Computers in the Workplace - Human Resources

This week I am going to write about computer literacy within and Human Resource Management (HR). HR is a broad support industry that every company has to some degree. While the exact functions can vary based on the industry or company being supported, there are common functions throughout. Overall, HR is about supporting the people aspect of a company like talent acquisition and retention, managing employee pay and benefits, and workforce monitoring and analysis (ADP, n.d).  

As degree seekers, we are likely to be dealing with HR recruitment systems in the future as we strive to put our earned knowledge to use. For years, HR departments have been using resume analysis programs to weed through applications in the hope of finding the best applicant without the interference of human bias (Dastin). However, reviews of the results revealed more of the same bias. As Martin (2018) puts it: 

“This is one major drawback to AI, where whatever goes in is what goes out. This means that if there is already a bias in the hiring process of things like years of experience and certainly preferred degrees over skills or men over women in tech, the AI bot only knows what it is being told” (para 4). 

The user may think that the cold logic of the computer is infallible when what they are actually getting is the repackaged logic of the people who came before. Dastin (2018) calls out that the transfer of these biases is likely unintentional but still a natural result of the training data.  

Imagine you have recorded and ranked all the socks you have ever purchased. Early in your life your mom only got you SoccySocks. When you got out on your own, you purchased a few CallySocz because they were convenient, but never got around to trying MadSocks. You enter all these soc rankings into a computer and ask what kinds of socks you should buy next. SoccySocks has more scores than CallySocz, so it gets recommended higher. The program doesn’t extrapolate that CallySocz has a new cotton bamboo blend that you would like to try if you knew about it. The program has no basis to make any conclusions about MadSocks at all.  

This example may sound silly, but if you apply this idea to collages on applicants' resumes, you can see how a program would keep with known successes, regardless of the actual causes of those successes. In the real world, this manifests as the resume programs downgrading applicants from all-girl women’s colleges (Dastin, 2018).  

This brings me to the computer literacy of HR professionals who would be using or implementing resume analysis programs. I do not expect HR professionals to be able to write or understand the line-by-line code of every program they are using, nor do I expect that of anyone, even programmers. What I do recommend is an understanding of logic flows: if this, then that. I think HR professionals should know the connection between the input and output of the software they use well enough (or have access to meaningful enough explanations for reference) that they could examine a resume or situation themselves that they can match the program output.  

This may delve more into critical thinking skills than computer literacy itself, but an ability without the critical eye to apply it well is meaningless at best, and actively harmful at worst.  

Initial Thoughts on Web/Mobile Apps

I am currently interested in the topic of web/mobile apps. In the short term, this topic interests me because I like to make tools that help me with repetitive tasks or calculations. In the past, I have modified a .html file that included some JavaScript to serve as a template generator for common tasks in my job. It has also been common for me to make a spreadsheet that helps me appraise the best path forward or the best value for games I play. As I expand my knowledge of Python, I am building more complicated custom apps to answer these questions for me, though from what I have read Python is not very viable in the web/mobile app space. I think these homemade tools could be even better and easier to share with others if I can learn how to execute these concepts as web/mobile apps for portability.   

In the long term, making or at least understanding the development of web/mobile apps can be a boon to my future career in IT. According to Jiangning et al, (2019), “90% of people’s mobile time is spent using mobile apps” and the Apple and Google app stores offer over 1.5 billion apps each (p. 828). This high usage and high volume of apps makes me feel secure that the demand for skills related to web/mobile apps can be well leveraged in my future carrier. 

Network Travel - Ping and Traceroute

Today I pinged and ran a traceroute on three websites:  

• Google.com - the recommended test, a US company. 
• CTRIP.com - a Chinese company I learned about in my last class. 
• Restaurant-les-impressionnistes.com - Frech business I found by zooming into France on Google maps.  

 Summary Table of results:

	Google.com	CTRIP.com	https://restaurant-les-impressionnistes.com/
Country	USA	China	France
Ping: Round Trip min-max	14 ms - 17 ms	240 ms - 244 ms	163 ms - 185 ms
Ping: Packet Loss	0%	0%	0%
Traceroute: Hop Count	11	25	21
Traceroute: Failed Hops	7 (out of 33)	29 (out of 75)	23 (out of 63)

Immediately noticeable is that the USA company had a faster round trip time and fewer hops, the French company was second, and the Chinese company had the highest round trip time and most hops according to the ping and traceroute. The two international traceroutes had a pair of matching IP addresses as intermediary steps showing that the routing started very similarly for these two. This demonstrates to me that there is a general connection between distance and response time when using the internet. 

Ping and traceroute can be helpful in determining a point of failure. If the troubleshooter is familiar with what the results of these two tests are in an ideal situation, they can better identify the breakpoint by comparing current results (Radware, n.d). For example, with ping. If the ping round trip to Google.com was unusually high, there may be an issue with the user's internet. For the traceroute, if I know that there are supposed to be 25 hops, but I stop getting results after the 11th, the point of failure could be the transition between hops 11 and 12. 

One of the things that strikes me as I work on progressing from just an internet user to someone who is trying to understand the internet is just how physical the digital landscape is. We use cell phones and other wireless devices all the time, basking in the mobility and convenience of it all, but just one or two network steps away is very physical hardware that exists and interacts with the real world. Wifi connects to routers, connect to modems, connect to ISP, connects to other ISP around the world, connects to the destination modem, then router, then the relevant target computer or server, just to send a response back the way it came. Packets of data - snippets of the information the user wants to send packaged with destination, source, and other relevant information, travel back and forth on this path all faster than we can comprehend (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). 

 

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.

Radware. (n.d.) What is a Ping of Death (PoD) Attack? https://www.radware.com/security/ddos-knowledge-center/ddospedia/ping-of-death/#:~:text=A%20Ping%20of%20Death%20(PoD)%20attack%20is%20a%20form%20of,memory%20errors%20and%20system%20crashes

Documenting a Day - Capstone

This week’s tasks set us to experiment with tracking “A Day in My Life” with various applications so that we could experience the functionality of each. The applications are Microsoft Word, a word processor; Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet application; and Microsoft PowerPoint, a presentation application, along with considering databases. Using each program for different tasks with the same focus can help highlight the pros and cons of an application. When setting out on a task, it is important to choose the correct application that fits your goals.  

The first task was using a word processor to write a journal. See my detailed post about the word processor task here. Word processors are good for creating and editing text files, especially formatted text (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). In the case of writing a journal entry, formatting like bold was useful for making the dates of each entry stand out, along with using italics to highlight thoughts that need to stand out among the rest of the text. A word processor is best suited for written formats, like telling the narrative of my day. Images can be inserted into a word processor document, but a presentation would be better suited to handle image-heavy information.  

The second task for “A Day in My Life” involved using a spreadsheet. See my detailed post about the Spreadsheet task here. Spreadsheets let the user enter information into a table and then do calculations based on formulas and values in the table (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). The spreadsheet let me list and compare the hours spent on each activity. The spreadsheet program used, Microsoft Excel, has built-in options to create different kinds of graphs based on the entered data. Inserting a pie chart created an easy visualization allowing for a comparison of the size of the segments to each other and the rest of my day. While the cells of a spreadsheet can contain text, the formatting of text in a spreadsheet is not a robust as a word processor. Spreadsheets are ideal for working with numbers, formulas, and graphs. 

Task three was creating a presentation based on the journaled day. Presentations allow for a mixture of figures and text and many modern presentation applications allow for animation or movement of the presentation elements (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). One best practice around presentation text is keeping to no more than 6 lines of text and each line should be around 8 words long each with disregard for complete sentences while keeping the concept intact (Sharma, et al., 2022). So, although presentations can contain text, this text is only meant to be a high-level summary of important points. It is important to remember that presentations are often intended as a tool to aid the audience in understanding the information being presented. Unless the slides are intended to fully stand on their own, they do not replace the presenter themselves.

While these tasks only focused on one day, if I was going to continue this process for an extended period, I would likely get a database involved. A database would allow me to store a large amount of journaled and recorded data so that I can later retrieve it, but other applications are needed to display it (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). If weeks of data regarding how many hours each day was spent on a task, then could enter that information into a spreadsheet application and display summaries, comparisons, and trends related to time devoted to a task. 

Each of the application types discussed here allowed for different displays of the same event. Spreadsheets were useful for showing quantifiable data about my day, like hours spent. The word processor let me write a narrative about my day with added formatting for calling out important parts. The presentation app let me create slides showing a summary of my day with a few graphics added for emphasis. A database would let me store daily information and build up to a year in my life, or longer. Understanding the pros on cons of each of these applications will allow for the choice of the right one for the purpose when starting out on a project.