Academic drops have been a concern for university administration due to the negative impact they have on graduation rates and consequently the image of the university.

The Management Department has collected the data for 10 semesters with the following results:

Academic drops from the last 20 to 10 semesters have been:

10, 7, 8, 9, 8, 6, 10, 12, 8, 10.

Has the Management Department seen a significant change in the number of academic drops over the last 5 years?

              b.    The 10 most recent semesters of sample data are: 5, 6, 8, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 2.

              c.    Based on your evaluation of these data should the Management Department change their program to lower academic drops?

Deflation refers to the phenomenon of a negative inflation rate. (In 2004, the inflation rate was negative in Hong Kong and we say Hong Kong suffered deflation in 2004.) Many people regard deflation as bad. Can you explain why? Is deflation sometimes good (at least for some people)? (400 words)

A company paid for a 12-month insurance policy on February 1, 2004 for $3,600 and debited the Prepaid Insurance account for the cost of the policy. Assuming no previous adjusting entries have been made, what adjusting entry should be made at March 31, 2004 for the interim financial statements to be properly stated?

Discussion Board - Unit 6, Lesson 1

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1) Discuss the purpose of academic standards? How do teachers use them to plan for instruction? What are your personal thoughts on how standards are used to plan and assess student learning?

2) What are some of the key benefits of using academic standards for planning? What are some of the arguments that critics have to say about academic standards? Explain using evidence from the text.

FOR EDUCATION

The schema for the Academics database is as follows. Understanding this schema is necessary to answer the questions in Part B.

DEPARTMENT(deptnum, descrip, instname, deptname, state, postcode) 
ACADEMIC(acnum, deptnum*, famname, givename, initials, title) 
PAPER(panum, title) 
AUTHOR(panum*, acnum*) 
FIELD(fieldnum, id, title) 
INTEREST(fieldnum*, acnum*, descrip) 

The semantics of most attributes are self-explanatory. For each relation, the primary key is underlined and any foreign keys are denoted by an asterisk (*). Some additional information for relations is given below:

• DEPARTMENT: Each academic department (deptnum) belongs to an institution (instname).  
• ACADEMIC: Each academic (acnum) belongs to one department (deptnum).  

• AUTHOR: A paper (panum) may be written by more than one academic (acnum).  
• FIELD: The relation describes research areas, where id is a classification code like B.1.1.  
• INTEREST: The relation describes that an academic may have research interests in several fields (fieldnum), and provide description (descrip) of his/her research.

Question1 SQL

calculate the number of academics that have more than 10 papers?

Question 2 SQL

find the departments where at most 10 academics have more than 2 research fields, and display in alphabetical order the names of institutions and names of departments?

CASE_2

COMPARING UK AND MALAYSIAN ONLINE SHOPPING BEHAVIOUR

How did I end up here? Daniel mused as he sat staring at his computer screen. Six months earlier, as he left family and friends in Malaysia to complete his master’s degree on an exchange in UK, the future seem bright. Hundreds of kilometers away from home, with a deadline looming that could make or break his future career, he did not know where to start. He had left university with a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Northern University four years before and since that time had been on a graduate recruitment scheme with one of the largest supermarket chains in Malaysia. His performance in the early stages of a part time master’s programme in Retail Management sponsored by his employer had been good.

This, combined with his high standard of English, meant he had been offered the opportunity to travel to the UK to study for one year on a full-time basis and obtain a double qualification from both his Malaysian and a British institution. The taught classes in the first semester had complemented his previous studies and he had soon identified the area he wanted to investigate for his research project – online supermarket shopping. He decided the aim of his project would be to compare and contrast UK and Malaysian consumer’s behavior of supermarket’s online shopping offerings.

From his observation, almost every student he knew had bought something on eBay, Lelong.com, or Amazon, and many chose to do their supermarket shopping online to avoid wasting time standing in checkout queues. In addition, many supermarkets had diversified their offer away from daily consumables into white goods such as washing machines and even financial services (Colgate & Alexander, 2001); meaning consumers were now looking to these organisations for more than just the weekly household shopping. In other words, shopping convenience and variety of product offerings can give strong attitude towards online shopping.

In class, Daniel’s supervisor had identified the effect of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on the attitude towards online shopping (Juniwati, 2014; Suwunniponth, 2014; Ramayah & Ignatius, 2005; Yu et al., 2005). He also emphasized the issue of consumer concerns around security and trust (Beldad et al., 2010; Koufari & Hampton-Sosa, 2004) that can influence the attitude of online shopper.

It has been reported that the intention to purchase online strongly link to the positive attitude on online shopping. When consumers have the intention to purchase online the tendency of making the purchase online is high (Li & Zhang, 2002; Wu, 2003; Yang, Lester, & James, 2007). In this study, Daniel also wants to find out whether consumer characteristics have significant impact on the relationship between attitude and intention to purchase online.

It had been a revelation to see how well developed the retail websites were in the UK, compared with those in Malaysia, and how different the webscape was in the two countries. Statistics he had found showed that in June 2010 there were 51.4 million Internet users in the UK, 82.5% of the population, an increase of 234% between 2000 and 2010. In Malaysia, the figures were 17.7 million users, 60.7% of the population, an increase of 356.8% between 2000 and 2012 (Internet Usage Stats and Marketing Report, 2015).

Daniel decided he needed to identify his population, and from that draw a representative sample. He thought his organisation’s database of existing online customers would be a useful place to start, but he was unsure whether he would be allowed access. In addition, he did not simply want to undertake a large-scale quantitative survey of existing customers as did not think it would produce a picture of the wider situation. One of his objectives was, after all, to identify the Malaysian consumers’ expectations of these online offerings. How could he ensure he limited bias in the respondents’ answer, which would be a threat to the reliability of his findings?

His initial idea to use Facebook to gain access to a bigger population had not been received enthusiastically by his project tutor but he had anticipated the need to justify this suggestion. He argued that using this informal network, and building simple instructions and collecting demographic data in an Internet questionnaire, he would be able to categorize respondents and identify which supermarket website they were evaluating.

So here he was, with an interesting project that fitted perfectly with the need of his employer, which wanted to develop its presence on the Web. His intention was to get an overview of online consumer perceptions and expectations of the online supermarket sites available in the UK and France. He then planned to compare the data collected from the participants to identify the differences between the online activities of the British and Malaysian supermarkets and produce some guidelines to help his employer develop this side of its activities. However, the problem he came back to gain was how to select his sample.

Daniel thought a non-probability approach would fit this exploratory research but, if he was honest, the research methods lectures had totally confused him. A great deal of time had been spent on the explanation of the formula to work out the optimum sample size for a survey, and population. His concern was how to build the argument for using non-probability sampling and be able to justify it to his project tutor, whose own research activity involved large-scale marketing research projects run in conjunction with companies in Malaysia.

So here he was preparing his argument to produce a questionnaire using Survey Monkey and post the link on Facebook. In addition, he would send the link via emails to other friends who did not use Facebook. He would make the request that they all pass the link on their friends and family who fell within the parameters that would be defined in the message accompanying the link.

One point he felt that was in his favour was he had been able to develop a network of contacts during his time in the UK. As one of the few Malaysian students on campus he had taken advantage of his generous nature and tried to meet as many people as possible. His Facebook wall had thousands of postings from his ‘friends’. He was convinced this was the place to start but really needed to get his head around non-probability sampling if he was going to do it well.

Based on the given scenario, answer the following questions:

1. Identify the broad problem area.
2. Develop theoretical framework.
3. Suggest TWO (2) theories that related to the framework.
4. Develop THREE (3) research objectives and research questions.
5. Develop THREE (3) directional alternative hypotheses.
6. Suggest appropriate research design in terms of (please justify each answer):
   1. Purpose of study
   2. Researcher interference
   3. Study setting
   4. Research strategies
   5. Time horizon
   6. Unit of analysis
7. State the population for the study.
8. Identify the proper sampling design (probability or non-probability). Justify you answer.

Find the solution to the heat equation in 3 dimensions on the half space z>0, with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions at z=0.

u'' + sinu = sinx (-1<x<1)

u(-1)=1, u'(1)=0

solve this boundary value problem.

1. Use the approximate integral method to find the pressure gradient at the inlet of a circular pipe (BOUNDARY LAYER THEORY IN FLUID MECHANICS);

Distinguish between homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions. Which ones are described
by boundary conditions and which ones manifest themselves in the differential equations