CHAPTER 31 Essays - Communication, News, Sociology Of Knowledge

CHAPTER 31 Essays - Communication, News, Sociology Of Knowledge CHAPTER 31 ECONOMIC, SOCIAL , AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE LATE 20TH CENTURY Chapter Outline I.A Changing People A.An Aging, Shifting Population B.The New Immigration C.The Metropolitan Nation II.Economic Transformation A.New Technologies B.Changes in the Structure and Operations of Business C.The Financial Sector D.The Sports-Entertainment Industry III.Culture and Media A.The Video Revolution B.Hollywood C.The Changing Media Environment for Pop Music D.New Mass Culture Debates E.The Religious Landscape Chronology 1971Starbucks Coffee opens first store 1972Congress passes Title IX (Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act) 1973Federal Express opens for business 1977Congress passes Community Reinvestment Act 1978Supreme Court decision frees banks to relocate credit-card operations 1979ESPN joins cable-TV lineup 1981MTV and CNN debut on cable TV 1982Congress relaxes regulations of SLs 1986Congress passes Immigration Reform and Control Act 1987Prices crash on New York Stock Exchange and then rebound 1988Fox television network begins 1989Congress enacts bailout plan for SL industry 1990Congress passes another Immigration Act 1991First McDonalds opens in Moscow 1995Amazon.com begins selling books online 1996Fox News Network debut 2000Human Genome Project issues preliminary draft Lecture Outline 1.The United States has always been a changing people and its population demographics since 1980 reflect the continuation of this condition. a.Declining birth rates, rising life expectancy, and a desire for warmer climates combined to produce an aging, shifting population. b.The Sunbelt also proved attractive to a large percentage of the new immigration from Latin America and Asia. c.Continued flight of businesses and individuals to the suburbs has brought transformation and crisis to the metropolitan nation. 2.The surge in available consumer goods and new technologies would create profound economic transformations in the nation. a.The adoption of personal computers and the rise of "virtual" sources of information is perhaps the more obvious of the new technologies that spurred an information revolution in the nation. b.Computerization leads the way in massive changes in the structure and operations of business as new methods of large-scale global business operations and online companies come to dominate much of the corporate world. c.The financial sector experienced great changes as a result of the information revolution because computers allowed complex trades on an international scale to become routine. d.Enriched by new, larger media contracts and clever marketing of individual athletes and teams, the sports-entertainment industry steadily grew. This growth was furthered with advent of the all-sports network, ESPN. 3.Technological change has dramatically transformed popular culture and media. a.The video revolution, which allowed viewers the option to "record now, watch later," coupled with the explosive growth in the number of "niche" cable stations, brought a steady decline in the overall viewership of network television. b.In Hollywood, since the 1970s, the television and movie industry shifted programming priorities in an effort to attract younger viewers. A focus on big budget, "blockbuster" movies reduces the overall number of films produced, whereas the advent of DVDs created a new revenue stream of film companies outside of the theater. c.The changing media environment for pop music during the 1980s saw the rise of cable television and new technologies such as CDs for music. The ability of consumers to use blank CDs to make high-quality home recordings created a new challenge of bootlegging within the industry. d.The media revolution, with its multitude of channels competing for attention with increasing sensationalism and "sound-bites," sparked a new mass-culture debate spearheaded by those who argued for scholarly contemplation of popular culture. e.Since the 1960s, the religious landscape had undergone profound changes because the interest and diversity of faith intensified. Many immigrants arrived with strong beliefs, including the nation's first significant Islamic movement, while groups such as Protestants and Mormons grew at rates faster than the general population. Conclusion: During the past quarter-century, the United States has experienced sweeping changes in demographics, economics, culture, and society. The most prominent development in American popular culture was the proliferation of the video screen.

Calculating a Confidence Interval for a Mean

Calculating a Confidence Interval for a Mean Inferential statistics concerns the process of beginning with a statistical sample and then arriving at the value of a population parameter that is unknown. The unknown value is not determined directly. Rather we end up with an estimate that falls into a range of values. This range is known in mathematical terms an interval of real numbers and is specifically referred to as a confidence interval. Confidence intervals are all similar to one another in a few ways. Two-sided confidence intervals all have the same form: Estimate  ± Margin of Error Similarities in confidence intervals also extend to the steps used to calculate confidence intervals. We will examine how to determine a two-sided confidence interval for a population mean when the population standard deviation is unknown. An underlying assumption is that we are sampling from a normally distributed population. Process for Confidence Interval for Mean With an Unknown Sigma We will work through a list of steps required to find our desired confidence interval. Although all of the steps are important, the first one is particularly so: Check Conditions: Begin by making sure that the conditions for our confidence interval have been met. We assume that the value of the population standard deviation, denoted by the Greek letter sigma ÏÆ', is unknown and that we are working with a normal distribution. We can relax the assumption that we have a normal distribution as long as our sample is large enough and has no outliers or extreme skewness.Calculate Estimate: We estimate our population parameter, in this case, the population mean, by use of a statistic, in this case, the sample mean. This involves forming a simple random sample from our population. Sometimes we can suppose that our sample is a simple random sample, even if it does not meet the strict definition.Critical Value: We obtain the critical value t* that correspond with our confidence level. These values are found by consulting a table of t-scores or by using the software. If we use a table, we will need to know the number of degrees of freedom. The number of degrees of freedom is one less than the number of individuals in our sample. Margin of Error: Calculate the margin of error t*s /√n, where n is the size of the simple random sample that we formed and s is the sample standard deviation, which we obtain from our statistical sample.Conclude: Finish by putting together the estimate and margin of error. This can be expressed as either Estimate  ± Margin of Error or as Estimate - Margin of Error to Estimate Margin of Error. In the statement of our confidence interval it is important to indicate the level of confidence. This is just as much a part of our confidence interval as numbers for the estimate and margin of error. Example To see how we can construct a confidence interval, we will work through an example. Suppose we know that the heights of a specific species of pea plants are normally distributed. A simple random sample of 30 pea plants has a mean height of 12 inches with a sample standard deviation of 2 inches. What is a 90% confidence interval for the mean height for the entire population of pea plants? We will work through the steps that were outlined above: Check Conditions: The conditions have been met as the population standard deviation is unknown and we are dealing with a normal distribution.Calculate Estimate: We have been told that we have a simple random sample of 30 pea plants. The mean height for this sample is 12 inches, so this is our estimate.Critical Value: Our sample has a size of 30, and so there are 29 degrees of freedom. The critical value for confidence level of 90% is given by t* 1.699.Margin of Error: Now we use the margin of error formula and obtain a margin of error of t*s /√n (1.699)(2) /√(30) 0.620.Conclude: We conclude by putting everything together. A 90% confidence interval for the population’s mean height score is 12  ± 0.62 inches. Alternatively, we could state this confidence interval as 11.38 inches to 12.62 inches. Practical Considerations Confidence intervals of the above type are more realistic than other types that can be encountered in a statistics course. It is very rare to know the population standard deviation but not know the population mean. Here we assume that we do not know either of these population parameters.