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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 entity. This annual report is designed to enable access to objective and transparent financial information about the United States within a single document. It can serve as a bridge to a candid and complete conversation about the nation's economic and financial condition. The summary is a descriptive work, not theoretical. To increase accessibility, effort was made where possible to present and describe information in layman's terms and language.

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 trying to adjust to virtual work. This technical note explores best practices for achieving success in virtual presence and virtual presentations. From testing your technology to optimizing your background, adjusting your expression and tone for video presentations, and engaging with your audience, it will help you bring your best self to Zoom meetings and beyond.

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 racial propaganda""; and (4) specify what was allowed on sports uniforms and equipment (such as logos and manufacturers' name), all to prevent unauthorized parties from using the public platform of the Olympics for their own purpose. However, athletes had pushed back for decades and, in 2020, with worldwide social protest following the killing of George Floyd, the IOC had to rethink Rule 50 and how the organization would deal with protest at the Games. This note gives a brief history of the Olympics and of protest at the games over the course of their existence.

This note provides an overview of causal inference for an introductory data science course. First, the note discusses observational studies and confounding variables. Next the note describes how randomized experiments can be used to account for the effect of confounding variables. Then it walks through the steps to designing an experiment, including a discussion of how to calculate the power of a test.

The dematerialization and servitization of products being brought about by the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is making it imperative for platform businesses to look at consumers and suppliers from a lifetime value perspective. This technical note compares two fundamental strategic marketing perspectives: the push strategy and the pull strategy, using simple systems-dynamics and agent-based models. The models, developed using Vensim and NetLogo software, illustrate the efficacies of push and pull marketing strategies at the individual customer level. Specifically, they demonstrate the possibilities of market failure due to excessive pushing and consumer community formation.

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 technical note provides a hands-on, step-by-step guide and templates to lead students in any discipline through a structured process for the design of experiments, from what it takes to frame testable ideas all the way through to choosing the best experimental design and prototype.

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 desirability of various product features to the financial potential of those features. This note expands this common approach to explicitly include the consideration of operational resources and capabilities. This includes the resources needed to develop the product or service and to deliver it. An organization's operational capabilities can dictate whether, how, and which potential new products can be built, so it is important to understand the interplay among marketing, finance, and operations when developing new products or refreshing existing ones. The framework in this note is useful both when developing new products and reexamining existing offerings. This note can stand alone, but works well when used with a case, ""Product Development at StubHub: Don't Stop Believin'"" (UVA-OM-1705), that explores a company's efforts to innovate and create new value for its customers.

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 processing power has increased exponentially, resulting in commensurate increases in the sophistication of and upfront costs associated with fabrication processes. The industry has evolved from a vertically integrated model of integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) to a disaggregated model of "fabless" technology companies that focus on research and design and rely on off-shore pure-play semiconductor foundries for production. An entire generation of US-based fabless semiconductor manufacturers, such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Cirrus Logic, have blossomed and thrived by taking advantage of high-quality, low-cost foundry services provided by the likes of TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries. The recent COVID-19 crisis and escalating US-China trade tensions have exposed the fragility of this ecosystem, and US technology companies must learn to manage an emerging set of risks. The note highlights how the natural evolution of an industry, in response to competitive and market pressures, may result in highly efficient but fragile value chains.

Financial restructuring for a distressed firm and its significant counterparties is the process of "recontracting." This involves significantly altering, replacing, or terminating key financial contracts for the purpose of rehabilitation. Most of these contracts, as of the date of such restructuring, typically relate to debt obligations with claim values that are known to the firm and to each of the counterparties who are involved in the restructuring process. This note examines the non-debt claims a distressed firm may face, specifically looking at (1) employee-related liabilities, such as those related to defined benefit pension obligations and retirement benefits; (2) tort-related claims, such as those related to litigation or environmental remediation; and (3) claims related to executory contracts, such as leases. The latter category is the most common, but it is also the easiest to resolve. In contrast, restructuring employee-related and tort-related claims is much more complex because the value of such claims may not be known at the time of the proposed restructuring. It is restructuring in these two areas, employee-related and tort-related claims, that are the subject of this note. The note contains three case examples for the purposes of class discussion.