QUESTION 01

1. Are there some social costs and social benefits associated with the upgrade and investment in human capital? List and then briefly comment on three (3) existing costs and three (3) existing benefits.                                                                                                          [6 marks]
2. In cases where a skill type is highly specific and scarce; what does this suggest about the years of training, the distribution of income, the labour productivity, and the private and social human capital investment cost of the individuals involved?                                     [8 marks]
3. Labour supply elasticities range from very low to very high coefficients, depending on the labour units involved. Use this comment to relate supply elasticities to skill levels and to do a simple analysis of how both low and high supply elasticities determine or relate to the earning power or income distribution of labour.                                                                        [8 marks]
4. With reference to the Cob Webb Model, briefly explain the supply and demand for labour and the distribution of income accruing to a specific occupation that has a highly specific skill. Include all the necessary assumptions but no diagram is necessary.

[8 marks]

1(a) Using a driving simulator, a human factors psychologist measured the time to press the brake pedal after a visual alert for younger and older drivers. The mean reaction time for a sample of 20 young drivers was 2.8 sec with a standard deviation of .3 sec, and 3.2 sec for a sample of 18 older drivers with a standard deviation of .4. Compute a 99% confidence interval for the difference between the population means for the two groups using the t-distribution. What is the lower limit?

(b) Using a driving simulator, a human factors psychologist measured the time to press the brake pedal after a visual alert for younger and older drivers. The mean reaction time for a sample of 20 younger drivers was 2.8 sec with a standard deviation of .3 sec, and 3.2 sec for a sample of 18 older drivers with a standard deviation of .4. Compute a 95% confidence interval for the difference between the population means for the two groups using the t-distribution. What is the lower limit?

The length of human pregnancies is approximately normally distributed with mean μ= 266 days and standard deviation σ = 15 days.

(a) What is the probability a randomly selected pregnancy lasts less than 262 days?

(b) Suppose a random sample of 20 pregnancies is obtained. Describe the sampling distribution of the sample mean length of human pregnancies.

(c) What is the probability that a random sample of 20 pregnancies has a mean gestation period of 262 days or less?

(d) What is the probability that a random sample of 40 pregnancies has a mean gestation period of 262 days or less?

(e) What might you conclude if a random sample of 40 pregnancies resulted in a mean gestation period of 262 days or less?

(d) What is the probability that a random sample of 50 pregnancies has a mean gestation period of 260 days or less? What might you conclude if a random sample of 50 pregnancies resulted in a mean gestation period of 260 days or less?

Programming assignment for ENSC 3213

NIM

The program is to be written in Matlab. Program must be liberally commented.

The program is a game played by a human versus the machine.

At the start, the prompt asks the human to enter three non-zero integers. These will constitute how many counters are in each Pile.

The machine then asks who goes first.

A turn consists of selecting a Pile and taking a number of counters from that pile.

For example, if the Piles contain 3, 7 and 12 counters, a legal move consists of taking from 1 to 3 from Pile 1, or 1, 2, … 7 from Pile2 etc.

The object of the game is to be the player to take the last counter(s). So if Piles contain 0 2 0, the player whose turn it is will take 2 from Pile 2 and win.

The program must play and optimal strategy so if it has a winning position it will win the game. If it does not have a winning position it should try to extend the game.

At the end of the game, the program must declare the winner.

Data was collected on annual personal time (in hours) taken by a random selection of 50 women and 55 men employed by a medium-sized company. We know that the data for women and men is normally distributed. The Human Resources Department believes that the amount of personal time used by women is less than the amount of personal time used by men.

The sample of women took an average of 25 hours of personal time with a standard deviation of 4.9 hours. The men took an average of 27.6 hours of personal time with a standard deviation of 4.8 hours. Assuming the population standard deviations are equal, test the Human Resources Departments claim at α = 0.05.

1. State the null (H₀) and alternate (H_A) hypotheses.

2. Check the assumptions

3. Give the test statistic.

4. Give the P-value and the conclusion reached about the null hypothesis based on the P-value.

5. Summarize the final conclusion in the context of the claim.

6. Also construct a 95% confidence interval for the mean difference. Does this confidence interval include the value of 0? Should it? Explain

You are a researcher at a small biotech company and your company has just obtained the license for use of a human GENOMIC DNA fragment putatively encoding a potentially novel protein, which is thought to regulate p53, the known tumor supressor protein. The scientists who originally cloned this GENE fragment HDM5 "claim" that HDM5 shares 90% DNA sequence homology with one of the HDM2 genes (refer to the review Levine & Oren, 2009). They propose that HDM5 may have HDM2-like properties and may be involved in regulating cell proliferation, and thus a good target to potentially develop as a cancer therapy. Your company has asked you to characterize the gene and gene products, as well as to provide an opinion as to its potential human therapeutic uses.

1. Before proceeding, you wish to know whether this gene is actually expressed in humans ?Describe, in detail, 2 efficient experimental approaches to answer this question. ?Discuss whether your proposed methods measure synthesis or accumulation of the product

1. In the article “The human Vomeronasal Organ. Part II: Prenatal Development” (Journal of Anatomy, Vol.197, Issue 3, pp 421 -436), T. Smith and K. Bhatnagar examined the controversial issue of the human vomeronasal organ, regarding its structure, function, and identity. The following table shows the age of fetuses (x) in weeks and the length of crown-rump (y), in millimeters.

   x	10	10	13	13	18	19	19	23	25	28
   y	66	66	108	106	161	166	177	228	235	280

2. Give a point estimate of length of crown-rump in millimeter of an 18 weeks old fetus. Is this value the same as the observe value? What is the difference?

3. Find the 95% confidence interval for y when x = 18 (t.95= 2.05)

3. Calculate a 99% confidence interval of the slope of the actual population regression line (x-variable coefficient

Edit: Forgot to mark X and Y, apologies

True/false/ambiguous. For each of the following, indicate whether the statement is true, false, or ambiguous, and briefly explain your answer. If your answer depends on any assumptions, state them clearly. Use graphs or equations to illustrate your answer whenever it is helpful.

11. In efficiency wage models, employers take the market wage as given, and then choose the level of effort at which employees are required to work.

12. Mandatory retirement only makes sense in a delayed compensation (or underpayment-overpayment) model of earnings

13. In negotiating a salary with your employer, you should always try to get the highest salary possible – that is, the salary just below the level at which the employer would choose not to hire you. Otherwise you are leaving money on the table.

14. Workers are willing to invest in increasing their specific human capital as long as they capture all the economic returns to that investment.

15. If the economic return to school is due to signaling rather than human capital investment, then the private return to schooling is higher than the social return.

Which of the following terms best describes large patterns of normal cultural or social behavior, as well as laws and policy, that reinforce a given behavior within individuals?

Antonio is in the habit of eating chips and cookies and other snacks after dinner while watching TV. Recently he has begun to try to change this habit by instead either going for a walk or a run after dinner, or lifting simple hand weights and using exercise bands for strength building in front of the TV at night. Which process of change is Antonio engaging in?

What is NOT true of Ecological Models of Health Behavior?