Lisa and Richard wish to acquire Acacia Corp., a C corporation. As part of their discussions with Tobias, the sole shareholder of Acacia, they examined the business’ tax accounting balance sheet. The relevant information is summarized as follows:     Fair value Adjusted basis Assets:     Cash $30,000 $30,000 Equipment $70,000 $10,000 Building1 $260,000 $140,000 Land1 $410,000 $180,000 Total $770,000 $360,000       Liabilities:     Payables $20,000 $20,000 Mortgage1 $150,000 $150,000 Total $170,000 $170,000   1 Mortgage is attached to the building and the land.   Tobias’ basis in the Acacia stock is $400,000. Lisa and Richard offer to pay Tobias $900,000 for his company.   [question 4 of 4] How much gain or loss must Tobias recognize if the transaction is structured as a direct asset sale and Acacia distributes all its after-tax proceeds to Tobias in liquidation of his stock? (assume a 21 percent corporate tax rate)

HUMOR OR HUMILIATION               What should a parent do when a 2-year-old shrieks inconsolably because her string cheese wrapper tore “the wrong way”? Increasingly, the answer is “snap a photo, add a snarky caption and upload it to Instagram.”             Publicly laughing at your toddler’s distress has somehow become not only acceptable but encouraged. Websites offer “best of” compilations, or canned quips readers can use when posting tantrum photos and videos. As psychologists and parents ourselves, we understand the urge to laugh when a child howls because he’s forbidden to eat the packing peanuts from the Amazon box, and we also understand the impulse to make these moments public. The problem is the mockery.             When a child cries, parents are biologically programmed to spring into action; blood pressure increases, for example, even if it’s not your kid. Because you know there’s no real danger during a typical tantrum, you joke in an attempt to silence the false alarm your ancient brain is sounding. In addition, joking about difficulties with those who share your situation creates an in-group, a feeling of solidarity. In a classic experiment, a researcher observed that patients in a hospital ward were quick to joke with one another about their greatest discomforts: helplessness in the face of hospital routine or fear of the unknown.             The benefits of humor do come at a cost — someone must be the butt of the joke. Another hospital study noted that humor usually has an undercurrent of hostility, which is why jokesters felt compelled to respect social hierarchies. Doctors could poke fun at residents, and residents at nurses, but jokes directed up the hierarchy were not acceptable.  More formal experiments confirm the role of aggression in humor. In one, an experimenter interacted with subjects either rudely or neutrally. Later, the experimenter “accidentally” spilled hot tea on herself, and subjects to whom she was rude were much more likely to smile or laugh.             This perspective — that there’s a whiff of meanness in the tantrum-posting craze — may strike you as melodramatic. After all, he’s not crying because his dog died; he’s crying because the water in his sippy cup is too wet. It’s funny because there’s nothing wrong. But in his 2-year-old brain, those two events may be equally tragic. The prefrontal cortex has not fully developed, making it difficult to appreciate that water can only be wet or that his dog will not return, or to regulate the ensuing emotion in either case. That his agitation is illogical makes it no less real.             Another person’s distress should not be a signal to pull out your phone, craving “likes.” That’s bad enough when it’s a stranger on a plane, but how much the more so when it’s your child, who needs your respect and compassion? Yes, children should learn to laugh at themselves, and that type of learning should first occur in the safety of the family. But those early lessons should concern some harmless folly the child can understand, and a tantrum signals that it’s the wrong moment.             Parents have needs too, but you can satisfy them without mocking your child. When a tantrum jangles your nerves, instead of laughing, try this empirically proven method of interrupting the “panic cycle.” Notice your body’s response — the racing heart, the shallow breathing — and remember that your reaction is biological, not cause for alarm. Further calm yourself with a deep breath or a quick 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise.             Solidarity with other parents comes from sharing your experiences in raising kids, so sure, continue posting stories and pictures of your children — just don’t mock them. If you must tell someone about your kid falling apart because you are “very bad at making lassos,” tell a family member or close friend. Teasing entails trust and love; strangers on the internet don’t love your child.             Raising children is complicated, and few rules can be applied without exception. Humor offers one, though: Always laugh with your children, never at them.

STAY HOME, VOLUNTOURISTS!               Several years ago, when I was working as a reporter in Haiti, I came upon a group of Americans, struggling with heavy shovels to stir a pile of cement. They were there to build a school alongside a church. Muscular Haitians stood by watching, perplexed and a bit amused at the sight of men and women who had come all the way from the United States to do a mundane construction job.             The Americans were a familiar sight: They were voluntourists. They would come for a week or two for a “project” — a temporary medical clinic, an orphanage visit or a school construction. A 2008 survey of 300 organizations estimated that 1.6 million people volunteer on vacation. Celebrities drop in to meet locals and witness a project that bears their name. Other people come to teach English during school vacations or during a gap year. And some sun-seeking vacationers stay at beachside resorts but also want to see “the real (name your country).”             Volunteering seems an admirable way to spend a vacation. We donate money to foreign charities to make the world a better place, so why not also use our skills? However, I wonder if these good intentions are misplaced. The people I watched knew nothing about construction. They had spent thousands of dollars to fly there to do a job that Haitian bricklayers could have done much faster. Imagine how many classrooms could have been built if the volunteers had donated that money instead of flying to Haiti. Those Haitian masons could have found weeks of employment with a decent wage instead of being out of a job — at least for several days.             Moreover, constructing a school is relatively easy. Improving education, especially in a place like Haiti, is not. Do volunteer groups have long-term plans to train and recruit qualified teachers to staff the school? Do they have a budget to pay those teachers? Other school-builders I met in Haiti admitted they weren’t involved in any long-term planning.             Sometimes, volunteering causes real harm. Research in South Africa has found that “orphan tourism” — where visitors volunteer as caregivers for children whose parents died or can’t support them — has become so popular that some orphanages operate more like businesses than charities, intentionally subjecting children to poor conditions in order to entice unsuspecting volunteers to donate more money. Many “orphans,” it turns out, have living parents who, with a little support, could probably do a better job of raising their children than some volunteer can. Importantly, the constant arrivals and departures of volunteers have been linked to attachment disorders in children.             Some volunteers possess specialized skills. In Haiti I met an ophthalmologist from Milwaukee who had just spent a week performing laser eye surgery. He recounted the joy he felt at helping people who were going blind from cataracts to see. But not all voluntourists come with an expertise like ophthalmology. When I asked one volunteer why she moved to Haiti, she said, “I felt called to be here, and came not knowing what I was going to do.” In many ways, this woman is typical; many believe that being a good neighbor in a globalized world means that simply experiencing a foreign culture is not enough. They must change that place for the better.             Perhaps we are fooling ourselves. Unsatisfying as it may be, we ought to acknowledge the truth that we, as amateurs, often don’t have much to offer. Perhaps we ought to abandon the assumption that we, simply by being privileged enough to travel the world, are somehow qualified to help.             I believe that the first step toward making the world a better place is to simply experience that place. Unless you’re willing to devote your career to studying international affairs and public policy, researching the mistakes that foreign charities have made while acting upon good intentions, and identifying approaches to development that have data and hard evidence behind them — stay home, because voluntourism is not for you.

GOING AGAINST THE CURVE                          Ask people what’s wrong in American higher education, and you’ll hear about grade inflation. Across 200 colleges and universities, over 40 percent of grades were in the A realm, a percentage that has grown over the past three decades. But the opposite problem worries me even more: grade deflation, when teachers use a forced grading curve: The top 10 percent of students receive A’s, the next 30 percent get B’s, and so on.             The forced curve arbitrarily limits the number of students who can excel. If your forced curve allows for only seven A’s, but 10 students have mastered the material, three of them will be unfairly punished. It disincentivizes studying, creating an atmosphere that pits students against one another. At best, it increases competition, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.             Many people believe that the world is a zero-sum game, but as an organizational psychologist, I’ve found that they’re wrong. The time employees spend helping others contributes as much to their performance evaluations and promotion rates as how well they do their jobs. An analysis of 168 studies of more than 51,000 employees showed that leaders reward people who make the team and the organization more successful. My research studying the careers of “takers,” who aim to come out ahead, and “givers,” who enjoy helping others showed that in the short run, the takers were more successful. But in the long run, the givers consistently achieved better results. Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships — people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.             Like most people in business schools, my students were intent on networking, but they focused their efforts outside their classes and regarded their in-class peers as competition. I decided to change that culture. I started experimenting with grading schemes that would encourage community and collaboration, while still maintaining standards and assessing students individually.             I began by writing unusually difficult exams. That was enough to motivate students to study hard. And I introduced a rule: No student will ever be hurt by another student’s grade. I promised them that I would never curve downward, only upward. If the highest mark was an 83, I would add 17 points to everyone’s score. Now one student’s excellence didn’t hurt another’s grade.             But while that removed a level of competition, it didn’t address the bigger goal, which was to make preparing for my exam a team effort. How could I get students to help one another?             I tried another approach. The most difficult section of my final exam was multiple choice. I told the students that they could pick the one question about which they were most unsure, and write down the name of a classmate who might know the answer. If the classmate got it right, they would both earn the points. Essentially, I was trying to build a collaborative culture with a reward system where one person’s success benefited someone else. It was a small offering but it made a big difference. More students started studying together in small groups, then the groups started pooling their knowledge.             The results: Their average scores were 2 percent higher than the previous year’s. We’ve long known that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. In fact, evidence suggests that this is one of the reasons that firstborns tend to slightly outperform younger siblings on grades and IQ tests: Firstborns benefit from educating their younger siblings.             I had been trying to teach this lesson through my research on givers and takers, but it was so much more powerful for them to live it. Creating an atmosphere in which students want to help one another also allowed them to benefit from another of the defining features of personal and professional relationships: transactive memory, which is simply knowing who knows best. In a work team you don’t have to know how to perfect PowerPoint slides if your colleague is an expert.             When students take the time to find out who has expertise, they become smarter at learning. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to teach, isn’t it? The mark of higher education isn’t the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It’s the skills you gain about how to learn.

SHOULD YOU HAVE A PET?   America is experiencing a population boom — of pets. Driven by rising disposable income and urbanization and by evolving attitudes toward animals, the number of pets has grown more rapidly since the mid-1970s than the human population, to the point where there are now about as many pets as there are people. We don’t just buy pets as never before, we also treat them differently. More animals are living in our houses and are given over to a life of leisure. Animals are spoken of as family members — and not just dogs and cats, but rabbits, rats and snakes. We feed them scientifically formulated organic diets and take them to veterinary specialists. Veterinarians and psychologists describe these changing practices as evidence of a deepening “human-animal bond.” I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the very notion of “pet.” Scientists studying animal cognition and emotion are continually peeling back the mysteries of animal minds, revealing an incredible and often surprising richness in the thoughts and feelings of other creatures. For instance, the more I’ve learned about goldfish the guiltier I feel that I subjected several of these creatures to a life of endless tedium, swimming circles in a small bowl on my daughter’s dresser. When I came upon the conclusion by the University of Tennessee ethologist Gordon Burghardt that the best we can do for captive reptiles is a life of “controlled deprivation,” I wished I had never bought Lizzy, our gecko. I felt awful when I learned that Lizzy’s perpetual clawing at the glass wall of her tank was most likely a manifestation of captivity-induced stress. We had basically been torturing her, and it is not surprising that she died after only two years, despite our efforts to give proper care. The ethical problems with the small creatures we stuff into cages and tanks are relatively clear-cut. The more challenging moral questions arise in relation to our closest furry friends: dogs and cats. Unlike animals that must spend their entire life in a cage or that must struggle to adapt to a human environment, most cats and dogs have it pretty good. Many have the run of our homes, share in many of the activities of their human families, and may even have opportunities to form social relationships with others of their kind. They have lived in close contact with humans for thousands of years and are well adapted to living as our companions. They can form close bonds with us and, despite species barriers, can communicate their needs and preferences to us, and we to them. Yet the well-being of our cats and dogs is perhaps more compromised than most of us would like to admit. There are, of course, the obvious systemic problems like cruelty, neglect, abandonment, the millions wasting away in shelters waiting for a “forever home” or whose lives are snuffed out because they don’t behave the way a “good” pet should. But even the most well-meaning owner doesn’t always provide what an animal needs, and it is likely that our dogs and cats may be suffering in ways we don’t readily see or acknowledge. We can too easily forget that although we have an entire world outside our home, we are everything to our animals. How many dogs, for instance, are given lots of attention inside a home, but rarely get outside? How many spend their weekdays inside and alone, while their owners are at work, save for the one or two times a dog walker or neighbor drops by for a few minutes to feed them and take them out briefly? Is it going too far to suggest that these dogs are suffering? It may be hard to recognize the harmful aspects of pet keeping when all we hear is how beloved pets are, how happy they are to be in our company, and how beautiful and enduring the human-animal bond is. Yet if we really care about animals, we ought to look beyond the sentimental and carefully scrutinize our practices. Animals are not toys — they are living, breathing, feeling creatures. Perhaps we can try to step into their paws or claws and see what being a pet means from their perspective. We might not always like what we see.

22F develops anaphylactic shock. You are the nurse and give her epinephrine. You know epinephrine is the drug of choice as it is an agonist for which of the following receptors? Select all that apply

Which sentence demonstrates the elimination of wordiness? a. The sun rose. The birds sang. The flowers bloomed.b. As the sun rose, the birds sang and the flowers bloomed.c. The rising sun welcomed singing birds and blooming flowers.d. Rising, singing, blooming: nature awakened with the sun.

True or false: The Supreme Court has ruled that it is unreasonable for police to arrest someone for a minor traffic offense.

The Zygomatic process is located on what bone?

The majority of arrests are made _____________.