Calculate the Internal Rate of Return of each of the following potential investments and recommend whether or not to include them in the upcoming capital budget given that the firm’s cost of capital is 14.5%.

New Software:

• Initial Cost                         $25,000
• Training Cost                    $12,000
• Annual Cost Savings        $10,500
• Useful Life                        6 Years

Machine A or Machine B

Note: The key word here is “or”. One or the other machine must be bought. So, the analysis should be based on the incremental cash flows resulting from the more expensive alternative.

• Annual Production in units                                   40,000
• Cost of Machine A                                                $38,000
• Cost of Machine B                                                $32,000
• Unit Cost to Produce on Machine A                     $2.20
• Unit Cost to Produce on Machine B                     $2.22
• Useful Life                                                            12 Years

You are the owner of Clean Rite Carpet Cleaners, and company that cleans carpets using a special chemical process. You do not guarantee success, but you have a good reputation for getting out stains. Sam Jones is placing his house for sale and preparing for an open house. One of the carpets has a red stain that came from the painted wooden chair leg. When you left after cleaning the carpet, the stain appeared to be gone. However, you received word that the stain reappeared and Mr. Jones is requesting one-half the cost of a new carpet. Their open house is only a week from now, and the stain could discourage buyers. Write a letter refusing the request using the format discussed in Chapter 8 and in class.

ABC Tour Limited is a medium-size travel agency. The staff are using the Microsoft Office, including Excel, Word and Power-point, to conduct most of their daily operations and record keeping. John, the general manager of ABC Tour, would like to increase the operation efficiency by replacing the Microsoft Office with a new customer relationship management (CRM) software. However, the labor union is opposing on the change due to some concerns.

(a)In order to tailor-made the CRM system, the IT vendor would like to have a field study. What could be achieved by having field study in the ABC Tour’s office?

(b)John would like to hold a meeting with the labor union to address their concern. List TWO potential concerns that the labor union may have.

This assignment asks you to analyze various companies’ mission or organizational vision statements to determine how such statements guide leadership practices within an organization.

Select a mission statement or organizational vision statement from one company that professes to practice servant leadership and one that practices a standard leadership model. Some well-known companies that practice servant leadership are Southwest Airlines, REI, and Aflac. Conduct additional research to locate others.

Once you have selected two companies, write a 250 word analysis that addresses the following:

Compare and contrast the mission and/or organizational visions statements of the two companies. What are the similarities and differences? How do you think these statements impact the culture of each organization?

Managers and employees have long expressed dislike and skepticism about performance appraisal, as it is typically practiced in organizations. Some HR practitioners and consultants, such as Samuel Culbert, have advocated getting rid of the standard performance appraisal programs. Culbert has suggested that the arguments typically given for performance appraisal are invalid and, in a word, “bogus.”  

a. Describe two arguments or reasons that are typically given in support of formal performance appraisals.

b. Then explain why Culbert and others who are skeptical of performance appraisal believe these arguments are weak or bogus.

c. Explain your perspective on whether performance appraisals are necessary, and why or why not. If you believe they are not necessary, explain what procedures, if any, you would recommend to fulfill the functions that performance appraisals are said to fulfill.

A teacher gives the following assignment to 200 students: Check the local newspaper every morning for a week and count how many times the word “gun” is mentioned on the “local news” pages. At the end of the week, the students report their totals. The mean result is 85, with a standard deviation of 8. The distribution of scores is normal. a. How many students would be expected to count fewer than 70 cases? b. How many students would be expected to count between 80 and 90 cases? c. Karen is a notoriously lazy student. She reports a total of 110 cases at the end of the week. The professor tells her that he is convinced she has not done the assignment, but has simply made up the number. Are his suspicions justified?

If A is a 32-bit address, typically an instruction sequence such as: lui x19, A_upper addi x19, x19, A_lower can be used to load the word at A into a register (in this case x19).

a) How many bits of A are in A_upper?

b) If the MSB of A_upper is 1, what would be the value of the leftmost 32-bits of register x19. Provide your answer in decimal.

c) After the lui instruction, the rightmost 12-bits of x19 would be filled with all 1’s. True or False?

d) If the bit 11 (12th bit) of A is 1, how should A_upper be changed? Choose (X) one of the following (A_upper = A_upper + 1) / (A_upper = A_upper - 1) /(None)

e) What other instruction can be used instead of addi?

For this IP, you will create a very simple drawing app using Android Studio. The purpose of this assignment is to give you more building blocks to use when programming apps. For full credit for this assignment, you should complete the following: Create a menu and display menu items on the app bar Detect when the user touches the screen and moves a finger Be able to change the color and width of a line Be able to save an image To turn in this assignment, upload screenshots of the working app (from the emulator) as a Word document. The screenshots need to show that the app works and that all of the parts listed work. At a minimum, students should upload 2 screenshots showing: A drawing Menu showing the different color choices and line widths.

• What you had most hoped to learn about marketing when you had registered
• Two of the most important marketing strategies that you learned this term, and why
• Examples from commerce (not from the textbook) that illustrate these two important topics (you can include screen shots to help explain these concepts if you would like).
• Thoughts on the term project
• What one topic introduced to you in this course that you wish you could have spent more time on, and why

For each of the above, you should give specific evidence/examples. Don’t make general and vague statements for which you offer no support.

Your MAX word count = 1,200. (Be concise: I will stop reading at the 1,200 marks).