The Risks of Miscategorization

In discussing risk management and analytics, you should recognize that there is risk inherent simply in the conducting of analytics — especially predictive analytics. What if our predictions are false? What if the data upon which the predictions are based is incomplete or inherently flawed in some way? The purpose of this week’s discussion is to analyze the risks associated with categorical predictive analytics.

Research an instance where categorical prediction has been used by a business or governmental organization. Simply typing “categorical prediction” into www.news.google.com will reveal a number of news articles relating to this topic.

Read a few articles and select one that is interesting to you. Summarize it for the class. Make sure you identify the risks that your article addresses into one of the four quadrants of a risk matrix: High Probability/High Impact; High Probability/Low Impact; Low Probability/High Impact; Low Probability/Low Impact. Justify your classification with information from your article. Then, discuss the potential problems that could (or did) arise if the predictive activities discussed in your chosen article yielded bad results. What could (or did) happen as a result of erroneous or unreliable categorization through predictive modeling?

Scenario

You are newly appointed to the communications team for a reputable, multi-faceted philanthropic organization, Momentum for Better. The current task for your team is to create a brand-new campaign that promotes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. To kick off this campaign, you have been asked to develop a mood board presentation and written summary that you will present to leadership at the upcoming annual meeting.

You are reminded that a mood board is a deliverable—a collage of images, colors, patterns/textures, and text—that visually describes the intended look & feel of the campaign.

You DON’T need to be an artist or designer to create a mood board, but you DO need to have a keen understanding of what various visuals communicate and how they make people feel. Keep in mind the various ways that you analyzed and evaluated visuals throughout this course.

Instructions

Mood Board Presentation

1. First, create a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Your presentation will need to have the slides listed below clearly labeled.
2. Visually compelling title slide
3. Colors and Patterns
4. Logos, Ethos, Pathos
5. Graphics
6. Delivery Methods
7. Memes
8. Second, think about the overall look & feel that you want the campaign to have. Then, search the web for examples of the kinds of images, graphics, colors, and patterns/textures that you have in mind.
9. Third, copy and paste those images, graphics, etc., into the appropriate slides of your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. You must have at least four (4) images per slide, except for the Memes slide, which just needs two (2). The images should fill up as much of the slide as possible but DON’T stretch or squish the images. Here is more detail about the types of images you need to include in the slides.
10. Visually compelling title slide
11. Include one main image and a title for your presentation.
12. Include the organization’s name, Momentum for Better.
13. Colors and Patterns
14. Your color scheme must feature two colors.
15. Images of color swatches or things that are your chosen colors (e.g., fire engine red, canary yellow, etc.).
16. Patterns or textures that feature strong use of lines (e.g., stripes, swirls, borders, plaid, etc.).
17. Logos, Ethos, Pathos (choose one main rhetorical approach)
18. Photos of people that signify your chosen rhetorical approach.
19. Photos must include people of various genders, ethnicities, and ages.
20. Graphics
21. Logo and/or symbol graphics that convey diversity, equity, and inclusion.
22. Delivery Methods
23. Images of two (2) chosen delivery methods for spreading awareness about the campaign. For example, if you want social media to be one of the options, then include photos of a person using social media.
24. Memes
25. Create two (2) positive, inspiring memes that fit the overall message of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Don’t make the memes funny, satirical, or divisive.
26. You can only use public domain or Creative Commons licensed images. You CAN’T use images from movies, shows, comics, books, video games, etc.
27. You may use PowerPoint, Canva, Adobe Express, Microsoft Paint, or any other app to create the memes. Save them as a JPG or PNG file, then insert them into your PowerPoint presentation.
28. Fourth, as you develop the visually compelling title slide and all the other slides, you need to demonstrate your understanding of visual presentation. In other words, your slides need to be aesthetically pleasing with good visual connectivity.

Written Summary

Once you’ve finished creating your mood board presentation, you need to write a detailed summary explaining why you chose the visuals that you did. Your summary should include the following:

1. In a Microsoft Word document, use APA formatting. The title on your title page must match the title slide of your mood board presentation.
2. Your introductory paragraph must explain your overall intended look & feel for the campaign and how it will communicate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. For example, will it be serene, energetic, serious, or something else?
3. Include section headings in your summary, and these must match the slide labels from your mood board presentation.

Each section must contain 2–3 full paragraphs explaining your chosen images in detail. Keep in mind how you’ve analyzed and evaluated visuals throughout this course. Connect them to the overarching message of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. You’ll be graded on your ability to defend your choices and clearly articulate your analysis.

Submit a PowerPoint presentation (PPTX) and Microsoft Word document (DOCX).

In this assignment, you are taking on the role of a person who is responsible for raising awareness of the threats and posted by phishing messages.  The target audience is the faculty members and administrators at Adelphi.  You want to create an example of a phishing message that can be used to demonstrate effective techniques used by such messages and help train faculty and administration to avoid falling for such scams.

For this part, your team will design an effective phishing message.  Your design must include a subject line and a message body.  In the message body, you can use the following placeholders to make the phish more realistic:

• [FIRST]        First name of recipient
• [LAST]         Last name of recipient
• [EMAIL]       Email address included in the message
• [URL]           URL of a phishing landing page (you can specify the text that would be displayed for the link)

Be creative as you want, as long as you keep the tone and content “business appropriate.”  Remember the target audience and tailor your messages for the target audience.  

If you want to incorporate graphics feel free to do so.  You can submit either an email text (with appropriate placeholders) or a PDF of a formatted message. 

Instructions

Using MS Excel, create a new workbook with the following (Save as w7_firstname_lastname.xlsx or w7_firstname_lastname.xls).

As an administrator, you recorded the requests from different locations (i.e. a few states are listed) in the sheet below, you may create your own sheet. You need to explain the collected data. In the table below, you have the requests against the locations.

Software Installation requestsSoftware Update requestsHardware Installation requestsWV231215MD1385VA1746DC1462NY741FL292111

You can use any data gathering for your choice

Create at least 5 statistical functions and graphs relating to the data.

From the data discuss the trend (your conclusion, what does this data mean for your planning), You can use the question of “What if… then”

Introduction to What-if Analysis

Submit your week 7 work in w7_firstname_lastname.xlsx or w7_firstname_lastname.xls

Requirements

Points

Data Layout

20

Statistical functions and graph

50

Data Analysis Conclusion

30

TOTAL POINTS

100

Stretch Assignment: (I’d like to include this portion of the assignment in future classes. I ask that you give it a try and provide me a short summary on your thoughts of adding this to the class going forward!)

Macros are little recorded sessions of code changes in Excel. We know scripting as anything trigger or event based that is recurrent. I ask that you create a script in Excel by creating a Macro. Your macro should ZERO OUT all of the data in the table you are using. You can call the macro, StartOfTheDay. You would run this macro, say, when you arrived in the morning to enter new data into the tables and purge the data from the previous day. Give it a try! Remember save your file as a filename.xlsm (if it includes a macro). If you’d prefer a different macro, just let me know the pupose of your macro in the comments section of your submission.