I spent the last days of break writing my portion of the paper. Specifically, I wrote about implementation, the introduction, conclusion, executive summary, and depending on our need to go more in depth on the reason that our solution outweighs the other solutions we proposed, I will compose such a portion for the paper.

My job was to also compile the paper, so I placed all of our individual portions together and tried to make them flow. I also played with some formatting and fonts to see if there was a particular style that went with this paper.

This evening I continued to work on formatting, fixed up some more transitions and wording in our document so that it is easier for us to edit it together tomorrow.

The week of Thanksgiving our group began writing our portions of the Rec Report. According to our Gantt, we were to finish individual research by the Friday before thanksgiving. That was accomplished because that week we spent writing the first drafts of our individual portions and sending them to each other. As we received each others' papers, we compiled them. We also compiled our work cited at this time to make it easier in the end.

We also added graphics into our paper, and we're still trying to decide which ones to keep, which ones to delete, or whether we should add different ones.

The beginning of this week was spent compiling the report and playing around with fonts and designs. We must still think of a good title, a final design, catchy headings, and transitions between our sections so that we sure that our paper flows.

Tomorrow we are meeting to edit our paper according to our peer review and begin making the powerpoint.

This week I took a (personally) bold step and actually called up one of the companies that our group is writing about to get up to date info and ask for some clarification. I was fed up with the ambiguity of our solution- we have a solid argument, but pieces were missing from it and I felt like the actual company would know the correct answer. I first emailed them, explained a bit about the Rec Paper, and asked if I could interview someone who is familiar with our topic. Within days I had contact information for the Business Development person at the company and spoke to him a couple days ago. I prepared a list of about 10 questions about their product and I learned a lot from him. I'm glad I made a list of questions because it's inevitable that I would have forgotten something.

I will begin to compose my portion of the paper soon, and I'm relieved that our group will have solid information. After doing a bit more research to get some outside info apart from the company I think we will have a legitimate argument. The only thing I'm waiting to see now is how many words we end up writing... this word minimum seems harder to fill at this point than the white paper, but we shall see.

On Wednesday we decided that the solution we would argue would be the outsourcing of fraud management to the companies iovation and ID Insight, who are coming together to create the state-of-the-art anti-fraud software.

Sicne this product is still in process, I had to do some research before Friday to make sure there is adequate information available thus far to compose a recommendation report. There is a decent amount of information about which specialties of each company would be incorporated in the final software, so we have a good idea of what the final product will be capable of.

On Friday we typed our memo in class so what we have left to do is the Gantt chart. Due to us all being out of town this weekend, we are rotating who gets the Gantt chart to edit it. I am creating it and adding the content and then I will pass it on to my group members to edit according to their schedules.

This week was super busy, not only with the white paper and getting it all good to go, but with other exams, etc.

For the white paper, we did our individual editing and then compiled a new copy of it on Tuesday evening. We then organized it visually so that it would look better, and then I did a final grammar, spelling, "does this make sense" (or as much as possible), and design check on it. I also made the handout for our presentation in a similar style to the white paper.

Last night I practiced my portion of the presentation. I also printed our white paper and had it spiral bound, and after that we were good to go.

After doing peer reviews this week, we really got to see how much we needed to alter our own paper. We had just done individual portions of  the white paper and had organized it into one document, but we were missing all the headers and some of our content was lengthy.

Yesterday I decided to fix up my portion of the white paper. I edited the executive summary so that is more concise and does not get into too much detail. In terms of my solution, I used a header and subheaders to make it more clear. Rather than it being the huge chunk of writing that it was before, it is now divided into sections that make sense complete with headers that really make it easier to understand (hopefully).

Also, I found two charts from the FBI's internet crime report to be potentially included in our white paper. We directly reference that report in our paper, and it would only make sense to provide the charts that support our claims.

I look forward to getting our peer review back so that we know what we must edit.

This week my group members and I came in with 2 potential solution ideas to class on Wednesday. From that our goal was to choose 3 of them to ultimately write our white paper about.

My two potential solutions were to use a fraud management software/service available from another company or to form a security task force within eBay. Ultimately, we chose the fraud management software idea as a solution, and Ricardo molded the task force idea into a unique separate solution.

For Friday (10/17), we are to have completed the rough drafts of the solutions and the summary. I completed mine earlier today, and I focused on an article about a new fraud management software that will be available in the future. The article is actually dated 10/16/2008, so it is very timely and current. I also used the website of the company that is featured in the article, iovation, for more specifics about how their system works.

www.iovation.com

iovation; iovation Partners with ID Insight to Provide Comprehensive Solution to Combat Online Fraud
Anonymous.  Computer Business Week.  Atlanta:Oct 16, 2008.  p. 87 

This weekend is the bulk of my contribution of the paper, as I will be writing the summary after all portions have been emailed to me, so I have a writing-filled weekend to look forward to. :)

Hey guys, so who's all in this group? Ricardo and Kyle?

The advent of role-playing games such as Second Life and Teen Second Life has enhanced the world’s ability to interact across continents, researchers’ ability to conduct social experiments without manipulating humans, and a person’s ability to experiment with different lifestyles and gain different perspectives. However, such games have crept into the lives of teenagers, who use such programs as an escape from reality and a method of creating a more ideal life for themselves. The teenage years are the prime social development years, and if teens escape to these fake worlds to avoid reality they will never learn to deal and develop with the real world.   

To utilize my aviation management knowledge and teamwork skills as an environmental planning and compliance intern.

A position as an environmental planning and compliance intern for Landrum and Brown allowing me to develop my aviation, teamwork, and research skills and knowledge. 

An opportunity to pursue my goal of developing new opportunities for  the aviation industry in the area of environmental planning and compliance with an emphasis in aviation management and teamwork skills.  

An environmental planning and compliance intern in the areas of aviation, teamwork, and research.