Perhaps the only uncontroversial thing one can say about the Last of Us Part 2 is that it is deeply controversial. What's interesting about the polarized discourse surrounding it, though, is the game is being evaluated not just on its undeniable technical brilliance, but its thematic ambition, character motivations, and story execution. There may be meticulously crafted animations, luscious environments, an attention to detail that borders on the obsessive, but people are critiquing the game for its rendition of cycles of vengeance, its examination of violence in games, its deconstruction of the medium and ourselves. This makes the Last of Us Part 2 not a toaster.  In his book How to Talk About Video Games, Ian Bogos suggests that we talk about games like we do toasters. How? Our critical language looks at a game's features and evaluates it like a consumer product. Shiny chrome and evenly distributed warmth? Five stars. Good graphics sound and gameplay? Nine out of ten. Not only is this method reductive, it minimizes the aesthetic merit of games and limits what we can say about them. Toaster evaluation is deeply utilitarian, and so too has game criticism followed suit for too long. Games are commercial products under this view, not art or culture. And so the Last of Us Part 2 is untoaster-like, because even though the simple mention of the game may summon controversy from the deepest corners of cyberspace, it is being celebrated and critiqued for what its value is as an artistic object, not as a toaster, not as a commercial fodder, because the Last of Us Part 2 is technically one of the shiniest toasters out there. This makes the game somewhat ironically hopeful, despite the game itself and the language surrounding it being bleak, disjointed, and ultimately conflicted. Another very untoaster-like game is Death Stranding. The consensus about the game's critical consensus suggests it was similarly divisive, but its aggregate score on Metacritic is still an 83. Wait though, the Last of Us 2 scored a 93. Inflated scores in games is still a symptom of toaster syndrome. We are reviewing games as functional objects of commodity consumption. We only score them low if they physically don't work, if they don't perform a use. Death Stranding was weird though. Its gameplay constitutes several dozen hours of walking. If it were a George Foreman grill, we would not trust it to heat fire. There is plenty of it, but there is plenty of what. Death Stranding is a deconstruction, really. It is a game that foregrounds the silliness of our frenzied quests from A to B in games, but it also reveals the absurdity of defining games. Players argue games need rules, goals, but Death Stranding is a triple-A avant-garde game. It is about the aesthetic experience of traversal through space, about the intimacy of asynchronous human interaction, about the sleep of death when dreams may come. It is about our evolutionary instinct to persist, but also to reflect on the peril of that persistence. To talk about Death Stranding is hard though. The only way to describe it is to call it a mix of walking simulator, journey, and zen in the art of motorcycle. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said about defining things including games, we describe by family resemblances, by its similarity to other games of a supposed canon. Evaluating a game based on its adherence to genre is pointless though, if there is no genre for it to be compared to. We have to evaluate Death Stranding for its aesthetic, thematic and phenomenological weight, its ability to enrapture us, inspire us, or perhaps in its failure to do so. The Last of Us Part II and Death Stranding reveal distinct but complementary things about the state of video game criticism. Both where it has been and perhaps where it might go. Critical reviews for the Last of Us Part II are mostly positive, but the heated discussion surrounding it has almost nothing to do with its technical accomplishments. It is somehow both product and art. We can call this the Toaster Uncertainty Principle. Death Stranding, in removing most things resembling convention and video game formalism of what we normally consider the product of games, forces us to evaluate aesthetics and question the definition of games. Both games are not toasters. For better or worse, they are art. Criticism is a storied and venerated field, a rigorous academic discipline. It overlaps with aesthetics, the philosophical pursuit of what is beautiful, but criticism is more specific. It is about evaluating the specific merits of objects and their impact on us. In his book On Criticism, Noel Carroll says criticism is ultimately about evaluation with reasons, but like Death Stranding, it is about understanding the experience something generates, not its adherence to formalism. He states, it is the taste of the pudding the critic cares about, not its adherence to an established recipe. What does this criticism look like, though? Carroll provides us steps, description, what does the game entail, contextualization, the circumstances surrounding the game's production and distribution, elucidation, an analysis of its symbolic motifs, interpretation and understanding of the overall meaning of a piece, and finally, analysis, which as he says is to promote the audience's understanding and appreciation of the artwork and the ground and evaluation of the work. This means good criticism involves recognizing that Death Stranding blends mediums in ways that subverts rigid game classification, that the context of lower budgets in indie games require we appreciate innovation and efficiency in design, that the tragedy at the heart of Wander's quest in Shadow of the Colossus is not just his but ours. We are engaging with works on their own terms, we are partaking in what is called a close read, but ultimately, it is about enlightening, clarifying, about revealing not just why games are good, but why they matter. But this seemingly flies in the face of what students are taught in schools of literary criticism. Criticism is about analyzing through different interpretive lenses, through a post-structuralist or Marxist or formalist or deconstructive lens. Art reflects the biases of the era it is in, though, the author is dead, right? Interpretation is now recognized by many as the anarchic domain of infinite interpretations, an anxiety only placated by the invocation of some framework, some perspective. A post-colonial critique of Far Cry 2 and how its omission of civilians obfuscates the truth, or how horizon zero dawn, although superficially evocative of ecology, is actually anti-ecological at a mechanical level. These lenses provide fascinating insights into not just games, but the cultural context they exist in. This leaves us with a problem though, is criticism subjective or objective? Is it opinionated, or the unearthing of some universal form? In his book The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Fry argues criticism is or ought to be like a science. There are works of art that are higher, better, more worthy of consideration. To get to this, we have to construct a formalism, a rubric to evaluate things by. Remember, criticism is evaluation with reasons. Games are both art and science, and to be evaluated thus. We can invoke narrative frameworks to discuss why Uncharted is paced well. Use poetic frameworks like defamiliarization to argue for how undertale is metafictional genius. We can even cite science, as Steve Swink does in his book Game Feel, to argue why Mario just feels good to play, or how games meet our psychological needs. Whether psychology, sociology, or art theory, games criticism under this view should encourage frameworks of analysis, both in the academic and literary study of games. But if we are going to evaluate games using the scaffolding of some formalism, why not use a formalism for the design of games themselves? In his essay, I have no words and I must design, Greg Kostakhan set in motion the program to develop a vocabulary for good design practice. What makes a good game on its own terms? The MDA framework, the Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics framework, is the most famous of these, establishing the what, how, and why of play, and how to craft different types of games. For the longest time, there was a debate between lodologists and narratologists, or games play or story. Countless books, articles, and videos are now being made on the design of games, invoking and creating a language as they go. There is Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design, Raph Kostakhan's A Theory of Fun, Game Mechanics, Advanced Game Design. Why is Mario 1-1 so good is now a meme? It has interesting decisions, precise mechanics, it teaches without teaching. Good criticism here is understanding that the strange mechanics of eco, its architecture and puzzle design, are there to reinforce an emotion, a theme. But then where does the vitality of personal experience enter the fray? Is all criticism better when it is subsumed by the interpretive lenses of someone, or the contrived formalism of another? To answer this, we must turn to aesthetics, where fellows like Kant and Hume said we can actually peer into universals through subjective analysis. The line between the two is broken. Through the cultivation of good judgment, a critic can put aside their biases and peer into universal forms of beauty. When a critic is criticized, they often say it's just their opinion, but there are good opinions and bad opinions, arguments that are justified and arguments that aren't. But a good critic can put aside their personal preferences and analyze the work of art in itself. Doing this requires expertise. Only someone adept at fighting games should be analyzing the intricacies of a game's meta. But a good critic knows a good fighting game even if they themselves don't like it. There needs to be an understanding of the structure of a game, a cultivation of analysis as a skill that takes time and dedication. But if to evaluate something in itself is to suppress one's personal whims, is there even a space for the artistry of personal opinion to reside? One of the first comprehensive attempts at a critical language for games came in the form of Ian Bogost and his book Unit Operations. In the book, he argues we need to analyze games using their procedures and understand units of meaning, of symbolic relevance at the structural level. Journey communicates unity by endowing you with more abilities when you meet another. It's a clear unit operation of meaning. Metal Gear Solid 2 has minor instances of meaning to reinforce the idea of lies, of memes, of post-modern meta-fiction. Kojima lied about who we were playing in the game, just as Raiden is lied to about his past, his present, and his purpose. Every unit operation of the game, both in mechanics and fiction, reinforced the theme of meme, of information and lies. Jonathan Blow did something similar with The Witness. Each area of the island systemizes different ideas about the nature of truth. The individual symbols in these games can be understood as part of a grander scheme where the intentions of both Kojima and Blow matter in the evaluation of the work of art. This analysis can be extended to systems as well. Games like Civilization and SimCity have meaning encoded, biased in the system, whether intentional or not. The game critic needs to be able to unearth this, to analyze the systems of games at both a unit and systemic level. But of course, games involve play, which complicates things. Games are ergodic texts, they require work to unearth. In his book, The Ethics of Computer Games, Miguel Cicard argues that the meaning of games is not just encoded in a system, it is also constructed by the player, both in participation and interpretation. What does this mean? It means evaluating a game is not simply a matter of unearthing symbols and assigning some rigid meaning. The experience of games is different for everyone. In literary circles, there are theories like reader-response theory that says interpretation is paramount within communities that do so. But games have a stronger claim. In his essay, Across Worlds and Bodies, Brendan Keough argues for a reconciliation between subjective and objective critical lenses. He says, The academic video game critic, as opposed to the game studies formalist, must be concerned with understanding how and why certain video games feel to play, then with how well it fits into a predetermined and arbitrary notion of gameness. This method of video game criticism cannot help but be phenomenologically grounded, accounting for and tracing meaning through bodies and worlds without privileging one or the other. It cannot distinguish between game and non-game elements of the video game, as has previously been done. According to Keough, games are cybernetic systems. There are feedback loops between human and machine. What this means is that you, yes you, are actually a part of the formalism of a game, because you are literally a part of the game. When Psycho Mantis pointed at you through the screen, the game simply foregrounded the inevitable truth that we are all in fact a part of the game. This means our subjective experiences and impressions are a part of the game itself. Keough then critiques what the formal, academic and institutional study of games has entailed. There is a broader suspicion in game studies to subjective critical analysis of games that do not contribute to some formal universal understanding of what games are. Circling back to Noelle Carroll's words, games are being evaluated in accordance with their adherence to recipe and not for the taste of the dish. Ironically, in an instrumental medium, games are being instrumentalized to give us insights into the nature of games and play instead of being evaluated on their own terms, or more precisely, in the experiences they create for those participating in their creation. So now the floodgates open for a radical perspectivism in games criticism and a crystallization of what criticism might actually be. It is to evaluate games for their own sake, on their own terms, the real meaning of toasterfying games, using them for purposes other than their own evaluation. Instrumentalization is not wrong though. We need formal analysis of the art and science of games, consumer review, and design formalism. But what we also need is for games to speak for themselves. Given that we are a part of the formalism of games, it is our responsibility to speak for them. But then the way we choose to speak about games is just that. Our choice. It is a methodological anarchism. So a formal analysis of games actually leads to a phenomenological one, but our subjective critique of games is also enhanced the more we understand about games. When Clint Hawking critiqued Bioshock for its incoherence between gameplay and story, he coined the term ludonarrative dissonance. The piece of writing it came from though was criticism. It was a close read of his personal experience with playing the game. But Hawking is also an esteemed game designer. He says, Bioshock is not our citizen cane, but it does more than any game I have ever played. Show us how close we are to achieving that milestone. Bioshock reaches for it and slips. But we leave our deepest footprints when we pick ourselves up from a fall. It seems to me that it will take several years to learn from Bioshock's mistakes and create a new generation of games that do manage to successfully marry their ludic and narrative themes. So criticism can lead to formalism, but so too can formalism enhance our criticism. In fact, it can change how we see games entirely. Before I'd even played Final Fantasy XIII, I'd heard it was suffocatingly linear. This was a critical consensus it would seem. When I played the game, I thought the same. The game is a line, a singular, highly polished corridor. That is, until I read Hills and Lines by Simon Ferrari. The first 20 hours of the game asked the player to follow a straight line towards a checkpoint. This corridor, perhaps the longest unbroken span of narrow, unilinear space in video game history, makes one realize something that was true of Final Fantasy games all along. We've always been running in a straight line. But then he points out the brilliant thematic weight of this design decision. In Final Fantasy XIII, there are two worlds, Cocoon, which is the linear corridor we have been on, and Pulse, which is where the game opens up. Cocoon is a bounded sphere where humans are simultaneously provided for and controlled in every conceivable way. And so the linearity is a metaphor for a carefully contrived and designed environment. Pulse, though, is meant to represent freedom, a laissez-faire ethic of infinite choice. Space is both thematic and metafictional, revealing the nature of games as artifice. However, it is in the contrast between Pulse and Cocoon that the game truly communicates its meaning. He continues, grasping the conflict between Cocoon and Pulse requires neither video nor text. Reviewers of Final Fantasy XIII remarked that the game gets better or truly begins to shine when the player hits the 20-hour mark. That's when the player transitions from Cocoon to Pulse. We trade a series of stifling hallways for a wide open world. In Pulse, it is somewhat difficult to find one's way to a definite goal. Many enemies will instantly kill the player's team on being engaged. The literacy model carefully constructed throughout the first half of the game flies out the window. Instead, the player is left to fend for themselves, to pick her battles and hope for the best. She has left a world where everything a human needs is provided by divine stewards, entering another where the demigods have decided to let natural selection reign. Does this mean Final Fantasy XIII is a good or bad toaster? Neither. It means through criticism, aspects of its nature are elucidated, the audience's confusion is clarified, and insights into the nature of games and play are gleaned. A critical analysis was enhanced by formalism and informed it all the same. We understand every playthrough of games as different. It is a playthrough, after all. In one of the most interesting playthroughs of the game Far Cry 2, Permadeath, Ben Abraham documents his experience with playing the game with a single life, and how this constraint completely altered how he approached the game. Every corner was a renewed chance for death. The fear and dread was amplified to a fever pitch. This was a precursor to the modern Let's Play, an ethnographic, almost anthropological survey of one's first-hand experience playing the game. We watch people play and react to games, most likely because we all recognize every play of the game is a different play of the game. So a critic's personal knowledge and experience is just the first step of this. What this means is that honest and objective writing about games will always be deeply subjective. Participation implies ownership, authorship. However, there is also a universality to our subjective experiences. Compilations of people's experiences with games reveal similar emotions at key beats. Personal experiences can reveal insights about the human condition. So a good critic is also highly attuned to their own experience of games as they play them. As Brendan Keough puts it, to understand what is actually happening in a moment of video game play, the critic must attend to both what the player is consciously aware of and what the player is trying to ignore. When we play games, we often ignore the fiction. We ignore that games are played on physical hardware and instantiated by code. And mostly, we forget that without us, the game does not exist. When I finished The Last of Us Part 2, I was more confused than anything else. In fact, I still don't know what to think about the game. Frameworks and lenses and formalism are then a crutch when writing. We can analyze the game by its unit operations, by how each of its sequences is there to reinforce its criticism of violence, of humanity. We can look at the context of the game and suppose it is a response to endless criticism towards Naughty Dog, for luden art of dissonance, or how the leaks of the game frame people's expectations before they even played it. We can cite the lead developer's childhood experiences of the Israel-Palestine conflict to contextualize the core theme of cycles of retribution. I have read people arguing how the game is the first of a lineage of daughter games, how the strange character motivations in the game are about guilt or grief or PTSD that we are supposed to be angry. Then I watched Kurt Vonnegut's speech on storytelling and how the singular brilliance of Hamlet is that it kinda just has a series of events that happens. Gravitas, sure, but just incidental things.  Then The Last of Us Part 2's incoherence became coherent, at least for a moment. Why do we impose this expectation on stories, that there needs to be a payoff? Why is there a shape to stories at all? Do I still know what I think about The Last of Us Part 2? Outside of the fact that it is a shiny toaster, not really. Before I read about others' experiences of the game, as well as the formalism of both games and stories, as well as examining my own personal view on experiencing the game, the more something resembling coherent thoughts about it start to manifest. Could we analyze the gameplay systems of the game? Sure. Could we analyze the embedded narrative sequences in the game? Yes. Could we do a Marxist critique of the sociopolitical nature of post-apocalyptic society? Sure. Could I write to you about the process of formulating thoughts? Well, yes. Noelle Carroll said criticism is about the taste of the dish, not its adherence to recipe. But recipes are also important, for then there would be no dish. Writing about criticism is itself criticism, and so my personal opinion here is both valid and invalid. This is the criticism uncertainty principle. I think criticism is a craft that is cultivated by being both radically attuned to one's own experience of a game, combined with the experiences of others, combined with the knowledge of the form and function of the medium you are in. It is the taste of the dish, and others taste of the dish, and its adherence or deviation from recipes near and far, and why others should dine there, and why some don't like the dish, and why that's okay, and why we even make dishes to begin with.


Oh Hi, everyone, and he follows on Instagram Twitter Personally YouTube channels links always in the description No Today I think this trailer dropped a few days ago.  Is that you know what I learned? Yeah, it's not applicable to this what I was talking about in Johnny today and there was I don't remember how it came up But I learned the difference between the non nasal pronunciations in Hindi and Bengali versus the nasal ones because we don't do that in English Not that it applies here. Yeah. Yeah, I was so excited. I could do that. I can be nasal now But this has a Yushka Sharma in it cool a new sugar Sharma who produced As well in case you didn't don't remember me saying that our petal. How do you say it look? No, I'm smiling because that's exactly how I pronounced it and every time I did pronounce it that way and Johnny was like Yeah, it's it's Yeah But don't know what this one.  That's it three two One Dang that's a shot Me Me I'm a concern. I will go to the bus Satya Jalla The cinematography is insane. Beautiful. What happened? The day of worship has come to an end. Man is a man. Have you seen anyone? Have you heard anything? No. Wonderful. That looks fantastic. June 24th. That was my birthday. I loved the way you said that. It comes out June 24th. So it's a story set in the late 19th century Bengal. Boolaboo travelers, the journey of a young girl from innocence to strength as the legend of Chulbiel casts a looming shadow over the world. Well, first and foremost, it looked just beautiful. Gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. Especially that one at the beginning. At 15 seconds. You can go to the thing. Look at that shot at 15 seconds. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Everyone in the, yes. Everything is just paint. And I know it's obviously computer graphics, but it's gorgeous. It is absolutely gorgeous. So that's the first thing I noticed about it. And then it just looks incredibly creepy and really, really good. Yeah. What do you think about it? I do. Yeah. It looks everything about it except one thing which remains to be seen. Cinematography. The music was great. The lighting, the production design, the costuming, everything looked at its A game level. The only thing I can't tell, and it's not the trailer's fault in any way, shape, or form is, I can't tell if equally wonderful is going to be the performances of the actors within the story. And if the story itself is going to be what it, based on the trailer, I'm very interested in this. I didn't notice any bad, bad acting in the trailer. No. I definitely didn't notice anything bad, but it wasn't anything like, and this isn't a fair comparison, but it wasn't anything like the trailer you get. And they're totally different films because these other films are more actor-centric, like Raman Raghav 2.0 or Punch Box or English of English. Or, you know, even if I'm remembering correctly, something more epic and elegant and visual, like Padma Vat, there were aspects of it that we were drawn in by in regard to, like, the Pika and Ranveer. And again, that's just nitpickiness. That's the only thing I didn't see that would have otherwise made this an extraordinarily good trailer. This is great. So it's, Yushka Sharma is not in it. She's produced it. So I'm wondering how much she likes to do that more than she likes acting. I know she's a huge actor as well. She's an NH10, which I know you don't remember, but it's, I think, one that they said we should start with. Let me know if I'm incorrect in that. But she's produced a lot and it's all really interesting content. Like, let's see what was... Let's see, she produced Patalak. Or however you... I don't know how to pronounce that, you know. She was the lead and producer in NH10, which is a very brutal, bloody type of thing. She produced... What was that one? Oh, Pari. Do you remember Pari, the trailer for that one at all? I do. It was like a horror and she was in that one film. So I think she has a tendency to like the genre of horror. Or at least like dark a lot. And you guys can tell if I'm incorrect in that, but I think that's the vibe I'm getting from her. I know we need to explore her more because she's a... Not only just a big-time actress, but she's a big-time producer now. She came out with such an amazing series like Patalak. Can we... Corbanize it with that? Can we... Patalak. Patalak. Patalak. You have to choke on it. Hey, hey, since we're pronouncing movies, what's... Name that movie. Say the pronunciation for that movie. That's B-A-H-U-B-A-L-I. Bahubali. There it is. Bahubali? Is that how you pronounce it? That literal Hecabraic Yiddish khah sound isn't in the Hindi to my knowledge. Well, that feels... Yeah, but I love that you do that. I love that Bahubali. Bahubali. Yeah, it happened when I did Hindi lessons for Heather that I would do that or I would do... I would roll my Rs a lot more because of Spanish. Spanish, right. As opposed to they don't do that as much short at all in Hindi. Right. So anyways, let us know what you think about this. Obviously, none of you have seen it. Well, actually, depending on when this drops, some of you might have seen it. Maybe. So let us know how this film is down below.


Greco is voluntarily recalling 1.2 million Greco Harmony high chairs. The problem is the screws on the front legs can loosen and fall out, or on the rear legs the bracket can crack and break, allowing the chair to unexpectedly tip over. This poses a fall hazard to young children. Greco has received 24 reports of injuries including bumps and bruises to the head, a hairline fracture to the arm, and cuts and bruises to the body. To find the model included in the recall, check the underside of the footrest. If you have one of these chairs, stop using it immediately and contact Greco directly to receive a free repair kit, either their toll-free number or website. The repair kit includes this fabric panel, which attaches to the high chair on the base of all four legs, as well as replacement screws. Harmony high chairs were sold at AAFES, Burlington Coat Factory, Babies Are Us, Toys Are Us, Sears, Target, Target.com, Walmart, Walmart.com, Shopco, USA Baby, and other retailers nationwide from December 2003 through March 2010 for between $70 and $120.


Imagine four objects, an aluminium toy, an iron now, a copper pipe and a gold ring are left out in the open for many years. Which of the four materials do you think will be in the best condition when they are rediscovered? Pause, think and continue when ready. If you think the gold ring is likely to be in the best condition, you're right. The copper pipe and the iron now will appear in a worse condition, but the aluminium toy is also preserved very well. Most likely the iron now will appear in the worst condition. This is because of corrosion. Corrosion is described as formation of compounds on the surface of a metal when it is exposed to air and or water or an electrolyte like salt water. Typically, once a metal corrodes, it forms compounds known as oxides or hydrated oxides. The now, made of iron, rusted. This, by the way, is the only time you should use the term rusting. All other metals are considered as having been corroded when they react with water and or oxygen it in the air. But why would the now be more corroded than the aluminium toy, the copper pipe or the gold ring? Have you any ideas? Pause the video and continue when ready. The reason is the metals all have different reactivities. Iron corrodes faster because it is more reactive than the copper and the gold. But you may be wondering why didn't the aluminium toy corrode the fastest? The truth is the aluminium is more reactive than the iron, so it reacts fastest with the oxygen from the air, forming aluminium oxide. Aluminium oxide is very unreactive because once the oxide layer is formed on the surface, it binds very tightly to the surface of the metal, so no cracks can form and cause further corrosion. Here's a challenge. How might you use this idea to protect the iron now? The answer is that by covering a metal like iron with another more reactive metal, like zinc, is that the zinc forms the zinc oxide layer quickly. The iron underneath is protected. This process is called galvanizing and can last up to 100 years. If you think of the metal on a bike, corrosion can be prevented by painting the frame a static part or greasing the metal parts like the chain which moves, or by covering it with a thin layer of a less reactive metal, like tin, copper or gold. But that would be very expensive.


Hello and this lecture will continue on the test type problems, the smaller problems that could be in format of multiple choice questions. We have a company has fixed costs of $35,000, a contribution margin of 25%. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. If expected sales are 200,000, what is the margin of safety as a percentage of sales? So first we're going to think about okay what is the margin of safety? How can we calculate the margin of safety? I'm going to put a colon there we're going to calculate that that's going to be the sales less minus the break even. So that's how we're going to calculate that so do we have the material to do that we have first the 200,000 is going to be the sales the break even we don't have that so we're going to need that that's something that we will need in order to calculate the margin of safety and so that'll be our end calculation so I'll put that'll indent that out there and that is what we are looking for now once we get that then we need to get the percentage and that will just be the margin of safety divided by the sales that's how we're going to get as margin of safety as a percentage of sales so now we got to we got to figure out what the break even will be how we're going to get the break even the break even formula will be will be here it's fixed cost over the contribution margin percent so you can memorize that you can kind of derive that you probably want to have that somewhere handy for you when you're taking test questions and that's going to then eat the fixed cost given to us up here being the 35 i'm going to put a comma thousand i'm going to put alt enter to go underneath and we're going to divide that by 25 percent which is also given in the problem up here as the contribution margin ratio i'm going to go ahead and underline that and hit enter then go back on the cell then we can center it so that's our ratio that we need to do our division problem therefore then we can take this equals the 35 000 just going to calculate this divided by 0.25 25 percent is 0.25 and that will give us the 140 so that's the break even point so 140 so we can plug that in here that equals this 140 we just calculated right there and therefore the margin of safety equals if we think we're going to get 200 000 we say well how much over the break even where we make no profit are we minus the 140 we ever have a 60 000 margin of safety well what's the margin of safety as a percentage of sales then well that's going to equal the 60 000 divided by the 200 000 so that's what that's what a ratio is going to be now it's not zero of course because that means that there's no decimals right here so we're going to go to the home tab numbers and we can increase it's going to be 30 percent or we can just hit this percentage and there we have that so 30 percent so what is the margin of safety as a percentage of sales anytime you see as the percentage of sales it's going to be that ratio is the 60 over the sales in this case next one says that during its most recent fiscal year company had total sales of three million 260 000 contribution margin amount of one million five hundred thirty thousand and pre-tax income of four hundred and forty five thousand what should have been reported as fixed costs in the company's contribution margin income statement for the year in question all right so we're going to do our calculation here this is the kind of cost of volume calculation and we're going to start off with the sales just like we would with an income statement which would be the in this case three million two hundred and sixty thousand but different than a standard income statement we are going to subtract from that variable costs and that will then give us the contribution margin and we don't know the variable cost they didn't give us that but they did give us the contribution margin so we know that the contribution margin happens to be one million five hundred thirty thousand and they didn't ask us for variable cost and we don't really need to figure it out but we might as well because it's there so we we know that the formula for this would then be the three million two hundred sixty thousand minus variable costs kind of like our x fact they the unknown and that should equal this one million five thirty thousand so then if we solve for the variable cost we can see it's going to basically be a subtraction problem right so variable cost then if we solve for this is going to equal this uh three two six oh minus the one five three zero zero zero zero and that should be the variable cost if you could see that right here we could see it's a subtraction problem obviously it's going to be the sales minus the uh the contribution margin and we could double check that by saying okay well does that work if i pull out the calculator here does it work to say that three two six zero minus one seven three zero and i know i left off three zero but same thing yeah that works okay so that's that one and then we're going to say that we're going to take the fixed cost which that's what we're looking for we don't know that and then we have the income before tax it's kind of like net income net income before tax so and they gave us that number so once again we're backing into a number they gave us the 450 thousand so once again we're backing into this number so we subtracted these two to get to here and now we're taking this minus this to get to here we don't know what this is and once again that's going to be a subtraction problem you can kind of see it's a subtraction problem by saying well if it's this minus this gets to that then this must be the difference between this and that if that's unclear then write it down algebraically we can say that it's one million five hundred and thirty thousand minus the four four five oh i'm sorry minus the fixed cost the variable equals put it space the four equals the four four five comma and then if you write it down this way you can see algebraically that that basically it's going to be a subtraction problem because we're going to subtract the one million five thirty from each side so the fixed cost then would equal the four four five zero zero zero minus the one five three zero and there and there we would have that and then we'd have to flip the sign of course so we're going to flip the sign by saying negative of that so i'll let you work the math on that but you can see of course if we plug that in here if we say this is going to equal this number minus this number then that's it and we can double check our work then by pulling out the calculator and saying all right does that work if we take the one five three zero minus the one oh eight five that's going to give us the four forty five so that works so if there's only three numbers you can probably plug something in there and then double check it if it's a obviously it's a subtraction problem in this case next one says that a firm expects to sell twenty five out twenty five six hundred twenty five thousand six hundred units of its product at eighteen dollars per unit pre-tax income is predicted to be sixty thousand six hundred if the variable cost per unit are nine dollars total fixed cost must be what all right so we can we can break this out and put what we know in here once again we're going to take our sales minus our variable cost that'll give us our contribution margin less the fixed cost that's going to give us basically our net income before taxes so on the sales side we're going to start with sales and we have firm expects to sell twenty units so we have units that we're going to have and then the cost per unit so we'll have cost so the units and the cost and then we'll have the total right so we have to do this calculation here so we got twenty five six units they cost eighteen uh i'm sorry and this is cost sales or cost it's going to be one or the other we can go ahead and center those if we would like go on the home tab go into the center and we can make it bold all right so then we got this equals the twenty five six times eighteen so they they have twenty five six units times eighteen that means we're going to have sales of four hundred sixty thousand eight hundred variable costs remember those change in relation to the number of sales that's why we're breaking it out this way rather than a standard um income statement because we can do this kind of estimate estimation this way so we're going to say okay the variable cost for the two five six units is going to be nine dollars nine dollars per unit that's given to us here therefore the variable costs are going to be the twenty five six hundred times nine that's the cost per unit and there we have that and then we're going to say minus that's going to be the contribution margin contribution margin is going to equal the sales price minus the variable cost and that's our contribution margin so i'll put an underline there and then what we do is we subtract out the fixed cost so remember there's only two types of costs we're kind of looking at here breaking them out between variable and fixed fixed cost is the unknown that's what we don't know we're going to go ahead and underline that what they gave us once again is they gave us the end number uh which was to be income so this is pre tax income so we're going to say income is going to be this minus this number but we don't know that number so we can't do that yet and so but they gave us that number it's going to be 60600 so we got to say okay this minus this is going to equal that and obviously again that's going to be a subtraction problem you can kind of see it you can say well if this minus this is going to equal that then i got to subtract it's got to be the difference between this and that you could write that down algebraically 230 400 minus something which in this case is fixed cost that's our unknown equals the 60600 so we can see it algebraically we're solving for fixed cost which means we're going to have to subtract this from each side which will leave us with a negative and then we'll have to remove the negative from each side so i'm just going to do the subtraction problem and just say that fixed cost equals the uh i'm going to do the 200 what would be something like this we can say it's the negative uh to flip the sign of 60600 minus the 230 400 so i took a couple steps in one and there and there's a subtraction problem so we can see it's a subtraction problem here basically we're just going to say it's the 230 400 minus the 60600 and there's no real problem to make an estimate if we're not totally sure because we can just double check it say what was that work 230 400 minus the 169 800 does that equal 60600 it does all right so that looks like it's okay next one says during march firm expects its total sales to be 163 000 its total variable cost to be 95 3 and its total fixed cost to be 25 3 the contribution margin for march is so this is going to be our same calculation we're going to start with sales how do we calculate contribution margin we take the sales first and that's going to be the 163 that gave us that number less variable cost and they actually gave us that number 95 300 and that should give us the contribution margin which is just going to be sales minus the variable cost so all we have to do is basically know the formula that we've been using in order to do that to get to the variable costs note that they gave us some extra information which is going to leave us wondering that you know when we do the problem like why do they give us that extra information but that's what happens sometimes in the multiple choice questions next one says a company company's product sells for 12 dollars and two cents per unit and has a five dollar and three cent per unit variable cost the company's total fixed costs are 97 900 the break even point in units is what so notice was a key factor here is we're looking for the break even in units we've looked for the break even in total sales dollars in this case we're going to calculate the break even in units how many units do we need to produce in order to break even the way we're going to do that is we're going to take the contribution margin per unit and divide it into the fixed cost so let's take a look at that and see if that makes sense we're going to say okay the sales per unit is the 12.02 and the variable cost per unit is 5.03 I'm going to have to add some decimals here obviously so I'm just going to highlight this whole area where my calculations will be going to go to the home tab going to go to the number it's going to add some decimals like so all right so that means that we got the contribution margin per unit so contribution margin per unit is going to be we get we sell them off for 12 dollars and two cents and they cost five dollars and three cents therefore we're walking away after variable costs with six dollars and ninety nine cents per unit that we sell so now we can just figure out well how many units do we have to sell to like pay the fixed cost to like basically pay the rent the rents being one of the major fixed costs right with a real rent doesn't change month to month so how many units after the variable cost do we have to pay to cover this so in order to do that we're going to take the fixed cost of ninety seven nine hundred and divide it by the the contribution margin per unit so that equals this cell which is this six ninety nine we're going to divide those two out so we're going to take the ninety seven nine divided by the six point nine nine six dollars nine nine cents that means we're going to need to sell about fourteen thousand five and obviously note that you know it doesn't divide evenly so that means that we're probably going to have to round up if we want to uh to hit that break even points we'll probably be fourteen thousand six now if you wanted to see the dollar sales you could multiply that times the sales price in this case if they asked for the dollar sales which was 12.02 per unit so this is how many units we need to make times the the sales price and we could then come up with the dollars that would be this times the 12.02 then would be the sales in dollars next one says that a product sale for 260 per unit and its variable cost per unit are 189 the fixed costs are 432 thousand if the firm wants to earn 38,020 pre-tax income how many units must be sold okay so this is going to be similar to the break even in units but now we're just going to add to it the amount of profit that we want to get so first thing we need to do is get the contribution margin per unit so what we're going to do is we're going to take the sales per unit and that's we're going to be the 260 that's how much we sell our items for in this case and then we're going to take the variable cost per unit because those things change in a in a similar way unlike fixed cost and that's going to be our contribution margin per unit so we're going to subtract that out we're going to take the 260 minus the 189 contribution margin per unit now remember it on in terms of the fixed cost the break even in units we just took the fixed cost divided by this that's how much money that we are walking away from after each unit sales so it would make sense then to say well if the rent is whatever the rent is then how many of those units do we got to pay in order to sell in order to just basically pay the fixed cost that we know what's going to happen now the only difference when we're projecting income is that we're going to take the fixed cost which they gave us to be 432,000 and we're going to add to it the income that we want to earn we want to earn pre-tax income we're estimating 38,020 we had to add that 20 on there for some reason so that's probably gonna all right and then that means that if we add those up then we're going to say this is going to be the 432 plus the 38,020 that this is the number then that we need to clear with our 71 units so we need to say how many units do we need to sell in order for the 71 to add up to this 470,020 and that's going to be the contribution margin per unit here is the 71 and then we're just going to divide this out so we're going to divide this out we're going to say this equals the 470,020 divided by the 71 contribution margin per unit would mean that we would need to sell about 6,620 units if we want to know how much dollar revenues would we need in order to make that 38,020 pre-tax net income we can multiply times the sales price we're going to sell those for 260 remember up here and that means that we would need revenue of 6,620 times the 260 of 1,721,200 companies break even point in units is 1,700 the sales price per unit is 12 and the variable cost per unit is 9 if the company sells 3,900 units what is net income so we're going to do our calculation for net income we're going to have our three headers though are going to be the number of units that we have then we're going to have the sales price and the cost per unit and then we're going to have the total over here so this is going to be what we have I'm going to make that bold we can underline it we can center it and we got these sales so the units that we're going to sell they say that we're going to sell in our projection 3,900 units and the sales price per unit 12 so we're going to say the total then would equal the 3,900 times 12 and that would give us the 46,8 then we've got the variable cost this is how we calculate the within this calculation and we're going to say that the variable cost per units are 3,900 units again and the variable costs are 9 therefore we're going to say this equals the 3,9 times the $9 cost per unit and that will give us the total variable cost 35,100 this gives us the contribution margin so contribution margin again 3,900 units and we can get the contribution margin per unit I'm going to go ahead and underline this home tab underline contribution margin per unit would equal the 12 minus the 9 so after each unit we sell we walk away with three dollars and we can calculate this one of two ways we can say we want the 46,8 minus the 35,1 and that'll give us the 11,7 we also could have calculated by saying that we want the 3,9 times the 3 the contribution margin per unit to get the 11,7 now the next thing that we would need are the fixed costs the fixed costs that's what they don't know they didn't give us the fixed costs we don't know what the fixed costs are and and that would give us the ending number here which is going to be net income and net income we do not know as well that's what we're looking for so question how can we back into this fixed cost how can we get that number next calculation that they gave us they gave us that the breakeven point is in units 1,700 so we can take a look at that calculation how do we get the breakeven calculation the breakeven calculation you'll recall is fixed cost so fixed cost and and that's going to be divided by the contribution margin so the contribution margin per unit let's say per unit so we know what that number is that's three and we know that the breakeven point is in units one seven so here we have it we're looking for this fixed cost that's what we're looking for and we and we know that it's going to be this divided by that is one seven this divided by that is one seven therefore if it's a division to get to here it's probably multiplication to get back to there we can verify that by saying well it's going to be fixed cost is going to be divided by three has got to equal the one seven that's our formula and therefore to solve for fixed cost we if a division we have to do the opposite we got to multiply so it would be fixed cost is going to equal the three times one seven so do that again equals three times one seven and that gives us our five one so let's do that one more time it's a division to get from here to here so it's probably multiplication which is going to be three times one seven and there's no real risk in us doing that because we can always just check our work and say well does that work let's see if I took the five one divided by three then we get the one seven so that looks to be correct that now is our fixed cost so now we had to find the fixed cost so that's going to be the five one and now we could finally get to our net income which is going to be where we were before the contribution margin of eleven seven minus the five one so that one was a little tricky to back into a few things there


At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. A Pike County man will now wait for a grand jury to decide whether he will face a murder trial for the shooting death of his son. A detective investigating the death of David Harris testified Thursday that autopsy results revealed he had been shot six times with a .22 revolver. Harris was shot in the chest, shoulder, neck, elbow, and leg. This information was revealed during the preliminary hearing for Larry Harris, who has been charged with the murder of his son, David Harris. Kentucky State Police Detective Tony Tackett also testified that Larry Harris stated he and his son had been drinking the evening of the domestic dispute. Larry called 911 after shooting David and gave a statement to the dispatcher. After hearing the evidence, District Judge Robert F. Wright ruled there was probable cause for a grand jury to consider filing formal charges in the case. Larry Harris is currently in Pike County Detention Center with his bond set at $10,000. For Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


Have you ever played the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? The premise is pretty simple, one person names an actor, and you try to get to Bacon by naming individuals that they've been in movies together in as few steps as possible. So if I was to list John Boyega, you might say that Boyega was in The Circle with Tom Hanks who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. The game stems from a more scientific framework of how people are connected. In 1969, Jeffrey Tavers and Stanley Milgram's letter experiment set out to discover, amongst other things, how interconnected Americans were. The experiment involved giving a few hundred people in Nebraska letters that were addressed to someone in Boston whom they did not know. Each participant in the study was asked to send a letter to someone they knew who was more likely to know the person in Boston, or at least more likely to know someone else who might. They tracked how many times it took for the letter to get to the person in Boston, and on average it took six steps, hence six degrees of separation. As a quick side note, the interest in this game has led to the rise of something called the Bacon Number, where people search obscure actors to find the highest Bacon Number. It's very difficult to find an actor who has a Bacon Number higher than two, but you should check it out. There's a link to the website in the doodly-doo. It seems like we've reached a time where it is impossible to meet someone who is not at least aware of social networking. Technologies like Facebook and Instagram have come to play major parts in our day-to-day lives. However, it is important to note that while these technologies might be the most dominant in our recognition, they are not the original conception of social networking. Today we're going to talk a little bit about what social networking is, and dive into some of the history and impact of social networking services. In their 2009 book, Connected, the surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler theorized that social networks are organized sets of people made up of two things, individuals and their connections. Each person in the network functions as a node to a larger network. What mediated communication studies scholars find of particular interest is how people are linked together in these networks. You see, when we talk about social networks from a theoretical sense, we're talking about a construct that can be used to study relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies. Social networks are structured in a variety of different ways. Christakis and Fowler point out that this could be modeled simply as a fire line where you pass an object from a person to person in order to get that object to the end of the line. In this metaphor, the object is a communicated idea. Each person is connected to the person, to their left and to their right, but no one else. In the modern communicative sense, networks are far more complicated with multiple levels of interconnectivity and overlap. This leads to a rich field of study where we can look at the different ways messaging spreads across networks. Recently, many scholars have invested efforts trying to understand why some ideas might go further or viral and why some messaging strategies seem to fail. In the field of mediated communication, when we talk about social networks, we tend to focus more on specific social networking services. Social networking service is an online platform that people can use to build social networks or social relations with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds, or even real-life connections. In the modern day, there are a wide variety of social networking services and each vary in format and the number of features. As time has passed, these services have gotten more complex and incorporated a wide range of new information and communication tools and platforms. Early social networking services like Friendster were predominantly text-based, where current social networks have a high level of media richness.  In the last decade, social networking services, Facebook in particular, have had a large influence on how people communicate with other members of their social networks. In their 2007 article, mediated communication researchers Dana Boyd and Nicole Ellison defined social networking sites as web-based services that allow individuals to one, construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system. Two, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection. And three, view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. What is interesting about social networking services like Facebook is the amount of connections they allow us to access. This presents some interesting possibilities where users are able to find connections that they would not have normally interacted with in the course of their day-to-day lives. The structure of these services also makes connections more or less public knowledge. In the past, it was possible to go years without realizing that you and a colleague shared a mutual connection. Sites like Facebook are quick to point that shared node, individual, out. Use of social networking services has increased greatly over the last two decades with approximately half the humans on this planet actively engaging in at least one social networking site. Current research has thought to determine why so many people have turned to social networking sites. While this area of study is still unfolding, there are a few things that we can determine. First, by and large, users of social networking sites use the platforms to maintain their relationships. Data released by Pew shows that users of social networks tend to have more close ties and are about half as likely to feel socially isolated than individuals who avoid social media. Further, Pew data supports the finding that users of social networking services feel like they get far more social support than their unconnected counterparts. This has led several mediated communication researchers to reach the somewhat controversial conclusion that sites like Facebook help us accomplish our social goals and are not necessarily a detriment to our interpersonal relationships. Obviously, this is still a developing area of study and researchers continue to look more into the impacts as phenomena such as internet addiction, online cyberbullying, online stalking, and other problematic occurrences that are facilitated by these technologies. Today we discussed a bit of the theoretical foundations of social networks and looked at how social networking services are changing the way that we communicate. As a final side note, in 2006, I went on a whitewater rafting trip with actor Andy Dick who was in Zoolander 2 with Benedict Cumberbeck who was in the film Black Mass with Kevin Bacon. Thanks for watching and I'll see y'all next time. This video series is written and produced by me, Ryan Guy, with the help of a wide variety of scholarly research and open educational resources. For more information on the references and materials used, go ahead and see the description page on YouTube. This video is published under a Creative Commons license. Please feel free to share, use, and remix its content.