This technical note provides a compiled 2021 annual report for the United States of America, consolidated for the public and private sectors. It includes financial statements, accompanying notes, discussion and analysis, and a summary of risk factors. An introductory section specifies the report’s overarching purpose, as well as describing the role of accounting more generally for any defined enti
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many people out of the office and into work-from-home setups. Use of video conferencing platforms, especially Zoom, skyrocketed during 2020 as meetings, presentations, and interviews started having to take place online. Virtual presence has become critical to professional success, but all too many people have made errors ranging from the silly to the disastrous in tryi
This technical note explains the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) Rule 50, put into place in the 1970s, which prohibited protest at the Olympic Games. The stated goals of the rule were to (1) protect the athletes; (2) minimize commercialization of the Games in what was known as the "clean venue" policy; (3) prevent the Games from becoming a vehicle for "promotion of political, religious or
Google Cloud Platform offers BigQuery ML, a popular cloud computing resource for developing data models. This note provides information about creating, evaluating, and deploying data models with BigQuery ML.
In innovation, experimentation is much talked about in the abstract, but poorly understood in practice. It bridges solution generation and implementation, yet often takes the form of smaller-scale pilots rather than learning-oriented experiments. Building an evidence base behind new ideas, and particularly being ready to discard what doesn’t work, is critical for successful innovation. This techni
The ability to achieve product–market alignment (PMA) differentiates businesses that will thrive from those that will fail. Yet many find it difficult to create—and sustain—products that continuously generate value, even as their markets change. Traditionally, managers seeking to develop new products or reexamine current offerings have relied on frameworks that compare customer views on the desira
This note describes the exponential growth of semiconductor technology over the last 40 years, as well as the evolution of the semiconductor value chain. Semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) are essential to all modern electronic equipment and are used in virtually every industry, including consumer electronics, office equipment, appliances, and automobiles. Semiconductor complexity and process
Machine-learning (ML) models have become a common tool used across a multitude of industries to help people make decisions. As these models have increased in predictive power, many have also grown in complexity. The pursuit to improve the accuracy of predictions has diminished the interpretability of many models—leaving users with little understanding of the model’s behavior or trust in its predic
Tableau is a powerful visualization software that supports the data analysis process. The program allows users to create custom visualizations from datasets of all sizes and types using a simple drag-and-drop interface. This note introduces new users to Tableau by providing guidance on connecting to data, exploring the interface, and creating a number of common visualizations.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers Cloud Storage, a popular cloud computing resource for data storage. This note provides information about uploading data to Cloud Storage, creating BigQuery tables from data found in Cloud Storage, previewing files in Cloud Storage, and sharing Cloud Storage buckets.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a popular cloud computing resource for writing Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. The resource is called BigQuery. This note provides step-by-step information about accessing BigQuery and using it to upload and explore data. It also includes a quick-start guide.
Anthony Palomba arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2020 as a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business (Darden). As a media-management and audience-analysis scholar, Palomba had previously assigned media- and entertainment-business-based cases to students to read. However, he had no idea how to exercise the case method in the classroom. In order to under