Information Technology Education

If you are seeking a decent income and a job with multifaceted appeal, then perhaps an information technology education might be in order. With the field of information technology (IT) expanding at an incredible pace, an information technology education could be your one-way ticket to professional success!

Information technology schools often present a comprehensive curriculum in administration, development, maintenance, and support of computer information systems. Additionally, students may opt to become qualified in specialty systems such as Cisco and Microsoft, whereby students are given in-depth instruction in how to design, install and maintain computer networking systems. Other information technology training may involve intranet communications and connections, microcomputer applications and installations, network administration, computer repair, and general maintenance of computer systems.

An information technology education may lead to several certifications including A+, CCNA, MCP, MCSA, MCSE, or Network+. Depending on level of experience, education and specific field of expertise, those who have successfully completed their information technology education can qualify for employment as Computer Support Specialists, Data Communications Analysts, Network Support Technicians, Network/Systems Engineers, PC Technicians, Systems/Network Administrators, or Wireless Network Technicians.

If you would like to learn more about Information Technology Education as well as Information Technology Schools and even Online Information Technology Schools, you can find more in-depth information and resources on our website.

DISCLAIMER: Above is a GENERAL OVERVIEW and may or may not reflect specific practices, courses and/or services associated with ANY ONE particular school(s) that is or is not advertised on SchoolsGalore.com.

Copyright 2007 - All rights reserved by SchoolsGalore.com, in association with Media Positive Communications, Inc.

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Michael Bustamante is a staff writer for Media Positive Communications, Inc. in association with SchoolsGalore.com. Find Information Technology Schools, Colleges, Universities, Vocational Schools, and Online Schools at SchoolsGalore.com, your educational resource to locate schools.

AP - Barack Obama soaked up most of the votes from the nation's women, blacks and Hispanics and siphoned off enough white support to leave John McCain with no way to win.

Technology Strategy - Do Your Experts Know What They Don't Know?

Knowing what is unknown sounds like a Zen koan, and perhaps it is. We admit that competitive technologies strategic blindness may be a difficult concept to grasp, but solving this riddle may mean the difference between success and failure for your company.

Blindness, in the sense of not knowing what we dont know, is a root cause of serious defects in the strategic competitive intelligence gathering process: defects such as not choosing a broad enough set of search strategies, not selecting the relevant cross-over subject areas, or missing the extreme ends.

The costs of under-sampling, overlooking or misinterpreting key competitive technological intelligence can be huge.

Consider the fact that only about 75 companies from the 1960s S&P 500 are still in existence. What happened to the other 425? Could competitive intelligence blindness have played a part?

One problem is that blindness costs are often hidden. It is difficult to measure revenues that are not earned because a product lacks certain competitive features, key features that might have been added had the technologies intelligence gathering phase been more wide ranging.

However, the competitive blindness costs of patent infringement penalty payments, and cease and desist orders are more visible. These can be measured as huge, often in hundreds of millions of dollars.

In many such IP infringement cases, the losing party will claim surprise that the competitor is bringing a claim. This may or may not be a courtroom tactic.

It has been our experience in working with many technologies companies that often the organizations technology landscape scenarios are too narrowly scoped, and they are truly dumbfounded to find that they were transgressing. This is particularly the case when the intellectual property in question was developed in an industry different from their own.

If we wanted to make it simple, we could say that the fixable causes of competitive technology strategy blindness might be due to lack of attention, or might result from time and money saving decisions made at some point.

But if we delve a little more deeply into the Zen-like nature of strategic technologies blindness, we learn that it can often be caused by too much knowing.

It turns out that blindness is largely built in to any expert scoping process -- due to inherent under-scoping biases of the human mind. In other words, the experts think they have a good sense of what sufficiently broad sampling boundaries are needed to draw conclusions with a 98% degree of confidence.

The experts are wrong, says Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan.

Taleb cites Philip Tetlocks study of twenty seven thousand predictions by experts, experts who believed their predictions were narrowly bounded. The results of the study didnt back them up; the error rates were many times what these experts had predicted. Interestingly, Tetlock found no differential advantage between those experts holding graduate degrees versus those with undergraduate degrees.

Taleb also offers studies by Albert and Raiffa to further open our minds to the blindness conundrum. The experts they studied said they had scoped their datasets to have 98% confidence of completeness, This means they their intended error rate to be bounded at 2%. However, it turned out they were off by 15-30%.

Albert and Raiffa then tested their Harvard MBA students. These non-experts under-estimated sufficient dataset scope by a whopping 45%. Taleb frames these percentages as
the difference between what people actually know and how much they think they know.

The belief that data scoping encompasses 98% of the relevant set, when it is more likely embraces only 70-85%, has a serious impact on the range of possibilities considered at the very beginning of the entire intelligence gathering process. It potentially leaves too many possibilities unconsidered and also confers a degree of confidence in the risk profile of the final product commercialization strategy that is unwarranted.

How big might this under-scoping error be in your organization? What are the implications of this blindness if your business strategy is centered around disruptive technologies or blue oceans or predicting revenues from the execution of open innovation technology transfer?

To formulate a winning technology innovation strategy, a sufficiently broad competitive intelligence scan of technology options is essential to illuminate potential breakthrough opportunities, as well as to expose potentially devastating hidden risks.

Leading companies have processes and visualization tools in place to mitigate this proven expert blindness problem.

They do this by increasing the scope of their global technologies landscape search process massively in the first instance, followed by including varied insights gained through cross-functional collaborative validation of the data. This collaborative vetting of broadly open options and possibilities happens at the very beginning, and continuously throughout, the product strategy development process.

Understanding the expert bias toward blindness is key to adequately scoping and validating competitive technologies intelligence, and questioning others assumptions. Going out of bounds to look for cross-over ideas that will surprise competitors is a worthwhile ongoing strategic business pursuit.

Knowing more of what is unknown is becoming a continuously improving core competency within organizations that are focused on sustaining significant competitive success in the marketplace.

Greg Narog, Oval Ideas, Inc.

Oval Ideas is a provider of software tools and methods to technologies products based companies, helping them visualize and validate global technology innovation and product strategies in a market context. http://www.ovalideas.com/rdtechstrategy.html

Knowing beats guessing.

AP - Massachusetts voters eased marijuana laws and turned down a chance to repeal the state income tax Tuesday as ballot measures across the nation addressed a host of contentious issues ranging from gay marriage to abortion.

NCAA Football 08 Video Game Review

NCAA 08 did not get many new features this season, but it is still a great game for the XBOX 360 and Playstation. If you are familiar with this football game series and are looking for something new then you will probably be disappointed. NCAA 08 is an excellent game, but if you own NCAA 07 there is not very much in the way of change for the new version. The Game play is the same and the graphics are very tight, just like last year's version. So, the best thing to do is talk about the new features of NCAA 08 that were not included in last year's version.

At first look dynasty mode looks and feels the same, but there are a few minor tweaks. The biggest change to dynasty mode is off the field in recruiting. Recruiting new players in NCAA 08 has a much more hands on feel to it this season. First, you will select thirty five players to focus on, rank the players in order of importance, and call them on the phone to establish a relationship. The interest aspect about this phase of recruiting is you need to be careful of the conversation you have with each recruit. Your school is ranked, so you will need to pick topics that closely match your school the players interest. An icon will indicate if the player is buying your speech or not, pretty cool feature. Another feature of recruiting is after you have established a relationship with a player over the phone, you will then want to schedule a campus visit. You will need to select activities for this player that match their interest to get the player interested in your school. As you can see, the recruiting phase of NCAA 08 is much more involved this season.

Campus legend mode was added to the XBOX 360 and Playstation three versions this season. First, pick you position and school. Once you have picked position and school you will play in the state's high school playoffs. You are motivated to do well because at the end of the game you will be offered a scholarship to a school. Most of the time if you pick a top 25 school you will have to work your way up the depth chart, but this really easily done by attending practice and you can attain the number 1 spot in a matter of weeks. The one aspect about the campus mode that I don not like is that you can only control plays in which your player is involved. This can be frustrating in two ways. The camera only focuses on your player, so you can not always see the entire field. Second, you are not the coach, so you do not get to select how many plays you will be involved in.

Overall NCAA 08 is a great football video game for the next generation systems. Compared to NCAA 07 this game adds the features that were missing from the game last season.

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AP - A son of Osama bin Laden who grabbed headlines by marrying a British woman last year has flown to Spain and requested asylum, the Spanish government said Tuesday.

Age of Conan Weapon Types

The MMORPG Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures puts you in control of a warrior in the universe created by Robert E. Howard and other writers over the past century. It's known for flashy sorcery, brutal combat and very deadly outcomes for both. Naturally, the game decided to put a lot of emphasis on the combat aspect, allowing you to engage in real-time combat with your weapon of choice. Weapons are divided into several types: one-handed edged, two-handed edged, one-handed blunt, two-handed blunt, and ranged. Different classes can use different weapons, and it's dependent on the situation. In Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, you have to think strategically about your weapon choices.

One-handed edged weapons are shorter things like knives, daggers, and short swords. These are useful for getting in close to an enemy and stabbing/slashing them behind the reach of a longer weapon like a sword. Most rogue classes tend to favor one-handed edged weapons just for the purposes of stealth. They're also lighter, than but just as deadly as some of the larger weapons. Some feats allow you to throw knives to act as ranged weapons.

Two-handed edged weapons are mainly larger swords and axes. Two-handed broadswords, the longsword, war-axes and other instruments of death fall into this category. They're useful for obviously straightforward killing, and are used by the soldier classes, especially on the battlefield. They're harder to hide, so generally aren't available to rogue or thief-like characters. Axes are heavier than swords, so your character will need a high strength stat to work with. Really, it take strength to wield any weapon for any length of time, but often your opponent may have a shield between you and them, so it'll take longer. After all, no one wants a sword through the chest, so they'll fight that much harder to defend. Another downside to swords is that they're expensive in-game, because they take a lot of metal and metalworking skills to produce anything of really good quality. There are bronze weapons, but these aren't very good. Spears also fall into this category, though you could also place them into the blunt weapons category.

One-handed blunt weapons are smaller bludgeoning instruments like maces, flails, morning-stars and clubs. These are simple weapons, not really requiring a lot of effort to make or maintain them. They're useful for inflicting non-lethal damage (yes, believe it or not, sometimes you don't want to kill your opponent) and for defense. They're used by priests and rogues. Very rarely will you see a soldier with this class of weapon.

Two-handed blunt weapons are pretty much just staves and polearms. These are used by soldiers, and they have a slightly longer reach than a sword. The disadvantage is obviously that they're a lot slower than a sword, so if the enemy gets inside your guard, prepare to respawn.

Ranged weapons are everything else that's used from a distance, like longbows, crossbows and thrown weapons. You use these by aiming at the target with your mouse when the game goes into an over-the-shoulder view.

Ben is an avid Age of Conan gamer and frequently writes about AoC strategy guides and tips. Visit his website at http://www.aocriches.com to dominate your server today.

AP - Four employees hired by a temporary staffing agency to encourage absentee voting for Republican presidential candidate John McCain say they were instructed to tell people they were GOP volunteers.