Learning Visual Basic free essay sample

Visual Basic was a learning challenge for me. After my first assignment, I started learning from my mistakes and eventually started understanding a little more at a time. Having already learned a few basics in Web Development coding, Visual Basic was quite a bit different in programming language.Visual Basic is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to create and modify code that is written in a basic programming language. There are different ways to use code in Visual Basic to make time more manageable by using less lines of code. During Class we learned how to convert algorithms to programs using input, output, variables, and looping. By reading flowcharts, hierarchy charts, and pseudo code a person can analyze and process the steps on how a program is to run. There was also a discussion on the different data types and how to use them. We will write a custom essay sample on Learning Visual Basic or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page There are 11 data types used in Visual Basic and they are: * Boolean * Byte * Currency * Data * Double * Integer * Long * Object * Single * String * Variant Using Windows Form Applications, various input/output boxes were designed and rogrammed to run by setting up variables using expressions and operators. Visual Basic could be an asset in the future as I pursue a career in Computer Science or programming. I believe this course will help by adding to the accumulating skills and could be used to open many opportunities in the Information Technology field. Learning to analyze and make decisions on various programs and their creation, Visual Basic could aid in understanding different coding concepts that may be familiar or similar.

GDP as a Measure of National Welfare essays

GDP as a Measure of National Welfare essays GDP per capita is often used as an indicator of welfare in an economy. While this approach has advantages, there are also many criticisms on GDP as an indicator of standard of living or welfare. The major advantages to using GDP per capita as an indicator of standard of living are that it is measured frequently, widely and consistently. Another advantage is that it is used in all countries which allow crude comparisons of the standard of living in different countries. The major disadvantage of using GDP as an indicator of standard of living is that it is not, strictly speaking, a measure of standard of living or welfare. GDP is intended to be a measure of particular types of economic activity within a country. For instance, in an extreme example, a country which exported 100 per cent of its production would still have a high GDP, but a very poor standard of living. There are many negative points raised against GDP as a measure of welfare of a country. Firstly, GDP attempts to remove value judgments on spending. All transactions are neutral; neither good nor bad. The costs of a major natural or ecological disaster cause an increase in GDP. So do the costs involved in a car accident or aggravated burglary health bills; cost of replacing property; police work; counseling. Both of these examples are obviously bad for our well-being, but GDP counts the results of them as positives. GDP also counts the shorter life span of products as a positive, since more would be sold. Secondly, many items are left out of the accounting that makes up GDP, mostly because they are hard to put values on. But leaving out domestic work, voluntary work, the underground economy, etc means that they are ignored in much government policy. Resource depletion and environmental damage also do not appear within GDP except with the costs of clean-ups. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the broadest quantitative measure of a nation's total economic activity...

Pterodactylus Facts and Figures

Pterodactylus Facts and Figures Name: Pterodactylus (Greek for wing finger); pronounced TEH-roe-DACK-till-us; sometimes called pterodactyl Habitat: Shores of Europe and South Africa Historical Period: Late Jurassic (150-144 million years ago) Size and Weight: Wingspan of three feet and two to 10 pounds Diet: Insects, meat and fish Distinguishing Characteristics: Long beak and neck; short tail; wings of skin attached to three-fingered hands About Pterodactylus Pterodactylus is a case study in how confusing it can be to classify 150-million-year-old animals. The first specimen of this pterosaur was discovered way back in 1784, in Germanys Solnhofen fossil beds, decades before before naturalists had any conception of the theory of evolution (which wouldnt be scientifically formulated, by Charles Darwin, until about 70 years later) or, indeed, any grasp of the possibility that animals could go extinct. Fortunately, in retrospect, Pterodactylus was named by one of the first academics to grapple with these issues, the Frenchman Georges Cuvier. (See a gallery of Pterodactylus and Pteranodon pictures and 10 facts about pterodactyls.) Because it was discovered so early in the history of paleontology, Pterodactylus suffered the same fate as other before-their-time dinosaurs of the 19th century like Megalosaurus and Iguanodon: any fossil that remotely resembled the type specimen was assumed to belong to a separate Pterodactylus species or a genus that later wound up being synonymized with Pterodactylus, so at one point there were no less than two dozen named varieties! Paleontologists have since sorted out most of the confusion; the remaining two Pterodactylus species, P. antiquus and P. kochi, are pretty much beyond reproach, and other species have since been assigned to related genera like Germanodactylus, Aerodactylus, and Ctenochasma. Now that weve sorted all that out, exactly what kind of creature was Pterodactylus? This late Jurassic pterosaur was characterized by its relatively small size (a wingspan of only about three feet and a weight of ten pounds, max), its long, narrow beak, and its short tail, the classic body plan of a pterodactyloid, as opposed to a rhamphorhynchoid, pterosaur. (During the later Mesozoic Era, some pterodactyloid pterosaurs would grow to truly enormous sizes, as witness the small-plane-sized Quetzalcoatlus.)Â  Pterodactylus is often depicted as flying low over the coastlines of western Europe and northern Africa (much like a modern seagull) and plucking small fish out of the water, though it may also have subsisted on insects (or even the occasional small dinosaur) as well. On a related note, because it has been in the public eye for well over two centuries, Pterodactylus (in the abbreviated form pterodactyl) has become pretty much synonymous with flying reptile, and is often used to refer to the entirely different pterosaur Pteranodon. Also, for the record, Pterodactylus was only remotely related to the first prehistoric birds, which descended instead from the small, terrestrial, feathered dinosaurs of the later Mesozoic Era. (Confusingly, the type specimen of Pterodactylus was recovered from the same Solnhofen deposits as the contemporaneous Archaeopteryx; its important to bear in mind that the former was a pterosaur, while the latter was a theropod dinosaur, and thus occupied an entirely different branch of the evolutionary tree.)

Report Type Assignment Based of Swatch Case Study Essay

Report Type Assignment Based of Swatch Case Study - Essay Example Based on the case study, working at the company must entail engaging in a lot of conversation, jocular gestures and more informal talk. This is because the management vouches for a less formal and relaxed mood in order to create an avenue for creativity, as well as motivate their employees. Its vertical frequency of communication places it at a highly vertically integrated state such that the open door policy enables individuals at different hierarchical levels, in the company, to interact freely. This makes all members of staff to feel important, valued, and respected. Their opinions must be considered in the decision-making processes, and they are free to share their ideas without fear of being judged or victimized. Such a work environment makes the Swatch organizational setting a fun yet focused place to be as an employee The core business of the company is manufacturing watches that would lead to customers imperceptibly becoming attached to them. Unlike other organizations, they believe that individuals can be manipulated emotionally such that they end up acquiring more than a couple of watches in their lifetime. This is the core of their business, and it is anchored on innovations, which appeal to potential buyers. As a result, consumers will keep coming for more and more watches; hence, keeping Swatch in business by boosting its sales. Finally, a customer would have a pleasant experience at a Swatch store since the staff is jovial and ready to assist them to explore the innovations offered by the company. Swatch has the ability to grow since it has four major development phases. The first phase, which was meant for the survival of Swatch, is its effective international distribution system. This helps the company to acquire a large market base all over the world. Secondly, the management of Swatch has employed good strategies, which have aided the company to succeed in reviving its luxury

Death Penalty and the Adolescents Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Death Penalty and the Adolescents - Essay Example They argued that the death penalty was needlessly cruel, overrated as a deterrent, and occasionally imposed in fatal error. Along with Quaker leaders and other social reformers, they defended life imprisonment as a more rational alternative. Countries such as Venezuela and Portugal were the first nations to abolish the death penalty altogether (http://www.richard.clark32.btinternet.co.uk/thoughts.html, 2004).1.) Incapacitation of the criminal - Capital punishment permanently removes the worst criminals from society and should prove much cheaper and safer for the rest of us than long term or permanent incarceration. It is self evident that dead criminals cannot commit any further crimes, either within prison or after escaping or being released from it 2.) Cost - Money is not an inexhaustible commodity and the state may very well better spend our (limited) resources on the old, the young and the sick rather than the long term imprisonment of murderers, rapists etc.3.) Vengeance or retribution - Execution is a very real punishment rather than some form of "rehabilitative" treatment, the criminal is made to suffer in proportion to the offence. Although whether there is a place in a modern society for the old fashioned principal of "lex talens" (an eye for an eye) is a matter of personal opinion 4.) Deterrence - There are numerous and great examples that in those countries (e.g. Singapore), which almost always carry out death sentences there is generally far less serious crime. This tends to indicate that the death penalty is a deterrent, but only where execution is an absolute certainty Death penalty has been banned in many countries. In the United States, an earlier move to eliminate capital punishment has now been reversed and more and more states are resorting to capital punishment for serious offenses such as murder (http://www.duhaime.org/dictionary/dict-c.htm, 2004). The arguments for and against death penalty started with the legal issues concerning the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Furman vs. Georgia case. During this trial it has been argued that capital punishment is a law that is evidently "arbitrary and capricious." Racial bias is one of the strongest arguments for the 'arbitrariness' of death penalty (http://justice.uaa.alaska.edu/death/history.html, 2006).

Genetic Algorithm (GA) as Optimization Technique

Genetic Algorithm (GA) as Optimization Technique Preference learning (or preference elicitation) is a critical problem in many scientific fields, such as decision theory [1,2], economics [3,4], logistic [ref] and database [5]. When modeling user preference, researchers often model the preferences as a solution to an optimization problem which maximizes some utility function. In reality, however, we are not a-priori given a utility but have only access to a finite historical user choice data. Therefore, the passive preference learning problem, that is, how to learn user preferences using her historical choice data, has gained a lot of attention in recent years. When dealing with preference learning, it is often assumed that user preference over the values of each attribute is independent of the values of other attributes. However, this assumption is not a sound in many world scenarios. For example, as it is shown in Fig. 1 for cloth shopping problem, one might choose the color of her shoes depending on the color of dress she will buy, i.e. her preference over shoes color is conditioned by the available dresses. More formally, we say the preferences induced by the users behavior are intrinsically related to textit{conditional preferential independence}, a key notion in multi-attribute decision theory[20]. Conditional preference networks (CP-nets) have been proposed for such problems [4] and have received a great deal of attention due to the compact and natural representation of ordinal preferences in multi-attribute domains [8-12, 17-19,22]. Briefly, a CP-net, fig. 1, is a digraph, whose nodes correspond to alternative attributes and edges correspond to the dependency between nodes and each node is annotated with a conditional preference table which describe the preferences over that particular attribute (chapter 3). It is sometimes claimed that CP-nets are `easy to elicit [16]. That is, we first explain CP-nets to the user, and then ask her to write down the CP-net that best describes her decision-making process [18,30]. However, it has been shown that when facing the choices, people often act differently from what they described previously as their preferences [39,40,97,103]. As an example, Kamishima and Akaho [53] point out that when customers were asked to rank ten sushi items and then later to assign rating scores to the same items, in 68% of the cases, the ordering implied by the ratings did not agree with the ranking elicited directly only minutes before. Based on these experiments, several CP-net learning algorithms have been developed depend on the users choice data. Some algorithms work on the historical choice data [23,64], a process known as passive learning. Others actively offer solutions in an attempt to learn the users preferences as they choose [23,29,47,58].   The work of this paper falls into the category of passive learning, in which the learner uses the recorded users choices and then fits a CP-net model to the observed data. Formally, we collect the set of samples $S = {o_i succ o_i}$, where   $o_i succ o_i$ means that the user strictly prefers outcome $o_i$ over outcome $o_i$ and then find a model $N$ that can best describe $S$. Such set of samples may be gathered, for instance, by observing online users choices. Table1 shows the number of binary CP-nets up to 7 nodes, i.e. each outcome consists of 7 attributes [A250110]. From the values, it is evident that, even for a small number of attributes, finding the best CP-net is not a trivial task due to the huge size of the search space. textbf{inja np-completo begoo.} To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing approach that can perform well on problem with more than 7 attributes hence they are not practical when facing real world problems, in which the alternatives usually consist of tens or even hundreds of attributes. Another problem that rises when learning preferences from human subjects is the possibility of noise or comparison data that are ultimately inconsistent in the chose data-set $S$. While noise is results of the observation of the users behavior,   inconsistency is the result of randomicity of the users behaviors; that   is, the transitive closure of data-set may result in a cycle in which some outcome $o$ is seen to be preferred to itself. The objective of most CP-net learning techniques is to learn (i.e. rebuild) a CP-net that can describe the whole data-set[ref]. However, since the $S$ is not usually clean,   there is no possibility of finding such a CP-net, that is consistent with every example in $S$. This fact motivated us to frame the CP-net learning problem as an optimization problem that is, to identify a model that maximizes some objective function, $f$, with respect to choice data-set. In this work, we utilized the power of Genetic Algorithm (GA) as an optimization technique. GA is an optimization algorithm inspired from the mechanism of natural selection and natural genetics, which can work without any a-priori knowledge about the problem domain and have received a growing interest in solving the complex combinatorial optimization problems especially for their scalability as compared with the deterministic algorithms [1]. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of implementing the GA to solve the passive CP-net learning problem.

The Concepts of Leadership Theories

This essay begins with how the concept of leadership starts with understanding what leadership means. According to Robbins and Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 15th edition states that leadership is the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of a vision or set of goals (p, 402). A good leader is more likely to accomplish this task through knowledge and skill.Knowledge to know about how to use what is known to influence workers in an organization to reach the goals of a company and skill to put in the effort to actually do what is meant to be done well to achieve organizational goals. In other words an effective leader should be capable of inspiring and motivating even the most inefficient employees to strive towards attaining the goals of the organization. Organizational effectiveness is critical to success in any business.In order to achieve increased and sustainable business results, organizations need to execute strategy an engage employees. T he validity of the stat ement ‘’an organisations performance and effectiveness are directly related to its leadership,† can be further explained by drawing a little focus on the theories of leadership. These theories include situational theory, participative leadership model, the path-goal theory and the transformational leadership theory. Situational theories focus on the followers.Situational theories propose that the effectiveness of a particular style of leadership is dependent on the context in which it is being exercised. For example, in a situation where the leader is the most knowledgeable an experienced member of a group, an authoritarian style might be most appropriate but in other instances where group members are skilled experts, a democratic style would be more effective. Fieders situational theories identify effective leadership style under changing situations (Fieder, Chemers and Mahon, 1977). These can be either relationship motivated or task motivated.A leader participat ive model is a leadership theory that provides a set of rules to determine the form and amount of participative decision making in different situations. These leaders encourage participation and contribution from groups members and helps members feel more relevant and committed to the decision making process. Persons are less competitive and more collaborative when they are working on joint goals. It has been proven that when decisions are made together, the social commitment to one another is greater and increases the commitment to he decision rather than when decisions are made by one person alone. Participative leadership can be effective in unstructured situations because it can increase role clarity and it can also be very effective for people who have a high need to control their environment. The path-goal theory which was developed by Robert House is a theory that states that it is a leader’s job to assist followers in attaining their goals and to provide the necessary direction and support to ensure that their goals are compatible with the overall objectives of the group or organization. Robbins and Judge 15th Edition) Effective path-goal leaders must recognize the needs of those they manage and try to satisfy their needs through the workplace by rewarding persons for achieving their goals, helping subordinates to identify the most effective path they need to take to reach their goals and clear the paths so that these subordinates can reach their goals. The transformational leadership theory focuses on the connections formed between leaders and followers.Transformational leadership is a process in which the leaders take actions to try to increase their associates' awareness of what is right and important, to raise their associates' motivational maturity and to move their associates to go beyond the associates' own self-interests for the good of the group, the organization, or society. Such leaders provide their associates with a sense of purpose that goes beyond a simple exchange of rewards for effort provided. The transformational leaders are proactive in many different and unique ways.These leaders attempt to optimize development, not just performance. Development encompasses the maturation of ability, motivation, attitudes, and values. Such leaders want to elevate the maturity level of the needs of their associates (from security needs to needs for achievement and self-development). They convince their associates to strive for a higher level of achievement as well as higher levels of moral and ethical standards. Through the development of their associates, they optimize the development of their organization as well.High performing associates build high performing organizations. A transformational leadership is more effective when in a smaller, privately held firm than in a complex organization because the personal nature can directly interact with the workforce and make decisions than when they report to an external bro ad of directors or deal with a complex bureaucratic structure. I conclude that each of these theories offers some insights into the qualities of successful leaders.The different leadership styles will differ depending on the type of organizational structure being used but they are all important for the effectiveness and performance of any organization. Bibliography Bass, B. M. (2005). Transformational leadership theory, In J. B. Miner. Organizational behavior Fiedler, (1967) A Theory of Leadership Effectiveness. NewYork: McGraw-Hill. Langton, N. , ; Robbins, S. (2007). Leadership. In N. Langton ; S. Robbins. Organizational Behavior: Concepts, controversies, applications Toronto: Prentice Hall Canada