on 11-Jul-2017 (Tue)

This subject is for LOS 6.e.

A series of uneven cash flows means that the cash flow stream is uneven over many time periods. There is no single formula available to compute the present or future value of a series of uneven cash flows.

Present Value

When we have unequal cash flows, we must first find the present value of each individual cash flow and then the sum of the respective present values. (This is usually accomplished with the help of a spreadsheet.)

Future Value

Once we know the present value of the cash flows, we can easily apply time-value equivalence by using the formula to calculate the future value of a single sum of money (LOS a).

Example

John wants to pay off his student loan in three annual installments: $2,000, $4,000 and $6,000, respectively, in the next three years. How much should John deposit into his bank account today if he wants to use the account balance to pay off the loan? Assume that the bank pays 8% interest, compounded annually.

In "Some Exploratory Discourse on Metadiscourse," Vande Kopple proposes two levels of writing. On one level, he says, the author provides propositional material concerning the subject matter in the text. On the other level, the author "does not add propositional material" but does "help our readers organize, classify, interpret, evaluate, and react to such material" (83). This is where metadiscourse operates. It follows that metadiscourse becomes "discourse about discourse or communication about communication" (83). 6

That Vande Kopple bases his characterization of metadiscourse largely upon the notion of truth and falsehood only makes that characterization suspect. Most simply put, both metadiscourse and primary discourse can be liable to the same kind of ills or infelicities, including various instances of "misfires" and "abuses" (Austin 18). These ills or infelicities have as much to do with truth and falsehood as with "nonpropositional" factors.

Take this sentence on vowel stress in French: "I hypothesize that words in French are stressed on one of the last two syllables." The sentence contains a metadiscourse marker "I hypothesize," which apparently purports not to add any new propositional material but to call the reader's attention to the speech act of hypothesizing. But, since what is supposedly being hypothesized is a well-acknowledged fact, the act of hypothesizing becomes untrue and thus "misfires."

It is self-evident that love is the primary topic of medieval Persian poetry.

I prefer the view of scholars who regard courtly love as an essentially literary phenomenon expressive of a mode of thought that has close ties with courtly values. 9

A great deal of research from the information processing framework has been conducted on the topic of memory and aging. The general consensus is that certain memory functions do decline with age. This work must be interpreted with care. These two factors combined make it difficult to generalize across age groups because of subject and cohort bias. Subject bias comes from using people who do not necessarily represent the general population (such as college students versus the broad population of young adults). Cohort bias or effect is any difference between groups of adults of varying ages that is due not to any maturation or developmental process, but simply to the fact that the different age groups have grown up under different historical and cultural circumstances. Some of the authors of these studies do not define older adult. Tthey neither describe nor critique the study participants. The range of the older adult group was from fifty to eighty.

Moreover, most of this research has been conducted primarily in laboratory settings using memory tasks and activities, such as repeating back nonsense words and lists of random numbers. The primary criticism leveled against thi s type of research on memory is that these tasks and skills are generally artificial and taken out of the context of everyday life.