ou are interested in testing the effectiveness of a new program designed to teach reading skills to elementary school students, describe how you would use a experimental design design to test the effectiveness of the program. Which type experimental design would you deploy? What type of conclusion can be drawn from the experiment?

Chi Square Test of Independence A vehicle quality survey asked new owners a variety of questions about their recently purchased cars. One questions asked for the owner’s rating of the vehicle using categorical responses of average, outstanding, and exceptional. Another question asked for the owner’s education level with the categorical responses some high school, high school graduate, college graduate, and university graduate. Assume the sample data below are for 500 owners who had recently purchased a car.

a. Compute the value of x² for a test of independence.

b. Use a 0.05 level of significance and a test of independence to determine if a new owner’s vehicle quality rating is independent of the owner’s education?

c. What is the p-value and what is your conclusion?

d. Use the overall percentage of average, outstanding and exceptional ratings to comment upon how new owners rate the quality of their recently purchased cars.

IN THE DECADE between 2005 and 2015, LEGO—the famous Danish toy company—grew fivefold from some $1 billion in revenues to $5 billion (see Exhibit MC12.1). Rediscovering, leveraging, and extending its core competence allowed a successful revival for a company that was floundering in the early 2000s. How did LEGO construct a successful turnaround? To answer this question, we first need to understand a bit of the history of this Danish wonder company.

The LEGO company was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The name is a contraction of the Danish words Leg godt, which means “play well.” Only later did LEGO executives realize that le go in Latin also means “I assemble.” Throughout its history, LEGO has had numerous formidable competitors, but it has outperformed all of them. Tinkertoys were more complex, Lincoln Logs were limited in what could be constructed, traditional blocks had nothing to hold them together and were too large to show much detail. LEGO bricks were the right balance of simplicity, versatility, and durability.

LEGO competes for the attention of children and their parents who buy the product. Moreover, there is also a sizable group of adult LEGO fans. In the wake of the personal computer revolution in the 1990s, however, the popularity of LEGO began to wane because of attractive alternatives for children such as gaming consoles and computer games. By 1998, LEGO was in trouble. The Danish toymaker hired a highly touted turnaround expert to change its fortune. Unfortunately, he had no background in the toy industry. To make matters worse, the new executive decided that LEGO’s hometown of Billund, Denmark, (with 6,000 people) was too provincial. He continued to live in Paris and either commute or run the company remotely.

Things at LEGO went from bad too worse. It started hyperinnovating and diversified into too many areas, too quickly, and too far away from its core. Among a whole slew of other innovation failures, the company created a Saturday morning cartoon called “Galidor,” which flopped. During this time period, it also decided to become a lifestyle company and to offer LEGO-branded clothing and accessories.

LEGO’s Turnaround

By 2003, LEGO was on the verge of bankruptcy. To avoid this fate, the closely held private company, owned by the Kristiansen family since its inception, needed to do something drastic and quickly. Almost out of desperation, it hired Jørgen Vig Knudstorp as CEO. His résumé was quite unusual to say the least: He was only 35 years old (in comparison, the average age for a Fortune 500 CEO is 55 years), held a doctorate in economics, and was a former academic. Knudstorp had transitioned to McKinsey, one of the world’s premier strategy consulting firms.

Page 458

Knudstorp decreed that LEGO must “go back to the brick” and focus on core products. As a result of the strategic refocusing, LEGO divested a number of assets including its theme parks. It also drastically culled its product portfolio by almost 50 percent, from some 13,000 pieces to 7,000. At the same time as Knudstorp focused LEGO again on its fundamental strengths, he was also careful to balance exploitation—applying current knowledge to enhance firm performance in the short term—with exploration—searching for new knowledge that may enhance a firm’s future performance. This allowed LEGO to improve the performance of traditional product lines, while at the same time to innovate, but this time in a much more disciplined manner.

In particular, LEGO increased sales of its well-known existing products by strengthening the interoperability of various LEGO pieces with other sets to encourage user innovation and creativity. To drive innovation, LEGO has brought its adult fans into the new product development process to leverage crowd-sourcing—obtaining ideas from a large fan base using online forums and other Internet-based technologies. To drive future growth, LEGO under Knudstorp has been much more careful with its product extensions. In the past LEGO had licensed its brand freely to other brands, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, Batman, the Simpsons, and Iron Man. The problem was that the benefits from these licensing agreements accrued mainly to the existing brands, because LEGO did not own the more critical intellectual property. Knudstorp focused on owning and leveraging the core intellectual property. As a case in point, The LEGO Movie in 2014 was a particular high for the company, grossing $500 million on a $60 million budget in the first year alone. Unlike in previous movie tie-ins, LEGO owned the intellectual property, which meant that LEGO did not need to split profits with existing brands.

Challenges

Although LEGO has grown fivefold since Knudstorp took over, it faces a number of challenges. LEGO needs to strengthen its triple-bottom-line performance (along economic, social, and ecological dimensions) and address globalization challenges.

LEGO must address ecological concerns in the face of growing consumer criticism: Its signature bricks are made from petroleum-based plastic. The company is searching for an environmentally friendly material to replace its bricks that date back to 1963. To overcome its relatively large carbon footprint, the company is spending millions on a 15-year R&D project in hope of finding an eco-friendly alternative. The goal is to invent and then be able to manufacture bricks cost-effectively from a new bio-friendly material that will be virtually indistinguishable from the current blocks. It is a difficult problem to solve because LEGObricks are precisely engineered to Page 459four-thousandths of a millimeter, hold a large range of colors well, and even have a particular sound when two pieces are snapped together.

To continue to grow, LEGO must become stronger in emerging growth markets such as China. LEGO is a comparatively new entry into China because of the fear that knockoff bricks have sufficiently damaged its brand. Knockoffs, which are rampant in China, are of inferior quality and even have injured some consumers. Yet, with growth in Western markets plateauing and a larger number of Chinese entering the middle class, this market opportunity is critical to LEGO’s future success. Moreover, Chinese government officials endorse LEGO as a “mind toy,” which helps children to develop creativity. The hope is that creative children will grow up to drive innovation in firms, something many critics say Chinese companies lack. In addition, Chinese parents and grandparents are eager to spend money on things that are perceived to help their offspring to excel academically. In general, parents around the globe are more than happy to spend money on games that get their children away from mobile devices, computers, and game consoles.

To take advantage of the growth opportunity in China and other Asian countries such as India and Indonesia, LEGO opened offices in Shanghai and Singapore as well as a factory in Jiaxing, China. To address the globalization challenge more generally, LEGO also needs to internationalize its management. At this point, it is a local, small-town company that happened to be successful globally, especially in the West. LEGO hopes to become a global company that happens to have its headquarters in the 6,000-people town of Billund, Denmark.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.  Why did LEGO face bankruptcy in the early 2000s? In your reasoning, focus on both external and internal factors.

2.  What is LEGO’s core competence? Explain.

3.  Apply the core competence–market matrix to show how LEGO leveraged its core competence into existing and new markets under Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, who was appointed CEO in late 2004.

4.  In terms of revenue growth, LEGO experienced a competitive advantage over both Hasbro and Mattel since 2007 because it grew much faster. What explains LEGO’s competitive advantage?

5.  What must LEGO do to sustain its competitive advantage in the future? One avenue to tackle this question is to think about diversification, both along products but also geography. Another avenue is partnerships such as strategic alliances or even acquisitions. What lessons from LEGO’s past should guide its future diversification?

***IN C++***

Create student structure with the following fields:



Name (cstring or null-terminated character array)



Student ID (int – unique random value between 1000 and 9999)



grade (char – Values A thru F)



birthday (myDate – random value: range 1/1/2000 to 12/31/2005)



Home Town (string)

Create an array of pointers to students of size 10.

Example: Student *stuPtr[10];

Write a function that populates the array with 10 students.

Example: populate(stuPtr);

Write a display function that displays the contents of the array on the screen as shown below –

nicely formatted and left justified.

The displayed list should be nicely formatted with column names like this: All columns should

be left-justified.

Name

Student ID

Grade

Birthday

Home Town

Tom Thumb

1002

C

January 1, 2002

Small Ville

Fred Flintstone

1995

D

February 3, 2003

Bedrock

Sponge Bob

2987

B

June 3, 2001

Bikini Bottom

Create a menu that shows the following options:

1)

Display list sorted by Name

2)

Display list sorted by Student ID

3)

Display list sorted by Grade

4)

Display list sorted by Birthday

5)

Display list sorted by Home Town

6)

Exit

You need to write a sorting function for each of the menu items – 5 options needs 5 functions.

Note:

You must create a function that returns a date between a range of 2 dates.

You will use the myDate class in this program – you will not create any other class. The Student

structure is NOT a class.

Take advantage of your myDate class that you just wrote. Also, it might be helpful to create a

new function that returns a string for the date format:

string myDate::toString( );

Draw a single line under subjects and a double line under verbs. Cross out prepositional phrases as necessary to find the subjects. Many sentences contain multiple subjects and verbs.

1.Maria Sklodowka was born in 1867 in Warsaw in the country now known as Poland.

2.Her father was a mathematics and physics professor, and her mother managed a boarding school for girls.

3.Maria’s mother died in 1878 of complications from tuberculosis.

4.Maria attended a clandestine university where she learned about Dostoevsky and Karl Marx.

5.Maria briefly moved to Paris to be a governess and to help her sister; her sister repaid Maria several years later when she insisted that Maria move back to Paris.

6.While in Paris, Maria met Pierre Curie and, after a courtship, married him in 1895, becoming Marie Curie.

7.Marie and Pierre worked together on the study of radiation.

8.In 1903, Marie and Pierre were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, making Marie the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize.

9.Pierre was killed in a wagon accident, and Marie began teaching at the Sorbonne.

10.When Marie was awarded a second Nobel Prize in 1911 for chemistry, she became the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes in different disciplines.

At what point does a Montana Real Estate Broker become a buyer's agent for an out of town buyer?

Which of the following is described as real property? A. Bulldozer B. Town Home C. Semitrailer D. Yacht

(TCOs E and F) A Remington School District employee has been charged with theft and forgery for allegedly stealing approximately $72,000 in district funds.

Mary Blaner, 51, was charged in District Court with one count of second-degree felony theft and five counts of third-degree felony forgery. She is the second school district employee to be formally charged with stealing from the district. Both individuals were charged in separate and apparently unrelated cases.
Blaner, who was the district's payroll clerk, allegedly arranged electronic direct deposits of funds for nonexistent employees that then went to her, according to the police. Blaner was a trusted employee who had worked at the district for over 10 years. (Note: She just went through a divorce and has four children to support. She needs money for her children and a new car and had plans to pay the money back later.)
"Over the course of the last 15 months, she was able to allegedly siphon funds out of their (the district's) account into her account, and she allegedly set up fictitious employees." School district officials became suspicious when they had trouble balancing the district's account. After an internal audit, school officials came across payroll listings for workers who did not have any matching Social Security numbers. Another school district employee, Cindy Heap, who formerly worked as an elementary school secretary, earlier was charged with theft and 11 counts of forgery in a different case, according to Gary Searle, deputy county attorney. Heap allegedly took just under $90,000 in district funds, Searle said. Heap, 32, resigned from her job.

(1) What factors allowed these frauds to occur?
(2) What do you think the school district should do in the future to prevent fraud from occurring in the future?
(3) What responsibility do you feel the current school external auditor has to detect this fraud?
(4) How have the three elements of the Fraud Triangle enabled Mary to commit this fraud?

The weights of newborn baby boys born at a local hospital are believed to have a normal distribution with a mean weight of 3311 grams and a standard deviation of 404 grams. If a newborn baby boy born at the local hospital is randomly selected, find the probability that the weight will be less than 3715 grams. Round your answer to four decimal places.

The book we are suppossed to use is: Comprehensive School Health Education. I cant find any of the answers in it.