Ethics

Ethics is an issue that comes up countless times in the business environment. To some people, Ethics come as common sense, but to others, their unethical acts always seem to have some justification - if nothing more than the fact that they just want ONE SONG illegally downloaded to their MP3 player. Nonetheless, any action like this is unethical. Other words I like to associate with unethical behavior are deviant, shady, secretive, and "Will I get caught?". Unfortunately when it comes to right and wrong, there are very skewed beliefs among us.

For businesses, acting unethically can seriously affect the bottom line profits. Whether it is executive level management like the ENRON case, or even down to the micro level at a small retail shop, small or big, these mistakes should all be treated as wrong. I have worked for a company where cashiers were in charge of ringing customers, adjusting promotion prices,  taking coupons, and ultimately deciding whether to give into peer pressure to "make an acceptation" to the policies. Giving into these situations is not only unethical, but it is stealing from the company. It is not fair for Sally Sue to always grant customers extra discounts, while George always stands firm in the company policy and only honor company-presented promotions and coupons. If any of George's customers ever found out what Sally Sue was doing, there would be problems to be sorted out and likely some  upset customers. This unequal treatment is unethical.

http://www.asaecenter.org/Resources/articledetail.cfm?ItemNumber=13073

The site above links to an article called Ethics in the Workplace Written by Joshua Joseph in October 2000. He talks about some recent implementations of Ethics programs in the workplace. Having Ethics Training, an Ethics hot line(somewhere to call and ask about if something is ethical or not), and written ethics standards seems to have dramatically increased ethical behavior in the workplace. If employees are aware of what is expected of them from the start of their job, they are more likely to report misconduct, feel good about their organizations, and feel valued as employees (according to the Ethics Resource center's 2000 National Business Ethics Survey)

The next time that you doubt whether you should do something or not, don't ask yourself "will I get caught?" anymore. Let's start asking "Is this really ethical?" and when the answer to that question is "no", then do it - but usually if you have to ask yourself, then you may as well forget about it.

This cartoon was taken from a Denver Post Staff Writer, Chuck Plunkett

The image above demonstrates what not to take away from an Ethics training. If people know how to act ethical, they are more likely to do their own work. Here, these students do not take Ethics seriously. Either that, or they missed out on some vital human skills when they were growing up.

Secure Email

Thunderbird Account, Screen Capture, 4/10/11, Karina Mills

After finishing my Secure Email Project, I learned a lot about how to secure my email to prevent problems like viruses. I learned both how to digitally sign and encrypt my email. The digital signature provides verification of who the sender really is. When we encrypt data, we are converting the readable data into unreadable characters in order to protect unauthorized access to the data. That encrypted data then needs to be decrypted in order to read it.

The picture shows both the signed and encrypted emails that were sent to my professor.


This information has proved useful in light of recent events with hackers in the media.

Email systems hacked at Kroger, Disney, and New York & Co.   
Allison Hillaker, 4.04.2011

This Article that I found explains that the email systems were hacked at a number of retailers. Epsilon, the email service provider, was the place that was directly hacked, resulting in the exposure of customer names and emails. The retailers immediately sent out emails to their customers informing them of this debacle in order to prevent any further damage. There is no note of how many people were seriously or remotely affected, but this event goes to show how vulnerable information really is, even when there are securities against it.

Access Database Project

After finishing this project in Access, I have learned a lot about this piece of software that I had never used before. Its similarity to the other software applications in Microsoft Office 2007 allowed me to understand the basic functions and made it easy to learn how to maneuver through Access. For me when it comes to Databases, it's out of sight out of mind. Never having known about Access, I never knew there was a such database that made it so easy to sort data the way Access does. I learned how to move data between Access and Excel in order to make the most of the different pieces of software that are out there. I learned how to use my critical thinking to get what I want out of a set of data.


In order to increase the functionality of this database with the data that we have of the membership to the fitness center, I would sort the data in a way that would show me how long the members remained members at the fitness center. This set of data returned the start date as well as the leave date for each member that has left. For those that are no longer members, I would dive into the information to see if I could uncover the reason for them leaving. Using a Query, I would (in theory) subtract the start date from the leave date to see how many months the average member remained a member. This average could then be tracked over time to determine if there was a need for some sort of incentive program for retaining members.

This picture was taken by Karina Mills in 2011 showing the screen shot of part of my Access Project. Pictured is the Query section where I sorted the Individual members who left the gym in the past 6 months by end date and last name.

Google

Google has made the world a better place. I hope that everyone that can read this Blog is familiar with Google, but just in case, check it out - and you will want to after reading this! Google is a  Portal website that offers many services to it's users all in one site. At it's homepage www.Google.com, the simplistic design makes it user friendly and clutter-free(which is especially good for those aging eyes). When I want a search engine that will return many results - most of which are "just what I was looking for" - I turn to Google.

What you might not know about Google...

Gmail is Google's email service. Although Gmail is gaining popularity and many people have a Gmail account, there are many things that make Gmail the best email client I have ever used.

1. It's free! What's not to like?

2. It's chat feature. After signing into Gmail, the page returns most of the view showing the inbox messages, but the bottom left side of the page shows all of the contacts that have been manually added to the list. Contacts who are online are marked with Green, idle are marked with yellow, and offline are marked with gray. This chat option can come in handy. I have had team projects that were solely web-based and when you are working with a deadline, sometimes that instant answer is what makes all the difference.

3. You can personalize it! There are many different settings and themes that you can choose to make your email just like you.

This is a screen capture that I created 3/27/11 of my personalized Gmail account.

4. Filter, Filter, Filter! Gmail's filter options allow you to filter your emails by sender, words included, words not included, etc... Not only that, but once you have applied a filter, you can apply a second filter on the filter that you have already created which allows you to really narrow down your search results. The screen cap pictured above shows the top portion of Gmail's home page. As you can see, to the right of the search bar, there is an option to "create a filter". Once clicked, you should see something like the image below:

Here is a screen capture that I have cropped using Paint 3/27/11 on my own computer to demonstrate the Filter option in Gmail.

I have applied a couple filters here in this image. I am planning to shop at a beauty retail chain tomorrow and want to see if there are any free offers or coupons that I should bring to the store. I set a filter for the "From" because I want my filter to only return emails that have been sent from that retailer. Next to the filter "Has the Words" I wrote "free" because I only want results that return a listing of promotions or a coupon for a free item somewhere in either the subject or the body of the message. Next to "Doesn't Have" I entered the words "today only" because I plan to shop tomorrow once the store is open again.

Filters can also be added to future postings. Gmail makes it easy to color-coordinate frequent senders in your inbox to prioritize emails quickly at a glance.

5. Google Documents. Google Docs allows users to upload documents onto the website which can then be shared, reviewed and/or modified by contacts who are granted access to those documents. Using the online project example again, being able to edit and save rough drafts of our project right there over the internet saved the hassle of ensuring we all had the most accurate and up-to-date draft to look over. Google Docs also shows the date and time of the most recent edit to the document was made and it shows who made the changes. These documents can also be viewed straight from an email on most smart phones now. Since the most complex document software my phone comes with is an application called "Notes", I count on Google docs to convert word files into a Google doc  so that I can read important documents straight from my phone.


I hope that this information will encourage you to either set up a Gmail account or use your portal account to it's full potential. There are many functions that I just recently learned about that could have saved me countless hours in the past. Even if you do not use Google, but you use another portal style website, having the inter connectivity between all of your internet needs has proven to be quite useful to me and I assume it will do the same for you.

The Saxophone Presentation

Here is the link to my Presentation on the Saxophone:
http://www.screencast.com/users/KarinaMills/folders/Default/media/33a4ac59-526c-4b5e-a0e8-92fd67c9df23

Image taken by Karina Mills

Overall, I am pleased with my presentation. Going over the evaluation rubric though, I found some things that I could have improved. After a short introduction, I dove right into the meat of my project without much information to the audience of the purpose of the presentation and more of an outline for what I would be presenting. It was more of an informative presentation, so it was not as imperative to precede my presentation with putting the audience into that persuasive mindset. The purpose was to introduce to the audience some information about my passion, and maybe something they did not know before.

Seeing as how the majority of my audience is not familiar with the Saxophone, I don't expect that my audience had too many questions leaving the presentation because I thoroughly covered the basics about the saxophone. Since the topic is very broad, there may have been random questions that I could not necessarily  anticipate from the audience. I did not ask questions to spark curiosity; rather, I caught the attention of my audience through the use of multiple multimedia outlets. From the first slide where I played a simple blues scale,  to the video clips I included to show different musical styles, the audience was sure to be left with a tune in their head.

I took the time to ensure my information was accurate and presented in an easy to read format. Sometimes when we go into a presentation knowing EVERYTHING about the subject, there is a disconnect between the presenter and the audience because of the knowledge gap. I tried to tone the information down to be pretty basic. Had I gone too much into detail with the information, I would have bored the audience. I left the simple information with lots of visuals on the slides, and expanded upon the information by explaining it in more detail to be more engaging.

Image taken by Karina Mills

I learned a lot from this presentation. Never before had I been successful in recording my own audio to accompany the presentation - let alone figure out how to upload it online! Taking the time to read the resources given and researching on the internet allowed me to learn many things about Media, Software, PowerPoint, and the internet in general.  This knowledge will come in handy in the future. Especially since I am part of the Online Business Program, I need to know how to do the things that I did in this project. It was also good that we were able to see other peoples' presentations. One of the best ways that I learn is to take ideas from my peers. Before I even began, there were some projects already posted for me to review. It was also nice to see how my presentation compared to others once I finished. Even if I have a presentation that I will have to present in person, knowing how to record the audio will come in handy. It will be nice to use the audio as a resource to allow me to do a rough run through of my presentation and use the playback feature to hear any issues and correct them before I present live.

Creating a Storyboard

Anyone can pitch an idea. Children try to convince their parents to take them to the movies on a weeknight. Sales persons speak about the benefits of their products to get them in the shopping bag. We all can do it. But the people who can make the best story have the best chance of being successful.

I am planning to pitch an idea to a group of venture capitalists in hopes of getting investing for a project that has been on hold because of the economy. I have a lot of content to work with, but I need to narrow it down to my target audience. This is where my storyboard will come in handy.

A storyboard is basically a rough draft of a presentation - in my case, I will be using Microsoft PowerPoint to pitch my project. To get started, I had a sheet of paper with 12 blank boxes to mimic my presentations. Now, since this is a rough draft, I can always add or delete slides as I go. I decided to start with 12. It's simple really - I started how I would start any presentation - with some sort of opening. In my case, I chose a picture with a graphic image above with the name of my project. This is a music education project that is distributed through video format. The concept made it easy for me to be able to choose bits and pieces of video clips to add in as I saw fit. I really wanted to focus on visual presentation. Yes, I will pitch my idea verbally, but having some nice interim's of video and audio clips makes for a seamless non-linear presentation that takes away from awkward silences. After all, pitching an idea to venture capitalists can be intimidating. I chose a nice mix of video clips, audio clips, transitions, pictures, spreadsheets, and graphs to relay ideas and to allow my audience to easily understand this rather complicated concept that we are pitching.

The storyboard does a great job focusing my attention on the content rather than all the pizazz. Sometimes when preparing presentations, I get caught up in the graphics for hours on a particular slide and forget what the plan was for the next one! I feel at ease with the storyboard, and although technically I have not started my actual presentation, I feel more prepared and excited to start the fun stuff!

And this is my storyboard! Voila!

Excel Project

I just completed an analysis of heart rate measurements taken by my boss for 500 individuals during a particular workout at the fitness center. Heart rates were taken every minute starting at zero and ending at 20 minutes. My boss is interested in the heart rates of a variety of active individuals both male and female ages 20-49 before, during a 15 minute workout, and during a 5 minute cool down.  She was most interested in whether or not the subject reached their target heart rate for their age, as well as the average percent increase in heart rate from start to highest heart rate recorded. in order to find this information, I had to use a number of formulas that connected cells to each other to form easily readable data for my boss. I referred to the Help Button (upper right hand corner in Excel 2007) numerous times for reference.

First I had to find out which subjects reached their target heart rates for their age. My boss gave me a target heart rate of 80% which, if changed, would affect the numbers in the cells that were connected to it. The target heart rate would be 80% of the maximum HR. Since the Maximum HR for an individual is roughly 220-Age, I used the formula "=220-[subject Age Cell]" in order to get the Maximum HR, then I used the formula "=[MaxHR]*$E$1" where cell E1 is currently 80% in order to lock in that cell to find the TgtHR. Finally, I used the IF function to return a "Yes" if the HighestHR recorded was >=TgtHR, or return a "No" if the HighestHR was NOT >=Tgt HR. I created a Pivot table to refine the data by Females and Males that returned a Yes or No. Grand Totals are also displayed to show the bigger picture to my boss.

Then, she wanted to know the average percent increase in HR. I had to use the MAX function to find the highest HR recorded for each individual. We then used the formula "=(HighestHR-resting HR)/resting HR" to determine the percent increase that was achieved at the highest heart rate compared to the heart rate recorded at time 0:00. I then transferred the data to another worksheet creating a Pivot table more specifically grouping the data by Sex and by Age Group. The breakdown by demographic group will allow my boss to more accurately determine which groups benefit the most from these exercises.

Pictured below, I took a screen shot of the Pivot Table showing the Average Percent Increase in HR. *Notice that I suppressed the Grand Totals column and row that automatically show to leave only the information by demographic for my Boss.

This project allowed me to better understand the functions that I learned about Excel. I practiced manipulating and grouping data using different linkages throughout an excel workbook. I also took the time to learn about page layout and how to print a large group of data with many rows and columns and got practice with using tables to show only data that is most useful to the recipient. This project could easily transfer to a real world scenario and I will know how to use my knowledge of Excel to work through it, even if that means half of the time in the Help window.