2 Reading summaries

Guiding and Encouraging Parental Involvement Brochure

Guiding and Encouraging Parental Involvement Brochure.

For this week’s assignment, you will be designing a one-page digital brochure for parents outlining how they can help motivate their children to read. The brochure can be bi-fold, tri-fold, half page, full page, whatever your imagination can come up with, and grabs the parent’s attention!Guiding questions for this assignment include:What can I do at home to encourage reading?How can I facilitate the love of learning and reading at home?What types of behaviors can I display as a parent to encourage reading for enjoyment?How can I share what I know with other parents?Your response should be in the form of a digital brochure, with graphics and images to support the content.
Guiding and Encouraging Parental Involvement Brochure

The irresponsible cell phone users

essay help online When a cell phone goes off in a classroom or at a concert, we are irritated, but at least our lives are not endangered. When we are on the road, however, irresponsible cell phone users are more than irritating: They are putting our lives at risk. Many of us have witnessed drivers so distracted by dialing and chatting that they resemble drunk drivers, weaving between lanes, for example, or nearly running down pedestrians in crosswalks. A number of bills to regulate use of cell phones on the road have been introduced in state legislatures, and the time has come to push for their passage. Regulation is needed because drivers using phones are seriously impaired and because laws on negligent and reckless driving are not sufficient to punish offenders. No one can deny that cell phones have caused traffic deaths and injuries. Cell phones were implicated in three fatal accidents in November 1999 alone. Early in November, two-year-old Morgan Pena was killed by a driver distracted by his cell phone. Morgan’s mother, Patti Pena, reports that the driver “ran a stop sign at 45 mph, broadsided my vehicle and killed Morgan as she sat in her car seat.” A week later, corrections officer Shannon Smith, who was guarding prisoners by the side of the road, was killed by a woman distracted by a phone call (Besthoff). On Thanksgiving weekend that same month, John and Carole Hall were killed when a Naval Academy midshipman crashed into their parked car. The driver said in court that when he looked up from the cell phone he was dialing, he was three feet from the car and had no time to stop (Stockwell B8). Expert testimony, public opinion, and even cartoons suggest that driving while phoning is dangerous. Frances Bents, an expert on the relation between cell phones and accidents, estimates that between 450 and 1,000 crashes a year have some connection to cell phone use (Layton C9). In a survey published by Farmers Insurance Group, 87% of those polled said that cell phones affect a driver’s ability, and 40% reported having close calls with drivers distracted by phones. Scientific research confirms the dangers of using phones while on the road. In 1997 an important study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors, Donald Redelmeier and Robert Tibshirani, studied 699 volunteers who made their cell phone bills available in order to confirm the times when they had placed calls. The participants agreed to report any nonfatal collision in which they were involved. By comparing the time of a collision with the phone records, the researchers assessed the dangers of driving while phoning. The results are unsettling: We found that using a cellular telephone was associated with a risk of having a motor vehicle collision that was about four times as high as that among the same drivers when they were not using their cellular telephones. This relative risk is similar to the hazard associated with driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit. (456) The news media often exaggerated the latter claim (“similar to” is not “equal to”); nonetheless, the comparison with drunk driving suggests the extent to which cell phone use while driving can impair judgment. A 1998 study focused on Oklahoma, one of the few states to keep records on fatal accidents involving cell phones. Using police records, John M. Violanti of the Rochester Institute of Technology investigated the relation between traffic fatalities in Oklahoma and the use or presence of a cell phone. He found a ninefold increase in the risk of fatality if a phone was being used and a doubled risk simply when a phone was present in a vehicle (522-23). The latter statistic is interesting, for it suggests that those who carry phones in their cars may tend to be more negligent (or prone to distractions of all kinds) than those who do not. Some groups have argued that state traffic laws make legislation regulating cell phone use unnecessary. Sadly, this is not true. Laws on traffic safety vary from state to state, and drivers distracted by cell phones can get off with light punishment even when they cause fatal accidents. For example, although the midshipman mentioned earlier was charged with vehicular manslaughter for the deaths of John and Carole Hall, the judge was unable to issue a verdict of guilty. Under Maryland law, he could only find the defendant guilty of negligent driving and impose a $500 fine (Layton C1). Such a light sentence is not unusual. The driver who killed Morgan Pena in Pennsylvania received two tickets and a $50 fine–and retained his driving privileges (Pena). In Georgia, a young woman distracted by her phone ran down and killed a two year-old; her sentence was ninety days in boot camp and five hundred hours of community service (Ippolito J1). The families of the victims are understandably distressed by laws that lead to such light sentences. When certain kinds of driver behavior are shown to be especially dangerous, we wisely draft special laws making them illegal and imposing specific punishments. Running red lights, failing to stop for a school bus, and drunk driving are obvious examples; phoning in a moving vehicle should be no exception. Unlike more general laws covering negligent driving, specific laws leave little ambiguity for law officers and for judges and juries imposing punishments. Such laws have another important benefit: They leave no ambiguity for drivers. Currently, drivers can tease themselves into thinking they are using their car phones responsibly because the definition of “negligent driving” is vague. As of December 2000, twenty countries were restricting use of cell phones in moving vehicles (Sundeen 8). In the United States, it is highly unlikely that legislation could be passed on the national level, since traffic safety is considered a state and local issue. To date, only a few counties and towns have passed traffic laws restricting cell phone use. For example, in Suffolk County, New York, it is illegal for drivers to use a handheld phone for anything but an emergency call while on the road (Haughney A8). The first town to restrict use of handheld phones was Brooklyn, Ohio (Layton C9). Brooklyn, the first community in the country to pass a seat belt law, has once again shown its concern for traffic safety. Laws passed by counties and towns have had some effect, but it makes more sense to legislate at the state level. Local laws are not likely to have the impact of state laws, and keeping track of a wide variety of local ordinances is confusing for drivers. Even a spokesperson for Verizon Wireless has said that statewide bans are preferable to a “crazy patchwork quilt of ordinances” (qtd. in Haughney A8). Unfortunately, although a number of bills have been introduced in state legislatures, as of early 2001 no state law seriously restricting use of the phones had passed–largely because of effective lobbying from the wireless industry. Despite the claims of some lobbyists, tough laws regulating phone use can make our roads safer. In Japan, for example, accidents linked to cell phones fell by 75% just a month after the country prohibited using a handheld phone while driving (Haughney A8). Research suggests and common sense tells us that it is not possible to drive an automobile at high speeds, dial numbers, and carry on conversations without significant risks. When such behavior is regulated, obviously our roads will be safer. Because of mounting public awareness of the dangers of drivers distracted by phones, state legislators must begin to take the problem seriously. “It’s definitely an issue that is gaining steam around the country,” says Matt Sundeen of the National Conference of State Legislatures (qtd. in Layton C9). Lon Anderson of the American Automobile Association agrees: “There is momentum building,” he says, to pass laws (qtd. in Layton C9). The time has come for states to adopt legislation restricting the use of cell phones in moving vehicles.

BPA 331 University of Phoenix Financial Management of an Endowment Case Study

BPA 331 University of Phoenix Financial Management of an Endowment Case Study.

You and your Learning Team members
are the financial managers of a midsize nonprofit that has just received a
substantial endowment from a longtime supporter. The board members are excited
because years of effort have gone into seeking this endowment, and they are
expecting that the endowment will mean increased financial stability for the
nonprofit in the future.The board members have been
distressed by money shortages in recent years caused by donor fatigue and the
economic downturn. However, they do not know how an endowment should be
managed. A few members have knowledge of accounting and auditing, but no one on
the board is an investment expert. The nonprofit has no experience in endowment
investment, given that this is the first endowment the nonprofit has received.As the financial managers of the
nonprofit, you have been asked to take on the responsibility of establishing
and managing the endowment, which is a situation not uncommon in small and
midsize nonprofits. You are all very pleased with the infusion of capital as an
endowment, but you are taking on the role of managing the endowment with some
trepidation because you know how unprepared the nonprofit is for this new
financial management task. Your team wants to perform well
with the endowment for the mission of the nonprofit, but you do not want to
take the blame if the endowment does not achieve excellence, despite your best
efforts, because of uncontrollable events like swings in the stock market and
economic fluctuations.What should you take into consideration and what steps should you undertake if you intend to take on responsibility for the endowment in addition to your other duties?With the new infusion of capital, why is it important for your nonprofit to develop and maintain an internal control system?Why are independent financial reviews necessary for this nonprofit?With new infusions of capital, how does the Sarbanes-Oxley Act assist you in being a more responsible financial manager?Include references and citations to support your responses. Format your presentation consistent with APA guidelines.
BPA 331 University of Phoenix Financial Management of an Endowment Case Study

Substation system

Substation system. Can you help me understand this Engineering question?

You are an automation engineer at an X Power Enterprise Company, which owns several substations. Because of deregulation and the increased need for economy and reliability, the company intends to upgrade its old SCADA system. The present system in the substations has legacy RTU’s hardwired to meters and protection relays for analogue measurements and to breaker and switch status information.
The RTU communicates with the SCADA master (at the control center) using a propriety vendor protocol over a serial communication link.
Control room at master station has only HMI’s for visualizing measurements and status, but no EMS system. Corporate office (non-operational) engineers do not have access to the system.
Starting at the substation, explain your concept for modernizing the SCADA. Explain the logical steps to begin with, and then complete your system such that it becomes capable of automation, and is able to perform advanced EMS functions such as AGC, can provide both real-time operational data, and enterprise level non-operational data. Remember that no two SCADA systems are the same, so you have room to suggest any reasonable solution. Explain what you would use for substation equipment, for protocols, for communications, and for SCADA applications at the Master substation.
Draw a conceptual diagram of your complete systems and label it.
Keep your answer within two pages.
Substation system