated process.

There were several types of system described starting from the oldest to newest. They are:

1The waterfall system;

2) The fountain model;

3) The spiral model;

4) The rapid prototyping;

5) The incremental model.

The author offer to use the synchronize and stabilize method, which combines the advantages of the spiral model with technology for overseeing and managing source code. This method allows many teams to work efficiently in parallel. The approach was defined by David Yoffie of Harvard University and Michael Cusumano of MIT. For me it seems very reasonable to use new types of system developments models in response to the rapid changes in the society requirements. The last model seems to be very interesting. The companies, which used this method (Microsoft and Netscape) also give it more weight in consideration.

Comments on classes and Article 13.

Hello. Sorry for the late posting. This week presentation about Time Warner Cable was very interesting, but it did not reveal all the possible opportunities of company's expansion. It is not minus as teams agreed on exact problems to discuss, but to mention that there are some more interesting ways of expansion could be useful. But, anyway, I will mention one of them later in the article analysis. It was also an interesting idea for cable companies to merge together to fulfill one very expensive project. Even though some of my classmates doubt that I believe it is possible. We can see the example of railroad companies, which cooperated in building railroad centuries ago. For one company it was impossible option. But lets' come back to Time Warner expansion possibilities.

Article. Time Warner Cable Tries Business IPTV.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=135542&page_number=1&site=
This article was interesting for me as it talked about expanding into business user sector, which was not mentioned during the presentation. And it is also mentioned Internet TV, which does not require creating separate internal television network. So, Time Warner moved toward business users offering them special BusinessLink.tv, which pipes 10 news channels to the PCs of business customers via high-speed cable modem connections. It is offered only in New York and New Jersey so far, an area with 1.4 million subscribers total. Time Warner Cable Business Class is using a combination of cable modem connections and IP multicast to deliver the service, which requires a "core" LAN bandwidth capacity of 4 Mbit/s. The service is reliable, secure, and provides up-to-the-minute live news without hampering the existing IT infrastructure." I believe that this market segment will develop very fast and rather promising for the company to maintain. Constant and updated information is key factor for each business today and to get it fast and easy without leaving work place and disconnecting from working PC is crucial for modern business people.

Individual Assignment no. 4

Information aggregation.

Suggest two other business cases in which this method can be used to collect information. What problems do you see besides the ones mentioned in the Background information section? What kind of information system do you need to design to support this method of collecting information? Provide a simple hardware/software configuration.

Answer:
There are a lot of different applications possible for using Information aggregation methods. The ones I found most interesting are:

1. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/390/1

One of the most interesting economics technologies that has not yet been widely deployed is the information aggregation market (infomart). These markets support open trading on “proposition bets”, wagers on which of two or more outcomes will occur. Such markets can continuously predict the future with more accuracy than opinion polls. The most famous of the infomarts are the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEMs), which trade various kinds of securities. Winner-take-all markets pay $1 for the winning outcome and nothing to losers so the trade price in pennies represents the percent chance the proposition will be true. Vote share markets pay according to the vote share of two or more outcomes. These two types of securities can be used to answer most types of questions. Adopting informarts for space could potentially lead to space colonization years earlier at a far lower total cost than continuing with poor forecasting leading into more blind allies.

2. http://lessig.org/blog/2005/07/extremism_and_information_aggr.html

Using of Information Aggregation method allowed to discover that: In many controversial areas (eg, affirmative action, campaign finance, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, environmental regulation, and more), Republican appointees show especially conservative voting patterns when they're sitting on 3-judge panels that consist only of Republican appointees. So too for Democratic appointees: They're far more liberal, in their voting patterns, when sitting with two fellow Democratic appointees, than when sitting on a panel with at least one Republican appointee. In other words, Republican appointees look more conservative when they sit only with fellow Republican appointees, and Democratic appointees look more liberal when they sit only with fellow Democratic appointees.

The problems and requirements for this method are complex and they are shown in the pictures below. If the system meets all the requirements below, you can say that the software will work as needed and correct results will be obtained.

Source: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/patterns/bi/select-application-topology.html

One of the software that can be used is i-Fetch. i-Fetch is a feed reader and information aggregation program that enables you to read various RSS feeds on your desktop, so that you can get information from various sources on a single interface.

http://www.sharewareconnection.com/i-fetch.htm

Comments on classes and Article 12.

Hello. In talking about UHC presentations I would like to mention that they were very good in revealing today problems of Health Care system both for the patients and the doctors and I liked some of the solutions offered. Especially interesting for me was Ranking system problem as it had huge effects on efficient physicians' work and patients feedback. The article below will touch upon this problem too.

Article 12. INSURERS RANK PHYSICIANS: WHO IS IT REALLY GOOD FOR?
http://docwhisperer.wordpress.com/2007/08/29/physician-rankings-who-are-they-really-good-for/
As it was very nice described in the article the goal of creating ranking systems for physicians was to provide customers with additional information on people, who treat them and the level of service. “People don’t want to go to a movie or buy a book or buy a car or go to a restaurant without some ability to assess value for dollar. ” Such ranking systems work more than in 100 insurance industry markets or regions across the country. The idea seems to be great, but lets see what is wrong with it and why doctors, who are one day in the top ratings are deleted from the network the following day. Is it possible that their level of service changes so rapidly?
The main disadvantages are:
1. Data often contain errors and that doctors often lack the ability to correct them;
2. The effort is more about cutting costs than raising quality;
3. Doctors are held accountable for whether patients exercise, take their medications or follow their prescribed regimens;
4. Disparate ratings can confuse patients and cause turbulence in group practices and much more.
In my opinion before creating such ranking the insurance company have to double check several times how the system is working because it is very easy to ruin somebody's reputation in a moment, but it takes hundreds of years to build it after!!

Comments on classes and Article 11.

Hello. As from this week we have our projects running I would like to leave some feedback on information received and new CIS applications in real life learned. First two teams discussing Duane Reade made a great job in company and industry analysis. Some of the solutions to the offered problems were really interesting too. Especially I liked one of the teams' offers of micro-marketing - personalized advertising and self-efficient carts, with the help of which you can check out without any lines and other payment complications. I believe this would be a great solution for improving customer service in Duane Reade.

Article 11. Shopping Cart Concierge
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/shopping-cart-concierge

The article above gives more details about self-service shopping card discussed during the presentation. Integrated into the shopping cart handle, Concierge is an interactive touch-screen computer that uses a wireless in-store network. It can assist with self-serve checkouts and provide shoppers with a wealth of information. It offers the following features:
Personalized Account recognition; Product Scanning; Self Check-Out; In-Store Cart Tracking; Dynamic Advertising; Product Finder; Interactive Shopping List; Recipes. I believe this new cart is really great and will save a lot of time both for the stores and shoppers. It will also keep shoppers more loyal to the stores as the carts will provide them with all personalized information needed and hints necessary. As a shopper myself I am looking forward to using such cars and sure that it will be very good experience.