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Concerns about security of cryptocurrencies worry both citizens and economic analysts. These concerns have constrained its growth in some communities. On the other hand, much of the popularity of cryptocurrency is due to its departure from traditional overly-restrictive security and debt measures that rely on oversight by large banks and governments. These oversight institutions are often expensive, deeply bureaucratic, and sometimes corrupt. Some experts believe that a universal, decentralized, digital currency with internal security like blockchain can make markets more efficient by eliminating barriers to the flow of money. This is particularly important in countries where the majority of citizens do not have bank accounts and are unable to invest in regional or global financial markets. Some governments, however, view the lack of regulation around these currencies and their anonymity as too risky because of how easily they can be used in illicit transactions, such as tax sheltering or purchasing illegal merchandise. Others feel that a secure digital currency offers a more convenient and safer form of financial exchange. For instance, a universally accepted currency would enable truly global financial markets and would protect individual assets against regional inflation fluctuations and artificial manipulation of currency by regional governments. If alternative digital systems become more established, there will be many questions about how digital currency will affect current banking systems and nation-based currencies.

Your team’s submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet,
• One-page policy recommendation for national leaders,
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 22 pages with your summary and policy recommendation.
• Judges expect a complete list of references with in-text citations, but may not consider appendices in the judging process.
• Note: Reference list and any appendices do not count toward the 22-page limit and should appear after your completed solution.

References:

Paul Krugman, “O Canada: A neglected nation gets its Nobel”. Slate, Oct 19, 1999.
https://slate.com/business/1999/10/o-canada.html

Stephanie Lo and J. Christina Wang, “Bitcoin as Money?” Current Policy Perspectives,

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2014.
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspectives/2014/bitcoin-as-money.aspx or https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/Workingpapers/PDF/cpp1404.pdf

Glossary:

Anonymity - the state of being unnamed or unidentified; the state of being anonymous.

Blockchain - the record keeping technology that can document transactions between two parties in a verifiable and permanent way; a digital database containing information that can be shared and simultaneously used across a large publicly accessible and decentralized network.

Cryptocurrency - a digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography (protecting information through the use of codes) for security.

Digital Currency - [digital money, electronic money, electronic currency] is a type of currency in digital (electronic) versus physical (coins, paper) form.

Illicit - illegal or dishonest.

Fluctuations - variations or oscillations; rises and falls. .

Monetary -relating to money or finances, or to the mechanisms by which money is supplied to and circulates in the economy.

Nation-based currencies - [national currencies] a system of money issued by a central bank and in common use within a particular nation or group of nations; examples are United States dollar (USD), Chinese renminbi (RMB or CNY), European Euro (EUR), British pound sterling (GBP), and Japanese yen (JPY).

Underground cult - hidden or mysterious group of people sharing an excessive devotion toward a particular person, belief, or thing.

Traditionally, most land use projects do not consider the impact of, or account for changes to, ecosystem services. The economic costs to mitigate negative results of land use changes: polluted rivers, poor air quality, hazardous waste sites, poorly treated waste water, climate changes, etc., are often not included in the plan. Is it possible to put a value on the environmental cost of land use development projects? How would environmental degradation be accounted for in these project costs? Once ecosystem services are accounted for in the cost-benefit ratio of a project, then the true and comprehensive valuation of the project can be determined and assessed.
Your ICM team has been hired to create an ecological services valuation model to understand the true economic costs of land use projects when ecosystem services are considered. Use your model to perform a cost benefit analysis of land use development projects of varying sizes, from small community-based projects to large national projects. Evaluate the effectiveness of your model based on your analyses and model design. What are the implications of your modeling on land use project planners and managers? How might your model need to change over time?
Your submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet,
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 21 pages with your summary.
• Judges expect a complete list of references with in-text citations, but may not consider appendices in the judging process.
• Note: Reference list and any appendices do not count toward the 21-page limit and should appear after your completed solution.

References:

Chee, Y., 2004. An ecological perspective on the valuation of ecosystem services. Biological Conservation 120, 549-565.

Costanza, R., d’Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farber, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B., Limburg, K., Naeem, S., O’Neill, R.V., Paruelo, J., Raskin, R.G., Sutton, P., van den Belt, M., 1997. The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 387, 253-260.

G贸mez-Baggethuna, E., de Groot, R., Lomas, P., Montesa, C., 1 April 2010. The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: From early notions to markets and payment schemes. Ecological Economics 69 (6), 1209-1218.

Norgaard, R., 1 April 2010. Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder. Ecological Economics 69 (6), 1219-1227.

Richmond, A., Kaufmann R., Myneni, R., 2007, Valuing ecosystem services: A shadow price for net primary production. Ecological Economics 64, 454-462.

Yang, Q., Liu, G., Casazza, M., Campbell, E., Giannettia, B., Brown, M., December 2018. Development of a new framework for non-monetary accounting on ecosystem services valuation. Ecosystem Services 34A, 37-54.

Data sources:

US based data: https://www.data.gov/ecosystems/
Satellite data: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/satellite-data/satellite-data-access-datasets

Glossary:

Biodiversity - refers to the variety of life in an ecosystem; all of the living organisms within a given area.

Biosphere - the part of the Earth that is occupied by living organisms and generally includes the interaction between these organisms and their physical environment.

Ecosystem - a subset of the biosphere that primarily focuses on the interaction between living things and their physical environment.

Ecosystem Services - the many benefits and assets that humans receive freely from our natural environment and a fully functioning ecosystem.

Environmental Degradation - the deterioration or compromise of the natural environment through consumption of assets either by natural processes or human activities.

Mitigate - to make less severe, painful, or impactful.

Valuation - refers to the estimating or determining the current worth of something.

The Louvre is one of the world’s largest and most visited art museum, receiving more than 8.1 million visitors in 2017^[2]. The number of guests in the museum varies throughout the day and year, which provides challenges in planning for regular movement within the museum. The diversity of visitors -- speaking a variety of languages, groups traveling together, and disabled visitors -- makes evacuation in an emergency even more challenging.

The Louvre has five floors, two of which are underground.

Figure 1: Floor plan of Louvre^[3]

The 380,000 exhibits located on these five floors cover approximately 72,735 square meters, with building wings as long as 480 meters or 5 city blocks^[3]. The pyramid entrance is the main and most used public entrance to the museum. However, there are also three other entrances usually reserved for groups and individuals with museum memberships: the Passage Richelieu entrance, the Carrousel du Louvre entrance, and the Portes Des Lions entrance. The Louvre has an online application, “Affluences” (https://www.affluences.com/louvre.php), that provides real-time updates on the estimated waiting time at each of these entrances to help facilitate entry to the museum. Your team might consider how technology, to include apps such as Affluences, or others could be used to facilitate your evacuation plan.

Only emergency personnel and museum officials know the actual number of total available exit points (service doors, employee entrances, VIP entrances, emergency exits, and old secret entrances built by the monarchy, etc.). While public awareness of these exit points could provide additional strength to an evacuation plan, their use would simultaneously cause security concerns due to the lower or limited security postures at these exits compared with level of security at the four main entrances. Thus, when creating your model, your team should consider carefully when and how any additional exits might be utilized.

Your supervisor wants your ICM team to develop an emergency evacuation model that allows the museum leaders to explore a range of options to evacuate visitors from the museum, while also allowing emergency personnel to enter the building as quickly as possible. It is important to identify potential bottlenecks that may limit movement towards the exits. The museum emergency planners are especially interested in an adaptable model that can be designed to address a broad set of considerations and various types of potential threats. Each threat has the potential to alter or remove segments of possible routes to safety that may be essential in a single optimized route. Once developed, validate your model(s) and discuss how the Louvre would implement it.

Based on the results of your work, propose policy and procedural recommendations for emergency management of the Louvre. Include any applicable crowd management and control procedures that your team believes are necessary for the safety of the visitors. Additionally, discuss how you could adapt and implement your model(s) for other large, crowded structures.

Your submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet,
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 21 pages with your summary.
• Judges expect a complete list of references with in-text citations, but may not consider appendices in the judging process.
• Note: Reference list and any appendices do not count toward the 21-page limit and should appear after your completed solution.

In the fictional television series Game of Thrones, based on the series of epic fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire^[1], three dragons are raised by Daenerys Targaryen, the “Mother of Dragons.” When hatched, the dragons are small, roughly 10 kg, and after a year grow to roughly 30-40 kg. They continue to grow throughout their life depending on the conditions and amount of food available to them.

For the purposes of this problem, consider these three fictional dragons are living today. Assume that the basic biology of dragons described above is accurate. You will need to make some additional assumptions about dragons that might include, for example, that dragons are able to fly great distances, breath fire, and resist tremendous trauma. As you address the problem requirements, it should be clear how your assumptions are related to the physical constraints of the functions, size, diet, changes, or other characteristics associated with the animals.
Your team is assigned to analyze dragon characteristics, behavior, habits, diet, and interaction with their environment. To do so, you will have to consider many questions. At a minimum, address the following: What is the ecological impact and requirements of the dragons? What are the energy expenditures of the dragons, and what are their caloric intake requirements? How much area is required to support the three dragons? How large a community is necessary to support a dragon for varying levels of assistance that can be provided to the dragons? Be clear about what factors you are considering when addressing these questions.

As with other animals that migrate, dragons might travel to different regions of the world with very different climates. How important are the climate conditions to your analysis? For example, would moving a dragon between an arid region, a warm temperate region, and an arctic region make a big difference in the resources required to maintain and grow a dragon?

Once your dragon analysis is complete, draft a two-page letter to the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin, to provide guidance about how to maintain the realistic ecological underpinning of the story, especially with respect to the movement of dragons from arid regions to temperate regions and to arctic regions.

While your dragon analysis does not directly apply to a real physical situation, the mathematical modeling itself makes use of many realistic features used in modeling a situation. Aside from the modeling activities themselves, describe and discuss a situation outside of the realm of fictional dragons that your modeling efforts might help inform and provide insight?

Your submission should consist of:

● One-page Summary Sheet,
● Two-page letter,
● Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 23 pages with your summary and letter.
● Note: Reference list and any appendices do not count toward the 23-page limit and should appear after your completed solution.

NOTE: You should not make use of unauthorized images and materials whose use is restricted by copyright laws. Please be careful in how you use and cite the sources for your ideas and the materials used in your report.

Reference

As a result of a recent UN ruling that opened the door to the theoretical recognition of EDPs as refugees, the International Climate Migration Foundation (ICM-F) has hired you to advise the UN by developing a model and using it to analyze this multifaceted issue of when, why, and how the UN should step into a role of addressing the increasing challenge of EDPs. The ICM-F plans to brief the UN on guidance for how the UN should generate a systemized response for EDPs, especially in consideration of the desire to preserve cultural heritage. Your assignment is to develop a model (or set of models) and use your model(s) to provide the analysis to support this briefing. The ICM-F is especially interested in understanding the scope of the issue of EDPs. For example, how many people are currently at risk of becoming EDPs^[1]; what is the value of the cultures of at-risk nations; how are those answers likely to change over time? Furthermore, how should the world respond with an international policy that specifically focuses on protecting the rights of persons whose nations have disappeared in the face of climate change while also aiming to preserve culture? Based on your analysis, what recommendations can you offer on this matter, and what are the implications of accepting or rejecting your recommendations?

This problem is extremely complex. We understand that your submission will not be able to fully consider all of the aspects described in the Issue Paper beginning on page 3. However, considering the aspects that you address, synthesize your work into a cohesive answer to the ICM-F as they advise the UN. At a minimum, your team's paper should include:

• An analysis of the scope of the issue in terms of both the number of people at risk and the risk of loss of culture;
• Proposed policies to address EDPs in terms of both human rights (being able to resettle and participate fully in life in their new home) and cultural preservation;
• A description of the development of a model used to measure the potential impact of proposed policies;
• An explanation of how your model was used to design and/or improve your proposed policies;
• An explanation, backed by your analysis, of the importance of implementing your proposed policies.

The ICM-F consists of interdisciplinary judges including mathematicians, climate scientists, and experts in refugee migration to review your work. Therefore, your paper should be written for a scientifically literate yet diverse audience.

Your submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet
• Table of Contents
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 22 pages with your summary and table of contents.

NOTE: Reference List and any appendices do not count toward the page limit and should appear after your completed solution. You should not make use of unauthorized images and materials whose use is restricted by copyright laws. Ensure you cite the sources for your ideas and the materials used in your report.

Glossary

Environmentally displaced persons (EDPs): people who must relocate as their homeland becomes uninhabitable due to climate change events

Cultural heritage: the ways of living of a group or society passed through generations to include customs, practices, art, and values.

Your team has been hired by the International Council of Plastic Waste Management (ICM) to address this escalating environmental crisis. You must develop a plan to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, single-use and disposable plastic product waste.

• Develop a model to estimate the maximum levels of single-use or disposable plastic product waste that can safely be mitigated without further environmental damage. You may need to consider, among many factors, the source of this waste, the extent of the current waste problem, and the availability of resources to process the waste.

• Discuss to what extent plastic waste can be reduced to reach an environmentally safe level. This may involve considering factors impacting the levels of plastic waste to include, but not limited to, sources and uses of single-use or disposable plastics, the availability of alternatives to plastics, the impact on the lives of citizens, or policies of cities, regions, countries, and continents to decrease single-use or disposable plastic and the effectiveness of such policies. These can vary between regions, so considering regional-specific constraints may make some policies more effective than others.

• Using your model and discussion, set a target for the minimal achievable level of global waste of single-use or disposable plastic products and discuss the impacts for achieving such levels. You may consider ways in which human life is altered, the environmental impacts, or the effects on the multi-trillion-dollar plastic industry.

• While this is a global problem, the causes and effects are not equally distributed across nations or regions. Discuss the equity issues that arise from the global crisis and your intended solutions. How do you suggest ICM address these issues?

• Write a two-page memo to the ICM describing a realistic global target minimum achievable level of global single-use or disposable plastic product waste, a timeline to reach this level, and any circumstances that may accelerate or hinder the achievement of your target and timeline.

Your submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet
• Table of Contents
• Two-page Memo
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 24 pages with your summary, table of contents, and two-page memo.

Note: Reference List and any appendices do not count toward the page limit and should appear after your completed solution. You should not make use of unauthorized images and materials whose use is restricted by copyright laws. Ensure you cite the sources for your ideas and the materials used in your report.

Glossary

Disposable Plastic Products: plastic materials or products that are not recyclable and become trash.

Mitigate: To make less severe, to moderate, to alleviate.

Plastic Waste: plastic objects that have not been recycled properly or cannot be recycled; debris made of plastic.

Single-Use Plastic Products: products made of plastic intended for one time use before being discarded.

One of the most informative settings to explore team processes is in competitive team sports. Team sports must conform to strict rules that may include, but are not limited to, the number of players, their roles, allowable contact between players, their location and movement, points earned, and consequences of violations. Team success is much more than the sum of the abilities of individual players. Rather, it is based on many other factors that involve how well the teammates play together. Such factors may include whether the team has a diversity of skills (one person may be fast, while another is precise), how well the team balances between individual versus collective performance (star players may help leverage the skills of all their teammates), and the team's ability to effectively coordinate over time (as one player steals the ball from an opponent, another player is poised for offense).

In light of your modeling skills, the coach of the Huskies, your home soccer (known in Europe and other places as football) team, has asked your company, Intrepid Champion Modeling (ICM), to help understand the team's dynamics. In particular, the coach has asked you to explore how the complex interactions among the players on the field impacts their success. The goal is not only to examine the interactions that lead directly to a score, but to explore team dynamics throughout the game and over the entire season, to help identify specific strategies that can improve teamwork next season. The coach has asked ICM to quantify and formalize the structural and dynamical features that have been successful (and unsuccessful) for the team. The Huskies have provided data[1] detailing information from last season, including all 38 games they played against their 19 opponents (they played each opposing team twice). Overall, the data covers 23,429 passes between 366 players (30 Huskies players, and 336 players from opposing teams), and 59,271 game events.

To respond to the Huskie coach's requests, your team from ICM should use the provided data to address the following:

• Create a network for the ball passing between players, where each player is a node and each pass constitutes a link between players. Use your passing network to identify network patterns, such as dyadic and triadic configurations and team formations. Also consider other structural indicators and network properties across the games. You should explore multiple scales such as, but not limited to, micro (pairwise) to macro (all players) when looking at interactions, and time such as short (minute-to-minute) to long (entire game or entire season).

• Identify performance indicators that reflect successful teamwork (in addition to points or wins) such as diversity in the types of plays, coordination among players or distribution of contributions. You also may consider other team level processes, such as adaptability, flexibility, tempo, or flow. It may be important to clarify whether strategies are universally effective or dependent on opponents' counter-strategies. Use the performance indicators and team level processes that you have identified to create a model that captures structural, configurational, and dynamical aspects of teamwork.

• Use the insights gained from your teamwork model to inform the coach about what kinds of structural strategies have been effective for the Huskies. Advise the coach on what changes the network analysis indicates that they should make next season to improve team success.

• Your analysis of the Huskies has allowed you to consider group dynamics in a controlled setting of a team sport. Understanding the complex set of factors that make some groups perform better than others is critical for how societies develop and innovate. As our societies increasingly solve problems involving teams, can you generalize your findings to say something about how to design more effective teams? What other aspects of teamwork would need to be captured to develop generalized models of team performance?

Your submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet
• Table of Contents
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 22 pages with your summary and table of contents.

Note: Reference List and any appendices do not count toward the page limit and should appear after your completed solution. You should not make use of unauthorized images and materials whose use is restricted by copyright laws. Ensure you cite the sources for your ideas and the materials used in your report.

Attachment

2020_Problem_D_DATA.zip
fullevents.csv
matches.csv
passingevents.csv
README.txt

This data set was processed from a much larger dataset covering nearly 2000 matches from five European national soccer competitions, as well as the 2018 World Cup.

Glossary

Dyadic Configurations: relationships involving pairs of players.

Triadic Configurations: relationships involving groups of three players.

Sunshine Company is planning to introduce and sell three new products in the online marketplace: a microwave oven, a baby pacifier, and a hair dryer. They have hired your team as consultants to identify key patterns, relationships, measures, and parameters in past customer-supplied ratings and reviews associated with other competing products to 1) inform their online sales strategy and 2) identify potentially important design features that would enhance product desirability. Sunshine Company has used data to inform sales strategies in the past, but they have not previously used this particular combination and type of data. Of particular interest to Sunshine Companyare time-based patterns in these data, and whether they interact in ways that will help the company craft successful products.

To assist you, Sunshine's data center has provided you with three data files for this project: hair_dryer.tsv, microwave.tsv, and pacifier.tsv. These data represent customer-supplied ratings and reviews for microwave ovens, baby pacifiers, and hair dryers sold in the Amazon marketplace over the time period(s) indicated in the data. A glossary of data label definitions is provided as well. THE DATA FILES PROVIDED CONTAIN THE ONLY DATA YOU SHOULD USE FOR THIS PROBLEM.

Requirements

1. Analyze the three product data sets provided to identify, describe, and support with mathematical evidence, meaningful quantitative and/or qualitative patterns, relationships, measures, and parameters within and between star ratings, reviews, and helpfulness ratings that will help Sunshine Company succeed in their three new online marketplace product offerings.

2. Use your analysis to address the following specific questions and requests from the Sunshine Company Marketing Director:

• Identify data measures based on ratings and reviews that are most informative for Sunshine Company to track, once their three products are placed on sale in the online marketplace.
• Identify and discuss time-based measures and patterns within each data set that might suggest that a product's reputation is increasing or decreasing in the online marketplace.
• Determine combinations of text-based measure(s) and ratings-based measures that best indicate a potentially successful or failing product.
• Do specific star ratings incite more reviews? For example, are customers more likely to write some type of review after seeing a series of low star ratings?
• Are specific quality descriptors of text-based reviews such as 'enthusiastic', 'disappointed', and others, strongly associated with rating levels?

3. Write a one- to two-page letter to the Marketing Director of Sunshine Company summarizing your team's analysis and results. Include specific justification(s) for the result that your team most confidently recommends to the Marketing Director.

Your submission should consist of:

• One-page Summary Sheet
• Table of Contents
• One- to Two-page Letter
• Your solution of no more than 20 pages, for a maximum of 24 pages with your summary sheet, table of contents, and two-page letter.

Note: Reference List and any appendices do not count toward the page limit and should appear after your completed solution. You should not make use of unauthorized images and materials whose use is restricted by copyright laws. Ensure you cite the sources for your ideas and the materials used in your report.

Glossary

Helpfulness Rating: an indication of how valuable a particular product review is when making a decision whether or not to purchase that product.

Pacifier: a rubber or plastic soothing device, often nipple shaped, given to a baby to suck or bite on.

Review: a written evaluation of a product.

Star Rating: a score given in a system that allows people to rate a product with a number of stars.

Attachments: The Problem Datasets

Problem_C_Data.zip
The three data sets provided contain product user ratings and reviews extracted from the Amazon Customer Reviews Dataset thru Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
hair_dryer.tsv
microwave.tsv
pacifier.tsv

Data Set Definitions: Each row represents data partitioned into the following columns.

• marketplace (string): 2 letter country code of the marketplace where the review was written.
• customer_id (string): Random identifier that can be used to aggregate reviews written by a single author.
• review_id (string): The unique ID of the review.
• product_id (string): The unique Product ID the review pertains to.
• product_parent (string): Random identifier that can be used to aggregate reviews for the same product.
• product_title (string): Title of the product.
• product_category (string): The major consumer category for the product.
• star_rating (int): The 1-5 star rating of the review.
• helpful_votes (int): Number of helpful votes.
• total_votes (int): Number of total votes the review received.
• vine (string): Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine Voices based on the trust that they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon provides Amazon Vine members with free copies of products that have been submitted to the program by vendors. Amazon doesn't influence the opinions of Amazon Vine members, nor do they modify or edit reviews.
• verified_purchase (string): A "Y" indicates Amazon verified that the person writing the review purchased the product at Amazon and didn't receive the product at a deep discount.
• review_headline (string): The title of the review.
• review_body (string): The review text.
• review_date (bigint): The date the review was written.