Author: chris

Due Week 9 and worth 175 points

This paper will be a revised and expanded version of the first research paper. Based on your instructor’s feedback, you will first revise the first paper.

Write three-to-four (3-4) new pages that address the following:

1. Define presidential doctrine and summarize the regional or global events during the Cold War leading up to the formation of the presidential doctrine you wrote about in Assignment 1.
2. Select one country you wrote about in Assignment 1 and describe the Cold War relationship that existed between the country you selected and the U.S. before the presidential doctrine was announced.
3. Describe the relationship that currently exists between the U.S. and the country you selected in section (2) above.
4. Describe the effect that the presidential doctrine has had on regional or global affairs since it was announced during the Cold War.
5. Assess whether or not the presidential doctrine you wrote about in Assignment 1 doctrine had had the intended effect of altering the behavior of the country you selected in section (2) above since the doctrine was first announced.
6. Use at least four (4) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and other Websites do not qualify as academic resources.

To help you understand this assignment further, the following description and examples may be useful.

According to the textbook, the goal of financial reporting is to report financial information that is transparent and complete and truthfully report the financial performance of a company. Investors and other interested parties need to read and understand all aspects of financing reporting.

Use the Internet to research Verizon Communications’ financial statements, annual report, notes to the financial statements, president’s letter, and management discussion and analysis from the most recent year in order to complete this assignment.

Write a five to six (5-6) page paper in which you:

1. Discuss the disclosure requirement on accounting policies, and identify at least two (2) examples of the most commonly required disclosure. Explain the key ways in which the examples you provided are useful to financial statement users. Analyze Verizon Communications’ disclosure on accounting policies, and give your opinion on whether or not the information is helpful for decision making. Provide a rationale for your response.
2. Explain the importance of the management discussion and analysis section of an annual report.  Select three (3) items from Verizon’s management and discussion analysis of the annual report that could be useful to potential investors. Provide three (3) specific examples of how the three (3) items you selected could influence a potential investor’s decision to invest in Verizon.
3. Describe segmented information, and explain the way in which companies determine segments. Identify at least three (3) advantages and three (3) disadvantages of segmented financial data. Give your opinion on whether or not the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Outline the manner in which Verizon segments its financial data. Suggest key actions that Verizon’s management can take in order to improve the company’s segmented financial data. Provide a rationale for your response.
4. Analyze the various types of auditor’s reports, and determine the impact that the auditor’s report has on a company’s ability to obtain financing from a bank. Identify the type of auditor’s report issued on Verizon, and speculate the manner in which you believe banks will perceive Verizon’s auditor’s report.
5. Use at least two (2) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and other Websites do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not inclu

write a four to five (4-5) page paper in which you:

1. Propose two (2) ethical concerns that management may need to address. Create the context in which such concerns may or may not be ethical in nature. Provide a rationale for your response.
2. Analyze the overall manner in which organizational structure impacts organizational ethics. Select one (1) public agency or one (1) non-profit organization in which your challenges may not be considered actual challenges. Provide a rationale for your response.
3. Use the Inventory of Public Management Skills Management, located on pages 11 to 12 of the textbook, to construct a self-evaluation. Assess your level of development in each of the skills. Propose two (2) to three (3) activities that would help you to improve the skills in question.
4. Use the results of your self-evaluation and recommendations from Question 3 to formulate a response to the challenges that you have presented that creates a win-win situation for the organization, the employees, and the public. Predict two (2) potential obstacles to success and two (2) plans to overcome such obstacles.
5. Include at least four (4) academic references (no more than five [5] years old) from material outside the textbook and no more than one (1) governmental Website. Note: Appropriate academic resources include academic and governmental Websites, scholarly texts, and peer-reviewed articles. Wikipedia, other wikis, and any other Websites ending in anything other than “.gov” do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Rearrange public administration, both the traditional and the new approaches, from structural, functional, and process perspectives, as well as the key goals of the public and private sector.
• Predict the changing nature and responsibilities for managing public and nonprofit organizations.
• Critique ethics in public service and its influence on the study of public administration as it relates to political choice.
• Compose the concepts of public leadership and management essential to the study of public administration.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in public administration.
• Write clearly and concisely about public administration using proper writing mechanics.

Students will create a data set with information on variables (see attachment). Students will develop a hypothesis and test the hypothesis using the appropriate statistical test. Students will write a brief paper in which they describe the hypothesis and the results of the statistical test. The paper should be written in APA format with a complete results and discussion section.

Attached is the article that I summarized. The summary is below.

Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence
In this piece, Richard Easterlin investigates the effect of wealth on human happiness. He begins by discussing the concept of happiness, establishing that “it is not confined to economic well-being” (90). He explains that happiness also correlates to social welfare and welfare at large. However, economists rarely recognize potential boundaries between these concepts of welfare, and operate on the Pigou’s dictum, or that “there is a clear presumption that changes in economic welfare indicate changes in social welfare in the same direction, if not in the same degree” (90). Easterlin conveys that this dictum—relative to the study of economic proliferation—is the primary focus of the piece.
The first section of the paper discusses “the concept and measure of happiness” (91). Easterlin establishes that factors influencing personal happiness have shown to be relatively similar across distinct cultures (94). However, measurement problems persist due to the subjective nature of self-reports and ability of participants to accurately gauge their happiness. Participants may also respond more genuinely if asked to gauge happiness via a self-administered questionnaire rather than an in-person interview. Additionally, polls utilized for analysis do not place questions that assess happiness close to those that determine the participant’s income in order to deter the individual from considering social norms of wealth and happiness. Finally, wording of the happiness question was a concern in terms of ensuring accurate reports of happiness, as different surveys present contrasting categorizations of happiness. However, after comparing two surveys with different categorical representations of happiness, it was found that “the direction of the shift and the consistency by income level suggest that respondents throughout the population are placing similar interpretations on the question asked and are answering, at least to some extent, in terms of their real feelings” (99). Despite these concerns, Easterlin claims, “…while such bias may exist, it is not significant enough to invalidate the conclusions on the association between income and happiness” (99).
The second part of the piece presents empirical evidence in order to establish an association between income and happiness. Easterlin utilizes individual reports on subjective happiness levels from nineteen countries, developed and less developed, from 1946 to 1970. Specifically, Easterlin studies associations between income and happiness on: an individual level, by comparing happiness levels of wealthier individuals to poorer ones of a given society; a large-scale, by comparing happiness levels of wealthier countries to poorer ones; and over time, by investigating the influence of economic growth on human happiness. He finds that—generally—wealthier individuals communicate higher happiness levels than others at a point in time. However, over time, the average happiness level remains fairly constant despite continuous growth of both personal and national wealth.
In the third section, Easterlin interprets his analytical results. He proposes possible explanations for the observed paradox. Namely, he states, “…an increase in the income of any one individual would increase his happiness, but increasing the income of everyone would leave happiness unchanged” (112). This rationale justifies Easterlin’s findings, which demonstrate differential effects of income on happiness when observing happiness levels at one point in time versus over a period of time. Moreover, “this provides a common point of reference in self-appraisals of well-being, leading those below the norm to feel less happy and those above the norm, more happy. Over time, this norm tends to rise with the general level of consumption, though the two are not necessarily on a one-to-one basis” (113). Another explanation Easterlin offers is that “at a given time, it might be argued, the rich are better able to avoid these sources of ‘ill-fare’ and hence are happier. But over time and across societies increases in income are largely or wholly offset by a corresponding growth in pollution, congestion, and so forth” (113). Lastly, Easterlin proposes a radical interpretation of the data, which suggests that power may have bearing on levels of happiness. He explains that those with more power (i.e the rich) at a given time are happier. However, as time progresses and societies develop, increases in income are not coupled with a broader power distribution amongst socioeconomic levels; therefore, happiness has not increased (113). He goes on to convey the relative nature of the evidence, stating that “it would be premature to assert that ‘everything is relative,’ but it is hard to resist the inference that relative considerations play an important part in explaining evidence presented here” (116). Moreover, societal norms contribute to perceptions of happiness, which may alter observed associations between happiness levels and income over time. In closing, Easterlin posits, “The only sure conclusion is that we need much more research on the nature and causes of human welfare” (119).

Assignment Objectives

Assess the general functions of management as depicted by planning, organizing, leading, and controlling

Assignment Details

Deliverable Length:  2-3 pages

McGee Carpet and Trim installs carpets in commercial offices. Andrea McGee has been very concerned with the amount of time it took to complete several recent jobs. Some of her workers are very unreliable. A list of activities and their optimistic completion time, the most likely completion time, and the pessimistic completion time (all in days) for a new contract are provided in a given table. Following are the activities that are required to install the carpets in the offices:

•         Activity 1: Measure office room dimensions
•         Activity 2: Estimate cost
•         Activity 3: Material requisition
•         Activity 4: Workforce requisition
•         Activity 5: Special tool requisition
•         Activity 6: Installation
•         Activity 7: Inspection and customer acceptance

Activity 2 starts immediately after Activity 1. Activity 3, Activity 4, and Activity 5 start concurrently after Activity 2. Activity 6 does not start until after Activity 3, Activity 4, and Activity 5 are completed. The carpet installation project is complete after Activity 7 is completed. If OT = Optimistic Time, MT = Most Likely Time, and PT = Pessimistic Time, use a Program Evaluation Review Estimate (PERT) to compute the statistical time for each activity, as in the following table:

You must also do the following:

•         Determine the expected completion time and the variance for each activity
•         Determine the total project completion time and the critical path for the project
•         Determine Early Start (ES), Early Finish (EF), Late Start (LS), and slack for each activity
•         What is the probability that McGee Carpet and Trim will finish the project in 40 days or less?
•         Define project management and the necessary requirements.
•         Analyze implications of changes in project scheduling.
•         Evaluate application of project management techniques in terms of the firm’s business operational goals and requirements.

Please submit your assignment in an APA-formatted paper.

Submitting your assignment in APA format means, at a minimum, you will need the following:

• Title page: Remember the running head. The title should be in all capitals.
• Abstract: A summary of your paper, not an introduction. Begin writing in third-person voice.
• Body: The body of your paper begins on the page following the title page and abstract page and must be double-spaced (be careful not to triple- or quadruple-space between paragraphs). The type face should be 12-pt. Times Roman or 12-pt. Courier in regular black type. Do not use color, bold type, or italics except as required for APA-level headings and references. The deliverable length of the body of your paper for this assignment is 2–3 pages. In-body academic citations to support your decisions and analysis are required. A variety of academic sources is encouraged.
• Reference page: References that align with your in-body academic sources are listed on the final page of your paper. The references must be in APA format using appropriate spacing, hang indention, italics, and upper- and lowercase usage as appropriate for the type of resource used. Remember, the Reference Page is not a bibliography but a further listing of the abbreviated in-body citations used in the paper. Every referenced item must have a corresponding in-body citation.

Vroom’s Model of Expectancy Theory

In a two- to three-page paper (excluding the title and reference pages), examine how Vroom’s Model of Expectancy Theory can help with staffing issues in an organization. Include the following in your paper:

1. Describe Vroom’s Model of Expectancy Theory.
2. Describe how the model measures motivation.
3. Explain how the measure of valence can aid staffing issues in an organization.

Your paper must include in-text citations and references from at least two scholarly sources, excluding the textbook, and be formatted according to APA guidelines outlined in the Ashford Writing Center.

DISCUSSION 1

In the textbook, two main views of human resource development are examined. Discuss the similarities and differences between the views of performance-based and developmental HRD. Answer the following question: Which view do you believe is more relevant to your organization, and why?

Discussion 2

There are three types of knowledge discussed in the textbook: explicit, implicit, and tacit. Describe the three types of knowledge. Give an example of each of the three types of knowledge based on your position in your organization. Which of the three types of knowledge is the most difficult for a trainer to teach?

Assignment 2: Selection and Description of Organization

Select a business organization from the Fortune 500 which is of interest to you and ensure that you will be able to obtain the necessary information about its strategy, business model, and performance (much of this information can be obtained from the organization’s Web site, annual report, financial news, etc.). Write an overview of the organization you selected, including the following:

• Name of the organization, locations, web address
• Overall organizational strategy and business model
• Products or services, industry, and market position
• Sources of information about the organization (at least three)
• Your reasons for selecting the organization

For assistance in analyzing strategy, review the presentations in this module’s readings available at the textbook Web site.

Your response to this assignment will serve as foundation for your Strategic Analysis in Module 3 and your Organizational Assessment in Module 5.

Write your response in 2–3 pages in Word format. Cite your sources. Apply APA standards for writing style to your work. Use the following file naming convention: LastnameFirstInitial_M2_A2.doc. For example, if your name is John Smith, your document will be named SmithJ_M2_A2.doc.

By Wednesday, December 9, 2015, deliver your assignment to the M2: Assignment 2 Dropbox.

Deliverable Length:  1,250 to 1,500 words for the paper or 8 rounds in the Footrace

Choose one of the following options for your Unit 4 assignment.

Option A: Unit 4 IP Task Assignment (A Choice) : The Value of You Paper or the Footraces

Option B: Footrace Option (150 possible points)

1.Unit 4 IP is an option for you of doing the footraces or the paper titled “The Value of You”. The instructions for how to sign up for the footrace is below if you choose that option. If you do eight rounds in the footraces and you are profitable by the eighth round you will get full points for the assignment. If you do all eight rounds and are not profitable by then you lose 10 points. Profitable just means you are not losing money, it does not matter how profitable you are. If you do up to four you will get 75 points. The footraces are great practice for the CompXM final exam coming up in week 5. If you choose the footraces, you don’t have to do the paper.

2. To register for the footrace you need to:

1. Go to www.capsim.com <http://www.capsim.com/>
2. Click on ///”Log in or Register///” in the top right.
3. Next, click the ///”Student Registration///” button.
4. If you agree to the terms of usage on step one then select ///”I Agree///” and continue with initial registration.
5. On step two, enter your industry ID C68622_000 (Industry number changes each physical year) and then continue to step three.
6. Enter your account information on step three.  Continue to step four.
7. At this point, you can return to www.capsim.com get started playing the footrace whenever you are ready.  NOTE: When it asks you to name a company and contact your instructor, just name it whatever you want as you will be running Andrews either way.
8. You should only register one account in the footrace industry.  If you finish the simulation and wish to have your simulation reset then please email support@capsim.com and they will restart your simulation for you.

Paper Option (The Value of You – 150 possible points)

1. Using Indeed.com, identify three current positions in your field that interest you.
2. Using Careeronestop.org and/or BLS.gov, conduct research on the three positions you are interested in and answer the following questions.
3. Reflection: Choose one of the positions you researched that you are most interested in and answer the following questions in paragraph form.Assignment Questions
4. What are the job titles that you found in your research of job descriptions? Briefly summarize what employers are asking for in terms of experience, education, and other qualifications.
5. How do you match up with what employers say they need? What qualifications do you have that align? What are the gaps between what you currently have to offer and what the employer expects? What will you do to overcome those gaps? (Please note: Obviously few people will have everything an employer advertises, so aim to have about 60-70% of the stated qualifications. If you find that you have less than that, and you are not qualified for the jobs you identified, then go back again and search for new jobs that you are qualified for. You might need to look for more entry-level jobs. If you don’t have experience in your field, where do you need to start to get experience?)
6. Look for themes among the job ads. List at least 3 core competencies that someone needs to do that job effectively. In other words, what are the skills, characteristics, and abilities that a successful candidate must have (analysis, forecasting, budgeting, complex decision making, ethics or compliance, persistence, number orientation, communication, specific software knowledge, etc.)?
7. For each of the three core competencies, write at least one specific story that demonstrates how you have proven that you possess that competency. In other words, think about times when you have demonstrated those skills and characteristics. What did you do? How well did you do it? What was the result? What specific, detailed, concrete examples can you provide to your future employer that demonstrates your value? Consider this a personal success “story” you can tell to prove your ability. Your stories can come from your work experience, education, volunteer work, even personal life (if those stories are professional and relevant). See examples of stories in Resources.
8. For each story you have written, condense each story into one powerful accomplishment action bullet that you can use on your resume. See examples of action bullets in Resources. If you had to describe the value you gained from this course to your future employer in an interview, how would you do that? What story would you tell about this educational experience? What have you learned from running your own simulated business that will help you add value to your future employer? Write an answer for how you might tell that story on your next interview?
9. If you had to describe the value you gained from this course to your future employer in an interview, how would you do that? What story would you tell about this educational experience? What have you learned from running your own simulated business that will help you add value to your future employer? Write an answer for how you might tell that story on your next interview?

Next Steps

1. You have begun to create the book of stories to use in your career search and advancement, but this is just the start. Where you take your stories from here is up to you. It is not enough to just have experience or education in your field. You also need to know how to communicate your value.
2. As you move your career forward, consider further how you might use these stories to demonstrate your value. Find ways to add to your book of stories. Use them to write your resume, network, see your own value, prepare for your next interview, and more.
3. As you graduate and build your career, CTU is here to support you. You have your own dedicated career coach assigned to you to help you make sure that you are telling your personal success stories in a way that will set you apart in the job marketplace. You can contact your career coach to schedule an appointment by e-mailing careerservices@ctuonline.edu.

Please submit your assignment if it was the paper. If you chose the Footraces, your Professor will go in and check your final Courier for the profit or loss and grade accordingly.