Department of Management Information Systems, Temple University
Weekly questions to consider when creating your posts. These questions are a jumping off point to asking your own questions, pose new ideas, and provide explanations and examples backed by careful analysis. Apply class concepts, terms, and theories too. Refer to Assignment 12 for additional details.
We use loops “sequence of instruction that is repeated until a certain condition is reached.” There are three types of loops you might need during coding. There is “for loop,” “while loop,” and “do-while loop.” Loops are common to run codes. It repeats until a condition evaluates to false. While loop executes its statement as long as the condition is true. Lastly, a do-while-loop is a statement repeated until the condition is false, meaning it stops execution and is passed to the do-while statement. I believe we use it for loop when we want to code a specific number of times because it’s always executed by initialization, expression, and increment statements. While loop is when you don’t know the specific number of times it executes as long as the expression is true.
Source:https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Loops_and_iteration#do…while_statement
https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/for-loop-vs-while-loop
We use if/else statement to examine if the condition is true or false. If statements is where the condition of code is true. Else statement is same condition to be false. Lastly else if is for new test if the first condition is false. The basic syntax of if/else statements is from class that helped me understand what if/else statements are.
if (something_is_true){
do something;
}else{
do_something_different
}
“isNaN” stands for is not-a-number when it’s true its value is not a number. It helps converting “the value to a number before testing it” for example
//This returns true;
isNaN(‘Hello’);
//This returns false;
Number.isNaN(‘Hello’);
To evaluate conditions “&&” “if” its true then the condition if block will be executed. False the else statement will be executed. With “||” if both are true the code inside the if statement will be executed.
Sources: https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_if.asp#:~:text=Use%20if%20to%20specify%20a,the%20first%20condition%20is%20falsehttps://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_isnan.asp#:~:text=isNaN()%20returns%20true%20if,a%20number%20before%20testing%20it.
Ransomware is a negative type of system that is designed to attack computer systems for information in exchange for monetary value. Ransomware takes people’s personal data and threatens to publish this information, as well as sensitive information, and hopes that victims will pay them to not post this information. Ransomware is a popular topic, especially in the hospital world. Hospitals are meant to always keep up-to-date information/records for all of their patients at all times. This includes social security info, payment, phone numbers, and more. Ransomware targets hospitals because of the records they have, and because they are most likely up to date at all times. Personally, if I was a criminal this is definitely a smart place to target. Because of this information being up to date at all times, then it means if they are to successfully access this information, there is a higher chance of them being able to obtain accurate information to use. Below is a snippet from an article I found about ransomware in a hospital that I found super intriguing as well:
Threat modeling is a process by which potential threats can be identified, enumerated, and prioritized. Artificial Intelligence can be described as a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Al uses machines as opposed to Natural Intelligence displayed by animals or people.
Artificial Intelligence is used to solve problems, act to achieve a specific goal, and make tasks easier to complete. Examples of Al include Siri, Alexa, self-driving cars, conversational robots (Kuki AI), and Netflix recommendations.
The three types of Artificial Intelligence are Narrow (ANI), General (AGI), Superintelligence (ASI). Narrow Al is designed to perform a single task, and any knowledge gained from completing that task will not automatically be applied to other tasks. Narrow Al is where we are at today and where we have been, and General Al is where we want to head in the future General Al is the hypothetical ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn an intellectual task that a human being can. It is also referred to as strong Al. Superintelligence Als a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. A speed superintelligence could do everything a human mind could do, and much faster.
The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. A human is to communicate with both a human and an Al through text, and then the arbiter selects which one they think is human and which is the Al. Kuki is a good example of this. The idea of the test is that if the arbiter selects the Al, then human-level intelligence has successfully been created programmatically through the Al.
Why do we use loops?
We use loops to avoid writing repetitive code. Using loops makes our code cleaner, run smoother, and ultimately saves us a lot of time. When I looked at JavaScript on Codecademy, they had me write the same piece of code ten times to illustrate what precisely loops save you from doing. The point was well received. There are many kinds of loops, but we learned the for loop, the while loop, and the do… while loop. The for loop iterates through a block of code a known or specific number of times. The while loop iterates through a block of code while a specified condition is true – this means that the number of iterations does not necessarily have to be known. The do… while loop is similar to the while loop, also iterating through a block of code while a condition is true, but it is written in reverse of the while loop (the condition is last, not first). I am most familiar with the for loop, and therefore find it to be the most intuitive. However, mastering the three parts, as shown in the above image, can be somewhat tricky!
&& and ||
In JavaScript, we have the three (really four, but I’m omitting ??) logical operators seen above, &&, !, and ||. These operators can work for any value, boolean (true/false) or otherwise. These operators evaluate an expression, converts the operand to a boolean value, and, according to the rules of each operator, may or may not return the value of the operand. For the || operator, the OR operator, the first true value will be returned. This means that only one OR the other value must convert to true for the value of the operand to return. Practically, as we see this operator used, if you have an if statement and only one condition evaluates to true, the code will still run. Conversely, for the && operator, the AND operator, both statements must convert to true for the code to run. The ! operator, or NOT operator, doesn’t work similarly to the first two – ! will return the inverse boolean value of an operand. The explanations of these operators don’t seem to make much sense when written out, but they are fairly intuitive when you are actually coding. For now, I try to just remember them as AND and OR, and not confuse myself with the intricacies.
Cloud computing is the method of delivery of many different services through the internet. These services include data storage, servers, databases, and software. With cloud computing, comes many pros and cons. Collaboration is a pro of cloud computing as it allows for better collaboration because it grants access to data anywhere you are and whenever you need it. Another pro to cloud computing is data loss prevention, the cloud back-ups all of the data in case there is a disaster where the data is originally located. Lastly, the most important is that it allows for an overall faster experience accessing the data. Since the data is not limited to certain hardware, it allows the developers to manipulate and test ideas at a faster rate than ever before. Businesses do not have to pay to install certain hardware now that cloud computing has become available, decreasing the cost while increasing flexibility. Now with all of the benefits of cloud computing, do come some negative aspects. Since cloud computing is solely internet based, it is dependent on the internet in the local area. If there is an internet outage, the data will not be accessible, causing delays. Another disadvantage is security. Since this data can be accessed through external service providers, it increases the risk of data breaches and attacks.
An API is an application programming interface. This allows the software to use the resources and infrastructure of another software or organization. For example, Uber Eats uses google maps and the apple weather app uses the weather bureau’s system when delivering weather information to its users. There are three different API’s. The first is Saas which stands for software as a service. Saas allows for the delivery of applications over the internet, which are accessed as services by the users. Examples of Saas are google doc and gmail. Iaas is infrastructure as a service which means that computing services are offered to customers from a service provider. An example of an Iaas is Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that cloud products and services to help customers solve solutions within their business. Lastly Paas is platform as a service. Paas is a complete development in the cloud. An example of this would be the amazon web service.
Data analytics is the use of tools and people to uncover data that is not readily available to the eye, such as patterns. There are three different types of data analytics, descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive. Descriptive data analytics is used when trying to answer the question “what happened?”. This is found using business intelligence (BI). Business intelligence is software that takes in data from a business and turns it over to the user in reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs. This software analyzes data and then presents it in a form that is easily understandable by the business in order to make a proper business decision. The descriptive analysis allows a business to understand its strengths and weaknesses. After the data has been analyzed and placed into visualizations for the users based on historical data, they perform predictive analytics. Predictive analytics uses this past data for the creation of future models. These models will predict the future outcomes of the business the data that has been previously collected. Using both predictive and descriptive analytics, prescriptive analytics allows for this data to be used to create optimization within the business. Optimization is the process of manipulating a business strategy or process in order to make it more efficient and less costly. Using optimization prescriptive analytics advises you on how to do your job the best you can.
The whole process starts with data, which is raw and unorganized facts. There are many sources from which data comes including systems, people, locations, platforms, and transactions. Each business retrieves the data, then gathers it, then stores it, and finally interprets it using data analytics. Google Analytics is a great example of data analytics and its use of it. Google Analytics captures user engagement, the number of sessions, the average time of a session, and the number of pages visited. They then interpret this data using data analytics to come to conclusions.
An ERP is enterprise resource planning. ERP is a type of software that allows those in the business world to organize their business processes. An ERP creates one copy of the data. During class, we spoke about an example of an ERP being Temple’s banner. Since all the data needed is on the banner, it allows for an efficient and simpler experience for its users. This data includes class registrations, financial billing, canvas access, download access for certain extensions, and connecting to faculty and staff throughout the university. CRM stands for customer relationship management. This allows a company to oversee, organize and manage all of its current, past, and future customers. The goal of a CRM is to improve business relationships between the company and the customers, leading to an overall expansion of your consumer base. Salesforce is the best example of a CRM, this cloud-based platform allows for a business of any size to start managing its customers, in hopes of it leading to overall improvements and expansion of the business. When we used Maxlabs at the beginning of the semester, we toggled with some scenarios on inserting and manipulating customer data while making it easy for users to access. Through those labs, I began to understand how Salesforce uses its cloud-based CRM to insert customers into the CRM to track the interaction and future interactions. Legacy systems are outdated software that is still being used today for the original use it was designed for. These legacy systems have a couple of issues as they tend to age. These systems do not allow for growth as they are not compatible with the current technology. The greatest issue though is security. These systems are easily hacked by users as they do not allow for such security as two-factor authentication and role-based access. Even though these systems are out of date compared to the newest technology, they are still in use today in businesses. ERPs are about the business and focus internally on the business and all the components included in the ERP for sufficient access to everything needed to run that business. Whereas a CRM is about the customer and focuses on the external factors of the business. The two aspects both of these platforms have in common is that they include shared data and are both used to increase the profit of a business.