Information Technology

Information technology (IT)- is the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware. IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.

Today, the term information has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term has become very recognizable. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems.

When computer and communications technologies are combined, the result is information technology, or "infotech". Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information.

A History of Information Technology

• Four basic periods
  Characterized by a principal technology used to solve the input, processing, output and communication problems of the time:

  1. Premechanical,
  2. Mechanical,
  3. Electromechanical, and
  4. Electronic

A. Premechanical Age: 300 B.C - 1450 A.D

1. Writing and Alphabets--communication.
   1. First humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings.
   2. 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq) devised cuniform
   3. Around 2000 B.C., Phoenicians created symbols
   4. The Greeks later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels; the Romans gave the letters Latin names to create the alphabet we use today.
2. Paper and Pens--input technologies.
   1. Sumerians' input technology was a stylus that could scratch marks in wet clay.
   2. About 2600 B.C., the Egyptians write on the papyrus plant
   3. around 100 A.D., the Chinese made paper from rags, on which modern-day papermaking is based.
3. Books and Libraries: Permanent Storage Devices.
   1. Religious leaders in Mesopotamia kept the earliest "books"
   2. The Egyptians kept scrolls
   3. Around 600 B.C., the Greeks began to fold sheets of papyrus vertically into leaves and bind them together.
4. The First Numbering Systems.
   1. Egyptian system:
      • The numbers 1-9 as vertical lines, the number 10 as a U or circle, the number 100 as a coiled rope, and the number 1,000 as a lotus blossom.
   2. The first numbering systems similar to those in use today were invented between 100 and 200 A.D. by Hindus in India who created a nine-digit numbering system.
   3. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed.
5. The First Calculators: The Abacus.

B. The Mechanical Age: 1450 - 1840

1. The First Information Explosion.
   1. Johann Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany)
      • Invented the movable metal-type printing process in 1450.
   2. The development of book indexes and the widespread use of page numbers.
2. The first general purpose "computers"
   • Actually people who held the job title "computer: one who works with numbers."
3. Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's Machine.
   • Slide Rule.

C. Electromechanical Age: 1840 - 1940

1. The Beginnings of Telecommunication.
   
   1. Voltaic Battery.
      • Late 18th century.
   2. Telegraph.
      • Early 1800s.
   3. Morse Code.
      • Developed in1835 by Samuel Morse
      • Dots and dashes.
   4. Telephone and Radio.
      • 
        Alexander Graham Bell.
      • 1876
   5. Followed by the discovery that electrical waves travel through space and can produce an effect far from the point at which they originated.
   6. These two events led to the invention of the radio
      • Guglielmo Marconi
      • 1894

D. Electronic Age: 1940 - Present

1. First Tries.
   • Early 1940s
   • Electronic vacuum tubes.
2. Eckert and Mauchly.
   1. The First High-Speed, General-Purpose Computer Using Vacuum Tubes:
      Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)

♀ My Favorites ♀

♠ its gonna make sense ♠
by: Michael Learns to Rock


Intro:

Life comes in many shapes
You think you know what you got
Until it changes

And life will take you high and low
You gotta learn how to walk
And then which way to go

Every choice you make
When you’re lost
Every step you take
Has it’s cause

Chorus:

After you clear your eyes
You’ll see the light
Somewhere in the darkness
After the rain has gone
You’ll feel the sun come
And though it seems your sorrow never ends
Someday it’s gonna make sense

Refrain:

Tears you shed are all the same
When you laughed ’till you cried
Or broken down in pain

All the hours you have spent in the past
Worrying about
A thing that didn’t last

Everything you saw
Played a part
In everything you are
In your heart

(back to chorus)

Release:

Someday you’re gonna find the answers
To all the things you’ve become and all they’ve done
At your expense
Someday it’s gonna make sense

Presentation Skills

Introduction

Presentations and reports are ways of communicating ideas and information to a group. But unlike a report, a presentation carries the speaker's personality better and allows immediate interaction between all the participants. A good presentation has:

• Content - It contains information that people need. But unlike reports, which are read at the reader's own pace, presentations must account for how much information the audience can absorb in one sitting.
• Structure - It has a logical beginning, middle, and end. It must be sequenced and paced so that the audience can understand it. Where as reports have appendices and footnotes to guide the reader, the speaker must be careful not to loose the audience when wandering from the main point of the presentation.
• Packaging - It must be well prepared. A report can be reread and portions skipped over, but with a presentation, the audience is at the mercy of a presenter.
• Human Element - A good presentation will be remembered much more than a good report because it has a person attached to it. But you still need to analyze if the audience's needs would not be better met if a report was sent instead.

The Voice

The voice is probably the most valuable tool of the presenter. It carries most of the content that the audience takes away. One of the oddities of speech is that we can easily tell others what is wrong with their voice, e.g. too fast, too high, too soft, etc., but we have trouble listening to and changing our own voices.

There are four main terms used for defining vocal qualities:

• Volume: How loud the sound is. The goal is to be heard without shouting. Good speakers lower their voice to draw the audience in, and raise it to make a point.
• Tone: The characteristics of a sound. An airplane has a different sound than leaves being rustled by the wind. A voice that carries fear can frighten the audience, while a voice that carries laughter can get the audience to smile.
• Pitch: How high or low a note is. Pee Wee Herman has a high voice, Barbara Walters has a moderate voice, while James Earl Jones has a low voice.
• Pace: This is how long a sound lasts. Talking too fast causes the words and syllables to be short, while talking slowly lengthens them. Varying the pace helps to maintain the audience's interest.
• Color: Both projection and tone variance can be practiced by taking the line "This new policy is going to be exciting" and saying it first with surprise, then with irony, then with grief, and finally with anger. The key is to over-act. Remember Shakespeare's words "All the world's a stage" -- presentations are the opening night on Broadway

The Body

Your body communicates different impressions to the audience. People not only listen to you, they also watch you. Slouching tells them you are indifferent or you do not care...even though you might care a great deal! On the other hand, displaying good posture tells your audience that you know what you are doing and you care deeply about it. Also, a good posture helps you to speak more clearly and effective.

Throughout you presentation, display:

• Eye contact: This helps to regulate the flow of communication. It signals interest in others and increases the speaker's credibility. Speakers who make eye contact open the flow of communication and convey interest, concern, warmth, and credibility.
• Facial Expressions: Smiling is a powerful cue that transmits happiness, friendliness, warmth, and liking. So, if you smile frequently you will be perceived as more likable, friendly, warm, and approachable. Smiling is often contagious and others will react favorably. They will be more comfortable around you and will want to listen to you more.
• Gestures: If you fail to gesture while speaking, you may be perceived as boring and stiff. A lively speaking style captures attention, makes the material more interesting, and facilitates understanding.
• Posture and body orientation: You communicate numerous messages by the way you talk and move. Standing erect and leaning forward communicates that you are approachable, receptive, and friendly. Interpersonal closeness results when you and your audience face each other. Speaking with your back turned or looking at the floor or ceiling should be avoided as it communicates disinterest.
• Proximity: Cultural norms dictate a comfortable distance for interaction with others. You should look for signals of discomfort caused by invading other's space. Some of these are: rocking, leg swinging, tapping, and gaze aversion. Typically, in large rooms, space invasion is not a problem. In most instances there is too much distance. To counteract this, move around the room to increase interaction with your audience. Increasing the proximity enables you to make better eye contact and increases the opportunities for others to speak.
• Voice. One of the major criticisms of speakers is that they speak in a monotone voice. Listeners perceive this type of speaker as boring and dull. People report that they learn less and lose interest more quickly when listening to those who have not learned to modulate their voices.

Presentation Skill: Top 7 Tips for Making the Most of Your Presentation Practice

Believe it or not, preparation is a better determinant of presentation success than knowledge, experience, or even talent. The best presenter is almost always the presenter who is the most prepared. Even so, there are a lot of conflicting ideas about what constitutes thorough presentation preparation. So what exactly is thorough preparation? Here are seven straight forward tips to increase the effectiveness of the time you invest in your practice.

1. Practice Delivery Out Loud. Practice is NOT mentally rehearsing your presentation on the drive over to the presentation or even thinking about your presentation while tossing and turning at night. Both of these are something, but not practice. A lot can happen between thinking about what you want to say and actually getting the words to come out of your mouth coherently. If you don’t actually practice speaking out loud, when the time comes, you may struggle to articulate your mentally well rehearsed thoughts. To the audience, this struggle will appear to be lack of preparation.
   
   
2. Try to Conduct Your Practice in a Situation Similar to the Real Speaking Venue. Whenever possible, conduct your practice in a situation that closely mirrors the real presentation. For example, if you will be speaking in front of a large group in an auditorium or large conference room, try to practice in a large room filled with as many audience recruits as possible. Why? Research indicates that if your practice closely mirrors your real presentation, once you are in the actual presentation your brain will think you have done this before. Besides practice, the next most important ingredient in your success is experience.
   
   
3. Practice in Front of Real People. If you can’t find any audience recruits at work, ask your spouse, best friend, or if all else fails, your pet to listen to your presentation. Interacting with a live audience is an important part of your practice. It helps you not only rehearse your delivery, but gain experience reading and reacting to the silent messages your audience is sending you about their understanding, their likes, and their dislikes.
   
   
4. The Mirror is Your Friend. Even after you’ve practiced in front of an audience, continue to rehearse in front of the greatest critic of all, yourself in the mirror. The mirror is a WONDERFUL if underused presentation practice tool. It will allow you to see and hear your delivery live and make decisions about how to enhance your style. Remember, when it comes to practicing your presentation, the mirror really is your friend.
   
   
5. Practice From Beginning to End Without Stopping. Practice all the way through the presentation without stopping—even if you make a mistake. Most presenters have a tendency to stop their practice each time they make a mistake. Besides reinforcing this negative practice, when you continually stop and start over you get very good at the beginning of the presentation, but can’t deliver an effective conclusion because you’ve rarely made it to the end of the presentation. As the second most remembered part of your presentation, it is important to have a strong, well-rehearsed close.
   
   
6. Practice With Your Props. If you are using visual aids such as a PowerPoint slide show, make sure you practice with your slides. Visual aids of any kind add another layer of complexity to presentation and require practice to use effectively. Practicing with your slides will help prepare you for the things that inevitably go wrong and help you avoid unprofessional behaviors such as not knowing how to advance your slide show or how to put the slide show in the proper view for display.
   
   
7. Do it One More Time. After you feel you’ve done it well in practice and are happy with your performance, practice one more time to make sure your success wasn’t just a happy accident. All in all, depending upon you and your content, you may need to practice your presentation delivery out loud 5 to 10 times. Yes, that’s right, you might have to practice out loud up to 10 times, but don’t worry, your audience’s thundering applause will make the effort worthwhile!

What is ETHICS?

Each society forms a set of rules that establishes the boundaries of generally accepted behavior. These rules are often expressed in statements about how people should behave, and they fit together to form the moral code by which a society lives. Unfortunately, the different rules often have contradictions, and you can be uncertain about which rule to follow. For instance, if you witness a friend copy someone else's answers while taking an exam, you might be caught in a conflict between loyalty to your friend and the value of telling the truth. Sometimes, the rules do not seem to cover new situations, and you must determine how to apply the existing rules or develop new ones. You may strongly support personal privacy, but in a time when employers e-mail and Internet usage, what rules do you think are accepted to govern the appropriate use of company resources?
The term morality refers to social conventions about right and wrong that are so widely shared that they become the basis for an established consensus. However, one's view of what is moral may vary by age, cultural group, ethnic background, religion, and gender. There is widespread agreement on the immorality of murder, theft, and arson, but other in the United States it is perfectly acceptable to place one's elderly parents in a managed care facility in their declining years. In most Middle Eastern countries, however , elderly parents would never be placed in such a facility they remain at home and are for by other family members.
Another example concerns attitudes toward the illegal copying ( piracy ), which range from strong opposition to acceptance as a standard approach to business. In 2003, 36 percent of all software in circulation worldwide was pirated, at a cost of $29 billion to software vendors. The highest piracy rates were in Vietnam and China, where 92 percent of the software was pirated. In the United States, the piracy rate was 22 percent.
Even within the same society, people can have strong disagreements over important moral issues▬in the United States, for example, issues such as abortion, the death penalty, ang gun control are continuously debated, and both sides feel their arguments are on solid moral ground.

Definition of ETHICS
ETHICS is a set of beliefs about right and wrong behavior. Ethical behavior conforms to generally accepted social norms, many of which are almost universal. However, although nearly everyone would agree that lying and cheating are unethical, what constitutes ethical behavior on many other issues is a matter of opinion. For example, most people would not steal an umbrella from someone's home, but a person who finds an umbrella in a theater might be tempted to keep it. A person's opinion of what represents ethical behavior is strongly influenced by a combination of family influences, life expressions, education, religious beliefs, personal values, and peer influences.
As a children grow, they learn complicated tasks▬riding a bike, writing alphabet▬that they out of habit for the rest of their lives. People also develop habits that make it easier to choose between what society considers good or bad.