1) A group of software developers are geographically dispersed in three different continents of America, Asia and Europe. They use different types of communication and collaboration tools to facilitate working as team members. Explain with detail three primary challenges in terms of communication/collaboration that these software developers may face. Once explained the challenges, how do you think such teams can overcome these challenges?

2)Using an example (a job title), explain the “managerial level” of decision making, and describe the major characteristics of jobs at this level? How the use of Business intelligence (BI) helps employees at this level?

The United States of America has long been viewed as a land of opportunity where everyone is positioned to succeed. Stratification scholars have long argued that opportunity is limited based on the social class one was born into. An individual born into a higher social class background is likely to have more opportunities that one born into a lower social class background. This is believed to be true in post-zombie US as well. To explore this, please see the data from the New Reformed U.S. Census Bureau below comparing the percentage of state residents with a Bachelor’s degree with state median household income collected in 2013. This data represents the 10 most populated states in the Reformed U.S.

1. What is the r value for the relationship between the data distributions above?

2. What is the proportion of variance accounted for?

3. You will need to find the regression line for this data. With that in mind, what is the b for this data?

4. What is the a for this data?

5. Using the data above, what is the Y' for an X of 24.8?

6. Using the data above, what is the Y' for an X of 27.65?

7. In your own words but based on the strength and direction of the relationship you calculated, explain the relationship between education and median household income.

The United States of America (USA) have by far the highest negative trade balance among the world countries in absolute terms. At the same time they have continuously reduced the tariffs imposed on imports over the last decades (average import tarriff rate has gradually fallen from about 20% in the 1930’s to less than 2% currently). Please, provide your comment on this situation! Would you suggest the USA to impose more trade barriers in order to reduce their trade deficit – why or why not?

According to the Air Transport Association of America, the average operating cost of an MD-80 jet airliner is $2,087 per hour. Suppose the operating costs of an MD-80 jet airliner are normally distributed with a standard deviation of $160 per hour.

(Round the value of z to 2 decimal places. Round your answers to 2 decimal places.)

According to the Air Transport Association of America, the average operating cost of an MD-80 jet airliner is $2,087 per hour. Suppose the operating costs of an MD-80 jet airliner are normally distributed with a standard deviation of $166 per hour.

(Round the value of z to 2 decimal places. Round your answers to 2 decimal places.)

A run for your money

Developing countries in Latin America and Asia can borrow for longer

Aug 26th 2010

PERU is not an obvious investment darling. For much of its existence, the country has been in a state of default. As recently as 1990 the inflation rate was 7,500%. Yet in the past few years Peru has persuaded creditors to lend it money for ever-longer periods in its own currency. It issued its first 20-year local-currency bond in 2006; its debut 30-year bonds followed a year later. Earlier this year Peru was able to issue 300m soles ($105.2m) of 32-year local-currency bonds. Investors in these bonds are compensated for the risk of inflation by yields of just 6.9%, a once unthinkable prospect.

Peru is not alone. Anxious to wean themselves off flighty foreign funding after the crises of the 1990s, many emerging-market governments sought to build up local-currency bond issuance. Extending the maturity of bonds is the next step. In 2007 around 40% of Peru's local-currency debt was short-term (ie, maturing in less than a year). That had fallen to 30% by 2009, according to the Bank for International Settlements. In Mexico average maturities have gone from 1.5 years in 2000 to seven years a decade later, says Gerardo Rodríguez, who heads the country's debt office.

Asian countries are also trying to lock in yield-seeking investors. The Philippines is pursuing a number of debt swaps, offering to buy back shorter-dated debt in return for longer-dated issues. It hopes to stretch the country's average debt maturity from ten years to 25 years. In Indonesia, bonds maturing in 2011-13 were exchanged in July for bonds maturing in 2031.

Improving growth prospects and lower public debt than many rich-world issuers have allowed Asian and Latin American countries to lengthen maturities. (Europe's emerging markets have proved unable to do the same.) So too has a more professional approach to debt management. For instance, Uruguay created a debt agency in 2005. In the years that followed, it skewed its borrowing to the long end of the yield curve because it expected slower GDP growth, says Carlos Steneri, who heads the country's public-debt agency.

Domestic savings pools have deepened over the past decade to absorb the supply of local debt issues. The number of retail investors is rising as people become richer. Pension reform has led to the creation of funds that are flush with cash and need assets to match their long-term, local-currency liabilities. Most of Peru's 32-year bonds were reportedly picked up by local pension funds. Demand from such institutions explains why Latin America, with its more developed social-security net, is ahead of emerging Asia in extending its debt.

But a well-developed local market seems also to attract foreign investors. In Mexico a quarter of the long-dated local debt is held by foreigners. In the year to July, inflows to emerging-market debt funds have more than doubled to $21.6 billion from the previous year, according to EPFR Global, a financial-data firm. Whether investors are getting enough compensation for the risk of holding long-term emerging-market debt is questionable. But for issuers in a crowded sovereign-debt market, it means fewer trips to the well.

source : The Economist

question:

1.Please state and describe THREE country risks which will be incurred worldwide.

2.According to part (1), please suggest ONE main political/financial risk factor which this article reckons?

3. How can a MNC adjust its long-term financing upon the stated sovereign-debt market? Also, suggest ONE hedging instrument to tackle upon adjustment.

Difference in production process (Finance the project the same either way)

Mfg. Corp of America is using an old production process. Under this old process, they expect to have $175,000 of total variable costs,and $90,000 of total fixed costs for expected sales of 8,000 units. The price of each unit is $50. Mfg. Corp. is considering a choice of 2 new processes to use. It's sales will be 11,000 units with either of the new processes in place. Price per unit will remain $50. It's total variable and fixed costs under the new plans are as follows:

Plan A Plan B

Tot. Variable Costs = $75,000 Tot. Var Costs = $30,000

Total Fixed Costs = $150,000 Total Fixed Costs = $250,000

If the firm goes with the new process, it will need to raise $1,000,000.

$300,000 of which would be raised by issuing new bonds at a cost of 12%.

$700,000 would be raised by selling stock at $40 a share.

IT IS GOING TO ISSUE BOTH $300,000 + $700,000 = $1,000,000

The firm currently has $500,000 in debt outstanding at 6%, and has 50,000 shares of stock currently outstanding. The firm has a tax rate of 50%.

A. Fill in the blanks below.

B. Which alternative gives the company the highest EPS at the projected level of sales of each?

C. Compute the DOL, DFL, DTL for both plans.

D. What is the operating break even point (units) for the old process?

E. Which process should the firm use if it is a risk minimizer and profit maximizer?

Plan A Plan B

Labor Intensive Process Capital Intensive Process

SALES _____________ ______________

-VC _____________ ______________

-FC ______________ ______________

EBIT ______________ ______________

- I ______________ ______________

EBT ______________ ______________

- T ______________ ______________

NIAT ______________ ______________________

MANAGED CARE AND HEALTH INSURANCE PROJECT Pros and Cons of Managed Care in America Students will submit their Managed Care Project in APA format Introduction: Students will submit a one paragraph introduction of the topic they will be discussing. Body of the Paper will include the following. Explain your topic in detail. Define the Challenges and Problems with your topic. What are recommended solutions to the challenges and problems? Are there any implementation to solve the challenges and problems? What is your opinion on the topic and what would you do if you were in charge to fix the problem. Conclusion

For a recent "Smartest State in America" article, a journalist wants to know how many people with a bachelor's degree or higher are in each state. The journalist finds that there are an average of 5,000,000 people in each state with a bachelor's degree or higher, with a standard deviation of 450,000 people, normally distributed.

To further analyze her data, she wants to identify the amount of people that separates the lowest 12.5% of the means of the population with a bachelor's degree from the highest 87.5% in a sampling distribution of 25 states. Use Excel to find this amount of people.

Round x¯ to the nearest whole number.

Crossing the Quality Chasm

Janet Corrigan

Institute of Medicine

The Quality of Care in America Project was started about three years ago. The final report, Crossing the Quality Chasm, is a comprehensive review of the overall quality of the health care system, including an assessment of its safety and effectiveness and recommendations for a comprehensive strategy for improvement (IOM, 2001).

The first step in the project was a review of the literature by RAND. About 70 RAND studies have documented serious deficiencies and large gaps between the care people should receive and the care they actually do receive. Deficiencies were observed in all health care settings, in all age groups, and in all geographic areas. In other words, the problems are systemic and permeate the health care industry; problems are just as prevalent in traditional indemnity, or less managed, settings as in managed care settings.

Two factors influence how we approach this problem. The first is the expanding knowledge base, which has clearly overwhelmed physicians and made it all but impossible for an individual physician to provide high quality care on his or her own. A tremendous number of publications now report the results of randomized controlled trials, and the number of new drugs and medical devices and the amount of information flowing into the marketplace has increased exponentially.

The second major factor is the need to care for people with chronic conditions. A very limited number of chronic conditions, 15 or 20, account for the bulk of health care problems. If we targeted those conditions, we could make tremendous progress and affect a sizable proportion of the health care delivery system, as well as of the general population.

The models that are most useful in caring for the chronically ill are very different from our current delivery system models. Providing high-quality care to chronically ill individuals requires well designed care processes focused on information that meets the self-management needs of patients and their families. Patients with chronic illnesses require multidisciplinary care from teams of physicians, nurses, social workers, aides, and others. Team care is essential for high quality care.

Our current health care delivery system, which is organized around professionals and types of institutions, grew out of a need to provide primarily acute care rather than chronic care. This is one kind of chasm we have to cross. The health care delivery system must be reorganized to meet the real needs of patients.

Few clinical programs have the infrastructure to provide a full complement of services to chronically ill patients. Some institutions have well defined programs for particular chronic conditions, but few institutions or systems provide high quality care for the full range of chronic conditions. In addition, we have a problem in “scaling up”—exemplary programs are not replicated throughout the industry.

The lack of standardized performance measures has made it difficult if not impossible to make cross-institutional comparisons. For example, we have no standardized performance or outcome measures that enable us to identify which providers deliver exemplary care for diabetes. This creates two problems. First, we do not know where the best performers are. Second, the best performers are not rewarded for their excellent work. We need much better systems for managing knowledge and for using information technology to help people make decisions, and we need unfettered, timely access to clinical information.

Today, physician groups often operate as “silos” (i.e., in isolation) without benefit of the kind of information, infrastructure, and support they need to provide high quality care. On the one hand, we can no longer deliver health care through a collection of silos. On the other hand, we do not have the organizational support that can, for example, pull together the latest knowledge and make it readily available to providers and patients. If one looks on the Web, one finds 42,000 sites on lupus and 75,000 sites on breast cancer. Individual patients and individual professionals are overloaded with huge amounts of undigestible, disorganized information.

The Committee on Quality of Health Care in America recommended that the redesign process be initiated by focusing on priority areas. Specifically, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality should identify 15 priority areas and define them clearly so that everyone involved can work toward the same goals. The committee also recommended that Congress establish a $1 billion innovation fund to seed improvement projects and that purchasers, health care organizations, and professional groups begin to develop action plans immediately for each priority area. The goal should be a 50-percent improvement in quality and safety in the next five years.

Meaningful innovation in the health care delivery system will require some significant changes in the overall health system environment. The Chasm report describes changes in four key areas: (1) the use of information technology; (2) payment policies; (3) the development of best practices, decision support tools, and an accountability system; and (4) professional education and training (IOM, 2001).

We have many examples of how information technology can improve quality. For instance, we know that computerized order entry by physicians can reduce adverse drug events by 50 to 60 percent—an enormous improvement in safety. Reminder systems for physicians or patients and their families have been found to be effective in getting people the right services at the right time. The Institute of Medicine is working on a strategic plan for an information technology initiative that should be ready soon.

Second, current payment policies are complex, contradictory, and often work against improving quality. For example, current payment systems do not reward investments in information technology. Unlike investments in medical technology, investments in information technology do not directly generate billable services under Medicare or third-party-payer, fee-for-service systems. Hence, providers may realize a faster return on investments in a new surgical suite than they will on investments in an automated order entry system. Unfortunately, errors in clinical care contribute to rising health care expenditures because patients injured as a result of errors typically require more services and readmissions.

The problem is compounded because the marketplace typically cannot discern differences in quality. Because we do not have good comparative data for measuring quality and performance in medical care and patient outcomes, health care organizations, medical groups, and hospital systems that have better outcomes do no better in the marketplace than providers with poorer outcomes. We must move very aggressively to address these payment concerns before they stifle the adoption of information technologies critical to improving the safety and quality of care.

Third, we need to translate the evidence base into best practices that can be implemented in care delivery and then communicate this information to health care professionals and patients. In addition, we must develop and implement decision-support tools to assist clinicians and patients in using the clinical knowledge base effectively. Last but not least, the Chasm report calls for “transparency”—an accountability system that emphasizes the release of comparative data.

Fourth, we must make major changes in the medical education system. Currently, many providers are trained in environments that are not “wired.” Students are not exposed to technology and decision-support systems, evidence-based practices are not emphasized, and learning is not focused on multidisciplinary teams. In other words, we are not training individuals to practice or acquire the kinds of skills they will need to be effective in the health care delivery system we are attempting to create. Changing the medical education system will require the active participation of professional associations, educational leaders, and professional licensing and certification groups.

Go to:

FIVE-PART AGENDA FOR CHANGE

The committee put forward an agenda for changing the U.S. health care system:

Commit to a shared agenda for improvement in six areas: safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and fairness.

Adopt “10 rules” (see below) to guide the redesign of care processes.

Implement more effective organizational supports.

Focus initial efforts on priority areas.

Create an environment that fosters and rewards improvement.

Go to:

TEN RULES FOR REDESIGNING AND IMPROVING CARE

Private and public purchasers, health care organizations, clinicians, and patients should work together to redesign health care processes in accordance with the following rules.

Care should be based on continuous healing relationships. Patients should receive care whenever they need it and in many forms, not just through face-to-face visits. The health care system should be responsive at all times (24 hours a day, every day), and access to care should be provided over the Internet, by telephone, and by other means in addition to face-to-face visits.

Care should be customized based on the patient's needs and values. The system of care should be designed to meet the most common needs but should have the flexibility to respond to an individual patient's choices and preferences.

The patient should be in control. Patients should be given necessary information and the opportunity to exercise as much control as they choose over health care decisions that affect them. The health system should be able to accommodate differences in patient preferences and should encourage shared decision making.

The system should encourage shared knowledge and the free flow of information. Patients should have unfettered access to their own medical information and to clinical information. Clinicians and patients should communicate effectively and share information.

Decision making should be evidence-based. Patients should receive care based on the best available scientific knowledge. Care should not vary illogically from clinician to clinician or from place to place.

Safety should be a property of the system. Patients should be safe from injury caused by the care system. Reducing risk and ensuring safety will require systems that help prevent and mitigate errors.

The system should be transparent. The health care system should make information available to patients and their families that allows them to make informed decisions when selecting a health plan, a hospital, or a clinical practice or when choosing among alternative treatments. Patients should be informed of the system's performance on safety, evidence-based practice, and patient satisfaction.

The system should anticipate patients' needs. The health system should be proactive in anticipating a patient's needs, rather than simply reacting to events.

The system should constantly strive to decrease waste. The health system should not waste resources or patients' time.

The system should encourage cooperation among clinicians. Clinicians and institutions should actively collaborate and communicate with each other to ensure that patients receive appropriate care.

Please use the above article for the following question

1)

a. What strategies have you read about in the text?

b. How might you bring an employee along who struggles with change?

c. What tools might you see your staff needing to push forward facilitating this new climate for change?