“Innovation Applied” Please respond to the following:

 

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Assignment – Coolhunting

Researchers visit the sites where they believe cool resides, follow it, and bring it back to be used in product development and marketing communications. This type of field work is known as “coolhunting.” By extension, the spread of market ideas can be tracked via social media data.

(According to some scholars, the key to coolhunting is to look for cool people first and cool things later. Since cool things are always changing, cool people on the other hand are a constant).

The assignment consists in the following:

• Select and visit the social media outlet of your choice.
• Select material posted to social media and create a journal of observations and reflections. You can report these observations in a bulleted or numbered list.
• Identify the categories or trends (e.g. mobile devices) emerged from the data.
• Prepare a brief report, incorporating the journal of observations, answer to the following questions and a summary of the most important insights found.

• To what groups your cool finding(s) would apply? Describe its characteristics, behaviors and/or language.
• Provide a summary of your cool findings or trends, including a link, sentence, word or image that illustrate each finding.

Format

• The minimum number of pages is 2 and the maximum number is 3, not including references.
• Please use Times New Roman font, 12 pt.
• Be precise, concise and to the point.

 

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Non-for-Profit Financial Reporting Review

Due Week 9 and worth 240 points

Select one (1) not-for-profit organization in an area of interest to you and review the financial statements and audit report for the organization. The financial statements and audit report of the not-for-profit organization should be readily and publically available on an active Website.

Write a three to five (3-5) page paper in which you:

1. Analyze the selected not-for-profit’s financial statements to determine if the statements conform to Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) guidance in Statement No. 117, Financial Statements of Not-for-Profit Organizations (FASB ASC 958-205-45). Explain the selected organization’s use of the three (3) fund categories. Recommend at least two (2) areas of potential interest to the stakeholder concerning the status of revenue and expenses.
2. Analyze the organization’s statement of cash flows. Explain the format that the organization utilizes, including any unique areas of emphasis that differ from-GAAP accounting format.
3. Compare the organization’s reporting of pledges and contributions to its reporting of exchange transactions. Discuss the funds that are utilized.
4. Assess the fiscal condition of the selected organization utilizing and interpreting financial indicators, using financial ratios that are widely accepted as being indicative of fiscal health. This assessment should also be expanded to include fund-raising analysis, program review, contributions, and grant analysis and revenue analysis.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Assess the accounting and financial reporting requirements for not-for-profit organizations.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in government and not-for-profit accounting.
• Write clearly and concisely about government and not-for-profit accounting using proper writing mechanics

 

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The Six Sigma DMAIC model was developed in the mid-1980s by General Electric. Since its inception, Six Sigma has become a standard for continuous improvement and quality enhancement efforts. Tenets of the DMAIC methodology include:

Define – Characterize the problem, including scope and stakeholders.

Measure – Establish process flows and performance levels.

Analyze – Investigate for root cause and key variables involved in product variation.

Improve – Determine the most appropriate actions to reduce defect opportunities and implement them.

Control – Establish process control and continuous measurement to ensure problem has been corrected.

For this activity, consider the Six Sigma DMAIC model in responding to the following:

• If you applied statistical measures to production data, which part of the DMAIC model would you be using?
• Could you skip any of the DMAIC processes in solving production problems or reducing defects? Which one of these processes could be bypassed and why? What effect would this change in the DMAIC process have on production problems or reducing defects?

A minimum of one reference is required.

 

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Supreme Court Rejects Death Penalty for Child Rape

WASHINGTON — The death penalty is unconstitutional as a punishment for the rape of a child, a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The 5-to-4 decision overturned death penalty laws in Louisiana and five other states. The only two men in the country who have been sentenced to death for the crime of child rape, both in Louisiana, will receive new sentences of life without parole.

The court went beyond the question in the case to rule out the death penalty for any individual crime — as opposed to “offenses against the state,” such as treason or espionage — “where the victim’s life was not taken.”

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said there was “a distinction between intentional first-degree murder on the one hand and non-homicide crimes against individual persons,” even such “devastating” crimes as the rape of a child, on the other.

The decision was the third in the last six years to place a categorical limitation on capital punishment. In 2002, the court barred the execution of mentally retarded defendants. In 2005, it ruled that the Constitution bars the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18.

Nonetheless, despite this trend toward narrowing the application of the death penalty, there was no suggestion from the majority that the court was moving toward the abolition of capital punishment, which Justice John Paul Stevens called for in an opinion two months ago that no other justice joined.

Justice Kennedy said Wednesday that while the court’s death penalty jurisprudence “remains sound,” it should not be expanded to cover a crime for which no one has been executed in the United States for the past 44 years.

The case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, No. 07-343, was an appeal by one of the two Louisiana inmates, Patrick Kennedy. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter, whose injuries were severe enough to require emergency surgery. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Mr. Kennedy’s conviction and rejected his challenge to the constitutionality of his sentence.

The United States Supreme Court prohibited capital punishment for rape in a 1977 case, Coker v. Georgia, in which the victim, while only 16 years old, was married and had the legal status of an adult. It was not clear at the time whether that decision was limited to the rape of an adult woman, or whether it barred the death penalty for any rape. The court on Wednesday treated the issue of capital punishment for child rape as a fresh question, not governed by any existing precedent. As a matter of constitutional analysis, the question in the case was whether the death penalty was so disproportionate to the offense as to amount to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The court’s modern precedents interpret the Eighth Amendment according to “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Using that benchmark, Justice Kennedy said the majority had reached its conclusion based on “our own independent judgment” about the implications of extending the death penalty to child rape as well as on the fact that the great majority of states have declined to do so.

The Louisiana law extending the death penalty to the rape of children under the age of 12 dates to 1995. The states that followed were Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. Unlike Louisiana, those states all require that a defendant have a previous rape conviction or some other aggravating factor in order to be subject to the death penalty, and no one has yet been sentenced to death under any of the laws.

Justice Kennedy said there was thus a national consensus against applying capital punishment for the crime.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. sharply disputed this conclusion. He said that because many judges and lawyers had interpreted the 1977 Coker decision as barring capital punishment for any rape, state legislatures “have operated under the ominous shadow” of that decision “and thus have not been free to express their own understanding of our society’s standards of decency.”

The fact that six states in modern times have nonetheless enacted such laws, Justice Alito said, “might represent the beginning of a new evolutionary line” that “would not be out of step with changes in our society’s thinking since Coker was decided.” He said there were abundant indications that society had become more aware of and concerned about sex crimes against children.

Those who voted with Justice Kennedy in the majority were Justice Stevens and Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the dissent, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Addressing the separate question of the court’s “own judgment,” Justice Kennedy suggested that the flow of death penalty cases for child rape could overwhelm the country’s criminal justice system. He noted that in 2005 there were 5,702 reported rapes of children under the age of 12.

“In this context, which involves a crime that in many cases will overwhelm a decent person’s judgment,” Justice Kennedy said, “we have no confidence that the imposition of the death penalty would not be so arbitrary as to be freakish.”

He continued: “We cannot sanction this result when the harm to the victim, though grave, cannot be quantified in the same way as death of the victim.”

Justice Kennedy also said capital punishment for child rape presented specific problems, including the “special risks of unreliable testimony” by children and the fact that the crime often occurs within families. Families might be inclined to “shield the perpetrator from discovery” when the penalty is death, he said, leading to an increase in the problem of under-reporting of these crimes.

Justice Alito, in his dissenting opinion, said these concerns were “policy arguments” that were “simply not pertinent to the question whether the death penalty is ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment.” He said the Eighth Amendment “does not authorize this court to strike down federal or state criminal laws on the ground that they are not in the best interests of crime victims or the broader society.”

Both presidential candidates criticized the death penalty decision. Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, said: “That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing” He called the decision “an assault on law enforcement’s efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime.”

Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said, “I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime, and if a state makes a decision under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, that the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our Constitution.” He added that the Supreme Court should have set conditions for imposing the death penalty for the crime, “but it basically had a blanket prohibition, and I disagree with the decision.”

In a second decision on Wednesday, the court ruled that the introduction at trial of statements that a murder victim had made to the police violated the constitutional rights of the man who was on trial for killing her.

Before her death, the victim had summoned the police to complain that Dwayne Giles, later charged with her murder, had threatened to kill her. Writing for the court, Justice Scalia said that use of the statement violated Mr. Giles’s Sixth Amendment right to cross-examine the witnesses against him, unless the prosecution could first prove that he deliberately killed a witness was to make her unavailable to testify. Mr. Giles claimed self-defense in the killing.

The vote in the case, Giles v. California, No. 07-6053, was 6 to 3. Justices Breyer, Stevens, and Kennedy dissented. The decision overturned a ruling by the California Supreme Court, which had affirmed Mr. Giles’s murder conviction, but left the state free to try and prove the necessary intent.

Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court Rejects Death Penalty for Child Rape, nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/washington/26sco… (last visited March 9, 2010).

Giles v. California, 554 US 353 (2008)

QUESTION: Do you agree with the ruling? Why or why not? Your response should contain analysis of the law. All citations must be in Bluebook format.

 

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