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A tech company with $500 employees self-insures its health plan. They have a ‘Specific Stop-Loss’ limit of $$75,000. If one employee incurs $$200,000 in medical bills, how much is the employer’s final out-of-pocket responsibility for this specific claim?

PLS differs from PCA because PLS:

LASSO is often associated with:

In the decoding pipeline, which step typically comes immediately after signal detection?

Spike sorting errors can distort downstream measures of interactions (e.g., measured correlations) between neurons.

Prairie Vision Corp. reported net income of $2,000,000 for the year. The company had 600,000 common shares outstanding at January 1 and issued an additional 300,000 shares on July 1. The company also has 40,000 cumulative preferred shares with a stated annual dividend of $3 per share. No dividends were declared during the year. On April 1, the company issued an additional 10,000 preferred shares with identical terms. The assistant controller calculated basic EPS using total net income and a weighted average of common shares, and did not deduct any preferred dividends, arguing that no dividends were declared and that the April issuance should only affect future periods. The CFO disagrees and emphasizes both the cumulative nature of the preferred shares and the time-weighted impact of the additional issuance. What is basic earnings per share?

In the figure shown, the organism indicated with the arrow could be a(an)_______________________________

Read the following information and answer the questions at the end.  A major food processing company produces oil from corn and soybeans.  The five units that filter the oil during processing are located in one building.  One day, a foreman rushed into his supervisor’s office: “Number One Filter is leaking. There is oil all over the floor of the filter house.”  A mechanic was sent to fix the leak, but couldn’t tell much because the oil had already been cleaned up. The next day there was more leaked oil. Another mechanic examined the situation and traced the leak back to the cleanout hatch of the filter unit. He was puzzled though, because the cleanout hatch looked just fine and the gasket looked new.  He cleaned up the spilled oil and replaced the gasket just to be on the safe side.  The hatch continued to leak oil for the next several days while everyone offered their own opinions on what might be the cause of the leak.  Each day the processed oil was checked for contaminants and the spilled oil was cleaned up. Nearly a week passed and the problem still continued. Eventually someone asked, “How come the gasket on the Number One Filter has square corners? They always used to have rounded corners.”  A quick check of the filters revealed that the other four pumps still had round-cornered gaskets. This led to the discovery that the square-cornered gasket on the Number One Filter had been installed the evening before the leak was first noticed. It had come from a new lot purchased from a new supplier who charged 50 cents less per unit. This led to the question “How can they sell them for 50 cents less?” and to the subsequent observation “Because they don’t work.” The new square-cornered gasket was compared with the old gaskets. It was easy to see that the new ones were thinner and uneven. It was equally clear that this gasket had never been designed to be used on this kind of filter unit. It would always leak and should never have been installed or purchased. Consequently, all the square-cornered gaskets were discarded. After changing back to the round-cornered gasket, the leaking stopped. Interpret the three levels of “fix” for the above situation, i.e. what would it mean to fix the output, fix the process, and fix the system?

BONUS QUESTION Refer to the comic below. Discuss concepts/tools of quality management and process improvement that are illustrated in the comic (either positively or negatively). A response of only a sentence or two would be insufficient to demonstrate full understanding.

List at least two of the three “leverage points” process improvement and briefly explain the rationale why each is a leverage point. For a bonus point, list and explain the third leverage point.