Stephanie Sogello

Data handling is the process of ensuring that research data is stored, archived or disposed off in a safe and secure manner during and after the conclusion of a research project. This includes the development of policies and procedures to manage data handled electronically as well as through non-electronic means .

Data handling is important in ensuring the integrity of research data since it addresses concerns related to confidentially, security, and preservation/retention of research data. Proper planning for data handling can also result in efficient and economical storage, retrieval, and disposal of data. In the case of data handled electronically, data integrity is a primary concern to ensure that recorded data is not altered, erased, lost or accessed by unauthorized users.

Data handling issues encompass both electronic as well as non-electronic systems, such as paper files, journals, and laboratory notebooks. Electronic systems include computer workstations and laptops, personal digital assistants (PDA), storage media such as videotape, diskette, CD, DVD, memory cards, and other electronic instrumentation. These systems may be used for storage, archival, sharing, and disposing off data, and therefore, require adequate planning at the start of a research project so that issues related to data integrity can be analyzed and addressed early on.

Considerations/issues in data handling

Issues that should be considered in ensuring integrity of data handled include the following:

• Type of data handled and its impact on the environment (especially if it is on a toxic media).
• Type of media containing data and its storage capacity, handling and storage requirements, reliability, longevity (in the case of degradable medium), retrieval effectiveness, and ease of upgrade to newer media.
• Data handling responsibilities/privileges, that is, who can handle which portion of data, at what point during the project, for what purpose, etc.
• Data handling procedures that describe how long the data should be kept, and when, how, and who should handle data for storage, sharing, archival, retrieval and disposal purposes.

stephanie sogello

Computers don’t grow on trees, but with a little prodding from engineers, nature can produce computer components.

At the Clark School, Ray Phaneuf, associate professor of materials science and engineering, has developed a template nature can follow to produce “self-assembling” structures. The template causes atoms to be arranged in a defined pattern that can serve a variety of purposes—a semiconductor in a laptop, a component in a cell phone or a sensor in a wearable device.

The idea of self-assembly in nature has long been known—crystallization is one such process; the formation of shells into spirals is another. However, researchers have been limited to the designs that nature already knows how to make. Phaneuf’s work introduces a man-made template that nature then follows, addressing a number of manufacturing difficulties.

“While we understand how to make working nanoscale devices, making things out of a countable number of atoms takes a long time,” Phaneuf said. “Industry needs to be able to mass-produce them on a practical time scale.”

The template process can be used by device manufacturers to mass-produce tiny components rapidly and efficiently, reduce costs, shrink device sizes, and improve devices’ functionality in ways previously not possible.

“The same template can be used thousands of times,” Phaneuf said. “This results in enormous savings.”

Phaneuf says his work is one step in a “cocktail” approach to computer assembly—an engineer’s dream in which one could “mix-up” a computer the same way one mixes a drink.

“Imagine you shake up a cocktail and spill it onto a table,” Phaneuf said. “The liquid will collect in pools in a manner designated by nature.

“Now imagine that first you coated the table with wax and scraped a pattern into it. Now when you spill the liquid onto the table, it collects in the pattern you scraped into the wax—it assumes the form you want it to take. When we apply this idea to manufacturing nanoscale computer components, collections of atoms become ordered, accessible, controllable and reproducible—characteristics crucial to their use in high-tech devices.”

These devices could include those used in the growing field of quantum computing, which is believed to hold promise for carrying out exceptionally difficult mathematical processes, Phaneuf said. An application of the templates might be self-assembly of coupled quantum dots to form “qubits,” the building blocks of quantum computers. According to Phaneuf, templating could be used to make the manufacture of this highly complicated system more feasible: “Addressing individual qubits might be done optically, to get around the problem of trying to wire them all up.”

Phaneuf’s work focuses on silicon and gallium arsenide components. Silicon is the prevalent material for components in computers while gallium arsenide is used more often in cell phones.

The templates are created using photolithography (a process akin to photography, in which the template is chemically developed after being exposed to light) and etching, or by “nanoscraping,” in which an atomic force microscope is used to selectively scrape the pattern into the template.

Stephanie Sogello

APPLICATION SOFTWARE

Application software consists of Programs that direct computers to perform specific information processing activities for end users. These programs are called application packages because they direct the processing required for a particular use, or application, which users want to accomplish. Thousands of application packages are available because there are thousands of different jobs end users want computers to do.
Kinds of Application Software

Application software includes a variety of programs that can be subdivided into general-purpose and application-specific categories.

General-Purpose Application ProgramsGeneral-purpose applications packages are programs that perform common information processing hobs for end users. For example, word processing programs, electronic spreadsheet programs, database management programs, graphics programs, communications programs, and integrated packages are popular with microcomputer users for home, education, business, scientific, and many other general purposes.
They are also known as productivity packages, because they significantly increase the productivity of end users. This packaged software is also called off-the-shelf software packages, because these products are packaged and available for sale. Many features are common to most packaged programs.

Application-Specific Software

Many application programs are available to support specific applications of end users. Business Application Programs: Programs that accomplish the information processing tasks of important business functions or industry requirements.
Scientific Application Programs: Programs that perform information processing tasks for the natural, physical, social, and behavioral sciences, engineering and all other areas involved in scientific research, experimentation, and development. There are so many other application areas such as education, music, art, medicine, etc.

 

Application Software Trends

The trend in computer application software is toward multipurpose, expert-assisted packages with natural language and graphical user interfaces. There are two major trends:

Off-The-Shelf Software PackagesThere is a trend away from custom-designed one-of- a-kind programs developed by the professional programmers or end users of an organization.
Instead, the trend is toward the use of the “off-the-self” software package acquired by end users from software vendors. This trend accelerated with the development of inexpensive and easy-to-use productivity software packages for microcomputers, and it continues to grow.

Nonprocedural, Natural Languages

There is a major trend away from technical, machine-specific programming languages using binary-based or symbolic codes and from procedural languages, which use English-like statements and mathematical expressions to specify the sequence of instructions a computer must perform.
Instead, the trend is toward nonprocedural, natural languages that are closer to human conversation. This trend has accelerated with the creation of easy-to-use, nonprocedural fourth- generation languages (4GL). It continues to grow as developments in graphics and artificial intelligence produce natural language and graphical interfaces that make software packages easier to use.

 

 

Stephanie Sogello

 IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers’ ability to legally reverse engineer the BIOS through clean room design. Columbia Data Products built the first clone of an IBM personal computer through a clean room implementation of its BIOS. Many early IBM PC compatibles used the same computer bus as the original PC and AT models. The IBM AT compatible bus was later named the ISA bus by manufacturers of compatible computers.

The term “IBM PC compatible” became relegated to historical use with the rise of Windows and IBM’s loss of dominance in the personal computer market.

Descendants of the IBM PC compatibles make up the majority of microcomputers on the market today, although interoperability with the bus structure and peripherals of the original PC architecture may be limited or non-existent.

 Stephanie Sogello

1. Microcomputers (Personal computers)

Microcomputers are the most common type of computers in existence today, whether at work in school or on the desk at home. The term “microcomputer” was introduced with the advent of single chip microprocessors. The term “microcomputer” itself, is now practically an anachronism.

2. Minicomputers (Midrange computers)

A minicomputer (colloquially, mini) is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). The contemporary term for this class of system is midrange computer, such as the higher-end SPARC, POWER and Itanium -based systems from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

3. Mainframe Computers

The term mainframe computer was created to distinguish the traditional, large, institutional computer intended to service multiple users from the smaller, single user machines. These computers are capable of handling and processing very large amounts of data quickly. Mainframe computers are used in large institutions such as government, banks and large corporations. These institutions were early adopters of computer use, long before personal computers were available to individuals. “Mainframe” often refers to computers compatible with the computer architectures established in the 1960s. Thus, the origin of the architecture also affects the classification, not just processing power.

4. Supercomputer

A supercomputer is focused on performing tasks involving intense numerical calculations such as weather forecasting, simulations or complex computations. The distinction between supercomputers and mainframes can be difficult to define at times. Supercomputers tend to focus on floating point performance. Mainframes, while providing a lot of processing power, focus more on data throughput and reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), and generally perform many data handling operations involving minor computations.

 

 

I’m Stephanie B. Sogello, a computer science student of Hercor College.

 

The Good & Bad uses of computers…

The advantages of using computer(s) is that we can do research and find a lot of information we may be looking for. Other advantages include typing out a document, essay, letter, or a simple birthday card. We can communicate with our friends online and send them e-mails.
But there are disadvantages too… some people use computers in a bad way. Some people use computers to look at things that we aren’t suppose to see. People can actually get personal information about you by tricking you to fill out applications that LOOK real but are NOT real at all.