A leading magazine (like Barron's) reported at one time that the average number of weeks an individual is unemployed is 12.3 weeks. Assume that for the population of all unemployed individuals the population mean length of unemployment is 12.3 weeks and that the population standard deviation is 5.5 weeks. Suppose you would like to select a random sample of 99 unemployed individuals for a follow-up study. Find the probability that a single randomly selected value is between 13.7 and 14. P ( 13.7 < x < 14 ) = Find the probability that a sample of size n = 99 is randomly selected with a mean between 13.7 and 14. P ( 13.7 < ¯ x < 14 ) = Enter your answers as numbers accurate to 4 decimal places.

On 31 December 2018, The Hiya Magazine company reported the composition of their source of capital as presented in the following table:

The company is in 25% marginal tax rate and its dividend grows by 5% yearly. Currently, company preference shares and common shares are traded at $115 and $23, respectively.

Ques tion:

1. How does capital structure of the company affect its cost of capital? (4%)

2. Calculate the after-tax cost of capital of the bank loan! (3%)

3. Calculate the after-tax cost of capital of the company bonds! (3%)

4. Calculate the cost of capital of company preferred shares! (3%)

5. Calculate the cost of capital of company common shares! (3%)

6. Calculate the company weighted average of cost of capital (WACC)! (5%)

7. How does company use the WACC for? (4%)

According to the editor of Beautiful Bride magazine, Betty Bridegroom, the average age of a groom is now 26.2 years (µ = 26.2).  A sample of 16 prospective grooms (n = 16) in Chicago revealed that their average age was 28.2 years (X = 28.2) with a standard deviation of 5.3 years (s = 5.3).  Is there enough evidence to claim that the Chicago groom’s age is greater than the age reported by Betty?

Conduct a hypothesis test, use the traditional method to solve this problem using α = 0.01.

Make sure you provide all 5 steps of your hypothesis test.

A magazine published data on the best small firms in a certain year. These were firms that had been publicly traded for at least a year, have a stock price of at least $5 per share, and have reported annual revenue between $5 million and $1 billion. The table below shows the ages of the corporate CEOs for a random sample of these firms. 49 57 51 60 57 59 74 63 53 50 59 60 60 57 46 55 63 57 47 55 57 43 61 62 49 67 67 55 55 49 Use this sample data to construct a 90% confidence interval for the mean age of CEO's for these top small firms. Use the Student's t-distribution. (Round your answers to two decimal places.) ,

5. This quotation is from a recent article in The Economist magazine, “Bond yields rose in January as investors worried about a return of inflation and the trillion-dollar deficits likely after America’s recent tax cuts.” If you’d like to read the full article, you can at https://goo.gl/GPYC8R

a. Using a supply and demand diagram accompanied by a couple of sentences to explain, tell my why a fear of rising future inflation would cause bond yields to rise.

b. Using a supply and demand diagram accompanied by a couple of sentences to explain, tell my why a fear of increased future government budget deficits would cause bond yields to rise.

For this week's Brief, read the attached article (below) from The Economist magazine and write a one page summary of it.

Bucks 114--Economist Article--VR.docx

Your objective is to produce an easy-to-read document that allows your reader to understand the article without having to read it in its entirety. There is no word count requirement for this assignment, but you must make sure that you include the vital information from the article (while necessarily eliminating noncritical information).

There are two specific formatting guidelines:

1. Your summary must fit on a single page

2. You must divide your summary into at least three sections, with an appropriate heading for each section

As other musicians were settling down on their sofas during lockdown, Travis Scott was seizing the virtual moment. On April 23rd the American hip-hop star staged a concert that was attended live online by more than 12m people within the three-dimensional world of “Fortnite”, a video game better known for its cartoonish violence. As the show began, the stage exploded and Mr Scott appeared as a giant, stomping across a surreal game landscape (pictured). He subsequently turned into a neon cyborg, and then a deep-sea diver, as the world filled with water and spectators swam around his giant figure. It was, in every sense, a truly immersive experience. Mr Scott’s performance took place in a world, of sorts—not merely on a screen.

Meanwhile, as other betrothed couples lamented the cancellation of their nuptials, Sharmin Asha and Nazmul Ahmed moved their wedding from a hip Brooklyn venue into the colourful world of “Animal Crossing: New Horizons”, a video game set on a tropical island in which people normally spend their time gardening or fishing. The couple, and a handful of friends, took part in a torchlit beachside ceremony. Mr Ahmed wore an in-game recreation of the suit he had bought for the wedding. Since then many other weddings, birthday parties and baby showers have been celebrated within the game.

Alternative venues for graduation ceremonies, many of which were cancelled this year amid the pandemic, have been the virtual worlds of “Roblox” and “Minecraft”, two popular games that are, in effect, digital construction sets. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, recreated their campus within the game to stage the event, which included speeches from the chancellor and vice-chancellor of the university, and ended with graduates tossing their virtual hats into the air.

People unversed in hip-hop or video games have been spending more time congregating in more minimal online environments, through endless work meetings on Zoom or family chats on FaceTime—ways of linking up people virtually that were unthinkable 25 years ago. These many not seem anything like virtual realities—but they are online spaces for interaction and the foundations around which more ambitious structures can be built. “Together” mode, an addition to Teams, Microsoft’s video-calling and collaboration system, displays all the participants in a call together in a virtual space, rather than the usual grid of boxes, changing the social dynamic by showing participants as members of a cohesive group. With virtual backgrounds, break-out rooms, collaboration tools and software that transforms how people look, video-calling platforms are becoming places to get things done.

Though all these technologies existed well before the pandemic, their widespread adoption has been “accelerated in a way that only a crisis could achieve,” says Matthew Ball, a Silicon Valley media analyst (and occasional contributor to The Economist). “You don’t go back from that.”

This is a remarkable shift. For decades, proponents of virtual reality (vr) have been experimenting with strange-looking, expensive headsets that fill the wearer’s field of view with computer-generated imagery. Access to virtual worlds via a headset has long been depicted in books, such as “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline and “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson, as well as in films. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, who spent more than $2bn to acquire Oculus, a vr startup, in 2014, has said that, as the technology gets cheaper and more capable, this will be “the next platform” for computing after the smartphone.

But the headset turns out to be optional. Computer-generated realities are already everywhere, not just in obvious places like video games or property websites that offer virtual tours to prospective buyers. They appear behind the scenes in television and film production, simulating detailed worlds for business and training purposes, and teaching autonomous cars how to drive. In sport the line between real and virtual worlds is blurring as graphics are super-imposed on television coverage of sporting events on the one hand, and professional athletes and drivers compete in virtual contests on the other. Virtual worlds have become part of people’s lives, whether they realise it or not.

This is not to say that headsets do not help. Put on one of the best and the immersive experience is extraordinary. Top-of-the-range headsets completely replace the wearer’s field of vision with a computer-generated world, using tiny screens in front of each eye. Sensors in the goggles detect head movements, and the imagery is adjusted accordingly, providing the illusion of being immersed in another world. More advanced systems can monitor the position of the headset, not just its orientation, within a small area. Such “room-scale vr” maintains the illusion even as the wearer moves or crouches down.

Tech firms large and small have also been working on “augmented reality” (ar) headsets that superimpose computer-generated imagery onto the real world—a more difficult trick than fully immersive vr, because it requires fancy optics in the headset to mix the real and the virtual. ar systems must also take into account the positions and shapes of objects in the real world, so that the resulting combination is convincing, and virtual objects sitting on surfaces, or floating in the air, stay put and do not jump around as the wearer moves. When virtual objects are able to interact with real environments, the result is sometimes known as mixed reality (xr).

Despite several false dawns, there are now signs that, for some industries, these technologies could at last be reaching the right price and capability to be useful. A report in 2019 by pwc, a consultancy, predicts that vr and ar have the potential to add $1.5trn to the world economy by 2030, by spurring productivity gains in areas including health care, engineering, product development, logistics, retail and entertainment.

Because the display of information is no longer confined by the size of a physical screen on a desktop or a mobile device, but can fill the entire field of vision, the use of vr and ar “creates a new and even more intuitive way to interact with a computer,” notes Goldman Sachs, a bank, which expects the market for such technology to be worth $95bn by 2025. And these predictions were made before the pandemic induced surge of interest in doing things in virtual environments.

Progress in developing virtual realities is being driven by hardware from the smartphone industry and software from the video-games industry. Modern smartphones, with their vivid colour screens and motion sensors, contain everything needed for vr: indeed, a phone slotted into a cardboard viewer with a couple of lenses can serve as a rudimentary vr headset. Dedicated systems use more advanced motion sensors, but can otherwise use many of the same components. Smartphones can also deliver a hand-held form of ar, overlaying graphics and virtual items on images from the phone’s camera.

The most famous example of this is “Pokémon Go”, a game that involves catching virtual monsters hidden around the real world. Other smartphone ar apps can identify passing aircraft by attaching labels to them, or provide walking directions by superimposing floating arrows on a street view. And ar “filters” that change the way people look, from adding make-up to more radical transformations, are popular on social-media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.

On the software front, vr has benefited from a change in the way video games are built. Games no longer involve pixelated monsters moving on two-dimensional grids, but are sophisticated simulations of the real world, or at least some version of it. Millions of lines of code turn the player’s button-presses into cinematic imagery on screen. The software that does this—known as a “game engine”—manages the rules and logic of the virtual world. It keeps characters from walking through walls or falling through floors, makes water flow in a natural way and ensures that interactions between objects occur realistically and according to the laws of physics. The game engine also renders the graphics, taking into account lighting, shadows, and the textures and reflectivity of different objects in the scene. And for multiplayer games, it handles interactions with other players around the world.

In the early days of the video-games industry, programmers would generally create a new engine every time they built a new game. That link was decisively broken in 1996 when id Software, based in Texas, released a first-person-shooter game called “Quake”. Set in a gothic, 3d world, it challenged players to navigate a maze-like environment while fighting monsters. Crucially, players could use the underlying Quake Engine to build new levels, weapons and challenges within the game to play with friends. The engine was also licensed to other developers, who used it to build entirely new games.

Using an existing game engine to handle the job of simulating a virtual world allowed game developers, large and small, to focus instead on the creative elements of game design, such as narrative, characters, assets and overall look. This is, of course, a familiar division of labour in other creative industries. Studios do not design their own cameras, lights or editing software when making their movies. They buy equipment and focus their energies instead on the creative side of their work: telling entertaining stories.

Once games and their engines had been separated, others beyond the gaming world realised that they, too, could use engines to build interactive 3d experiences. It was a perfect fit for those who wanted to build experiences in virtual or augmented reality. Game engines were “absolutely indispensable” to the growth of virtual worlds in other fields, says Bob Stone of the University of Birmingham in England. “The gaming community really changed the tide of fortune for the virtual-reality community.”

Two game engines in particular emerged as the dominant platforms: Unity, made by Unity Technologies, based in San Francisco, and Unreal Engine, made by Epic Games, based in Cary, North Carolina. Unity says its engine powers 60% of the world’s vr and ar experiences. Unreal Engine underpins games including “Gears of War”, “Mass Effect” and “BioShock”. Epic also uses it to make games of its own, most famously “Fortnite”, now one of the most popular and profitable games in the world, as well as the venue for elaborate online events like that staged in conjunction with Mr Scott.

Epic’s boss, Tim Sweeney, forecast in 2015 that there would be convergence between different creative fields as they all adopted similar tools. The ability to create photorealistic 3d objects in virtual worlds is not just attractive to game designers, but also to industrial designers, architects and film-makers, not to mention hip-hop stars. Game engines, Mr Sweeney predicted, would be the common language powering the graphics and simulations across all those previously separate professional and consumer worlds.

That is now happening, as the tools of virtual-world-building spread into many areas. This Technology Quarterly will explore where computer-generated realities are already starting to make an impact—work, entertainment and health are all seeing changes—and where the technology is heading.

Building a complex, immersive, virtual social space, like the “Metaverse” depicted in “Snow Crash” is the goal for many serious minds in technology today. Mr Sweeney sees the Metaverse, or something like it, as the next iteration of the web, where people can go to work, play games, shop or just pass the time.

Similarly, Mr Ball reckons game engines will become a base layer for digital 3d worlds, a standard upon which new industries will be built. Rather than predict specific future results of this standardisation, he cites the introduction of railways as a way to think about the many opportunities that lie ahead. “What happens when you layer the country with railroad infrastructure?” he asks. “What happens when you massively drop the friction to experimentation and creation?” When it comes to virtual worlds, that is now a very real question. ■

This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "Reaching into other worlds"

According to the text (and Forbes Magazine), the total revenues generated by the four major North American sports leagues totaled about _______ in 2010.

$21 billion

$200 billion

$2.1 billion

$200 million

Opportunity Cost is best defined as...

a. The benefits or costs that you convey to a third party from performing a task.

b. the value of the next best thing you could have done with your time/resources.

c. The monetary cost of doing something.

d. The cost to society of you performing a task.

Which topic would best be considered the study of Industrial Organization?

a. The study of how a firm in a market with many close competitors maximizes profit

b. The study of how wages and employment are determined in an industry.

c. The study of how a local government uses taxes and subsidies to keep a sports franchise.

d. The study of how labor unions organize and manage to drive up wages in an industry.

4. Which example is best associated with the field of Public Finance?

a. The study of how a firm in a market with many close competitors maximizes profit.

b. The study of how a local government uses taxes and subsidies to keep or attract a sports franchise.

c. The study of how labor unions organize and manage to drive up wages in an industry.

d. The study of how wages and employment are determined in an industry.

5. Which example is best associated with the field of Labor Economics?Which example is best associated with the field of Labor Economics?

a. The study of how lottery winnings are used to fund the construction of a new stadium and whether or not such a system is progressive or regressive.

b. Examining how wages and employment in the NFL compares to that in Major League Baseball.

c. Studying the optimal number of teams to have in the league to maximize league-wide revenue.

d. Studying the best type of tax system to use in order to fund a new stadium.

6. You hold a comparative advantage over someone else in performing a task...

a. If you can perform that task at a lower opportunity cost.

b. if you are simply better at performing that task than the other person.

c. If performing that task comes easier to you than it does the other person.

d. If you have a stronger preference in performing that task than the other person.

A leading magazine (like Barron's) reported at one time that the average number of weeks an individual is unemployed is 14.9 weeks. Assume that for the population of all unemployed individuals the population mean length of unemployment is 14.9 weeks and that the population standard deviation is 6.2 weeks. Suppose you would like to select a random sample of 208 unemployed individuals for a follow-up study.

Find the probability that a single randomly selected value is between 14.7 and 16.1.
P(14.7 < X < 16.1) =

Find the probability that a sample of size n=208 is randomly selected with a mean between 14.7 and 16.1.
P(14.7 < M < 16.1) =

Enter your answers as numbers accurate to 4 decimal places.

A leading magazine (like Barron's) reported at one time that the average number of weeks an individual is unemployed is 30 weeks. Assume that the length of unemployment is normally distributed with population mean of 30 weeks and the population standard deviation of 6 weeks. Suppose you would like to select a random sample of 8 unemployed individuals for a follow-up study. Round the answers of following questions to 4 decimal places.

1. What is the distribution of XX? XX ~ N(,)
2. What is the distribution of ¯xx¯? ¯xx¯ ~ N(,)
3. What is the probability that one randomly selected individual found a job more than 28 weeks?
4. For 8 unemployed individuals, find the probability that the average time that they found the next job is more than 28 weeks.
5. For part d), is the assumption of normal necessary?

A leading magazine (like Barron's) reported at one time that the average number of weeks an individual is unemployed is 28 weeks. Assume that the length of unemployment is normally distributed with population mean of 28 weeks and the population standard deviation of 9 weeks. Suppose you would like to select a random sample of 35 unemployed individuals for a follow-up study. Round the answers of following questions to 4 decimal places.

What is the distribution of X? X ~ N

What is the distribution of ¯x? ¯x ~ N

What is the probability that one randomly selected individual found a job more than 30 weeks?

For 35 unemployed individuals, find the probability that the average time that they found the next job is more than 30 weeks.

For part d), is the assumption of normal necessary? yes or no