Susan Stanley's Scavenger Hunt
1. Using the Census Bureau website (www.census.gov) find the median family income for your
home county.
The median family income for Westchester County is $56,865.
2. Using Edgar (or Free Edgar or Edgar Scan) find the net income of your company for the
most recently ended fiscal year. Note that this may be Dec. 31, 2000 for some companies, but
it could be another date in 2000 (maybe even 1999 or 1998) as well. The name of the form
that this information can be found is 10-K.
Sears Roebuck & Co.'s Net Income as of December 30, 2000
| NET INCOME | $1,343,000,000 |
3. What is your company's Price Earnings ratio compared to its industry PE ratio?
Sears Roebuck & Co.'s Price Earnings ratio is: 23.42
Industry Price Earning ratio is: 36.80
4. Obtain a real-time stock quote of the company you have previously used. As part of your
answer, include the date and time of your stock quote. In addition to a real time stock quote,
obtain the stock price of your selected company on your birthday, 2000. If your birthday
was on a weekend, choose the preceding Friday's quote.
Stock quote for Sears Roebuck:
Last
Date
Time
51.75
January 25, 2002 3:00 PM
| Date | Open | High | Low | Close | Volume | Adj. Close* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 51.80 | 52.20 | 51.40 | 51.75 | 2,881,000 | 51.75 |
Stock price for Sears Roebuck on October 10, 2000:
Close
33.65
| Date | Open | High | Low | Close | Volume | Adj. Close* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 34.90 | 34.92 | 33.63 | 33.65 | 1,256,800 | 32.6904 |
5. What 30 firms make up the Dow Jones
Industrial Average?
Company Name
1. Alcoa
2. American Express
3. Boeing
4. Caterpillar
5. CitiGroup
6. Disney
7. Du Pont
8. Eastman Kodak
9. General Electric
10. General Motors
11. Hewlett-Packard
12. Home Depot
13. Honeywell
14. Intel
15. International Business Machines
16. International Paper
17. Johnson & Johnson
18. JP Morgan Bank
19. Coca Cola
20. McDonalds
21. Microsoft
22. Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M)
23. Philip Morris
24. Merck
25. Procter and Gamble
26. SBC Communications
27. AT&T
28. United Technologies
29. WalMart Stores
30. Exxon Mobil
6. What was the closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the day you were born?
Find its current closing price.
Closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on October 10, 1983: 1284.70
| Date | Open | High | Low | Close | Volume | Adj. Close* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1269.60 | 1286.70 | 1261.60 | 1284.70 | 670,500 | 1284.70 |
October 10, 1983 Closing Price
Closing Price on January 25, 2002: 9840.08
| Date | Open | High | Low | Close | Volume | Adj. Close* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9793.23 | 9949.54 | 9697.47 | 9840.08 | 13,451,000 | 9840.0801 |
7. Accounting Web (www.accountingweb.com) keeps track of their most popular news stories
(referred to as Hot Topics). One of the recent Hot Topics was on "Avoiding Identity Theft".
Find this story and copy and paste the top 3 ways to avoid identity theft. You will need to
subscribe to Accounting Web to perform this task.
"Avoiding Identity Theft" Top 3 ways to avoid identity theft:
1.Destroy papers you don't need: credit-card and ATM receipts, checks or deposit slips, health insurance
benefit statements, paycheck stubs, tax records and preapproved credit-card offers. Buy a shredder and
use it.
2.Do not carry your Social Security number with you, never give it out unless absolutely necessary and do
not have it printed on your checks.
3.Check your credit report each year. Investigate any accounts you did not apply for directly. To check your
credit, contact one of the three major agencies: TransUnion 800-888-4213 (www.tuc.com), Experian
888-EXPERIAN (www.experian.com), or Equifax 800-685-1111 (www.equifax.com). There is a fee for this
service.
8. Web site comparison: Choose ONE of the following pair of web sites to compare:
Amazon vs. Barnes&Noble
Expedia vs. Travelocity
eBay vs. Yahoo! Auctions
Google vs. Metacrawler
For your comparison, consider the following criteria: ease of use (navigation), search
capabilities, overall design (look and feel) and any other criteria you feel is relevant to the
comparison. Be sure to point out the strengths and weaknesses of each site you are comparing.
| MetaCrawler | |
| -has a very simplistic look when you open it; it is very
straightforward
-searching in Google was easy because you just typed in what you were looking for and that was it -Google gives ten links at once when you search for something -Google had a total of 27,400,000 results when I searched for movies -Google came up with very good sites with the first 10 that it displayed -Google seemed to focus on how good the site would be in finding what you are looking for -search was quick and efficient -there were no advertisements on the page which made it easy to just do what you came to do, instead of being distracted |
-has a more complex appearance because there are a bunch of
different subtopics that can be viewed
-searching was a little harder because you had to select whether you wanted all the words to appear in your results or only parts -MetaCrawler gives 20 links at once when you search for something, and has two categories on the page: Featured Search Results and MetaCrawler Results -MetaCrawler had a total of 51 results when I searched for movies -MetaCrawler did not have that many good sites in its first 20 -MetaCrawler seemed to just look for the key word in finding sites -search was quick and efficient -page had advertisements on it which can be distracting sometimes
|
On the whole, both Google and MetaCrawler were easy to navigate, however Google was more straightforward. When I did a search for movies, Google took me to an excellent selection of sites, whereas MetaCrawler's sites were not as effective for what I was looking for. MetaCrawler also appears to be a much smaller search engine than Google, since Google came up with over 27,000,000 results, whereas MetaCrawler only came up with 51 on that particular search. Searching for movies is very broad, so it is surprising that only 51 sites would come up, most of which were not very helpful compared to those that came up in Google. The design of Google was also more appealing to me when compared to MetaCrawler, just because it was so plain. Fancy decorations can be distractions when all you want to do is find what you are looking for. Thus, Metacrawler would probably be good if you are not looking for a large amount of feedback, but maybe just one or two good sites. However, for bigger searches, Google is definitely the better choice.
9. Using Villanova's Career Services Web Site, find the name of a firm that recruits on
campus whose name starts with the same letter that your last name starts with.
A firm that recruits on campus is: Sunoco
10. Using Villanova's Campus Ministry website, find a service activity that seems appealing to
you and copy and paste a brief description of the activity into your web page.
Balloon Day- has a two-fold purpose to raise money for the poor in the Philadelphia area while bringing the Villanova Community together for fun and appreciation of springtime. This festival involves approximately 2,000 people and is one of the few events at Villanova that involves the entire University Community.
11. Using Falvey Library's website, complete the following (if completing this off campus, you
may need to use Villanova's proxy server):
a) Use the Gartner Group Intraweb database to find the research report published in
October 1999 that discusses the four emerging technology areas for e-business. Copy and
paste the first sentence of the article that indicates what these four areas are. Then, choose
one of these four areas and copy and paste the paragraph that describes that area in further
detail.
First Sentence:
We examine four areas of rapid technology development that exploit the capabilities of interactive e-channels: Web-based self-service, data mining, personalization and e-cash.
Personalization. Personalization in the form of customized portals (e.g., MyYahoo) and news notification against personal profiles are already mainstays of many Web offerings. However, most of today's personalization is human-driven, requiring users to explicitly state or select their preferences, or businesses to define rules to drive the customization. An emerging set of capabilities (based on machine learning and data mining) enables data-driven personalization, whereby the system learns the user's preferences automatically based on behavior such as click-through patterns or length of time spent in various areas of the site. In particular, real-time data mining enables a context-rich and immediate response and adjustment to customer behavior rather than relying solely on offline historical data. An early example of automated personalization is Amazon's use of collaborative filtering to provide its "users who bought this book also bought …" feature.
b) Using the Lexis-Nexis database, find a newspaper article written about your company that
mentions their earnings per share (EPS).
Article says:
Sears, Roebuck and Co reported fourth-quarter earnings per share, excluding non-comparable items, of 2.01 usd
compared with 1.82 usd a year ago, largely reflecting improved margins in its core retail and credit businesses.
12. Download one of each of the following types of files to your hard drive and then copy and
paste the files to your FrontPage account. Then, create a link to these files from your
scavenger hunt web page.
a) WAV (sounds)
b)MIDI (music)
c) MP3
scav/Linkin Park - In The End.mp3
downloaded from Morpheus
d) Animated GIF (image)
13. Download and install at least one of the following programs: Paint Shop Pro, Music Match
Jukebox, or Eudora email. A highly recommended website to download these files from (and
lots of other files as well) is http://tucows.epix.net. For the program you have downloaded and
installed, copy and paste the the following file from the folder on your hard drive where you
installed the program to your FrontPage account and then
create a link to that file on your
scavenger hunt web page:
from Paint Shop Pro, the file tips.txt;
from JUKEBOX, the file mmorder.txt; or
from Eudora, the file license.txt.
Be sure to have a hyperlink to the site where
you obtained these programs.
14. Wall Street Journal activities
a) The Wall Street Journal has a weekly column on Personal Technology. Who is the author of
this column? Using the Interactive edition, add this person's column to your list of favorites.
One of this writer's recent columns (within the past 6 months) concerned two new portable
CD/MP3 players. What were the two devices featured, and what was the major problem with
each one? You may need to use Lexis-Nexis to find this article if you cannot find it on the
Interactive Edition.
The author of the Wall Street Journal column on Personal Technology is: Walt Mossberg.
The Two devices featured were: Philips Expanium and the Pine D'music SM-200C
Major problem with Philips Expanium: "it doesn't display any song information, making navigation hard. Its overall feel is flimsy and its controls were a little clumsy. I found its antishock feature, which prevents skips when the unit is moved, to be less than perfect. It also lacks a versatile set of equalizer settings to change the tone of the music. "
Major problem with Pine D'music SM-200C: "It caused skips in my MP3-CDs and, in some cases, it played five or 10 seconds of static before starting a song."
New Hybrid Music Gizmo Holds Tons of MP3 Files
b) Using the WSJ Interactive edition, set up a News Folder to track the issue you have
chosen for your Wall Street Journal Project. Provide me with at least one link to an article
you have been alerted to through this service.