Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Need More Data

Each fall I teach an undergraduate course in database modeling.  In this course we learn how to design relational databases and use SQL to manipulate the database and the data within the tables.  It is a good course but we are challenged with the limited data in our databases.

I created sample databases for us to use to execute our SQL queries but these databases are limited in size (about 12 records in the transaction table).  As a result, we are not able to produce meaningful results from our queries.  This limitation takes away from our exercises but I don't have time to create the number of records we need for the database.  Also, we want the data to provide us with the ability to spot realistic trends to support more analysis of the data.  As a result, we not only need a large amount of data but it has to be realistic.

I would really like to get my hands on transactional data from a real company.  If we were able to dummy up the data (to protect the intellectual capital of the organization) we could create a relational database with this data and perhaps return some value to the organization through a set of queries they could use to analyze their own data.

Maybe I'll be able to get a hold of some data before the fall semester.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Traveling with my iPad

I'm in Washington DC this week looking at colleges with my son. It is nice to get away and DC is beautiful this time of the year with the blossoms still on the trees.

One of the great things about online education is the flexibility in both teaching online courses and as a student participating in online classes. While I'm away I'm able to take advantage of the free Wi-Fi offered at the hotel to check into my online classes and post to the course discussions. However, my travel plans this week had to first work around my face-to-face MBA class I taught Monday evening. While I still really enjoy teaching in the physical classroom, I appreciate the flexibility offered in the online environment.

This week I decided to take along my iPad rather than bringing my netbook or lugging my laptop. The iPad fits nicely in my bag, is very light, and allows me to watch a few purchased episodes of The IT Crowd while on the plane. While it was great having my iPad along on this trip, posting to my discussions and writing this blog post takes much more time; especially when I have to go back and edit my posts. At this point I wish I had packed my netbook or laptop.

I think my experience this week typifies most of the iPad reviews. This device is a much better content consumption devise than a content creation device. However, the portability does make up for the challenges of the onscreen keyboard. Maybe the challenge of the keyboard is worth all the benefits of this great device.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Firefox or Chrome?

I keep switching between Firefox and Chrome for my main browser.  Prior iterations of the Firefox browser proved to be very slow to load; even without many extensions on the browser.  As a result, I switched to Google's flashy Chrome browser and immediately noticed an increase start-up time.  Since then I have stuck with Chrome and suffered through some Java incompatibilities with the WYSIWYG editor in our learning management system and the manual steps required to download an exported file from EndNote.

Every month or so I think about migrating back to Firefox so that I can take advantage of a more flexible browser but I just couldn't take the slow load times and the less polished interface.  I was also hooked on the combination URL address and Google search bar at the top of the Chrome browser.  Chrome offered a much more pleasant interface to work within but it just didn't support the Java scripts needed for my learning management system and the online journal database exporting.  Throughout my waffling back and forth between Chrome and Firefox I also contemplated migrating to Internet Explorer but just can't give up the native spell checking in Firefox and Chrome.

After reading the ProfHacker blog posting today I decided to make the switch back to Firefox.  While I miss the wonderful Chrome interface, I do appreciate the enhanced Java capabilities of Firefox.

What is your experience?  Do you favor one browser over the other?  Why?

Brandon

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Overtime

This weekend our department is hosting the 2011 Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium (MICS).  This symposium brings together computer science students and faculty from across the upper Midwest for programming and robotics competitions and paper presentations.

Friday morning during the paper presentations, a colleague and I presented our paper titled Overtime Effects on Project Team Effectiveness.  In this paper we discussed the impacts scheduling and extended overtime pressures have on the project team; particularly software designers and software developers.  In researching this paper I found a study showing that 75% of software faults occur in the design phase and 71% of faults result in long-term stress factors such as short development timelines, human error, and skipping steps in the methodology.  The causes of these errors are not surprising but it is rather surprising to see the highest level of faults occurring in the design phase rather than in the development phase.

Later this week the proceedings from the conference will be published.  I'll post a link once they are available.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

What are we Missing?

Our college recently implemented a unified search tool to search for journal articles across several journal databases.  This new search tool has saves me a lot of time but I noticed that I often only scan through the first page or two of results.  I wondered what I was missing out on by skipping the remaining pages of partially relevant results.


I recently read an article by Evens (2008) that addressed this very concern.  This author noted as journal articles are published online and become part of these databases, scholars search rather than browse as a method to locate sources of information.  Evans found this trend resulted in a smaller subset of articles referenced in publications and the referenced articles were newer than articles published prior to searchable journal databases.  The author concluded the search results first display recent articles that are most relevant and, as a result, older and less directly relevant articles are not found or used by researchers.  The conclusion was recent research is based on a smaller set of sources and typically relies on a disproportional amount of newer sources.


Evans, J.A. (2008). Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarshipScience, 321(5887), 395-399.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

First Post

This is the first posting to my new blog site.  At this point I suspect nobody will read this message but I need to start somewhere.  I'm going to begin my blog by defining the purpose and scope of this blog.

I plan to use this blog site to highlight my experiences as a faculty member and share interesting, and hopefully useful, information I come across in my readings and research.  The scope of the blog will be mostly IT-related however I may diverge from time to time.  Since my interests lie in knowledge management, project management, software engineering, database modeling, IT education, and technology gadgets, most of my postings will fall into these one of these categories.

I hope I'm able to develop content for this blog that is meaningful and applicable to IT practitioners and scholars alike.

Skills to Look for in Project Managers

Today I read a brief article describing the eight skills to look for when hiring an IT project manager. The headlines caught my attention...