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CI-310 : November 15, 2000

• Taste Testing
• Class Critiques

Spreadsheet Review

Substitute Problem: Aplus.com

You intend to operate your business out of your dorm room. Your fixed expenses include your web server ($5 per week) , advertising ($100 per week on Tshirts that you will distribute at RMC away-game sporting events), and a weekly staff party for your writers involving two kegs, ten pizzas, and buying off the RA ($150/week).

Your variable expenses for each paper are the $10 per paper that you will pay other students for writing the papers for you. Your sub-contractors will write these papers while standing watch at the RMC desk, watching over the computer lab, or sitting in class pretending to work on their web page.

You will charge $25 per paper. In an attempt to increase business, you have guaranteed that your papers will receive grades of A or A+, or they'll get their money back. Not wanting to be over-extended, you intend to operate under the assumption that 25% of your papers will result in returns. Therefore, your actual revenue will be (#papers x $25 x .75) .

You suffer one other constraint: you only have time to deal with a certain number (FIVE) of these orders per day, five days a week. So you have a capacity limit of 25 orders per week.

• Question One: How many orders a week will you have to take in order to break even?
• Question Two: What is your maximum potential profit per week?

• Question Three: A. How much of your savings /investment did you lose during the weeks it took you to get to the break even point? B. How long will it take to restore your savings and investment?

After you have been operating profitably for a while, your OneTrueLove (OTL) suggests that you hire him/her as your CIO, doubling your capacity to 70 reports per week. OTL offers to perform this work for a flat rate of $250 per week, and hints you'll be able to write off your dates as a business expense. As you have only filed short-form tax returns, you choose to ignore the tax implications of this approach, but you hire OTL.

• FourA: As you and OTL move above 35 orders per week, and your return rate persists at 25%, you consider the impact of accepting the 36th order per week. How much did you lose/profit by moving from taking 35 orders by yourself to accepting the 36th order with OTL?
• FourB: At what volume of orders-per-week will you break even on your decision to hire OTL for $250 per week?
• FourC: What will your profit be at 70 orders per week?
• FourD: As you reflect on the hiring of your OTL, you discover the Employer's Conundrum: Employees are very costly, take a long time to justify their salary, and have to remain with you a long time to cost-justify your investment in them. Given this new insight, what do you intend to mention at your next job interview?

Databases

Alternative Problem: The APlus.Com Database

• Name: text
• Campus: text
• Email address: text
• Expertise1 : text
• Expertise2 : text
• Number of Papers Written: numerical
• Number of Papers Returned: numerical

• Create and save a new query: Display all students who can write on Art. Print it out.
• You want to identify your poor performers. Create and save a new query: Display all students with a return rate greater than 20%. Print it out.
• Do Some Business, Add new data: Mary did 3 papers, 2 were returned. Joe did 4 papers, 0 were returned.
• Party Opportunity! Who should we invite? Create and save a new query: Display all Moon students with a return rate less than 15%. Print it out.
• You have a problem: a great client needs a paper on HTML that will certainly get an A. Who do you assign it to?
• Print the table after completing all these steps.

Quiz.

• War Games
• The Bedford Incident
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Fail Safe
• Doctor Strangelove
• Wall Street

Timing

• Enjoy your Holiday.
• Upon your return, you must submit your Personal Project.
• Upon your return, you must submit Quiz Four.
• You should be moving along on your Group Project.
• Finals Distributed Nov 29th.