Chapter 2 Exercises

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Chapter 1 Exercises

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Principles of MIS

© 2008 by Jerry Post

What are the current best prices of disk drives ($/GB) and RAM ($/GB)? How much does it cost for the fastest processor you can find (not counting exotic supercomputers)?

Using a common Web site or retail store, find the price of a mid-level laptop. List the primary specifications. Identify the cost of doubling the amount of RAM on the laptop at the time of purchase. Use a discount Web site to compare the price of purchasing the RAM separately and installing it yourself.

Find or create a color chart that identifies and displays at least the 27 primary colors for the RGB color model. Use three levels (0, mid, max) for each of the three colors.

Find a high-resolution digital photograph. Using photo editing software, save several copies of the photo in JPEG format with different levels of compression. At what point do you begin to notice the photograph quality degrade? Compare the file sizes as well. Print the photo (a black and white print is fine) and compare the results to the original.

What is the highest capacity common USB drive available? What is a typical price? How fast is the write speed? Do some research to see if or when the industry might release faster speed devices.

How much would it cost to purchase the current release of Microsoft Office for a group of 10 people? How much would it cost to use similar software from an online provider? What are the drawbacks to going with an online provider?

Research state-of-the-art video displays. What are the best resolutions you can find? At what price? What additional capabilities exist (e.g., three-dimensional)?
1. A textbook of 700 pages. Create two single-spaced pages with a small PowerPoint drawing on one page. Convert it to PDF format and estimate the size. Compare this number to other sources.
2. A full-color image from a 7-megapixel camera. Both in raw form (TIFF) and an estimate of the size in high-quality JPEG format.
3. A 15-minute lecture recorded with the PC audio recorder. Make and save a 30-second recording and use the file size to estimate a 15-minute recording.
4. If you wanted to store your favorite half-hour television show in digital form, how many bytes of storage would it take? Extra credit: How much space would it take if you remove the commercials? (Hint: Time the commercials.) How much space would it take in HDTV format?
5. A Unicode document of about three pages of single-spaced text.

You have a photo from a 7-megapixel camera at 3072 x 2034 pixels. Your image editing software defaults to 72 pixels per inch, and claims the image is 42.667 x 32 inches. You want to convert to a standard 10-inch wide photo but keep the aspect ratio. You need to find a new resolution that sets the proper dpi and the height.

The size numbers for video are often quite large. How are Web sites such as YouTube able to share so many videos? Note: Research the site to find out.

Operating systems define drive space in terms of binary numbers where 1024 = 1 kilobyte, and 1 gigabyte is 1024*1024*1024. But disk drive manufacturers advertise storage space in decimal values, using 1,000 instead of 1,024. If you buy a drive advertised as 200 GB, how many bytes will the operating system recognize on it?

Technology Toolbox: Speech Recognition

Set up speech recognition on your computer and train it. Choose a paragraph of text and dictate it into Word. Do not make corrections to the text as you dictate it. When you have finished, copy the paragraph and make the corrections to the copy. Count the number of mistakes and hand in both paragraphs.

Do a quick survey of other students (not in the class) to find out how many have used speech input. Of the ones who have tested it, how many use it on a regular basis? Report the results and comment on the low usage rates.

How are the speech recognition systems used in other devices, such as cell phones, different from those used in basic personal computers?

Technology Toolbox: Charts

Identify the best chart to use for the following datasets, and give a brief justification for your choice:
1. Sales by department for the last five years.
2. Sales by employee for the last month.
3. Production data for output quality and percent of carbon.
4. Share of sales to five nations.
5. Total customer billings by employee for the last 24 months.

Find at least two data series from the government (try www.fedstats.gov) and plot them. Briefly explain any patterns or trends.
16. Enter the following sales data into a spreadsheet. Create two charts, one showing total sales over time and one showing the changing percentage sales over time by product type. Briefly comment on the two charts and describe the difference in the information content.

Year	Soft Goods	Hard Goods	Movies
2002	345	561	151
2003	431	627	255
2004	572	782	390
2005	634	833	488
2006	701	933	601
2007	753	960	657

Technology Toolbox: Spreadsheets

A company is evaluating the purchase of a new machine that costs $50,000. The company will also have to pay money each year for maintenance costs. However, the machine will increase profits by several thousand dollars each year. Enter the cost and profit data into a spreadsheet. Since the costs and profits occur over time, you have to discount them to a single point in time. Use the net present value (NPV) function to compute the present value of the costs and profits. Initially, assume the discount rate is 4 percent, but build the spreadsheet so managers can change the value easily. Use the Goal Seek tool to find the discount rate at which the investment breaks even. That is, search for the discount rate that sets the computed net value (net profits-net costs) to zero.

Year	Cost	Profit
2008	-50,000	10,000
2009	-2,000	12,000
2010	-2,000	13,000
2011	-2,000	14,000
2012	-5,000	15,000

Create a new spreadsheet for a company that has sales of two products (shoes and hats) in two regions (East and West). Put data for the East division in one worksheet and data for the West division in a separate worksheet. Create a third worksheet to display the totals of the two divisions. Chart the changes over time.

Year	Shoes	Hats
2003	456	110
2004	571	98
2005	632	87
2006	771	69
2007	780	120

Year	Shoes	Hats
2003	1024	234
2004	1305	198
2005	1525	178
2006	1598	165
2007	1652	208

Year	East	West	Total
2003	566	1258	1824
2004	669	1503	2172
2005	719	1703	2422
2006	840	1763	2603
2007	900	1860	2760
Total			11781

You need to evaluate your employees. You have a list of their performance on four tasks—measured in terms of time. The time is the number of minutes they finished behind the fastest person. So smaller numbers represent better performance. Two of the employees were injured at different points and did not complete all of the tasks. Enter the data into a spreadsheet and analyze it by computing the mean and standard deviation for each stage. Then compute four new columns that contain the individual Z-score for each employee in each stage: Zi = (Xi – average)/Std Dev. Compute the average Z-score for each person and rank them. Remember that smaller (negative) numbers are better. Chart the final averages. One extra credit point if you can identify the employees.

Employee	S0	S3	S5	Sf
Basso	0.23	3.05	1.05	7.23
Cruz	0.53	14.85	3.13	31.80
Danielson	0.17	9.92	1.33	11.50
Davis	0.32
Hincapie	0.13	3.05	0.67
Leipheimer	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
McCartney	0.32	0.07	0.42	0.90
Vandborg	0.30	14.85	3.03	25.30

Teamwork

Each person in the group should find and price a computer that would be used as a laptop computer for managerial work. Compare the results to determine how far apart the prices are and identify the components that cause the greatest price differentials. Try to agree on a standard configuration that could be used by everyone.

Each person should research a printer that could be used to print all of the work done by a group of 30 people who sometimes print (or copy) 200,000 pages per month. Each person should outline the benefits and costs of the printer selected. Combine the results and as a group, select the best printer and explain your recommendation.

Select a common application tool (word processor, spreadsheet, and so on). Each person on the team should read the documentation or search the Web and identify one feature that he or she has not used before. Create an example that uses this feature. Write a short note describing the feature and its benefits, including a brief tutorial on how to use it. Combine the notes into a document and share it with the team. Have each team member vote on the usefulness of each topic and reorganize the document so that the highest-ranked features are listed first.

Have each person on the team find an example of a good chart and a bad chart using newspapers and the Internet. Combine the results from each person into a document so that each person can vote on the best and worst charts.

Set up free accounts on one of the online application sites (such as Google). Create a short document to describe a recent movie or television show. Have each person add a couple of lines of comments about the movie. When finished, comment on the benefits and drawbacks of using the online system to write documents versus the traditional method of using separate copies and e-mailing them.

Rolling Thunder Database

Using the Export Data form, copy the data to a spreadsheet and create graphs for the following situations. (Choose the type of graph you feel is best suited to present the data.)
1. Sales by model type.
2. Sales by month.
3. Sales by model type for each month.
4. Sales by state.
5. Sales by employee by month.

Using the existing forms, enter data for a new bicycle order.

Find at least two other bicycles (e.g., on the Internet or from a dealer). Create a spreadsheet comparing the features and costs with a similar bicycle built by Rolling Thunder Bicycles.

Using the Export Data form, copy the data to a spreadsheet and compute the average profit margin for each type of bicycle for one different year. Comment on any differences that you find.

Assume you have to give a presentation to the marketing manager. Create a slide show to compare the sales of each model type for the last two years.