Xavier, a resident of California, has been a driver for Red Delivery Service for the past six years. For this purpose, he leases a truck from Red, and his compensation is based on a percentage of the income resulting from his pickup and delivery services. Red allows its drivers to choose their 10-hour shifts and does not exercise any control on how these services are carried out (e.g., the route to be taken or the order in which parcels are delivered or picked up). Under Red’s operating agreement with its drivers, Red can terminate the arrangement after 30 days’ notice. In practice, however, Red allows its truckers to quit immediately without giving advance notice. The agreement also identifies the drivers as independent contractors. Red maintains no health or retirement plans for its drivers, and each year it reports their income by issuing Forms 1099–MISC (and not Forms W–2). Red requires its drivers to maintain a commercial driver’s license and be in good standing with the state highway law enforcement division.

An IRS agent contends that Xavier is an independent contractor and, therefore, is subject to the self-employment tax. Xavier disagrees and contends that he is an employee (i.e., not self-employed). Who is correct? Why?

1)

a. There is an elevator on the 102th floor of the Empire State Building with a sign: MAXIMUM WEIGHT 2900 LBS. During refurbishment, the cable was being replaced. A section of the new cable is cut up and tested for its breaking strength. The cable was tested 20 times and the average breaking point of the sample was found to be 3100 LBS with a standard deviation of 280 LBS. Construct an appropriate hypothesis test that determines whether the cable is safe to use. Since this cable has lives on the line (literally) use an alpha level of .005. Show all work! (Hint: Do you desire the actual breaking point is greater or less than 2900 LBS?)

b. In a hypothesis test, what does the p-value mean? Hint: What does it mean in terms of the sample that was drawn?

2. An important debate among macroeconomists concerned the interest rate elasticity of money demand. Monetarists believed that money demand was very sensitive to interest rate changes, while Keynesians believed that money demand was insensitive to interest rate changes.
   1. Show how different assumptions about the interest rate elasticity of money demand affect the slope of the LM curve. To do this, derive the LM curve for both Keynesians and monetarists on the same set of diagrams so we can visualize the differences.
   2. Given what you find in (a), which school of thought believed that a tax cut would have a stronger impact on aggregate output? Illustrate by drawing a new IS-LM diagram with both a monetarist and Keynesian LM curve drawn on it. Explain your logic in detail.

You are an epidemiologist at a state health department, working in the disease surveillance unit. As part of your responsibilities, you routinely monitor your state’s data on reportable illnesses (http://wwwn.cdc.gov/NNDSS/script/SearchResults.aspx?Searchfor=). In your monthly update of case data, during which you generate trend charts and maps which cover each of the counties in your state, you notice what appears to be an increase in the number of babesiosis cases from the previous month. As a trained epidemiologist, you decide to look into the situation a bit further. Your system has information on the county of residence for the sick individual, as well as some basic demographic and clinical information (age, gender, race/ethnicity, health status, occupation).

Using the basic tenets of both descriptive epidemiology and surveillance, describe your approach to learning more about this potential babesiosis issue. Specifically, address the following questions in one or two detailed paragraphs.

1) Is this a babesiosis outbreak? Explain your answer.

2) What measures of disease frequency are relevant to your investigation?

3) What other pieces of information might be relevant, and how might you determine them?

a. An experiment consists of these three activities:

1. select a card from a standard 52 card deck
2. flip a coin
3. roll a die

How many elements are in the sample space of the experiment?

b. An experiment consists of these three activities:

1. select one card from a standard 52 card deck
2. flip a coin
3. roll a die

What is the probability of the event (spade, head, 3)? Round your answer to three decimal places.

c. A bag contains 10 marbles, 8 are red and two are green. I withdraw two marbles without replacement from the bag.

What is the probability that both marbles are red? (I.e., red and red)

Read the article (link is below) and answer the questions that follow in a paper format. (Paper has to be 1-page, 11-inch font- single-spaced). COPY THE BELOW LINK AND PASTE IN YOUR BROWSER.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276513001329

Primary Paper HW assignment guidelines

Your primary paper consists of three parts:

1. In your own words, state the essential take home message of the paper assigned.

-Here you should briefly mention what was known about this topic before this paper was published

-Then state what the aim/goal/purpose of this published study was. In other words, what did the authors set out to do?

-Also describe why this research is important (if you think it is important)/ what are the researchers hoping to contribute to the existing knowledge.

2. State how the authors demonstrated the essential point of the paper: what experiments and what methods they used to prove the point

-In this section you should link how a particular approach/method was used to obtain a particular result and why it would be important/relevant. For example:

-Authors used method A to get/show result B. Result B is important because (it supports their original hypothesis in the following way/describe how/ or it provides novel findings regarding mechanism X

-Continue the bulleted list to correlate specific method with specific result and how it supports the claims made in the paper.

3. Discuss the strengths and significance of the paper and also the weaknesses and indicate additional lines of investigation that you think would be worth pursuing that were opened up by the paper.

-Here I want you to critique the experimental approach and author’s conclusions, not their writing style or format of the paper. Also, keep in mind that these are primary research articles published in scientific journals, so they are intended for a scientific, not general audience. Hence the language could be a bit dense.

-I want you to be very specific here. Do not write general and vague statements. Instead, refer to specific data in the paper (in figure X, or table Y) and indicate any possible flaws or limitations of the experiment.

-Propose possible future directions or follow up studies. You can look up papers that cited this research or follow up on the last author’s subsequent research.

-Explain if this paper contributed anything new to the field and if it enabled better understanding of the subject

A statistics professor is at a supermarket waiting in line to buy some groceries. While waiting for the line to move he listened to several people complaining about the long delays. From the different conversions going on he quickly gathers some inform and estimates from the large sample that the mean waiting time is about 12 minutes. He then estimates the population standard deviation to be 1.5 minutes.
1. (a) Explain in detail using full sentences how he should go about finding a 90% confidence interval for the time he has to wait in line to be served. Enumerate each step.
2. Let’s assume that from the question in part (1) it is determined that its margin of error is approximately 3.5. minutes. (a) What does this mean exactly for a 90% confidence interval?

How do phenetic (distance) analyses differ from cladistic (character state) analyses in the types of data that they use, the kinds of trees they build and what types of inference you can make about evolutionary history from each?

( 7 ) What are " public goods " ? Define the characteristics , using examples . As we discussed in class , the existence of externalities creates an efficiency problem in the provision of these goods and services Unlike the private sector , State and Local Governments are able to intervene . Using the example of public goods you have provided , please provide an example of an externality that will impact it's provision , and detail how a government could intervene

( 9 ) To determine what / how a community determines levels of public goods , we discussed the application of three theories ( or principles ) and how they interact with each other . Explain these three , and using the concepts that we employed in our in class exercise , provide a rationale for why the system we have works in defining what individuals are willing to pay for certain public goods What are some of the inherent flaws with this system ?