ART 80F Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Gil Scott-Heron, Vimeo

read it and write down your ideas

Even though they have been doing it all their lives, people need to study communication simply because it is so complex. As stated in chapter 3 of the book, we all perceive things differently and "perception and communication influence each other, perception shapes our understanding of others' communication and the choices we make in our own communication" (pg. 41). For the reason that the choices we make and the ways that we view things/situations are changing everyday, communication between two individuals also changes and becomes more complex. Though we can communicate in general, how we communicate and what we communicate depends on how we perceive the world around us, making communication not as simple as it seems. As humans, we create broad categories of things (prototypes) and place people into them (Wood pg. 43). We then go on to create a more detailed assessment (a personal construct) where we measure a person or situation with a certain dimension of judgment (Wood pg. 43). We also place people and situations into stereotypes by making predictive generalizations or simply predicting what the personal/situation will be like or what will happen (Wood pg. 43). With all of these components to a basic path of communicating with others, it's hard to not see why we would study our complex underlying system of human communication. Not only do we make assumptions, but we base our thoughts/actions off of those assumptions which can then all be interpreted differently among various individuals. We study communication to try and dissect all of these interpretations and perceptions of others "to make sense of experience and to predict how we and others will act" (Wood pg. 45). Sometimes we follow a script or just simply act a specific way in a specific situation (like greeting someone and telling them your name) (Wood pg. 45). However, not everyone follows these scripts which just adds to the complexity of communication between us all.

Please answer the question after reading the paragraph.

We have a global health challenge in our hands today, and that is that the way we currently discover and develop new drugs is too costly, takes far too long, and it fails more often than it succeeds. It really just isn't working, and that means that patients that badly need new therapies are not getting them, and diseases are going untreated. We seem to be spending more and more money. So for every billion dollars we spend in R&D, we're getting less drugs approved into the market. More money, less drugs. Now we have a whole pipeline of different organ chips that we are currently working on in our labs. Now, the true power of this technology, however, really comes from the fact that we can fluidically link them. There's fluid flowing across these cells, so we can begin to interconnect multiple different chips together to form what we call a virtual human on a chip. Now we're really getting excited.We're not going to ever recreate a whole human in these chips, but what our goal is is to be able to recreate sufficient functionality so that we can make better predictions of what's going to happen in humans. For example, now we can begin to explore what happens when we put a drug like an aerosol drug. Those of you like me who have asthma, when you take your inhaler, we can explore how that drug comes into your lungs, how it enters the body, how it might affect, say, your heart. Does it change the beating of your heart? Does it have a toxicity? Does it get cleared by the liver? Is it metabolized in the liver? Is it excreted in your kidneys? We can begin to study the dynamic response of the body to a drug. Organs on chips could also change the way we do clinical trials in the future. Right now, the average participant in a clinical trial is that: average. Tends to be middle aged, tends to be female. You won't find many clinical trials in which children are involved, yet every day, we give children medications, and the only safety data we have on that drug is one that we obtained from adults. Children are not adults. They may not respond in the same way adults do. There are other things like genetic differences in populations that may lead to at-risk populations that are at risk of having an adverse drug reaction. Now imagine if we could take cells from all those different populations, put them on chips, and create populations on a chip. This could really change the way we do clinical trials. And this is the team and the people that are doing this. We have engineers, we have cell biologists, we have clinicians, all working together. We're really seeing something quite incredible at the Wyss Institute. It's really a convergence of disciplines, where biology is influencing the way we design, the way we engineer, the way we build. It's pretty exciting.

Question: For years, technology and medicine have joined together to pave the way or even solve some of the world’s greatest issues in healthcare. These issues include but are not limited to incurable diseases and disorders like AIDS and cancer. According to Geraldine Hamilton however, we as a population are spending too much money to develop drugs and solutions to these issues, only to be at a deficit with the drugs actually produced. She believes that one of the keys is how we test these drugs and finding more efficient ways to do so. As a result, she suggests the use of organs on chips, an innovation created and pioneered by her lab. The use of organs on chips could change the way new drugs are released and tested, thus possibly furthering the process of creating solutions to healthcare’s problems. Where is the fine line between technology and human innovation? Is human innovation gradually becoming depending on technology? (At least two paragraphs, a paragraph is at least 5 sentences long.)

Robatelli's Pizzeria Case StudyIntroduction On the morning of October 31st, Elaine Black, Chief Information Officer at Robatelli's Pizzeria, was waiting for both Jim Saxton, database administrator, and Peter Greyton, operations manager, to come to her office for a meeting. While waiting, Elaine was thinking about the surge of telephone and Internet orders expected to be received through the company's customer order center within the next 12 hours. Halloween had always been the most popular day of the year for people in the greater Pittsburgh area to order pizza from Robatelli's. There were 53 restaurant locations to serve these customers, but only one location to receive all of the orders and forward them to the right restaurant. Elaine's thoughts were interrupted as Jim and Peter entered her office. The following conversation took place: ELAINE Well, guys, it's here again, our biggest day of the year. Not only is Halloween a busy day, but we have the upcoming day after Thanksgiving, the week before Christmas, and Super Bowl Sunday. Can our current computer system's infrastructure and people keep pace with the orders we expect? JIM I think our systems are all running at peak performance. We shouldn't have any computer concerns for today or those other busy days. PETER Everyone in the customer order center is focused on making sure that our customers get their pizzas as ordered. We have plenty of people scheduled to work tonight, so we're good to go. ELAINE Terrific. But every time we face one of these peak sales days, I start wondering about the long-term capacity and effectiveness of our computer systems. Jim, we need to think long term about our computer system. I was just reading an article that I'd like you to take a look at. It's about Anheuser-Busch Companies and their use of data mining. JIM I do agree with you, Elaine; we should always be thinking about how newer IT systems can help us. Could you e-mail me the link to the article? ELAINE Sure, and I would like you to think about how we might use the same approach in our business. Peter, your order center people are doing a great job, but again there's something I'd like us to think about in the long run. As you know, we now have to manually enter all customer order center sales and store sales into our general ledger (GL). I think we could improve a lot of things if those sales are automatically fed into our GL software. Why don't you think about any advantages you see for an automatic interface, and we'll look at the costs compared to those advantages. How's that sound? PETER I'll do that. I'll give it some thought and work on a report about an automatic interface between our GL software and the point of sale systems in our restaurants as well as the phone and Internet sales. How soon do you want to meet again to look at these issues? ELAINE Let's say, in two weeks at the same time. As Jim and Peter left her office, Elaine continued to think about the features of the company's accounting information systems and whether or not data extracted from these systems could facilitate the multiple needs of the company. The focus had always been on providing accurate financial accounting information from the various locations; however, the company's aggressive growth strategies meant increased emphasis on the system's ability to analyze detailed customer information that could be translated into increased sales opportunities. Elaine knew the challenges they faced could very well affect the company's ability to maintain its competitive advantage. She realized that her department must continually improve the company's information systems to help it achieve growth strategies. Operating state-of-the-art systems was imperative to position the company to execute those growth plans. However, she was concerned about the possibility that restrictions of the current information systems could actually prevent the company from doing what it wanted to do. Allowing restrictive systems to prevent them from achieving business strategies was a risk that Elaine would not tolerate!

Review the Robatelli's Pizzeria Case Study.

Develop an internal controls system in Robatelli's Pizzeria sales and cash business areas.

Prepare a 12- to 16-slide presentation describing the typical activities and outlining an effective system of internal controls for the Sales, Sales Returns, and Cash Collections business areas. Include any associated risks in these areas.

Describe specific internal controls that include authorization of transactions, segregation of duties, adequate records and documentation, security of assets, and independent checks and reconciliation for each business area.