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Showing posts with the label Data

A Storm Is Coming

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By   McDonald, T.    | Date 29th of November 2020 The future as we know it is uncertain. As we become more and more dependent on computers and machine do we put our very existence at risk? Even in entertainment, sci-fi is constantly airing our subconsciousness concerns about our own demise. Now we have the problem of algorithms determining what type of propaganda gets the best results from us. As we move into an uncertain future due to the high levels of propaganda from politics and religion on the net not to mention the violence, the tension on the street and in everyday life grows. What are the problems that we face?   Influence from outside our nations: bots on the net.   By this i mean foreign countries with malicious intent.  You know how businesses collect information for advertising purposes so they can make adverts that are more appealing to someone?  Well, political parties can do the same.  Algorithms collect information on you and then determine what type of person

Relational Databases

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By McDonald, T.   |  Date 5th of November 2020 Why use a database? Databases are a great way to store and retrieve data.   Since they are so widely used in computing, knowing how to use them is a must have skill in this industry.   For instance, many websites use databases to store product details.   One of the main benefits to databases is allows data to be organised, manipulated and retrieved rather than just storing it making it a very powerful tool.      Tables and keys First let’s look at the parts of the table  Customer_Table customer_id name address phone 1 Tony McDonald Some place 0788454567 2 A man 17 somewhere else 0793453459 3 A woman 45 who knows 0712311180   All relational databases have columns and rows.   Columns are vertical, so phone is the label of a column containing phone numb

Databases: SQL and NoSQL

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  By   McDonald, T.    | Date 20th of November 2020 What is a database? A database can be anything that stores collection of information and is often abbreviated to DB. A relational database stores information that is related in some way. For example, a shopping list is a relational database since it is a list of related information. Other examples include: Phone book. List of twitter users. Your families favourite foods. Now you have an idea of what a database is we can talk about where to store it. In the examples above, the phone book is a list of numbers and related information that can be stored in a book. The shopping list is stored on paper. We can also store these databases on a computer. Notably, the computer can be in your office or be a dedicated computer in a server room or even stored in a virtual machine in the cloud, which uses dedicated computers. Keeping it simple for now we can just think of a computer hosting the database. Now we have a place to store the d

Problems with spreadsheets

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By McDonald, T.   |  Updated 24th of March 2020 Small errors in spreadsheets have been the cause of major problems in real life. Examining the kinds of common errors in spreadsheets helps us understand the general problems working with data can present. In order to understand these problems, it is a good idea to look at what a spreadsheet is and how equations can go wrong. Spreadsheet ideas   A spreadsheet consists of one or more sheets: A sheet is a two-dimensional (array) of cells in which each cell is referenced by an index consisting of its column letter and row number. A cell can contain data or a calculation (known as a formula). There is a text box, known as a formula bar, in which the contents of a cell are displayed, and which is used for creating and editing the contents of the cell. What is a spreadsheet?   A sheet can contain one or more: Tables (sheets) A table is a two-dimensional array of data; some data is numeric, some is text. The tabl