1) Did your company WALMART  report or release EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization)?  What income or expenses items were adjusted from net income to reconcile to EBITDA figures? (HINT: You may need to find the earnings press release correlating to the annual financial report).

2) Did your company’s net income increase or decrease from the prior period? Identify the major reasons for the increase or decrease.

3) Imagine that you are a financial analyst for your company asked to generate a forecast of your company’s net income for the future period. You know that generally the best place to start in forecasting next year’s net income is this year’s net income. Given this starting point, look at the items in your company’s recent period financial statements and make a forecast of the next period’s income.

4) What was your company’s comprehensive income for the recent period?

5) Locate your company’s note on revenue recognition. What is the revenue recognition policy? What FASB Codification is being followed?

6) Did you company’s revenue increase or decrease from the prior period? Identify the major reason for the increase or decrease.

DISCUSSION:

Far from being an exact science, accounting involves estimation and judgment.  Consider the case of Nelson Palmer, chief financial officer of Jasper Enterprises.  Jasper is a relatively young, privately held company with thoughts of going public in the near future.  The owners of the business would like to include in the prospectus (a document containing information about the company and its past performance) financial statements that support their assertion that Jasper is a successful company with a bright future.

The problem is the income statement for the past year shows a slight decrease in income from the prior period.  When Nelson presented this information to the board of directors, he was told to revise the income statement.  He was specifically counseled to review his estimates associated with bad debt expense, warranty expense, and estimated useful life of depreciable assets.  He was invited to present his “revised” income statement to the board when it showed a 5% increase over last period’s net income – anything less would not do.

After reviewing the assumptions made regarding uncollectibles, warranties, and depreciation, Nelson found that he could revise his estimates and obtain the 5% target increase in income.  But he did not feel that the revised income statement properly reflected the performance of Jasper for the period.

1. What are the risks to Nelson of revising the income statement to meet the target?

2. What are the risks to Nelson of not revising the income statement?

Research Problems

[WLOs: 2, 3] [CLO: 3]

Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read the following chapters from your textbook, and refer to the Research Proposal Project final project assignment as a reference in Week 6 for what you will be compiling for this project to gain an understanding of what research problem might be most appropriate.

• Chapter 1: The Nature and Tools of Research
  • Pages 1-9, 19-27
• Chapter 2: The Problem: The Heart of the Research Process
• Chapter 3: Review of the Related Literature
• Chapter 4: Planning Your Research Project

In addition, watch Creating a Research Question (Links to an external site.) and What Is research? (Links to an external site.)

Select a human/social service organization, which can be where you are currently employed, or where you would have an interest in gaining future employment. You will use this organization and research problem as the basis of your final Research Proposal Project.

Chapters 1 to 4 of the Leedy and Ormrod text will help guide you as decide what the problem is that you would like to propose to evaluate, what literature is going to be most appropriate for this proposal, and how to plan with the proposal. The chapters will guide you on how to construct and write the research proposal. It is important to select your research problem carefully. The following considerations should be addressed in the assignment:

• How do you know when you have a legitimate research problem?
• How would you delineate the subparts of the social problem for your research project?
• How did you make your determinations and what were the details of the determination process?
• How would you plan for such a research process?
• How do your tentative research question(s) apply to your final project?

Your instructor will provide feedback on the research problem and the proposed research question which will serve as “approval” to proceed with the project as a comment along with your grade in the gradebook. You may find Narrowing a Topic and Developing a Research Question (Links to an external site.) from the Writing Center to be useful in this assignment.

The Research Problems learning activity will be submitted to a Canvas dropbox. The paper must be two to three double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA Style (Links to an external site.) as outlined in the Writing Center’s APA Formatting for Microsoft Word (Links to an external site.) . The paper must utilize Academic Voice (Links to an external site.) and two scholarly sources (see Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.) for assistance). The scholarly sources need to be formatted in APA Style as outlined in the Writing Center’s APA: Citing Within Your Paper (Links to an external site.) guide, and the separate references page should be formatted according to the APA: Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.) resource.

•  Social Forces and Issues Shaping Curriculum Planning
  Preparation
  Research the student population and neighborhood demographics of your immediate area such as your county or city and the demographics of your state. Look at the most recent election results, especially for school board and elected state officials, and see what their opinions are about education. Especially note if your area is either aligned with your larger state or differs from your larger state.
  Student population description includes age, cultural diversity, family situation, academic achievement levels, and general attitudes toward school. Neighborhood refers to geographic setting, income levels, physical surroundings, and crime or safety challenges. Access demographic information from your district, city, county, or state websites and cite the URLs for this information in your paper.
  Scenario
  Assume you are leading a team of administrators, parents, students, and teachers to plan curricula that include the grade and subject you have been using to answer your discussion questions. Determine the top five social forces that you want to address. Describe three key issues of each social force, recommend a method to address the issues, and discuss the benefits expected. You can apply your paper to just the one grade and subject or broaden it to a grade range such as K–2, 3–5, middle school, et cetera. Otherwise, you can expand the grade range of your subjects such as elementary science or middle school ELA.
  Instructions
  Write a 6–8 page paper in which you: 
  1. Describe the demographics of your school district and compare them to the demographics of the county or city in which it resides. 
  2. Compare your local demographics to your state demographics, including recent election results, and note any major education issues that came up during the most recent election.
  3. Describe the top five social forces that you want to address through curriculum planning.
     1. Explain why you think these are the top five. 
     2. Explain why you think curriculum planning will help address these social forces. 
  4. Describe three key issues for each social force.
     1. Recommend a method to address the issue. 
     2. Discuss the benefits expected.
•  This course requires the use of Strayer Writing Standards. For assistance and information, please refer to the Strayer Writing Standards link in the left-hand menu of your course. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
  The specific course learning outcome associated with this assignment is:
  1. Account for the social force issues in a school’s curriculum planning.
•  

Using the Library Information Resource Network (LIRN), JSTOR, or any other electronic journal database, research six (6) peer-reviewed articles that can be used to answer your upcoming PA 1 assignment. Your discussion should summarize the articles in such a way that it can justify any arguments you may present in your PA 1 assignment and should be different from the abstract. In addition to your researched peer-reviewed article, you must include an example of the article researched as it is applied by industry (company, business entity, and so forth).

Please note: This article summary should not be the only article researched for your PA 1 assignment. You may (and should) have several other articles researched to fully answer your PA 1 assignment. The concept of this DQ is to allow students to be proactive in the research necessary to complete this assignment. You may use your article summary, partially or in its entirety in your PA 1 assignment.

Part 1 – For each the articles you’re going to use in Part 2 do these:

● In correct APA format, write the Reference of the article.

● Clearly state what the article is about and its purpose.

● Describe how you will use it in your upcoming assignment.

● Repeat for a total of six (6) peer-reviewed sources.

Part 2

For Professional Assignment 1 – Write 3 to 5 pages APA format discussing the following requirements: 

1. Identify      a product/service of your choice 
2. Provide the      description of your product and market 
3. Identify      your segment, target market, and positioning strategy
4. Conduct SWOT analysis 
5. PESTEL analysis 

Remember, you must have at least six (6) peer-reviewed sources plus the textbook

For this Data Workshop, you will be analyzing your own impression management in action. You will analyze your impression management in two interactions and then write a response to the questions below. Submit your answers as a Word document to the assignment dropbox on Canvas. In total, your response should fill about one to two pages in order to be thorough yet concise in your discussion.

They say that you never get to make a first impression twice, that people can size us up in a matter of seconds and quickly jump to conclusions about who we are. How well do you know yourself and the impressions you make on others? This exercise is designed to help make your own impression-management visible—and to help you see how integral it is to your everyday life. For this Data Workshop you will be doing participant observation research with yourself as the subject. Research that involves observing one’s own behavior is known as autoethnography. Refer to Chapter 2 for a review of this method.

Your task will be to observe yourself as you participate in two different social situations. Afterward, you will do a comparative analysis of your presentation of self in each setting. As you examine the most minute details of yourself in interactions, you will probably discover that you perform somewhat different versions of yourself in the two situations. “Doing student,” for instance, might be very different from “doing partner” or “doing friend.” Let’s see.

Step 1: Observation
Choose two different situations that you will encounter this week in your everyday life and commit to observing yourself for thirty minutes as you participate in each. For example, you may observe yourself at work, at a family birthday celebration, at lunch with friends, in your math class, riding on the bus or train, or watching an athletic match. The two situations you choose don’t need to be extraordinary in any way; in fact, the more mundane, the better. But they should be markedly different from each other.

Step 2: Field notes
In an autoethnography, your own actions, thoughts, and feelings are the focus of the study. Write some informal field notes about your experience so that you can refer to them when you discuss your findings. Your notes can be casual in tone and loose in format, but as always, it’s a good idea to write them as soon as possible after your time in the field. That way, you capture more of the details you’ll want to remember. Aim for at least one (or more!) full page of notes. Then, use your notes to answer the following questions:

1. What type of “front” do you encounter when you enter each situation? What role do you play and who is your “audience”?
2. How does the “region” or setting (location, scenery, and props) affect your presentation of self there?
3. Can you identify “backstage” and “frontstage” regions for each situation? Which of your activities are preparation and which are performance?
4. What type of “personal front” (appearance, manner, dress) do you bring to each situation?
5. How are your facial expressions, body language, and so forth (“expressions given off”) different in each situation?
6. What kinds of things do you say (“expressions given”) in each situation?
7. How convincing are you at managing the impression you want to make on others in each of the two situations?
8. Who are you in each situation? Do you present a slightly different version of yourself in each? Why?

Finally, consider the following Goffman-inspired questions:

1. Does engaging in impression management mean that we have no basic, unchanging self? If we bring different selves to different situations, what does that say about the idea of a “true self”? This issue is an important one, and we hope you use your Data Workshop findings to pursue it in greater depth.

You can submit your fieldnotes with your assignment if you would like to, but this is not required.