REDIRECTION...

This blog site will cease to get new posts/updates from the owner.

If you are looking for newer entries from Lyle Samuel, please visit http://lylesamuel.blogspot.com.

Thank you.

Artificial Intelligence And Supercomputer Fascination

Been checking on CADIE, a Google April Fool’s prank, which I was hoping was true. Reading on the CADIE feature, this sparked my interest back to the idea of Artificial Intelligence, and if it could be, in any slightest bit, possible.

Being a big fan of all AI movies, the idea of human-like-intelligent machines fascinate me. When Google set out for its new prank, CADIE, for this year, I was thinking, “Ey, this could be possible”. Google could very well be able to have this type of project working. With all the brilliant minds that this company is hiring ever since, every year (think of all brilliant graduates from MIT and other forward movers on IT and related technologies going to Google), the company could have the right brain muscle to have this type of thing going on within its Complex. But CADIE’s a prank. Google’s known to release pranks to it users, some small, others grand. The company started with MentalPlex in 2000, some telepathic online Google searching capability with the help of a spinning wheel. Crazy, right? Check Wiki for the whole literature, or some of it.

Okay, so I know HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) 9000 , I know Ariia (Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst), I know VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), and I was thinking would it not be neat if we actually have one of these supercomputers existing right now, capable of thinking, deducing and deciding on things, and evolving to generate its own logic, learn and gain intelligence. I know these supercomputers turned villain in each of the story that they are a part of. And supercomputers their level could be too ambitious for our time, but isn’t this where we are all going? Intelligent machines for the future?

Scouring the net in search of an AI article, I came across a transcript that talks about AI and how it is and it is not possible. The document is actually a talk given by Mark Humphrys during the “Next Generation” symposium in Jesus College, Cambridge, August of 1997. It is a very informative article that answers some of the questions regarding AI. If you have the time you can follow and check the actual article through this link. I have included Mark Humphrys’ transcript, as well, together with this post. Just read ’til the end and if you have some inputs, tell me what you think.

This type of things surely fascinate the curious human mind. Technology just hypes everyone up. I know it does for me. Haha…

‘Til next post, keep livin’ it free and easy. :)


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AI is possible .. but AI won’t happen: The future of Artificial Intelligence

by Mark Humphrys

A talk given to the “Next Generation” symposium,
Jesus College, Cambridge, Aug 1997.

Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a perfect example of how sometimes science moves more slowly than we would have predicted. In the first flush of enthusiasm at the invention of computers it was believed that we now finally had the tools with which to crack the problem of the mind, and within years we would see a new race of intelligent machines. We are older and wiser now. The first rush of enthusiasm is gone, the computers that impressed us so much back then do not impress us now, and we are soberly settling down to understand how hard the problems of AI really are.

What is AI? In some sense it is engineering inspired by biology. We look at animals, we look at humans and we want to be able to build machines that do what they do. We want machines to be able to learn in the way that they learn, to speak, to reason and eventually to have consciousness. AI is engineering but, at this stage, is it also science? Is it, for example, modelling in cognitive science? We would like to think that is both engineering and science but the contributions that is has made to cognitive science so far are perhaps weaker than the contributions that biology has given to the engineering.

The confused history of AI
Looking back at the history of AI, we can see that perhaps it began at the wrong end of the spectrum. If AI had been tackled logically, it would perhaps have begun as an artificial biology, looking at living things and saying “Can we model these with machines?”. The working hypothesis would have been that living things are physical systems so let’s try and see where the modelling takes us and where it breaks down. Artificial biology would look at the evolution of physical systems in general, development from infant to adult, self-organisation, complexity and so on. Then, as a subfield of that, a sort of artificial zoology that looks at sensorimotor behaviour, vision and navigation, recognising, avoiding and manipulating objects, basic, pre-linguistic learning and planning, and the simplest forms of internal representations of external objects. And finally, as a further subfield of this, an artificial psychology that looks at human behaviour where we deal with abstract reasoning, language, speech and social culture, and all those philosophical conundrums like consciousness, free will and so forth.

That would have been a logical progression and is what should have happened. But what did happen was that what people thought of as intelligence was the stuff that impresses us. Our peers are impressed by things like doing complex mathematics and playing a good chess game. The ability to walk, in contrast, doesn’t impress anyone. You can’t say to your friends, “Look, I can walk”, because your friends can walk too.

So all those problems that toddlers grapple with every day were seen as unglamorous, boring, and probably pretty easy anyway. The really hard problems, clearly, were things demanding abstract thought, like chess and mathematical theorem proving. Everyone ignored the animal and went straight to the human, and the adult human too, not even the child human. And this is what “AI” has come to mean - artificial adult human intelligence. But what has happened over the last 40-50 years - to the disappointment of all those who made breathless predictions about where AI would go - is that things such as playing chess have turned out to be incredibly easy for computers, whereas learning to walk and learning to get around in the world without falling over has proved to be unbelievably difficult.

And it is not as if we can ignore the latter skills and just carry on with human-level AI. It has proved very difficult to endow machines with “common sense”, emotions and those other intangibles which seem to drive much intelligent human behaviour, and it does seem that these may come more from our long history of interactions with the world and other humans than from any abstract reasoning and logical deduction. That is, the animal and child levels may be the key to making really convincing, well-rounded forms of intelligence, rather than the intelligence of chess-playing machines like Deep Blue, which are too easy to dismiss as “mindless”.

In retrospect, the new view makes sense. It took 3 billion years of evolution to produce apes, and then only another 2 million years or so for languages and all the things that we are impressed by to appear. That’s perhaps an indication that once you’ve got the mobile, tactile monkey, once you’ve got the Homo erectus, those human skills can evolve fairly quickly. It may be a fairly trivial matter for language and reasoning to evolve in a creature which can already find its way around the world.

The new AI, and the new optimism
That’s certainly what the history of AI has served to bear out. As a result, there has been a revolution in the field which goes by names such as Artificial Life (AL) and Adaptive Behavior, trying to re-situate AI within the context of an artificial biology and zoology (respectively). The basic philosophy is that we need much more understanding of the animal substrates of human behaviour before we can fulfil the dreams of AI in replicating convincing well-rounded intelligence.

(Incidentally, the reader should note that the terminology is in chaos, as fields re-group and re-define themselves. For example, I work on artificial zoology but describe myself casually as doing AI. This chaos can, however, be seen as a healthy sign of a field which has not yet stabilised. Any young scientist with imagination should realise that these are the kind of fields to get into. Who wants to be in a field where everything was solved long ago?)

So AI is not dead, but re-grouping, and is still being driven, as always, by testable scientific models. Discussions on philosophical questions, such as “What is life?” or “What is intelligence?”, change little over the years. There have been numerous attempts, from Roger Penrose to Gerald Edelman, to disprove AI (show that it is impossible) but none of these attempted revolutions has yet gathered much momentum. This is not just because of lack of agreement with their philosophical analysis (although there is plenty of that), but also perhaps because they fail to provide an alternative paradigm in which we can do science. Progress, as is normal in science, comes from building things and running experiments, and the flow of new and strange machines from AI laboratories is not remotely exhausted. On the contrary, it has been recently invigorated by the new biological approach.

In fact, the old optimism has even been resurrected. Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading has recently predicted that the new approach will lead to human-level AI in our lifetimes. But I think we have learned our lesson on that one. I, and many like me in new AI, imagine that this is still Physics before Newton, that the field might have a good one or two hundred years left to run. The reason is that there is no obvious way of getting from here to there - to human-level intelligence from the rather useless robots and brittle software programs that we have nowadays. A long series of conceptual breakthroughs are needed, and this kind of thinking is very difficult to timetable. What we are trying to do in the next generation is essentially to find out what are the right questions to ask.

It may never happen (but not for the reasons you think)
I think that people who are worried about robots taking over the world should go to a robotics conference and watch these things try to walk. They fall over, bump into walls and end up with their legs thrashing or wheels spinning in the air. I’m told that in this summer’s Robotic Football competition, the losing player scored all five goals - 2 against the opposing robot, and 3 against himself. The winner presumably just fell over.

Robots are more helpless than threatening. They are really quite sweet. I was in the MIT robotics laboratory once looking at Cog, Rodney Brooks’ latest robot. Poor Cog has no legs. He is a sort of humanoid, a torso stuck on a stand with arms, grippers, binocular vision and so on. I saw Cog on a Sunday afternoon in a darkened laboratory when everyone had gone home and I felt sorry for him which I know is mad. But it was Sunday afternoon and no one was going to come and play with him. If you consider the gulf between that and what most animals experience in their lives, surrounded by a tribe of fellow infants and adults, growing up with parents who are constantly with them and constantly stimulating them, then you understand the incredibly limited kind of life that artificial systems have.

The argument I am developing is that there may be limits to AI, not because the hypothesis of “strong AI” is false, but for more mundane reasons. The argument, which I develop further on my website, is that you can’t expect to build single isolated AI’s, alone in laboratories, and get anywhere. Unless the creatures can have the space in which to evolve a rich culture, with repeated social interaction with things that are like them, you can’t really expect to get beyond a certain stage. If we work up from insects to dogs to Homo erectus to humans, the AI project will I claim fall apart somewhere around the Homo erectus stage because of our inability to provide them with a real cultural environment. We cannot make millions of these things and give them the living space in which to develop their own primitive societies, language and cultures. We can’t because the planet is already full. That’s the main argument, and the reason for the title of this talk.

So what will happen?
So what will happen? What will happen over the next thirty years is that will see new types of animal-inspired machines that are more “messy” and unpredictable than any we have seen before. These machines will change over time as a result of their interactions with us and with the world. These silent, pre-linguistic, animal-like machines will be nothing like humans but they will gradually come to seem like a strange sort of animal. Machines that learn, familiar to researchers in labs for many years, will finally become mainstream and enter the public consciousness.

What category of problems could animal-like machines address? The kind of problems we are going to see this approach tackle will be problems that are somewhat noise and error resistant and that do not demand abstract reasoning. A special focus will be behaviour that is easier to learn than to articulate - most of us know how to walk but we couldn’t possibly tell anyone how we do it. Similarly with grasping objects and other such skills. These things involve building neural networks, filling in state-spaces and so on, and cannot be captured as a set of rules that we speak in language. You must experience the dynamics of your own body in infancy and thrash about until the changing internal numbers and weights start to converge on the correct behaviour. Different bodies mean different dynamics. And robots that can learn to walk can learn other sensorimotor skills that we can neither articulate nor perform ourselves.

What are examples of these type of problems? Well, for example, there are already autonomous lawnmowers that will wander around gardens all afternoon. The next step might be autonomous vacuum cleaners inside the house (though clutter and stairs present immediate problems for wheeled robots). These are all sorts of other uses for artificial animals in areas where people find jobs dangerous or tedious - land-mine clearance, toxic waste clearance, farming, mining, demolition, finding objects and robotic exploration, for example. Any jobs done currently or traditionally by animals would be a focus. We are familiar already from the Mars Pathfinder and other examples that we can send autonomous robots not only to inhospitable places, but also send them there on cheap one-way “suicide” missions. (Of course, no machine ever “dies”, since we can restore its mind in a new body on earth after the mission.)

Whether these type of machines may have a future in the home is an interesting question. If it ever happens, I think it will be because the robot is treated as a kind of pet, so that a machine roaming the house is regarded as cute rather than creepy. Machines that learn tend to develop an individual, unrepeatable character which humans can find quite attractive. There are already a few games in software - such as the Windows-based game Creatures, and the little Tamagotchi toys - whose personalities people can get very attached to. A major part of the appeal is the unique, fragile and unrepeatable nature of the software beings you interact with. If your Creature dies, you may never be able to raise another one like it again. Machines in the future will be similar, and the family robot will after a few years be, like a pet, literally irreplaceable.

What will hold things up? There are many things that could hold up progress but hardware is the one that is staring us in the face at the moment. Nobody is going to buy a robotic vacuum cleaner that costs £5000 no matter how many big cute eyes are painted on it or even if it has a voice that says, “I love you”. Many conceptual breakthroughs will be needed to create artificial animals. The major theoretical issue to be solved is probably representation: what is language and how do we classify the world. We say “That’s a table” and so on for different objects, but what does an insect do, what is going on in an insect’s head when it distinguishes objects in the world, what information is being passed around inside, what kind of data structures are they using. Each robot will have to learn an internal language customised for its sensorimotor system and the particular environmental niche in which it finds itself. It will have to learn this internal language on its own, since any representations we attempt to impose on it, coming from a different sensorimotor world, will probably not work.

Predictions
Finally, what will be the impact on society of animal-like machines? Let’s make a few predictions that I will later look back and laugh at.

First, family robots may be permanently connected to wireless family intranets, sharing information with those who you want to know where you are. You may never need to worry if your loved ones are alright when they are late or far away, because you will be permanently connected to them. Crime may get difficult if all family homes are full of half-aware, loyal family machines. In the future, we may never be entirely alone, and if the controls are in the hands of our loved ones rather than the state, that may not be such a bad thing.

Slightly further ahead, if some of the intelligence of the horse can be put back into the automobile, thousands of lives could be saved, as cars become nervous of their drunk owners, and refuse to get into positions where they would crash at high speed. We may look back in amazement at the carnage tolerated in this age, when every western country had road deaths equivalent to a long, slow-burning war. In the future, drunks will be able to use cars, which will take them home like loyal horses. And not just drunks, but children, the old and infirm, the blind, all will be empowered.

Eventually, if cars were all (wireless) networked, and humans stopped driving altogether, we might scrap the vast amount of clutter all over our road system - signposts, markings, traffic lights, roundabouts, central reservations - and return our roads to a soft, sparse, eighteenth-century look. All the information - negotiation with other cars, traffic and route updates - would come over the network invisibly. And our towns and countryside would look so much sparser and more peaceful.

Conclusion
I’ve been trying to give an idea of how artificial animals could be useful, but the reason that I’m interested in them is the hope that artificial animals will provide the route to artificial humans. But the latter is not going to happen in our lifetimes (and indeed may never happen, at least not in any straightforward way).

In the coming decades, we shouldn’t expect that the human race will become extinct and be replaced by robots. We can expect that classical AI will go on producing more and more sophisticated applications in restricted domains - expert systems, chess programs, Internet agents - but any time we expect common sense we will continue to be disappointed as we have been in the past. At vulnerable points these will continue to be exposed as “blind automata”. Whereas animal-based AI or AL will go on producing stranger and stranger machines, less rationally intelligent but more rounded and whole, in which we will start to feel that there is somebody at home, in a strange animal kind of way. In conclusion, we won’t see full AI in our lives, but we should live to get a good feel for whether or not it is possible, and how it could be achieved by our descendants.

Farewell my MIS Class

Officially, I have finished my Management Information System class. Woohoo... can't get better than that...

I have no reason to post any MIS stuff here anymore, hehe, I will try, posting more relevant things though... You all take care... Continue surfing the web, exploring horizons....

Computer Use In An International Marketplace: Developing A Sales Plan For An MNC

The Situation
Most MNCs have an organizational structure based on worldwide functional divisions and they pursue transnational strategies. The firms manufacture subassemblies at centrally located factories and ship the subassemblies to the subsidiaries, where they are assembled into finished products.
A sales plan should be made, aimed specifically to this target market. Aim sales efforts at precisely the point where they will do the most good. This is much more effective than trying to sell everything to everybody. Selling hardware and software, show the MNCs managers how these products will help them better them better coordinate their global resources.

Table 1 Location of Managers in Their Organizations
Manager Location Hours Per Week
Management level
First-line supervisor or manager 14.1
Midlevel manager 7.0
Executive-level manager 7.2
Functional area
Information systems 14.6
Manufacturing 11.3
Accounting and Finance 7.1
Marketing 6.6
Other 10.1

Table 2 Hardware and Software Use by Managers
Information Resource Percent Using
Hardware
Stand-alone personal computer (PC) 56
PC or other terminal connected to a center computer 49
PC or other terminal connected to distributed computer system 13
PC or other terminal connected to a local area network 5
Other 0
Software
Spreadsheet/financial report preparation 62
Word processing 42
Database applications 42
Graphics applications 40
Other packaged or developed programs 34
Writing/debugging/running own programs 16
Electronic mail/communication 9
Other applications 4

Table 1 shows the location of managers in their organizations and te average numbers of hours per week that they use their computers. Table 2 shows the hardware ad software used.


The Sales Plan
Sales Plan for Parent
To have the maximum chance of sale, it is important to approach managers who have the most desire for the organization to succeed. It is them that mostly understand how important are efforts that would aid the organization to achieve its goals and objectives. Overseeing the whole organization and having the obligation to effectively manage the whole company, Executive-level managers have a big say on how the company operations should be managed and done, of course with recommendations from the First-line supervisors and Midlevel managers. It is ideal for sales representatives to sell to Executive-level managers, for the Management Level and to the Accounting and finance aside from the Information systems, for the Functional Area. Accounting and finance is important for the organization in assessing the performance of each subsidiary in terms of sales and other financial operations. By knowing what subsidiary is working good and which is performing below as expected, the parent MNC can create solutions and corrective actions to help the subsidiary with problem.

The Executive-level manager oversees the organization and takes charge of making decisions on the company's future strategies and goals. It is assumed that Executive-level managers have a clear idea of his subordinates' needs and should be proactive in the company's efforts in gaining competitive advantage. By offering Executive managers PCs or other terminals connected to a central computer system (Hardware) and Electronic mail/communication (Software), they can effectively manage the whole organization and make eventual updates, communicate to subsidiary officers and other officers in the organization that have the needed information of current operation conditions.

PCs or other terminals connected to a distributed computer system (Hardware) and Spreadsheet/financial report preparation (Software) should also be offered to Accounting and finance. The hardware and the software will aid the department in keeping incontact with other departments and of other subsidiaries in its efforts of generating financial performance reports for the whole organization.

Sales Plan for Subsidiary Company
First-line supervisor or manager should be targeted by sales representatives in selling computer hardwares and softwares. It logs most of computer hours used and mans the company's front operations, mostly attending and overseeing the whole assembly proccess, going out in the field creating accounts and closing deals. They are the ones who mostly need applications to aid them or help them in doing their tasks. Offering them a PC and other terminal connected to local area network and Graphics applications for creating models of new products or machines for assembly and other relevant operations, First-line supervisors or managers will be better-off and could work best with their jobs. It is assumed that since the parent MNC has implemented electronic mail and commuincation softwares, First-line supervisors will have no problem in constantly communicating and interacting with its subordinates.

Marketing is important for a subsidiary's operation. it is vital in unifying and making the organization work. Through proper marketing efforts, the subsidiary can create better strategies and provide consistentcy in terms of services and products althroughout. By offering Marketing with PC or other terminal connected to a local area network and Word processing softwares, this will give the Marketing department better hold of its processes and help them create necessary and effective marketing strategies in its efforts of keeping the company, its product and services, well publicised and widely appreciated.

EDI Standards

What is EDI?
Short for Electronic Data Interchange, the transfer of data between different companies using networks, such as the Internet. As more and more companies get connected to the Internet, EDI is becoming increasingly important as an easy mechanism for companies to buy, sell, and trade information. ANSI has approved a set of EDI standards known as the X12 standards.1

Standards
According to a link from the Virginia Commonwelath University:

EDI, Electronic Data Interchange, is what drives 'B2B eBusiness'. Much of the 'C2B' eBusiness is very visible & involves customers using suppliers' web pages to enter their orders and get other customer services. EDI is involved in the 'back office' exchange of business documents such as Purchase Orders, Acknowledgements, Shipping Notices & Manifests, and Invoices. It is used to support both JIT (Just In
Time) and MRP (Materials Requirement Planning) approaches to purchasing. EDI standards are maintained by groups that take input from industry and promulgate standards.

Today, there are two major standards: ANSI X12 is maintained by an organization nearby, in Northern VA, Data Interchange Standards Association.
DISA is the 'Secretariat' that maintains and publishes this set of standards using meetings and methods of ANSI, American National Standards Institute. EDIFACT is another standard for exchange of business documents, more European in flavor.
Here's a website about UN/EDIFACT.

There are other 'players' important in EDI. Inovis is a large service bureau used by
manufacturers, distributors, and buyers for fashion & other 'department store' type goods. These trading partners hold one another to the Voluntary Inter-Industry Commerce Standards (VICS) and this is their EDI bible.

Here is an example of their emerging standards for Bills of Lading.
Book Distributors & Sellers use a standard called BISAC which is a subset of X12 devised by The Book Industry Study Group. Industrial customers and suppliers use yet another. Banks and Financial Institutions use subsets that move the Tender about the orders. I've learned recently that Health Insurance providers are moving toward an X.12 standard.

X.12 standards permeate all these electronic trading partnerships and keep it from being a Tower of Babel circumstance. Any Vertical enterprise application will be
of more value if the particular standards of EDI for its core activities are accommodated easily by its enterprise engines.

Standards are folded into other standards. Here's how the Uniform Code Council's UPC barcodes get into X12 documents about goods headed to a Department Store...
Inovis maintains a central catalog used for EDI trading partners. They have been in the business since long before the Windows desktop and their services have been
accessed for years by users of ascii terminals entering orders in unix, mainframe, or
proprietary minicomputer environments. For their buyer-customers they provide a
central database of exactly what is available from their vendor-customers and what the barcoded UPC will be when it arrives at the loading dock.

UCC, The Uniform Code Council, provides the service of registering the UPC, universal Product Code, barcodes that are practically universal for products headed our way. Manufacturers & distributors manage their range of UPC codes and this forms one of the data elements in the ANSI standard QRS catalog. EDI purchasing documents refer to these same #s so nobody is confused. UCC also defines the format of the UCC-128 barcode label that is the 'carton level identifier' affixed to each carton shipped by UPS, FedEx, or other common carrier when trucking is involved in the distribution. The ID of the UCC-128 barcode becomes one of the data elements in the shipping manifest that is sent via EDI.

When the carton arrives at the loading dock the distribution system already knows its contents and their destination. When there's air freight or ocean shipping involved there are other standards that apply and other organizations involved in the design and details of these documents and labels.

The ANSI Standard X.12 is quite complete and defines 10s of 1000s of separate codes used in 1000's of data elements used in 100s of data segments to form dozens of transaction sets for practically any transaction, acknowledgement, confirmation, enquiry, or update required in commerce.

Industry groups get together to pick and choose the particular standards needed to reflect their commerce. The Department of Defense, for example, chose these a few years back as they added EDI to their order processing legacy:

• 840 Request For Quotation
• 997 Functional Acknowledgment
• 843 Response To Request For Quotation
• 832 Price/Sales Catalog
• 850 Purchase Order
• 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgment
• 824 Application Advice
• 860 Purchase Order Change
• 836 Contract Award Summary
• 865 Purchase Order Change Acknowledgment
• 838 Trading Partner Profile
• 869 Order Status Inquiry
• 864 Text Message
• 870 Order Status Report
  

Vendors wanting to woo the DOD had best make sure that their flavor of EDI package can support the whole range or they'll be nixed by some Sergeant who isn't getting a snappy 997 & 870 for his 869. It's interesting to note that the DOD, as of this listing, has left out the whole range of documents that form the Advanced Ship Notice functions, in which carton contents are manifested and forwarded to the shipper for their application of delivery advice.

BISAC uses a subset of X12 which includes six documents. The nature of EDI transmissions is changing to take advantage of The Internet, but some of EDI still travels via the VANs (Value Added Networks). It is bound to be an interesting decade for EDI trading partners.2

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1 EDI http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/EDI.html As of 14 February 2006.
2 "ANSI X.12" http://www.courses.vcu.edu/INFO465-gs/ansi_x_12.htm As of 14 February 2006.

Search Engines' Help

The advent of the Internet has paved way in the increased information being offered and delivered to people all over the world. In business, Internet has been very vital for firms in gaining competitive advantage and increasing their operation's efficiency and effectivity.

But with all of this information garbled and all mixed-up in the web, how can an individual effectively go through and scan over this huge repository and finding the right information that one is targeting to get or acquire.

This is where the search engines' job comes in. Search engines, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, is a software program that searches a database and gathers and reports information that contains or is related to specified terms.1 It is basically a website whose primary function is providing a search engine for gathering and reporting information available on the Internet or a portion of the Internet.2

For investors or stockmarket players, search engines are very important in tracking company performances and in determining how well a company's stock has performed. Aside from determining the particular URL of a specific site that provides these information, such as of the Dowjones or Nasdaq, an investor may just go directly to these search engines and key in relevant keywords to get relative or pertinent links.

As a management student aspiring to work as an investment specialist, I decided to take on an experiment to determine for myself if search engines are really helpful in giving relelvant information. I decided to trace DELL's stocks and used these search engines (GOOGLE, YAHOO, ALTAVISTA) to determine how it's stocks are performing.

Using the Famous GOOGLE
Keying www.google.com after opening the Internet Explorer browser, the search engine's cover web page directly appeared. I'm quite impressed with the connection speed. This was maybe because I was the only one using the network (am trying all these in an internet cafe) or the connection speed offered in the cafe was just wonderfully superb, a service I would consider my school providing, hmmm, I don't know when (we are crawling here people).

Entering the keywords dell stock, Google finds 16,300,000 results within .23 seconds, sorting them according to relevance. Clicking on the links, one can see information upon information about DELL's: quotes' summary, its real-time ECN, options and historical prices; performance charts ranging from basic to technical analysis charts; news and info which includes headlines, company events and message boards; the company, providing a profile, key statistics, SEC filings, competitors, industry and components; analyst coverage which includes analyst opinion, analyst estiates, research reports an star analysts; ownership information which gives the company's major holders, insider, transactions info, and insider roster; and financials info which shows the company's income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.

Information about how DELL's stocks have perfomed over the week is easily accessed as well as how its has performed the past years or so. Above is the 5-day progress chart of Dell stocks, from Feb 7 to Feb 13. Above is the 5-year progress chart of Dell stocks.

News, events, company profile and other meaningful information can be accessed through the Internet which search engines easily display and sort for its users. This has fueled the increased importance of search engines and has proved why search engines are truly an internet-novice's bestfriend, it making easy for people to surf the gigantic information waves.

______________
1 "Search Engine" http://www.ask.com/reference/dictionary/ahdict/58678/search+engine As of 08 February 2006.
2 Ibidem

Now who's Edgar?

Edgar who?
"Now who is Edgar by the way?", I eavesdropped from my classmates talking. "Why are we to research about him?" Now, that should be one of the dumbest question one should ever hear.

Well, that is just to harsh to say. I know Edgar can be easily mistaken as an individual. As if an important person so valued that our teacher has required as to research about him. But Edgar in no man, nor any individual to that.

EDGAR (as how it is spelled, all in capital letters) stands for Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval System. EDGAR is an online database constructed by the Securities and Exchange Commision in the United States to facilitate companies operating in the country in filling their annual forms with the commision. SEC mentains EDGAR for the filing of registration statements, periodic reports and other filings mandated under the federal securities laws.1 EDGAR performs automated collection, validation, indexing, acceptance, and forwarding of submissions by companies and others who are required by law to file forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Its primary purpose is to increase the efficiency and fairness of the securities market for the benefit of investors, corporations, and the economy by accelerating the receipt, acceptance, dissemination, and analysis of time-sensitive corporate information filed with the agency.2
Apart from companies acquiring easy processes of filing their required documents, other companies and interested individuals may find information about these filing companies effortlessly or with less hassle. Having the option of downloading free data from the database is a major benefit that EDGAR gives to its users. For a company, knowing the competitor is very important. Companies can now monitor, determine and make strategies based on the vital information that EDGAR gives. The SEC-EDGAR webpage says, "All companies, foreign and domestic, are required to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through EDGAR. Anyone can access and download this information for free. Here you'll find links to a complete list of filings available through EDGAR and instructions for searching the EDGAR database."

Available Information
EDGAR offers a lot of valuable information for every individual that would take interest. Corporate financial information is what primarily EDGAR offers though searches are available for users to get specifics.

General-Purpose Searches

Companies and Other Filers

• This search works best when you have a specific company in mind. "Search Companies and Filings" allows you to retrieve real-time filings for a specific company and to find key company information — including its name, address, telephone number, state of incorporation, Central Index Key (CIK) number, Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code, and fiscal year end. Simply type in the name of the company or its CIK number. Note: A CIK is the unique number that the SEC's computer system assigns to individuals and corporations who file disclosure documents with the SEC. All new electronic and paper filers, foreign and domestic, receive a CIK number. You don't need to know a company's CIK, but searching by that number will narrow your search to the exact company you want.
  
• You can also search for all SEC-registered companies in a particular state. Or you can search for all companies with a specific SIC code. For example, if you enter 7370 in the SIC box, you'll retrieve all SEC-registered companies that fall into the Standard Industrial Classification known as "Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc."
  Once you've found the company you want, you can limit the search results by date (for example, "Prior to 2002-01-01") or by the type of filing (for example, "10-K").

Latest Filings

• Here you'll find the most recent filings our EDGAR system has received - from all SEC filers, including individuals and companies, paper filers and electronic filers. The list on this page features the most recent real-time filings from a broad range of companies and individuals for the current official filing date (including filings made after the 5:30 pm deadline on the previous filing day). Note: Filings may be made Monday through Friday (except for U.S. Federal Holidays).
  If you want to retrieve a paper filing, please contact the SEC Public Reference Room and be sure to provide the "Paper/Film #" that appears in blue under the company's name.

Search for Filings Directly

• Perhaps our most powerful and flexible search, "Search for Filings Directly" allows you to search by company name, type of form, or both. You can also narrow your search by selecting a specific date or date range.

Historical EDGAR Archives

• Enter a keyword or phrase to search all header information (including addresses) in all filings in the EDGAR database. You can also use the company CIK as a search term. This search will truncate at 2000 records (filings).
  Tip: For best results when using the Simple search syntax, use lower-case only and make use of phrase delimiters (commas, "and", "or", etc.), which are described more fully on the bottom of the search screen. For example, to search on "Washington Energy" and "Utility", use the keyphrase washington energy and utility.
  

Special-Purpose Searches

EDGAR CIK (Central Index Key) Lookup

• The CIK is a unique identifier assigned by the SEC to all companies and people who file disclosures with the SEC. Simply enter the company's name and click on search to find the CIK. Then use the CIK (including the leading zeroes - e.g., 00001111) as a keyword in your Archives or Forms Lookup search.

Current Events Analysis

• Retrieve filings made during the previous week. For example, you can check 10-K (annual) and 10-Q (quarterly) reports, proxies, and others. Simply select the desired time period and the form you'd like to see. Select "all" if you don't want to limit your search to a particular form.

Mutual Fund Prospectuses

• To view prospectuses for the mutual fund of your choice, enter at least 5 - but no more than 20 - characters of the mutual fund company's name, and then click the "Find Funds" button.
  Tip: Mutual fund companies often register several different funds as one "series" and include information about each of those funds in one prospectus for the series. For example, information about the "XYZ S&P 500 Index Fund" might appear in the prospectus for "XYZ Index Funds." If your search results don't list the exact name of the fund you're seeking, then scan the list for the most logical name, check each prospectus to see whether it covers the fund you're researching, or contact the fund to find out the name of the series to which the fund belongs.3

Using the information
Companies and interested individuals after seaching EDGAR may use these gathered information to effect and develop new strategies, weigh company standing in the market environment, know what competitors are doing and how they are faring each with their own operations. As discussed above, these information can be made as guide in conducting searches about other companies. Finding other companies' information and when making valuable research papers, EDGAR is a very good resource of valuable, timely and accurate information.

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1 "EDGAR" http://www.investordictionary.com/definition/electronic+data+gathering,+analysis,+and+retrieval+system+(edgar).aspx As of 08 February 2006.
2 "Important Information About EDGAR" http://www.sec.gov/edgar/aboutedgar.htm As of 08 February 2006.
3 "How Do I Use EDGAR?"http://www.sec.gov/edgar/quickedgar.htm. As of 08 February 2006

The CIO and IRM

Since corporations have acknowledge the importance of timely and accurate information in their efforts to gain competitive advantage in business, the creation of IS departments have gathered a following, with companies making it a point to utilize their environment data and information for their own advantage doing this effectively by assigning a particular person to head a specific department to handle such tasks. CIOs, they are called, are vital to a company's plans of gaining competitive advantage.

What then are CIOs?
CIOs (Chief Information Officer) are senior executives responsible for all aspects of their companies' information technology and systems. They direct the use of IT to support the company's goals. With knowledge of both technology and business process and a cross-functional perspective, they are usually the managers most capable of aligning the organization's technology deployment strategy with its business strategy. CIOs oversee technology purchases, implementation and various related services provided by the information systems department. However, at many leading-edge organizations, the CIO delegates many of the tactical and operational issues to a "trusted lieutenant" in order to focus on more strategic concerns.

The "information" part of the CIO's job is increasingly important. The effective and strategic use of common enterprise-wide information requires someone with a cross-functional perspective. CIOs have taken a leadership role in reengineering their organizations' business processes and the underpinning IT infrastructures to achieve more productive, efficient and valuable use of information within the enterprise. Many also take a leadership role in knowledge management and the valuation of intellectual capital. Similarly, CIOs are in an ideal position to lead organizations' Internet and Web initiatives.

CIOs usually report to the CEO, COO or CFO, and they often have a seat on the executive steering committee or board (or at least have frequent and close access to top officers). While the specific title CIO is generally a clear indication of an IT executive's senior rank and strategic influence, many executives with the title VP or director of information technology, systems or services hold comparable positions.1

In many corporations, the chief information officer (CIO) or IT director is the newest addition to the senior management team. But while it may be the latest ingredient in the alphabet soup of corporate management, the CIO's role is growing fast in both numbers and importance, and it is evolving as it grows.

The number of corporate CIOs has increased dramatically over the past two decades as information management moves from the wings of company operations to centre stage. The CIO's role is shifting from the technical business of data processing to the more broadly conceived job of 'knowledge management.' So important has managing knowledge become to the success of a company that harnessing knowledge may be a corporation's most pressing challenge-and at the very heart of the CIO's evolving role.

Though a relative newcomer to the executive wing, the CIO has become in many ways the most challenging and dynamic leadership role in the business world. Throughout the '80s and '90s, corporations have faced dramatic challenges brought about by changes in markets and corporate organisations. In many industries, both production and markets have globalised. Companies have experienced major shifts both upward and downward in their of scale of operations through significant downsizing and major mergers and acquisitions. In responding to these dramatic changes, companies have invested vast resources to reengineer their operations. It has been estimated that companies worldwide are spending $52 billion a year on reengineering, of which $40 billion goes annually into information technology. In other words, the CIO is at the centre of many of the most volatile and costly changes in the life of a corporation.2

Then what is IRM?
One of the dilemmas facing today's manager is that on the one hand they seem to be suffering from information overload, yet on other hand, they often they complain about shortage of information needed to make vital decisions.

Symptoms of overload are a growth of incoming information, including electronic mail, an explosion in the volume of information sources (there are over 10,000 business newsletter titles and a similar number of CD-ROM titles). Symptoms of scarcity are the lack of vital information for decision making, unexpected competitor moves and the inability to find the relevant 'needle in the haystack.

There is also the crucial problem of exploiting an organisation's proprietary information as a strategic asset.

Underlying these problems is that of having "the right information, in the right place, in the right format, at the right time".

Partial solutions include Executive Information Systems (EIS), On-line and CD-ROM data-bases, alerting services. A more encompassing solution is to adopt the principles of Information Resources Management (IRM) (not to be confused with an information management or information systems). Whereas the value (often declining!) of tangible assets, such as property and office equipment, is regularly assessed and audited, similar processes are lacking for intangible assets, such as information and knowledge, whose asset value is increasing in many organisations.

Information Resources Management (IRM) is an emerging discipline that helps managers assess and exploit their information assets for business development. It draws on the techniques of information science (libraries) and information systems (IT related). It an important foundation for knowledge management, in that deals systematically with explicit knowledge. Knowledge centres often play an important part in introducing IRM into an organization.3






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1 "What is a CIO?" http://www.cio.com/summaries/role/description/?action=print As of 02 February 2006.
2 "The Changing Role of the Chief Information Officer" http://www.cio.com/research/executive/edit/kornferry.html As of 02 February 2006.
3 "Information Resources Management" by David Skyrme http://www.skyrme.com/insights/8irm.htm#whatis As of 02 February 2006.

Knowledge Management is the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge - and its associated processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use and exploitation.