Author: chris

In this assignment, you will examine men and women as managers and leaders. All of us have experienced either being managed by a man or a woman, some of us by both. Using the Argosy University online library, the Internet, and your personal experience, respond to the following questions:

• Analyze what you consider to be the four characteristics of an effective manager or leader in the workplace. Consider characteristics such as honesty, integrity, or people skills. Should managers and leaders perform the same task?

• Compare and contrast the difference between a male and female manager and/or leader.

• Using the four characteristics you chose, evaluate how one gender may possess the four characteristics to a greater or lesser degree. Based on this evaluation, does gender impact whether or not an individual is a good manager or leader? Explain why, and provide support for your conclusions.

• Using the four characteristics you chose, evaluate how culture might impact an individual’s leadership abilities. Based on this evaluation, does culture impact whether or not an individual is a good manager or leader? Explain why, and provide support for your conclusions.

Write a 3–4-page paper in Word format (not counting title and references pages), citing examples using APA rules for attributing sources.

1-
archival data might be acquired from 3 different locations that are the following:
1-records: such as absentee, sick leave or vacation record; sales records; employee figures …etc
2-documents: training manuals and materials; evaluation plans; and job aids …etc
3- Existing databases: census data, department of labor data; vital statistics as birth, death, marriage, divorce …etc

Some advantages of archival data are:
– are easily collectable. reviewing records and documents and using databases doesn’t require participants to do anything different.
– May provide quantitative data. Records, document, and databases can provide data for evaluation questions that focus on quantity or frequency.
-Allow for the creation of new variables and scales.

Some disadvantages of archival data are:
-Aggregation. Records may be too aggregated to provide useful data.
-Changes over time. Definitions of terms and variables or data collection methods may have changed over time.
-Time consuming. if there are many documents to review, the task can be tedious and costly in term of time.

2-
observation can be a useful method for addressing evaluation questions concerning an employee’s or group’s behavior or actions before, during,or after a training program or other organization initiatives.Observing people and environments is particularly helpful in studying processes, relationships among people, and the context of certain events and environments. In addition, observation data can provide important information for answering specific evaluation questions for many kinds of evaluations.

3-

There are several choices to be made when considering how to collect and record observation data. one can need qualitative observations, and where qualitative data are required, the evaluators simply writes down detailed information in the form of a narrative as they are observing. the purpose of qualitative observations is to describe. while the interpretations of observations are left to the data analysis phase.
another choice to use for the observation methods is the video recording of someone’s performance to collect that kind of data. the evaluator positions a video camera to record the individual’s actions.
a third technique used for collecting observation methods is the use of still photographs. here the evaluator may decide to take photographs of the organization’s environment, the employee’s workspace, employees performing some tasks or interactions among employees.
The fourth method that can be used for that is the use of checklist or rating form. the evaluator develops a list of questions or items that will guide the observation.

4 while responding to a likert scale, some people feel compelled to put a mark somewhere in between numbers on the scale, for example between the 2 and the 3. this scale allows the responses of varying degrees to each specific survey item. it is important to provide these descriptions so that the respondents can provide their opinion or feeling about something, depending on the question, some people are neutral about certain matters and therefore cannot express their opinion about something this is why the midpoint can be used for 1-5 scales.

5-
some of the steps that evaluators need to follow when constructing a survey are the following:
1- use a variety of sources for possible items, such as available reports, correspondence, and previous surveys.
2- Use potential respondents language rather that one’s own
3- Try to avoid using “and/or” in an item. if you use one of these words, you may be asking two questions at the same time.
4- try to include three or four items to measure the same variable
5- Include instructions when needed to make it easier for the respondents to understand the question
6- conduct a pilot test with a group similar to the potential participants.

6-
advantages of conducting focus group interviews:
1- focus group interviews provide more in depth information that other methods.
2- focus group interviews allow the interviewer to make a personal connection with the interviewee which might enhance the quality and quantity of the data provided.
3- focus group interviews can can uncover unexpected information
4- the interviewer knows who the interviewees are and this can ensure greater participation

disadvantages of conducting focus group interviews:
1- focus group interviews can be relatively expensive methods of data collection compared with a mail survey
2- qualitative data collected from interview will take longer to transcribe and analyze than survey, checklist or test data
3- can be hard to schedule. even when a schedule has been set, the interviewee may not be available and the interview time may need to be rescheduled
4- some groups within an organization such us executives may refuse to participate in a focus group interview.

⦁ Question 7
Selected Answer: there are three types of approaches to be used when crafting interview questions:
1- Unstructured approach: you develop one or two questions to guide the interview, but the interview resembles more of a conversation that meanders through search and topics of interest to the interviewee. it can appropriate when all interview questions are not known and preliminary conversations will help identify the most critical or pertinent issues.
2-semistructured approach: where the interviewer develops a set of questions to guide the interview process in a consistent manner with all interviewees.
3-structured approach: this method is often used for telephone interviews, where the interviewer asks each question in the exact order listen on the interview guide of all interviewees.

⦁ Question 8
Selected Answer: there are several guidelines one need to take in order to select interviewers for focus groups or individual interviews. The interviewer should be able to identify any language or cultural barriers in advance and prepare alternative approaches to reducing those barriers. He should also dress formally for individual or focus group interviews for him to show some respects to the participants. in addition, the interviewer should be careful not to communicate information to interviewees that would bias their responses and should in most cases not express their personal views. on another level, the interviewer should try to develop rapport by using a friendly, relaxed, and non judgmental approach, he should also understand and be sensitive to what is being expressed by the interviewee.

⦁ Question 9

Convenience sampling is used to draw a random sample and is one of the non-probability sampling methods. it is used in cases for selecting members of a population that are most accessible.
on the other hand the purposive sampling which is also a non-probability sampling method is used to select specific individuals because of their position, experience, knowledge or attitude.

⦁ Question 10
sampling is undertaken when it is difficult or not feasible for an evaluator to involve the entire population in the evaluation. reasons for this include time constraint, cost constraint, limited accessibility or when accuracy may be compromised. the findings of the sample can then be generalized to the whole population as it has the same characteristics.

⦁ Question 11
there are several guidelines one need to take in order to select interviewers for focus groups or individual interviews. The interviewer should be able to identify any language or cultural barriers in advance and prepare alternative approaches to reducing those barriers. He should also dress formally for individual or focus group interviews for him to show some respects to the participants. in addition, the interviewer should be careful not to communicate information to interviewees that would bias their responses and should in most cases not express their personal views. on another level, the interviewer should try to develop rapport by using a friendly, relaxed, and non judgmental approach, he should also understand and be sensitive to what is being expressed by the interviewee.
⦁ Question 12
Selected Answer: Quantitative data are data with a numeric form, and it focuses on describing the data, searching for a specifying relationships among variables, predicting relationships among variables, or testing for significant differences among variables. Quantitative are more time consuming and expensive. an example can be percentages for a results or ratio that will be used as a basis for analysis.
The qualitative data on the other hand are more a description of the results or analysis and consist of linking data with theory, creating empirically derived categories and applying coding processes to the qualitative data. these are time consuming and expensive. qualitative examples can be the results of a long answer survey or interviews.

⦁ Question 13
the formula for the cost benefit analysis ratio is the following:

CBR= Program benefits / program costs.

a numerical example where program benefits are $ 500,000 and the program costs are $ 250, 000.

CBR= 500,00/250,000
CBR= 2:1

this means for each dollar spent of the training program the company made 2 dollars of benefits.
⦁ Question 14
: communication and reporting evaluation’s activities and findings are very critical especially when the objective is learning. one of them is to communicate to top management and stakeholders for collaborative decision making about evaluation design and activities, informing those directly involved about specific upcoming evaluation activities, keeping those directly and indirectly informed about progress of the evaluation. communication and reporting to the trainees and their managers is also important, the participants need to know how they did and how they can improve and their manager need to monitor their employees’ performance.

Guidelines for the review paper format
The Purpose
The purpose for this review paper is to learn how to systematize literature data on the topic and to
present them in a concise and understandable format.
The Format
Length: 3-4 pages (including the reference list)
Spacing: 1.5-line interval
Font: 12pt Times New Roman
The paper should include several sections (each of them is about a particular subtopic): you may name
those sections accordingly. The paper should contain a list of the used references. Below is a general
guidance for each of the sections (may not be exactly as shown).
Introduction (about 1 page): This is a section, in which you should briefly describe a purpose of your
work. Provide some background information, e.g., what is known about the problem and what is not,
why this problem is important, etc. Provide respective references to the original sources.
Results and Discussion (2-3 pages): This is a main section of your paper. It should summarize results
from the articles under review. Try to be clear and concise. Remember, “brevity is the soul of wit” (W.
Shakespeare). You may use table(s) or/and figure(s) (not more than 1 of each) to present your findings.
Discuss your results. What have been found and what remains obscure or still unknown? What are the
prospects?
Conclusions (1 paragraph, 1-2 sentences)): A brief concluding statement of the previous section.
References.
NB!
All papers will be checked by anti-plagiarism software Turnitin and all copy-paste text will be instantly
detected. Therefore, you must write this paper using your own word and sentence constructs.

Multimedia Assignment for JOUR 4551: New Media and Culture

The purpose of this assignment is for you to actually use digital media in an effort to better understand some of the concepts we have talked about throughout this semester.
Your multimedia product along with a short paper will be due on December 17th by 11:59 p.m.
This is a chance for you to be creative and interact with course concepts you are specifically interested in. You should relate the project to something that we covered in the class or to the themes of the course. You may do this directly by referring specifically to readings that we’ve had, or you might do this more loosely referring the topic headings for the various weeks throughout the semester. Just be sure that there is a specific tie-in to the course and make it clear what that is.

For this assignment, you need to create a multimedia project exploring the chosen course concept in depth. Think of it as a multimedia research paper. You should do the amount of research required to write a 15-page research paper on a specific topic, which means you should have a healthy number of outside sources.

This project is going to require a good deal of effort and is not something you can just throw together at the last minute. The following are approved media forms:

A series of videos about your chosen topic: You have a lot of latitude here. You can be creative and construct a fictional web series about your topic or you can do something more traditional and do a documentary style series of videos. In addition, something similar to what John Oliver does is also acceptable. You can talk about the topic and integrate graphics and videos into the discussion.

A series of podcasts about your chosen topic: Think of this as an audio version of the previous entry.

A weblog about your chosen topic: If you are going to do a blog, start now. I want you to make regular posts (a couple a week) over the next month about your topic. The blog should be focused on a specific topic, tackling different issues on that topic with each post. In addition to writing, I want you to create and integrate some audio-visual components to some of the posts as well. This can be interviews or quick videos on the topic.

Something more creative such as a video game. If you are interested in this option, I want you to talk to me about it first. Do not do a power point. That is not an acceptable format for this assignment.

The final product of this project should look as professional as possible, but I don’t want that to limit you on what you might try. If you want to create some sort of video project but have little experience with video creation, I would still encourage you to put in the effort to try. You will not be penalized for trying something out of your comfort zone. The project should demonstrate a connection to and understanding of concepts related to New Media and Culture.

You will also be required to turn in a brief 3-4 page paper demonstrating the research you did for this project and an explanation of how the project relates to the course in terms of its topic or subject matter. Include a summary of the work you did on the project. This summary should be well-written, thoughtful, and without typos and grammatical errors. You should discuss at least four sources (with at least two coming outside of the course) that helped you in the development of this project.

Reflection papers should not contain typos or grammatical errors. You will be penalized for these. A rubric will be posted to Moodle before the deadline so that you can see how the assignment will be graded.

Also, be sure to attach the references used in your project to the reflection paper.

Improving the Quantity and Quality of Wheat Production

I therefore propose to undertake a project on wheat breeding whose results will be used to make recommendations on the best time, best methods, and the appropriate selection criteria for selecting which wheat genetics to interbreed. This project is novel since it seeks to counter the effects of the anticipated wheat supply shortfall.
The project is basically a Gene-environment (G×E) interaction. The focus will be on how different genotypes wrought by breeding wheat with different genes composition respond to the environment. Different phenotypes will also be observed which will show the manifestation of the reaction of different genetic combinations to the environment. The focus of the project will be the physiological section traits, the optimal planting period, and planting methods.
This study intends to use phenotypic plant breeding techniques because it employs various breeding methodologies which provide ample room for comparison and determination of the best technique. The germplasm for the project will be collected from agricultural research centers, local, and foreign farmers. Different permutations for breeding will be generated depending on the germplasm collected; the resultant breeds will then be subjected to four stages of growth and observations at each stage. The environmental factors need not be controlled because that would be creating and artificial environment different from the one that would face the plans in real life. Instead, planting will be done at different times in order to observe how the wheat plants react to contingent different environments.
The project is about phenotyping. Yield will be analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Quantitative factors are grain size and weight while qualitative factors are resistance to biotic and abiotic factors.

Research Questions
Which breeding of wheat variety develops an improved specimen with high grain yield and quality?
What environmental conditions give the best nutrients, lights, and moisture requisite for successful wheat production?
Which planting period(s) coincide with the environment of best nutrients, lights, and moisture?
Research Hypothesis
Breeding of certain varieties of wheat can yield an improved specimen with more adaptive features to give high yield and high quality.
Wheat production will thrive under unique environmental conditions with proper nutrients lights, and moisture.
Timing to plant during periods with the right conditions will make wheat production more efficient.
Research Aims
To investigate how wheat breeding, different environmental conditions, and timing of the planting period relate to grain yield and quality.

What factors must be considered when measuring ideation in a company? Are these factors subjective or objective measures? What are some possible concerns with measuring these factors?

2.Describe a time when you used heuristic thinking to solve a problem at work. What steps did you take to solve the problem? What was the outcome? Is there anything you might have changed about your problem-solving process?

3.Leadership, engagement, extension, and alignment are four key issues related to implementation. Which of the key implementation issues do you feel is most important? Which is least important? Explain your answers.

ASSIGNMENT

Write a 1,250- to 1,500-word paper on the innovation planning and design process addressed in Week Two. Include the following in your paper:

•   Analyze the internal and external factors related to designing innovation strategies. Describe how they relate to one another and to the overall innovation process.

•   Describe the factors involved in innovation systems design. Explain the importance of innovation systems.

•   Describe the steps involved in the innovation planning process.

Format your paper consistent with APA guidelines and incorporate at least four scholarly references in addition to your texts.

MBA 540

1. Discuss how organizational architecture and corporate culture
are related. Use an example of a real-life firm and discuss how its
corporate culture blends with its organizational architecture.
2. Billy Riggan is in charge of all technical developments at
Always Round Tire. He makes all the choices concerning product innovations
in the company. He finds that he is overworked and that several of his
research scientists seem to be spending work hours playing tennis. What is
going on?
3. Always Round Tire tries to base its promotions on seniority
(where education and training requirements are not necessary). The company
finds that this system seems to work most of the time with shop floor
supervisors and team managers. But the system breaks down for higher-level
positions. Why?
4. Economists believe the free rider problem is very important in
complex business organizational structures. Still, businesses continue to
build teams to solve problems or to deliver products to consumers. Often
special rewards or bonuses are provided to the team rather than to the
individuals on the team. Write a brief essay that either defends the
economists’ concern or explain why economists are wrong on this issue.
5. Many firms today use 360-degree performance evaluations. Make a
case for this type of evaluation based on the informativeness principle.
What problems may be encountered from implementation of such a system?

6. Reflecting on what you have learned in this course, discuss the
relevance of Responsible Stewardship in the context of economic analysis and
organizational architecture.

APA FORMAT in text citations 2 reference one book
Brickley, J., Smith, C., & Zimmerman, J. (2016). Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture (6th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin.

Working as small peer-learning groups, during the timetabled workshops, complete three Excel spreadsheet tasks (balance sheets/budgeting, ratios/metrics and absorption costing/activity based costing) given to you for the workshops.
As an individual, produce a 1000 word (+/- 10%) written piece to compare and contrast the two approaches to costing (1 paragraph) and the potential impact on profits (1 paragraph). This will include a brief justification of the data sources used (from where they would be generated and what they relate to – 1 paragraph); a brief description of the method(s) and tool(s) used for analysis (a simple table of the Excel formulas/relationships used) and your interpretation of the data in the wider economic context (what impact macro-economic factors may have on the costs of direct materials, direct labour etc. and consequent business decisions – 1 paragraph). The requirements are in the file attached.

Choose a topic from Chapters 14 or 15 of your textbook (examples below). Write a 10-12 page literature review of your topic using at least 7 scholarly journal articles. The goal of this assignment is to demonstrate your knowledge of the topic and critical thinking skills by using original research articles to demonstrate your ability to synthesize and discuss your topic.

TOPIC: Individual and cultural differences in critical thinking

According to the APA manual (p. 10),

“Literature reviews are critical evaluations of material that has already been published. By organizing, integrating,and evaluating previously published material, authors of literature reviews consider the progress of research toward clarifying a problem. In a sense, literature reviews are tutorials, in that authors

define and clarify the problem;
summarize previous investigations to inform the reader of the state of research;
identify relations, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies in the literature; and
suggest the next step or steps in solving the problem.”

Be sure to use APA style, including appropriate grammar, spelling, and mechanics, as well as citations and references.

Two parts of this project are required. 1. One-page long report to explain the documentation and answer the questions below. 2. Java documentation.

Late delivery of either the report or the code will cause the refund.

https://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~matsd/uv/uv14/nlp/wsdnlp.html

First, make sure you understand: What is the problem of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD)? Why is it important from a language technology engineering point of view? How is it a classification problem? How do you use SVM learning and classification to solve classification problems generally and in this WSD case? (No detailed understanding of the internal mechanisms of SVM:s and SVM learning algorithms is required.) What is an n-fold cross validation? How do you compute the precision, recall and F1 scores? And what do they show?
The course literature, the links given here, and other net resources give plenty of useful information about the matters important to this assignment.
A Java implementation for WSD experiments provides the point of departure for the assignment [package wsd (tar), doc].
The sense keys are from WordNet and you can see how they are explained there. Classification applies to tokens belonging to a certain lemma, defined by the lemma and pos attributes, and is binary, predicting that a token has a certain sense (defined by a WordNet sense key) or that it doesn’t have that sense (has another sense).
You (and the Java implementation) will use the following resources (placed as specified in theFileLocations class fields, which you’re expected to modify according to your own preferences):
 Data: The largest publicly available sense-tagged corpus: semcor3.0. (Download semcor3.0.) Put the semcor3.0 contents in the FileLocations.semCorLoc directory. (This is already done for our own linux system.)
 We’ll use Thorsten Joachims’ SVMlight implementation of SVM learning (svm_learn) and classification (svm_classify). (Other SVM implementations can be used, of course.) Put the two programmes in the FileLocations.progLoc directory. (This is already done for our own linux system.)
 We’ll use the classification tasks in the following text file for our experiments:senseDistinctions.txt. It lists those senses which have at least 100 positive instances, and which applies to between 40 and 60 percent of all the instances of that lemma. The 32 entries are like “add VB 2:30:00::”, i.e. lemma, pos tag, and sense key separated by blanks. PutsenseDistinctions.txt in the FileLocations.wsdData directory.
 The FileLocations.wsdData directory should have the subdirectories examples, model, and predictions, in which input and output from SVMlight will reside.
The code is compiled and executed in this way on our Linux system when you stand in the srcdirectory (but you might want to use som other environment):
javac se/uu/lingfil/stp/wsd/*.*
java se.uu.lingfil.stp.wsd.Main
To describe the experiment briefly, it performs WSD SVM training and classification on each of the sense distinctions in “senseDistinctions.txt”. First, the example data are extracted from the SemCor corpus, i.e. positive and negative instances are located and features extracted. After that, training and validation sets are created for a 10-fold crossvalidation. They are used for SVM training and classification.
The Main.main method runs the experiment and reports precision, recall and F1 score for each sense distinction crossvalidation experiment and also averages of these outcome scores. This is an example of this: output.
The Java code that is provided gives us the following:
 The ten-fold crossvalidation setup is for each sense distinction based on all available instances (i.e. the training set sizes vary). It computes precision, recall and F1 score for each sense distinction crossvalidation experiment.
 An extremely parsimonious feature extraction class – FeatureExtractorLetterLeft – is provided. It only extracts the letter immediately to the left as a feature for a token.FeatureExtractorPosLetterLeft in addition extracts the pos tag for the token immediately to the left. (Of course, a lot of useful information escapes these schemes.) FeatureExtractorLetterLeftgives this result. As the result depends on a random partitioning of the data into ten folds, each run will give slightly different results.
The assignment consists in doing the following:
 Evaluation may also be based on training sets of equal size. Overall evaluation metrics may also be based on the totality of token level outcomes. Contrast these evaluation choices with the ones made in the existing implementation! Which evaluation metrics are most interesting (in what context)? Furthermore, modify the implementation to allow evaluation metrics to be computed also in these ways.
 Try to find and implement the best pos-tag-based collocational (pos at a certain relative position) feature extraction scheme.
 Try to find and implement a better collocational (something at a certain relative position) feature extraction scheme.
 In relation to the these extractions schemes, are there any sense distinctions that are unusually easy or difficult to predict? Is it possible to explain this with the help of a linguistics-based analysis of what is reasonable to expect from behaviour of the lemma?
 Try to find and implement the best bag-of-lemmas and bag-of-word-forms feature extraction scheme and compare the two.
Grading
In order to pass this assignment, you will need to: submit solutions to all points above, document them, and support your conclusions in a way that shows that you understand the empirical methods being used.