I.T. Project - Converting a Card Index System to a Database Essay Example for Free

I.T. Project Converting a Card Index System to a Database Essay The present system is based on the manual card index system so most of the work is done by hand, however due to the ever increasing growth of technology, and the internet, a wide range of resources are now being made easily accessible. British Airways has recently introduced booking online, where customers can book a flight and accommodation all over the Internet. Being such a big company as British Airways, most of their bookings are made through travel agents who book the flights and pass the information on to them. Question 1 Could you describe the current system being used by Question 2 How are these cards stored? Question3 What problems do you encounter at the moment? Software Available MICROSOFT OFFICE 2000 WORD PROCESSOR MICROSOFT WORD 2000 A word processing package is a program or set of programs used to edit, format, store and print documents. Word processors have many important unique features: * Spelling and Grammar Checker Misspelt words, or grammatical errors can be identified and corrected by the words in the computers dictionary. Correct words, identified by the spell check as wrong can be added to the dictionary. * Automatic creation of index and table of contents Any word in the text can be marked for inclusion in an index. Headings and subheadings in a given style can be included automatically in a table of contents, which can be updated at any time. * Import Files Tables, photographs, graphics, video and sound files can be imported from other sources and inserted in a document. * Mail merge A document and a list of names and addresses can be merged to produce personalised letters. * Creation of templates with preset text styles. Margins, formatting, letterheading etc. * WYSIWYG This stands for What You See Is What you Get, and refers to the ability to display on the screen. And enables the user to see their work on the screen exactly as it will be printed. SPREADSHEET MICROSOFT EXCEL 2000 Spreadsheet packages allow a user to create worksheets (spreadsheets) representing data in column and row form. Spreadsheets are used for any application that uses numerical data, such as budgets, cash flow forecasts, profit and loss statements, student marks or results of experiment. Spreadsheet features: * Format cells, rows and columns, specifying for example, the alignment of text, number of decimal points, height and width of cells. * Copy cell contents to other locations, with automatic adjustment of formulae from an area to another location. * Determine the effect of several different hypothetical changes of data; this facility is called what-if calculation. * Insert, move or delete rows and columns. * Use functions such as sum, average, max, min in formulae * Create a simple database and sort or query the data to produce a report of, say for example, all males gaining over a C grade, for a list of students. * Write macros to automate common procedures * Create templates Spreadsheets with formats and formulae already entered, into which new figures may be inserted. * Create multi dimensional spreadsheets using several sheets, and copy data from one sheet to another * Create many different types of chart and graphs DATABASE MICROSOFT ACCESS 2000 A database is a collection of data. It may be something as simple as a list of names and addresses or details of the CDs in your personal collection, or it may contain details of all the customers, products, orders and payments in a large organisation. When made reference to, the word database is assumed to be data held on a computer, but manual databases also exist. Some smaller business (a garage) may hold a card index file with details about a customer and their car. The main difference between a manual and computerised databases is the speed at which data can be accessed. PRESENTATION GRAPHICS MICROSOFT POWERPOINT 2000 Presentation graphics software such as PowerPoint is useful for putting together a presentation which can be delivered using a computer attached to a projection device, using transparencies and an ordinary overhead projector or as a self-running presentation in, say a shopping centre or cinema. The software allows the user to quickly create slides combining text, graphics and pictures and to create animation or sound effects and transition effects between slides. OPERATING SYSTEM MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98 Hardware Available These are the specifications of the PC I am using at Home: OPERATING SYSTEM WINDOWS(r) 98 PLUS! CPU INTEL(r) CELERONTM / 333MHZ RAM 64MB FOR WINDOWS(r) 98 SCREEN DISPLAY 800 BY 600 PIXELS TRUE COLOUR (32 BIT) CD-ROM SPEED 32-SPEED AVAILABLE SPACE ON HARD DRIVE 2.4GB AUDIO 16-BIT SOUND CARD OTHER LOUDSPEAKERS These are the system specifications for the systems at school: OPERATING SYSTEM WINDOWS(r) 98 CPU 433MHZ RAM 32MB FOR WINDOWS(r) 98 SCREEN DISPLAY 640 BY 480 PIXELS 256 COLOURS CD-ROM SPEED 24 SPEED AVAILABLE SPACE ON HARD DRIVE 10MB AUDIO 8-BIT SOUND CARD PRINTER HP LASERJET All systems should have Microsoft Office 97/2000. All systems must have Microsoft Excel 97/2000. End Users IT Literacy The end user of my system will already have basic IT skills and will have already had experience with the Microsoft Office Package. As they are working for a big trans-national company, they would have already undergone training in the secretarial sector, of which IT skills are a key part. To even have the job, they would have to be able to type quickly, answer calls and transmit data efficiently. Therefore, training costs will be kept to a minimum. Final Choice Having looked at the current system and the software and hardware available, I have decided to use Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program to design my booking system. Spreadsheet packages allow a user to create worksheets (spreadsheets) representing data in column and row form. Spreadsheets are used for any application that uses numerical data, such as budgets, cash flow forecasts, profit and loss statements, student marks or results of experiments. Spreadsheets offer a wide range of facilities making the task easier to perform. SKILLS: Current/To be acquired I have a good understanding of the Microsoft Excel package. I have done quite a few calculations and performed basic macros. Having looked through the coursework of former students, and reading through the coursework guide, I realise that I need to improve my knowledge of Excel. Excel is a powerful package and can carry out many tasks easily if instructed correctly. I have already started to go through sample projects showing me how to go about certain tasks with a book titled Successful I.T. Projects in Excel, written by P.M Heathcote. End User Requirements Provide detailed reports showing customer booking for every working day. Produce summary reports for flight bookings in order of popularity. Allow data entry for new customers. Provide easy access for amendments to customer details and flight details. Automatic backup for all centralised records daily and weekly. Provide an exception report for outstanding customer debts or extreme bank credit limits. The system should record financial details concerning money in/outstanding. Allow queries on the current flight availability. Quantitative Criteria Printed tickets are to be generated within 15 minutes. Accessing and amending customer/Fight/Airport details should be instantaneous. Queries are processed promptly on customer request. Backup should occur automatically every 24 hours. Flight details processed every Friday (1 hour max) Exception reports are produced quickly on demand within a minute. Qualitative Criteria The system should provide a workable Human Computer Interface system according to different users, i.e. simple menu selections or buttons The company logo is consistent on all forms and reports. Amount of available screen data is kept to a minimum (increase usability) Help systems are easily accessible.

Essay on the Test of Faith in Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown

Young Goodman Brown:Â   A Test of Faith The story Young Goodman Brown is about a man and his faith in himself, his wife, and the community they reside in. Goodman Brown must venture on a journey into the local forest, refuse the temptations of the devil, and return to the village before sunrise. The time era is approximately a generation after the time of the witch trials. Goodman Brown's struggle between good and evil is a struggle he does not think he can face. He reiterates his false confidence to himself repeatedly. Goodman knows what he must do but dreads the deed. Upon entering the forest he is suspicious of every rock and tree, thinking something evil will jump out at him. When he finally does meet someone on the trail, who appears to be of evil origin, he feels confident that he can refuse any temptations. This evil person makes several advances and Goodman refuses. This makes Goodman feel strong until they meet his childhood catechism teacher and see her turned. This act deters his confidence to a great degree. He continues down the trail looking for hope in the heavens but hears onl... ...community. Although these career driven people do not have a book to guide their path, they pursue it none the less. Some of these people have lost, or never had the belief, of reaching heaven, or even its existence. These people are the peers of the believers and set the rules or guidelines for career goals. So in effect the status in the community is a way of saying they are better. The people who do not believe in any god-like being fight in an effort to make their mark on the world, for this is the only they can be recognized or remembered. Â  

Black, White, and Color

Who am I? That is the hardest question to answer for a college freshman. In a sense my life has just begun. I am finally on my own trying to figure out who I am and what I want to do with my life. Does anyone find out who they are as a person at the age of eighteen? This is the age where a major transition is made from teen to a legal adult. I am going from being a child to being on my own making my own decisions. When I look at myself I see so many different things, some are things I learned in the past and I carry with me and others are things I hope to achieve or become. In Core 110 this year I learned that I could connect myself into what we were learning through studying psychology and science. At the beginning of the year I didn’t understand why we were learning psychology and science together but now I understand they go together. Without science there would be no psychological evidence and without psychology scientist would not be able to test certain theories. Because of Core 110 I can look deeper into myself by the insight I gained by studying psychology and science. In the book Forty Studies That Changed Psychology, by Roger Hock, he discusses Julian Rotter’s Locus of control theory of how individuals place the responsibility for what happens to them. Rotter explains that there are two types of people: internal locus of control and external locus of control (Hock 192). â€Å"When people interpret the consequences of their behavior to be controlled by luck, fate, or powerful others, this indicates a belief in what Rotter called an external locus of control. Conversely, he maintained that if people interpret their own choices and personality as responsible for their behavioral consequences, they believe in internal locus of control† (Hock 192). This is basically saying do you believe that your destiny is controlled by yourself or by external forces? Rotter believed that if a person’s likelihood to view events from an internal, versus an external, locus of control is fundamental to who we are and can be explained from a social learning theory perspective (Hock 192). In his view, as a person develops from infancy through childhood, behaviors in a given situation are learned because they are followed by some form or reward, or reinforcement† (192 Hock). From the rewards and reinforcements you learn from as a child follow you throughout life and make you develop an external or internal interpretation of the consequences of your behavior. Rotter wanted to demonstrate two points; first, make a test to measure how individuals posses an internal or an external locus of control orientation towards life. Second, is to show how internals and externals display differences in their interpretations of the causes of reinforcements in the same situations (Hock 193). Rotter came up with a test called the I-E Scale, which measured the extent to which a person possesses the personality characteristics of internal or external locus of control. He did this by asking certain questions that internal people would only answer a certain way and vice versa for the external people (Hock 193). In Rotter’s theory of locus of control I believe I have an internal locus of control because I control my own fate and destiny. My parent were very strict and always made sure I knew from right and wrong or else I would be punished. I grew up realizing I wouldn’t win the lottery and I had to work hard to become successful. My locus of control is very grounded and I don’t believe in luck. My portrait shows me on the playground looking towards the city in the background. It shows my goals and what I want to achieve but I am still in black and white; I’m not there yet. Being at college has only given me a taste of what it means to be an adult and be independent. I will one day achieve all my goals, but until then I’m still a kid stuck on the playground until one day I can reach the exciting city life. Another example from Roger Hock’s book is the study done by Langer and Rodin who look at the effects of choice and how it affects people. Everyday a person makes a choice or decision, â€Å"When your sense of control is threatened, you experience negative feelings (anger, outrage, indignation) and will rebel by behaving in ways that will restore your perception of personal freedom† (Hock 150). It’s like what kids do when they are told to do something or forbidden to do something, they either refuse to do it or do the exact opposite. Hock states, â€Å"What it all boils down to is that we are happier and more effective people when we have the power to choose† (Hock 151). This is a problem for both teens and elderly people, the only exception is that elderly people lose their rights where teens just aren’t old enough to get them yet. Elderly people lose their rights and control when they enter a nursing home. Langer and Rodin thought, â€Å"If the loss of personal responsibility for one’s life causes a person to be less happy and healthy, then increasing control and power should have the opposite effect† (Hock 151). They wanted to test this by directly enhancing personal power and choice for a group of nursing home residents. They predicted that the patients who were given the control should demonstrate improvements in mental alertness, activity level, satisfaction with life, and other positive measures of behavior and attitude (Hock 153). Langer and Rodin compared two floors of a nursing home, one given privileges the other stayed the same. The floors were given questionnaires about how they were treated by the end of the three weeks. The results showed (on chart 20-1 on page 154) that the differences in the two groups were extreme, which proved Langer and Rodin’s theory correct about the positive effects of choice and personal power (Hock 153). Langer and Rodin pointed out that their study, combined with other previous research, demonstrated that peoples’ lives improve when they are given a greater sense of personal responsibility (Hock 153). Being in control is a big thing for everyone. When I turned eighteen last year nothing changed for me except I was one year older and I could vote. My parents still treated me the same and I still had the same curfew. In their eye I was still a child. However, everything changed when I went to college. I became in control of almost everything except I still had to go to school. Being in control is such a powerful thing. I couldn’t imagine losing all my control like the elderly do. When I went home for Thanksgiving I lost most of my control to my parents and it upset me. I felt like the elderly people. My picture shows a divided line between black and white side and the color side showing I can’t get to what I want to be until I completely grow up and my parents treat me like a true adult. I’m stuck on the dark side wanting control, wanting color. In the book Accidental Mind, by David J. Linden, he discusses how perception is tied to emotion. Linden states, â€Å"Clearly, the perception/emotion distinction cuts deep into the way we think about the brain and the ways we deal with its dysfunctions† (Linden 98). He is basically saying that the time we realize or are aware of a sensation, emotions are already engaged. Two examples are Capgras Syndrome and people who have been blinded by damage to the primary visual cortex. Capgras syndrome is when someone can still visually identify objects and human faces, but they don’t evoke any emotional feeling. People who are blinded by damage to the primary visual cortex can accurately locate an object in their visual field even though they have no conscious awareness of seeing anything (Linden 99). The important point here is that visual information is rapidly fed into emotional centers in the brain, which make it impossible to separate emotion from perception in experience† (Linden 100). Linden concludes that the examples may only use vision, the principle still applies broadly to all of the sense, â€Å"emotions is integral to sensation and the two are not easily separated† (Linden 100). In my self-portrait everything is pastel t o show that where I am in my life is distorted yet connected and flows. I’m transitioning from being a teen to almost an adult. I see and experience things that are fair and also unfair. The color is so close to me yet I still have to wait for it. I am stuck on the playground trying to amuse myself until I am allowed to enter the real world. The playground and city are tied together because I will one day play on both. Another example from Linden’s book is the study on identical twins. Linden states that in certain cases some mental and behavioral traits come from genes. In the experiment they used identical twins (monozygotic twins) who were separated after birth and raised by different families and monozygotic twins who were raised together to compare with (Linden 53). â€Å"For example, identical twins given psychological tests to pin-point personality traits, such as extroversion or conscientiousness or openness, showed that identical twins have tended to share many of these traits whether or not the twins were raised together† (Linden 53). The point was to see if twins in the same environment and twins in separate environments were tested on being similar. Lindens conclusion was that, â€Å"in children and young adults from middle class or affluent families, in studies that have used a combination of twins, identical and nonidentical, raised together and apart, about 50 percent of â€Å"general intelligence† can attribute to genes, with the remainder determined by environmental factors† (Linden 54). Basically, genes influence general intelligence but to a lesser degree than they influence personality (Linden 54). When dealing with general intelligence, â€Å"both genes and environment contribute, but in the extreme case of environment deprivation seen in the poorest household, the effects of environment become much greater and largely overcome the effects of genes† (Linden 54). In the end the tests concluded that, â€Å"identical twins raised apart are significantly more alike in measures of personality than nonidentical twins raised apart† (Linden 54). This can conclude that there is some contribution due to genes. The main point of the twin experiment was to show that twins who grew up in separate environments were surprisingly more similar then expected. No matter what environment I am in I am still the same person. I can be on the playground playing or in the city working but no matter what I am still me. I grew up on the playground and learned many lessons that I will carry with me when I leave there. No matter how old I become or how aged I become I will still have the same personality and drive to achieve all my goals and dreams. Anything can happen if I set my mind to it and be patient. Eventually I’ll be in color like Mickey Mouse. My self-portrait shows the growth a person going from a child to a young adult. In humanity it is normal for a child to continually get frustrated about their age. A twelve-year-old is almost a teen, eighteen-year-old is a legal adult but not a true adult, and a twenty-year-old is so close to being twenty-one. Being a teen at any age is rough but every year is a year closer to something different. I may be stuck as a legal adult thriving to be ndependent from my parents but in reality I’m not even close to being able to be on my own. I’m stuck, like most of the other eighteen-year-olds in the world, trying to figure out who they are. I am just one of millions who feel this way, yet in reality what would I even do with all my independence and freedom? I am a freshman in college who really doesn’t know what I want to do with my life. I wont know until I figure out who I am as a person. This is why my self-portrait is in transition because before I can do anything with my life I have to answer the question: who am I?

Martin Luther King and Malcom X Construing the Courageous

MLK and X: Construing the Courageous Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X are equally categorized as courageous individuals; however the thoughts, actions, and beliefs as evidenced in their writings demonstrate that each chose a path opposite the other in exhibiting courageous actions. Through Martin Luther King Jr.’ speech, I’ve Been to the Mountain Top and Malcom X’s By any Means Necessary, we observe the steps that each of these Black Activist Leaders took in order to grasp the attention of African-Americans all while achieving results in moving the Black community upward toward equality. Martin Luther King Jr. showed courage when no one else showed courage – in patience. In his speech I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, he delivers his message in a preacher’s style that gives hope and promises for a new beginning for those who have been oppressed. He speaks with true courage and warns his followers that it is not the time for complacency or waiting for change to happen, it is everyone’s responsibility to act and bring about the change that is needed. â€Å"Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.† He speaks of power in numbers and demonstrates that a large group of people who work courageously in an organized and systematic fashion with the same goals and beliefs can change the thinking and the way society functions. â€Å"That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.† King overall was a