Stress management is important for software engineers

Stress has become one of the most significant problems due to dynamic social factor and changing needs of lifestyles. The work stress is found in all professions. IT professionals especially software engineers are very stressed because they are highly target driven and highly pressured on results. According to Uma Devi, “Athletes experience the strength that comes from eu-stress right before they play a big game or enter a big competition. Because of eu-stress, they suddenly receive the strength that is required to perform to the best of the ability. “(Uma Devi) Stress can make a person productive and constructive when it is identified and well managed.

 
The relationship between stress and performance is an inverted U-shaped curve with peak performance occurring at the optimum stress point. The optimum stress point is evidenced by optimum stress indicators. When a person’s stress level is at the optimum stress point these indicators are present. According to Sarah and Howard, “Optimum stress indicators include accurate judgement, composure during a crisis, high energy, high morale, high motivation, improved memory and recall, interpersonal competence, mental alertness, optimistic outlook, sharp perception, thorough analysis of problems, and the ability to work long hours without tiring.” (Sarah, Howard) Thus, people working at their optimum stress point can perform at their highest potential for quality and productivity. Therefore, stress management becomes more and more important to help people to performance well.

Something that is stressful for one individual may not be stressful for others. Each individual has a unique cultural and educational background along with a unique collection of personal interests, biases, values, skills and aptitudes. Some personalities are more stress prone than others. According to Cougar, “Personality factors include achievement needs, recognition needs, growth needs and social needs.” (Cougar) Cougar and Zawack found that computer professionals have high growth needs and Hackman 16 found that people with high growth needs perform best in jobs that have a high motivating potential. Therefore, it is important to find a great first job to the person’s growth need strength and motivating potential.

 
Word Cited:
Couger, J. Daniel and Robert A. Zawacki. Motivating and Managing Computer Personnel. New York: John Wiley, 1980.
Devi, U. (2011, October). A Study on Stress Management and Coping Strategies with Reference to IT Companies. Retrieved April 20, 2016, from http://www.gsmi-ijgb.com/Documents/V2 N2 JITED P03 -Uma Devi-Stress Management.pdf
SULLIVAN, S., & HILL, H. (n.d.). Software project stress versus quality and productivity. Retrieved April 20, 2016, from https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1987/5094/00/50940199.pdf

Privacy VS. Security

Which is one more important privacy or security in our increasingly digital, encrypted world? For me, it is privacy. People cannot prevent all the bad things happened. For example, in World War two, Alan Turing was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers. He uses his turning machine to decode the Enigma machine. Therefore, The Allies were able to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements. However, the current president of England decided to not share the cracking intercepted, coded messages to Russia to hide the fact that England already broke the Enigma code which it caused thousands of people dead for that. Therefore, I believe privacy is much important than security because the government is not going to save everyone’s life anyway.

 

As Christopher Soghoian said, “When you build a backdoor in your communication services or a piece of technology, you have no way to control it who is going to go through it.” We as the software engineer have no way to control whether this backdoor will be used by the good guy or bad guys. Therefore, I totally agree that people should build their community as secure as possible. It is also because I do not think people would like to be arrested because they said they are planning to do something bad as a joke. People like me would like to live the world without the monitor.

I like to use Apple’s product to prevent my privacy because one of the most powerful organization in the world FBI cannot invade it. According to Craig, “The rising use of encryption is already taking a toll on the ability of law enforcement officials to collect evidence from smartphones. Apple, in particular, has been introducing tough new security measures for more than two years that have made it difficult for police armed with cracking software to break in.”(Timberg) I would not need to worry about I will explore any of my data including pictures, bank account information, text history, and any private data even I lost my iPhone as a particular example. The thief would not consider stealing my iPhone because they cannot reset my iPhone, then sell it. It is very important for a customer to feel safe when they use a product, so privacy is important than security.

Word Cited:

Timberg, C., & Miller, G. (2016, September 25). FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones. Retrieved April 07, 2016, from FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones

Soghoian, C. (2015, March). How to avoid surveillance … with the phone in your pocket. Retrieved April 07, 2016, from https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_a_brief_history_of_phone_wiretapping_and_how_to_avoid_it

Why an internship?

The first important thing for me as a student to have an internship is to have and the opportunity for a possible full-time employment in the further. “Not only does participation in an internship make the student a more attractive candidate,” says NACE Executive Director Marilyn Macke, “but it can also be an avenue to a job.” (Hansen) The internship will also be a verification to matching our job expectation with the reality. According to Jonathan, “Internships give students the opportunity to gain valuable applied experience and make connections in professional fields they are considering for career paths; and give employers the opportunity to guide and evaluate talent.” (Jonathan) The meaningful internship is also a very important experience to learn how to work with the project in reality. In school, everything is prepared for students, a student just needs to follow the instruction to finish them. In reality, everything is a mess, people need to prepare everything by themselves and do a lot of research in order to complete a task.

One of the more significant advantages to providing internships is the opportunity to select and develop
student future talent. Students have the opportunity to evaluate and screen potential employees prior to making a full‐time position offer, which leads to financial savings. Employers have reported converting more than half of eligible interns into full‐time hires. If hired in a permanent position, previous interns assimilate faster to their new roles and have shorter learning curves than external hires.

A typical internship will help students to develop their professional skills with the relevant, and related background in the field during the internship. In order to get an internship, students can use LinkedIn to build their professional profile. In LinkedIn, students can show their education, work experience, class project, skills, volunteering experience, honors, awards, and even recommendation from co-workers or professors. It is a great tool for students to build up their personal profile in order to stand out from hundreds of competitors. It is also a great tool for recruiters to looking for talents in LinkedIn with all the detail information they want. Students can even connect their alumni in different companies through LinkedIn, so they might have a high chance of getting internal refer from those alumni.

Work Cited:

Hansen, K. (n.d.). College Students: You Simply Must Do an Internship (Better Yet: Multiple Internships)! Retrieved March 20, 2016, from https://www.quintcareers.com/internship-importance/

Smith, J. (2014, January 8). Internship Wish List: The 12 Things Students Value Mos. Retrieved March 20, 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2014/01/08/internship-wish-list-the-12-things-students-value-most/#6493259c2567

How can we deal with annoying password problem

Nowadays, we have to deal with annoyances which made by technology such as spam email and dozens set of accounts and password for different websites. It is annoying when people get tons of spam email in their inbox just like James mentioned, “unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted safe deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They pop up in our inboxes, and standard procedure is to delete on sight.” (James, p 1) Meanwhile, when people are using different websites they have to sign up a new account for each particular website and they have to follow different rules to create their password. It is almost impossible to memorize all the account name and password by our brain, and it is risky to set all the same account name and password, especially the one for purchase. Therefore, people have to found a way out to deal with this annoying problem.

(Photo Credit: Jeremy)

To solve this problem some companies in the industry, instead of creating a new account they choose to let the user log in with a popular social networking account such as the Facebook account. By authorization the website to achieve the public information even private information from the social account, the user can use one account to access a small amount of website they need without creating a new account. Another way to solve this problem is HTTP cookie. Cookies store all the account and password information even other private information, including email address, home address, birth date, etc. However, social accounts are not supported by all the website we use, cookies are not convenience to transfer in different drives and Brower dependencies.

One of the most successful ways to solve this problem is the fingerprint identification in Apple. Apple has the most security product in the world such as IPhone. FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized, “Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.” (James, p 1) There is an app called “1Password”, it is a cross-platform application, so people can use this application on PC, Mac, Linux/Unix, IPhone, and android. We can use this application for all website we want. We can store all the information such as logins, credit cards, identities even secure note in this application. Sometimes, people spend lots of time when they need to create an unusual password due to the website. However, 1Password is able to generate a new password for people and they do not need to even remember this password. People just need to remember the password for this application, then they have all the access to all the account. Therefore, I can save tons of time by using by using this application to solve all my accounts and security problems. Furthermore, I can use this application to deal with my security problems in my project, so I can spend more time to focus on the other parts.

Word Cited:

Timberg, C., & Miller, G. (2015, September 25). FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://www.cpsk12.org/cms/lib8/MO01909752/Centricity/Domain/5012/FBI blasts Apple Google for locking police out of phones.pdf

Veitch, J. (2015). Dot Con: The Art of Scamming a Scammer. London: Quadrille Publishing.

Zawodny, J. (2006, February 15). Password Insanity. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006309.html

 

IBM Watson retrieve and rank service

I disagree the industry stopped looking to hire computer science majors. In 21st century, every companies need to have a website to introduce their company, product and service. A lot of companies even provide their own service in app in either apple store or android store. Some big companies they have to build a database to store all their product and user information. The most important part is companies need hire people who major in computer science to do that, so I do not think the industry stopped looking for computer scientist. One of the sexiest job of the 21 century is data scientist. Dr. Thomas said, “if your organization stores multiple petabytes of data, if the information most critical to your business resides in forms other than rows and columns of numbers, or if answering your biggest question would involve a ‘mashup’ of several analytical efforts, you need a big data scientist.” (p. 72)

However, I found IBM Watson has a great ability to deal with huge unstructured data. According to Huma (2011), “In 2011, IBM Watson achieved remarkable success winning an unrestricted question-answer exhibition match competing against humans in Jeopardy, a US TV quiz show.” (p. 1) That is the first time Watson showed his power in question-answers in front of the public. Therefore, how IBM Watson can help computer scientist as a tool to deal with a huge amount of unstructured data what is what I am going to talk about.

In 2016, 80% of all data today is unstructured, so No-SQL is getting more and more popular and we need a tool to analyze those unstructured data. In this particle area, I found out Watson is doing a great job. There is service called retrieve and rank in Watson, what it does is it combines two information retrieval components in a single service. This combination provides users with more relevant results by automatically reranking them by suing these machine learning algorithms. Therefore, we can use this service to a number of information retrieval scenarios. For example, a project manager finding domain experts from a professional services organization to build out a project team.

Watson System is described as a deep question-answer technology. All data will be read as natural language in order to general the retrieval result. Peter (2011) explains that Watson’s system, “relies on massive amounts of data, spread over hundreds of computers, as well as a sophisticated mechanism for combining evidence from multiple sources” (p. 4) Therefore, Watson can general the most retrieval result base on massive amount of data. The more data we input to train the system, the more accuracy result we can get.

In my honor project, it is about I need to developed a system to general a best answer how a normal puppy becomes a professor guide dog. Since there are too many dependences, we have to come up with a machine learning system to deal with different situation base on the data we have. Therefore, we are able to general better answer base on more data we can get in the feature. Watson’s retrieve and rank service is the best fit in my project, so I am sure I will use this service in my project and even further projects in the future.

 

Word Cited:

Davenport, T. H., & Partil, D. J. (2012). Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century. Retrieved February 28, 2016, from http://128.255.244.58/strategic/articles/data_scientist-the_sexiest_job_of_the_21st_century.pdf

Norvig, P. (2011). The Machine Age – Watson takes on humans at Jeopardy!. But how close are we to a computer that thinks?

Shah, H. (2011). Turing’s misunderstood imitation game and IBM’s Watson success. York, UK: AISB.

 

How Map-Reduce can be useful in our project

Today I want to talk about MapReduce in No-SQL. Data size in the world is moving from GB to PB. The file system need to be more powerful and faster to handle more requests. The traditional way to store and process data is not good enough especially for dates do not really relate to each other, so people are going to use No-SQL instead of SQL. The Map-reduce system in No-SQL such as Hadoop provide us a very powerful way to deal with mess amount of data. Map-Reduce system “automatically distributes M Map tasks and R Reduce tasks across a large number of computer nodes.”

The system provides three categories of services to facilitate the running of a Map-Reduce program across a large number of machines, as shown in Figure 2. (i) Distributed file system: the input and output are stored in a distributed file system to be globally accessible. (ii) Automatically distributing tasks: the system instantiates Map and Reduce tasks across a large number of machines, partitions and assigns the input to individual Map tasks, then coordinates the copying of intermediate results (stored on local disks) from the machines running Map tasks to machines running Reduce tasks. A typical optimization is to co-locate a Map task to a machine (or rack) that also holds a copy of the assigned input partition in the distributed file system. (iii) Fault tolerance: the system monitors the task executions and re-executes tasks if they fail (due to machine crashes etc.). Since the input to a Reduce task may come from any of the Map tasks, it is necessary to wait for all Map tasks to finish before launching Reduce tasks. Near the end of the Map or the Reduce phase, the system schedules backup executions of the remaining in-progress tasks to protect against “stragglers”, which machines are taking an unusually long time to complete tasks due to permanent or transient hardware or software problems.

I am going to use Map-Reduce in my database class with Hadoop. Since I already have 1G of data, so the Map-Reduce will able to reduce a big amount of time to reiterate my data in the database. In addition to learning the characteristics of datasets and computations, the system may also provide interfaces that programmers can specify certain useful attributes for datasets and computations. Therefore, I am going to use Map-Reduce outside the school.

Word Cite

Chen, S., & Schlosser, S. (n.d.). Map-Reduce Meets Wider Varieties of Applications. Intel.