The African American Term. Or Discrimination Essay

The African American Term. Or Discrimination - Essay Example His demand that he should be considered an African-American because he is an African and an American citizen sounds genuine at first glace. But Swarn reveals the issues related to such a proposition from the perspective of those who oppose it. The fact that Colin Powell, the son of Jamaican parents, and Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and an African mother, have reached the pinnacles of US politics explains how the African immigrants have become an integral part of the black community. However, it remains to be seen whether the essentialist African-Americans would identify with them in all spheres. Mr. Alan Keyes, Obama’s Republican challenger for the Senate seat in Illinois had questioned Obama’s claim to be an African-American, stating that he lacks the consciousness that was formed by a heritage of slavery that the ancestors of African-Americans had gone through. Though Obama and Powell prefer to call themselves African-American, many of the children of Afri can Immigrants just prefer the term African, or Jamaican-African or Nigerian-African, depending on the places of their origin. Some others prefer the more generic term ‘black’ for their identity. Bobby Austin, who opposes the African immigrants being integrated to the category of African-Americans, explains that some people feared that â€Å"black immigrants and their children would snatch up the hard-won opportunities made possible by the civil rights movement†. Several surveys support this view, indicating that the children of black immigrants are making use of educational and employment opportunities in a greater number than African-Americans. Dr.Austin affirms that the suffering of the African-Americans that have lasted many decades is not at alleviated with the help of the civil rights movement, because the black immigrants pose a threat and hindrance to their social and cultural development. Mr. Obama’s view is that the African

An Inspector Calls Essay Example for Free

An Inspector Calls Essay Miss Sheila Birling, a prominent character in Priestlys play An Inspector Calls, undergoes many changes throughout the play. The audience and readers perspective towards her also alters. Sheila changes before our eyes from a little girl into a strong young woman. In the beginning, Sheila is described to us as being in her early twenties and very pleased with life. This gives us an impression that she is just a girl, who has not seen enough of the world yet and is very young in her thoughts. We see her as being very immature at first, addressing her parents as Mummy and Daddy. She is clearly a mummys girl who follows her parents instructions and orders For example, she meekly follows her mother to the drawing-room and leaves the men including her husband-to-be. Although she is engaged to Gerald Croft, Sheila places her husband-to-be on a pedestal, admiring him and calling h9im darling. She takes the engagement ring like a little girl would receive a new toy look, mummy! The way Sheila acts in the first part of the play makes her seem like someone who is soft, innocent and silly, or plain immature. After the Inspector arrives, our opinion towards her changes. After she confesses to the Inspector, Sheila breaks down. She feels very sorry for all the pain she has caused Eva Smith. The Inspector makes her feel responsible for using her wealth, importance and influence to get a truly innocent girl sacked from her last steady job. Sheila sobs and cries, like a child. However, our opinion really changes when she confronts Gerald. Sheila laughs hysterically, at the end of Act One, when she says, You fool. Of course he knows. And I hate to think what he knows that we dont know yet. This behaviour is rather like that of a teenager throwing a tantrum, showing her growing realisation and maturity. When Gerald begins to confess, Sheila shows a rebellious streak. She refuses to be led away by her parents who want her to be protected. This is like what the average adolescent would do when they wish to cross new territory. Sheila begins to control herself a little more rationally during Geralds interrogation Gerald falls off the high placing he was originally on as Sheila calls him by name rather than by some playful nickname.

Deletion Essay -- Biology, DNA

Deletion is a mutation in which a part of the chromosome or the DNA is absent or lost. It may be inherent, or it may be due to improper chromosomal crossing-over during meiosis. This deletion is responsible for the abnormalities in the patient. One of the known disorders seen due to deletion is the Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome (WHS), first described by Wolf et al[1] and Hirschhorn et al[2], results from the hemizygous deletion of the distal short arm of chromosome 4. Due to the complex and unmarked expression of this disorder, the WHS syndrome is presumed to be a contiguous gene syndrome with an indeterminate number of genes responsible for the phenotype i.e. a multigenic etiology. [3][4] The size of the terminal deletion may vary from a subtle 1.4Mb to a classic 30Mb [5]. Earlier genotype-phenotype correlation studies reveal that the main characteristic feature of WHS - the ‘Greek warrior helmet face’, is caused due to the hemizygosity of the WHSC1 gene located in the WHS critical region (WHSCR).[5] Various other genes are also located in the WHSCR which are responsible for most other phenotypic features. More precisely, the Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome critical region (WHSCR) is located at 4p16.3 region. Approximately 25% of the patients with WHS deletion in this region are not detectable by cytogenetic karyotyping [6]. Hence, FISH has to be performed. The prevalence of this syndrome is estimated to be 1 in 50,000 births [7] with a female to male ratio of 2:1[8]. Case report: A baby was born with low birth weight of 1.8 kg to a 36 yr old father and 32 yr old mother. The proposita is the 6th girl child of the non-consanguineous parents. As can be seen from the pedigree chart shown in figure 2, the mothe... ...infant with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome: a dilemma in determination of the optimal timing of delivery. Clinical Medicine: Case reports. 8. Society for the Study of Behavioral Phenotypes (SSBP) Information sheet: Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. Registered Charity number 1013849. 9. Altherr, M.R., Bengtsson, U., Elder, F. F. B., Ledbetter, D. H., Wasmuth, J. J., McDonald, M.E., Gusella, J. F., Greenberg, F. Molecular confirmation of Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome with a subtle translocation of chromosome 4. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 49: 1235-1242, 1991. [PubMed: 1746553] 10. Althea T. Impact of chromosome 4p-syndrome on communication and expressive language skills: A preliminary investigation. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools. Vol 41 265-276 July 2010. 11. Harold Chen. EMedicine Specialties> Pediatrics: Genetics and Metabolism Disease> Genetics. Updated Jun 16, 2009.

Animala and Human Language Essay

AAnimals and human language Features and characteristics Linguistics is defined as the systematic study of language – a discipline which describes language in all its aspects and formulates theories as to how it works . Language is the specialized sound signaling system which seems to be genetically programmed to develop in humans. Humans can, of course, communicate in numerous other ways, they can work, wave, smile, tap someone on the shoulder, and so on. It is clear that humans can transfer language to various other media: written symbols, Braille, sign language , and so on. Sign language is particular has interesting characteristics which are not to be participated in spoken word. However, language based on sound is more widespread and more basic , so it is given more importance in this analysis. Language is apart of culture, it is apart of human behavior. It is an acquired habit of systematic vocal activity representing meanings coming from human experience. Some features of difference between human language and animal communication. Use of sound signals When animals communicate with on another, they may do so by a variety of means. Grabs, for example, communicate by waving their claws at one another. But such method are not as widespread as the use of sounds, which are employed by humans , bird s, monkeys, and many other species. So our use of sound is no way unique. Sound signals have several advantages . They can be used in the dark , and at some distance to allow several messages to be sent. By regarding language basically as sound,. The linguist can take the advantage of the fact that all human beings produce speech sounds with essentially the same equipment. Even foreign language may sound strange or difficult to use , al of them can be described by accounting the movement of the articulatory organs that produce them. Arbitrariness An animal communication, their a strong recognizable link between the actual signal and the message an animal wishes to convey .An animal who wishes to warn off an opponent may simulate an attacking attitude . In human language there is no link between the signal and the message .The symbols used are arbitrary .There is no connection, for example , between the word elephant and the animal it symbolizes. Onomatopoeic words such as quack- quack are exceptions and they are relatively few. The need for learning Animal communicate with each other without learning. Their systems of communication are genetically inbuilt. This is quite different from the long learning process needed to acquire human language, which is culturally transmitted, and totally conditioned by the environment, and there is almost some type of innate predisposition towards language in anew born child. But this latent potentiality can be activated only by long exposure to language which require careful learning. Duality In animal communication vocal signals have a stock of sounds which vary according to species. cow, for example, has ten, a chicken has around twenty, and a fox over thirty. Human language works rather differently. Each language has a stock of sound units or phonemes, the average number is between 30 to 40.But each phoneme is normally meaningless in isolation. It become meaningful only when it is combined with other phonemes. That is, the sounds such as f, g, d, o mean nothing separately. The normally take on meaning only when they combined together in various ways, as in fog, dog, god. This organization of language into layers- a layer sounds which combine into a second layer of larger unit- is known as duality or double articulation. communication system with duality is considerably more flexible than one without it, because afar greater number of messages can be sent. Displacement Most animals can communicate about things in the immediate environment only. A bird utters its danger cry only when danger is present. It cannot give information about a peril which is removed in time and place. Human language can communicate about things that are absent as easily as about things that are present. This apparently rare phenomenon, known as displacement, does occasionally appear in the animal world . but this ability is limited for animal communication. Human language can cope with any subject whatever, and it does not matter how far away the topic of conversation is in time and place. Creativity(Productivity) Most animal have very limited number of messages they can send or receive . This restriction is not found in human language which is creative or productive. Human can produce novel utterances wherever they want to. A person can utter a sentence which has never been said before, in most unlikely circumstances, and still be understood. Patterning Human language is not a haphazard heap of individual items .Humans do not juxtapose sounds and words in a random way. Instead, they ring the changes on a few defined patterns. In English, for example, the sounds a.b, s,t. have only four possible ways to arrange bats, tabs, stab,or bast, but not sbt, abts, stab because the ‘rules’ subconsciously followed by people who know English do not allow these combinations for a new word. Similarly, consider the words, burglar, loudly, sneezed, the, only three combination are possible : The burglar sneezed loudly. Loudly sneezed the burglar The burglar loudly sneezed. (perhaps) English places firm restrictions on which item can occur together, and the order in which they come. Every item in language has its own characteristic place in the total pattern. Language can be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items.

Deconstructing redemption in The Road

â€Å"There Is no God and we are his prophets†: Deconstructing Redemption In Corm McCarthy The Road. (paper under review: not for quotation) Stefan Skirmisher The University of Manchester Stefan. [email  protected] AC. UK 09/09/09 Abstract Despite its overwhelmingly positive reception, the apparently redemptive conclusion to Corm McCarthy The Road attracted criticism from some reviewers. They read in it an inconsistency with the nihilism that otherwise pervades the novel, as well as McCarthy other works.But what are they referring to when they Interpret redemption', the ‘messianic' and ‘God' In McCarthy novel? Some Introductory thoughts from apocalypse theory and deconstruction reveal a more nuanced approach that not only ‘saves' McCarthy from the charge of such critics. It also opens up more interesting avenues for exploring the theme of redemption and the messianic in contemporary disaster fiction. Introduction Justifiably effusive praise was heaped, by t he literary community, upon McCarthy multiple award-winner The Road (2006).But perhaps the most interesting reaction came in the form of critique of the allegedly â€Å"redemptive† and â€Å"messianic† tone of Its conclusion. Michael Cabochon's celebrated review of the book argued that McCarthy appeared to insert such a tone â€Å"almost†¦ In spite of himself',l that is, out of character with his usual nihilism. Another reviewer went as far as to suggest the novel â€Å"failed† the â€Å"modernist challenge: to write about a holocaust, about the end of everything†¦ What happens Is a redemption, of sorts, arguably absurd In the face of such overwhelming nihilism. 2 One wonders how McCarthy himself would respond. Perhaps we should begin by recalling the cautionary and prophetic injunction that Nietzsche appended to one of his last works, Ace Homo: â€Å"l have a terrible fear I shall nee day be pronounced holy: one will guess why I bring out this book beforehand; it is Intended to prevent people from making mischief of me†¦ My truth Is dreadful: for hitherto the Ill has been called truth. â€Å"3 Nietzsche feared the untimely nature of the truth he came to announce to a modernity whose ‘end' had only just begun.He predicted the unpreserved of us â€Å"murderers of God† to stand up in the ruins of the transcendent â€Å"old God† of metaphysics, and an unwillingness to create our own tragic pursuit of life. God, he would later write, would simply refuse die; the task of modern man was therefore to kill him again and again. He difficult and paradoxical redemption offered in The Road is very far from resurrecting the old God of metaphysics. Indeed, I would like to argue in the following that it interweaves themes both of resistance (the refusal to die) and mourning (the passing of irreversible loss).In doing so, the novel powerfully engages the reader with the very porous nature of redemption in the context of its post-apocalyptic environment. Engaging McCarthy text in this way invites a Adrienne, deconstructive reading of the narrative of redemption in contemporary disaster fiction in general. This is cause the conversations and thought-experiments employed by McCarthy attempt in many different ways to destabilize and provoke questions of the binary oppositions involved in that very discussion of redemptive ends (indeed, of the possibility of conceiving ‘ends' at all).There are oppositions such as the saved and the damned, the lost and the retrievable; the redeemed and irredeemable futures. McCarthy provokes the question, in particular, of what meaning we might possibly attach to human redemption and the â€Å"messianic† in an ostensibly irredeemable earth. What can be hoped for, sustained, and believed in? On the one hand, therefore, McCarthy pursuit of life and lives in the scorched wasteland bears all the hallmarks of Nietzsche tragedy – the â€Å"taming of ho rror through art†4 -as opposed to a comic rendering of the apocalypse (in which the righteous are spared the calamities of the end).On the other hand, the ambiguous sense of the messianic in The Road hints at more than lyrical or existentialist responses to tragedy. By tracing McCarthy exploration of redemption alongside developments in the continental philosophy of religion, first in the form of ‘death of God theology, and second, that of indestructibility of the messianic, I hope to open up some exploratory questions about the ambiguity of redemption in this highly influential piece of contemporary fiction.Ends of The Road Michael Cabochon states that for authors attempting a move into the futuristic post- apocalypse genre, â€Å"it is an established fact that a preponderance of religious imagery or an avowed religious intent can go a long way toward mitigating the science- fictional taint. â€Å"5 And so Cabochon believes that, in McCarthy novel, the father â€Å"f eeds his son a story'. By constructing the creed or injunction to â€Å"carry the fire†, the story is infused with a â€Å"religious sense of mission† that, incarnate in the hope given to the life of the boy, â€Å"verges on the explicitly messianic†. We would do well to pause in front of the implications of this word â€Å"messianic†. Who is saved: the boy? The promise of human community? And who or what comes to save? The boys saviors at the end present a hesitant, and uncertain departure: the guarantee only that others like him are alive. The messianic here would appear to take the form as much as a threat as a promise. And yet, taken from the Hebrew term for ‘anointed one', the concept of messiah in Jewish and early Christian literature is indeed bound up closely with the apocalyptic social upheaval. Certain expressions of the messianic thus anticipate both destruction (of the old world) and rebirth (of the new). In Jewish rabbinic thought what is crucial for messianic belief is its relationship with history and historic experience. It is visionary hope in the present for the way things could be, whether these are simply restorative or utopian. 8 The tradition that emerges is subsequently one of the announcement of such a promise of the future through the voice of the prophets.Anticipating Jacques Deride, the concept of the messianic announcement is the voice of the fringe, the outside of sanctioned, homogeneous discourse: â€Å"a call, a promise of an independent future for what is to come, and which comes like every messiah in the shape of peace and Justice, a promise independent of religion, that is to say universal. â€Å"9 Whilst The Road carries its own utopian and dyspepsia prophets, however, redemption is nowhere conceived or expressed as the restoration of peace. Nor is it infused with any hope in the renewal of the earth, or even of the narrative of new beginnings for the scorched landscape.McCarthy relentlessl y refuses reassurance that any return to a golden age is possible. The novel is an exploration of the irreversible, of â€Å"things which could not be put back†. 10 In what, then, consist its alleged religiosity, its messianic expectation, or â€Å"greater The clues lie in the relationship formed between a salvation to come (framed in the metaphor of the road itself: Mimi need to keep going. You don't know what might be down the road†12) and the ambiguous sense of endings running throughout the book. The father's own life represents a refusal of the simplicity of endings.His son must not lay down and die. Or, more precisely, he may not die of his own choosing, before the Father has calculated death's permeability on his behalf. The terror of the novel is thus generated within the narrative context of this slipping away of the control over the appropriate end. The son knows neither how to die alone, nor, symbolically, the function of the pistol in his hands: (â€Å"l d on't know what to do, Papa. I don't know what to do. Where will you be? â€Å")13 In relation to a search for the messianic, we must seek the sense of redemption only within this disestablishing sense of time.The messianic takes on a perverse sort of tension between the desire for end as closure, and the refusal to end, as the resistance of death, and finality. The boys terror at the task asked of him (to kill himself) is not complicated. But this struggle between ends and beginnings in The Road also expresses the paradoxical nature of the post-apocalyptic genre in general. If we accept James Burger's account of post-apocalyptic narrative as concerned essentially with â€Å"aftermaths and remainders†, then we must also follow his conclusion that it is always oxymoron: â€Å"the End is never the end†. The modernist assumption, in Frank Sermon's celebrated study, has been that the â€Å"sense of an ending† is what gives our living â€Å"in the middies†1 5 narrative meaning. But post-apocalypse means the very unsettling of those temporal frames. It â€Å"impossibly straddles the boundary between before and after some event that has obliterated what went before yet defines what will come after. â€Å"16 Indeed, we can see the influence of this scatological tension – a concern to much modernist and postmodernist literary exploration of the nature and meaning of narrative closure.Paul Fiddles' wide ranging study of such explorations suggests that if there is a malaise in the writing of closure into contemporary fiction, it simply reflects the more general environment of â€Å"constant crisis†, replacing the sense of completion and fulfillment of history, in which we live. 17 Such a paradox also partly reflects The Road as a study of the refusal of endings, and e ipso a refusal of the redemption normally associated with the narrative end. For our fascination is drawn not to those who are destroyed, but to those who refuse to die.If McCarthy style emulates, as some critics suggest, the biblical language of Revelation, they can't have missed SST. John's vision, borrowed probably from Job, that during the scatological calamities, â€Å"people will long for death and not find it anywhere; they will want to die and death will evade them. â€Å"18 A comedic articulation of this craving crops up in the Backbitten character of Ely, echoing precisely the post-apocalyptic dilemma: Things will be better when everyone's gone. They will? Sure they will. Better for who? Everybody. Sure. We'll all be better off. We'll all breathe easier.That's good to know. Yes it is. When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days are numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it. He'll say: Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that? 19 McCarthy is arguably concerned, like Becket, to explore the experience of the death of God as instant paradox. That is, as a source of the death of hope for some, but also of an absurd affirmation of life by others, condemning them to a life of scatological suspension – of waiting, but for what?Our encounter with the ‘post' of post-apocalypse is, then, immediately one with the challenge of making narrative and ethical sense of the life that remains, rather than he purely nihilist gratuitousness of a death that won't come. It is more akin to Albert Campus' Rebel, 20 charged with the task of making an ethics of action in the absurd condition, without resorting to a leap of faith that removed the lucid reality of the absurd itself. It is the life of Sisyphus, who has made his rock his entire â€Å"universe† of meaning. 1 All talk of redemption and the messianic must take seriously this simultaneous presence of both the ‘end' and the refusal, or undesirability, of endings. The question that emanates from The Road is perhaps this one: what does nee do, given the knowledge of a certainty of the collapse of life, which might make walking possible along the remainder of the Road? How can this search operate within the traumatic experiment of post-apocalypse, of the never-ending? Dermis's interest in the concept of ‘apocalyptic time'.For Deride can be argued to echo the refusal of the security of endings that I have suggested lies at the heart of The Road. Deride refuses the scatological language of triumphal historicist (particularly in reference to Fuchsia's ‘end of history thesis), invoking Hamlet's fearful dictum, â€Å"the time is out of Joint†22 To express this refusal. Similarly, McCarthy frames the experience of this time of the ‘remainder' not as the aftermath of the singular catastrophic event. Rather, it is the perpetuity of catastrophe itself: the uncertainty of relationships, ecology, and the possibility for human community.The thought experiment becomes one of a tortuously open future, the absenc e of referents for forging new values, new rules, and new duties. The novel thus plays on the post-apocalypse genre by creating a dissonance of temporal perspectives. Time has already run out and is yet, for the boy, opening out inexorably: nothing has really knishes. For the father, the character of the time that remains is defined by the anxiety not only of the limited time allotted to him (who is really dying) but of the dubious gift of extending the time allotted the son into the future – and who's death he will not be able to oversee.Through the tender and contradictory relationship of the father and son, then, the genre of post-apocalypse is turned on its head. We grapple not so much with the post-modern fragmentation of endless traumatic symptoms,23 but the juxtaposition of these two impossible positions in the dialogue of father and child. On the one hand there is a protection of and desire for the end: the father's desire to secure the least tortuous conclusion to hi s son's life.And on the other there is the need for a beginning: the son's overwhelming concern for who and what must lie beyond: who exists? What are they like? Who looks after them? Who will guarantee their safety in the future? Apocalyptic Time Death, or limit, is thus explored in The Road as a painful loss of control over time. This resistance to the consolation of narrative ends represents the most unique and creative aspect of McCarthy apocalyptic style. But what can we say about ‘apocalyptic' literature in general that may shed light on the ambiguity of McCarthy redemptive turn?Literary apocalypses, in Jewish and Christian interdepartmental literature, intentionally sought to trace the limits of communicable discourse. It did this, crucially, against the political traumas of history, in which an old world was thought to be dying and a new one arising, which would completely overturn reality. Through visionary events bestowed upon favored emissaries or recipients, heaven ly truth revealed, through apocalypses, the â€Å"place beyond the limits of language†25 to unanimity. What is the function of this type of limit-discourse?Implicit to all apocalypses there is an ethically loaded injunction that the truth of the world is not all that is visible or conceivable by human means. 26 At its root, then, apocalypse claims that a deeper destiny and purpose lies underneath, and is here, through text and vision, disclosed. Revealed. It is this aspect of the coding of Revelation that so attracts Dermis's attention in his celebrated essay, On a Newly Arisen Tone in Philosophy. Dermis's fascination is with the figure of John and the complex symbolism of the fragmented, yard messages of the future contained in his vision.There is, believes Deride, something primal to Western thought in John's act as the messenger, this role of being the favored dispatcher of revelation and denouncing the false' ones, the â€Å"impostor apostles†. 27 Is there an echo of this cryptic prophecy in McCarthy – for instance, the language of God who is both announced and yet uncontainable, even within the friendly woman's talk of the â€Å"breath of God† that â€Å"passes from man to man through all of If so, the crucial lesson for an apocalyptic reading of McCarthy would be that apocalypse guarantees no certainties about future realities.On the contrary, it would be to resist the â€Å"temptation† of one apocalyptic tone, and to hear instead apocalypse as an â€Å"unmistakable polytonally'. 29 There is, in a deconstructive reading, only a deeper fragmentation and disestablishing of meaning and truth. And this is precisely the concern of Dermis's critique of an ontological and ‘contemporaneous' reading of history. As Fiddles puts it, narrative can be deconstructionist in the sense that, like the book of Revelation, â€Å"[the] ending deconstructs itself, and so disperses meaning rather than [completes] it. 30 This same ins tability and impermanence of discourse is prevalent within the illegal between father and son in The Road. The meaning of words and the possibility of language itself becomes shorn of its social or ethical grounds. McCarthy even poses the problem as one of the absurdity of text in the post-apocalyptic future. From the referent-less discussion of metaphor â€Å"as the crow flies†31 (to the boy, who has never known the existence of birds) to the man's memory of pausing in the â€Å"charred ruins of some library' and experiencing absolute dislocation between the value of words and the burnt remains of â€Å"the world to come†. 2 An attempt to speak in a world where words and meanings are disappearing mirrors ruefully the attempt to invoke faith in a world in which God is increasingly absent. The God of The Road is the impossible presence, the one whose name is invoked (by the father, and by the woman at the end) but whose very existence would pose only problems, not solu tions. To Ely, the possibility of the persistence of god or gods is a fearful prospect and impedance to the task at hand (of surviving?Or dying? ): â€Å"Where men can't live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. â€Å"33 But the existential struggle facing both the father and Ely is precisely the realization that, in he very act of their survival, something unshakeable of the trace of God (in the book it moves from â€Å"word†, to â€Å"breath†, to â€Å"dream† in that order) is incarnate. This appears, admittedly, as a curse to Ely, whose survival the father finds incredible.The fate bestowed on any unlucky enough to carry on down the road is to carry the remainder, the aftermath of this ineffability and this absence: â€Å"There is no God and we are his prophets. â€Å"34 It is, finally, in reference to the knowledge and memory of dying that any talk of the possible meaning of redemption must orient itself: hence hat must the remaining humans carry on being humans? The man questions Ely on this point: â€Å"how would you know if you were the last man on earth? † to which Ely replies â€Å"It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too. 35 The framing of post-apocalypse narrative in this context reiterates the centrality of the question of remainders, of those who might remain to remember and to hold the consciousness of humanity and the possibility of discourse (and therefore of God? ) in their very surviving. God is Dead (again) The reference to God, and God's potential for solving the conundrum of the meander (perhaps, wonders the man, â€Å"God would know' that you were the last on earth) is typically McCarthy. He is concerned mostly to problematic belief rather than to reject it or affirm it entirely through his characters.The fragmented quasi- theological discussions echo the brilliant, extended account of the preacher who does theological battle with a dyin g faith in The Crossing. 37 But, once again, a deeper examination of what sort of theistic faith such references might imply goes some way to answering those readers unhappy with McCarthy redemptive conclusions. Ells sat remark bears similarities to attempts made in the sass to articulate a faithful religious response to the existentialist current, through a â€Å"Death of God Theology'. Alongside Thomas J. J.Altimeter, The protestant theologian Paul Italics famously argued for the language of modern theology to acknowledge not only the ontological inadequacy of speaking of God's existence (since the essence of God is a Being â€Å"beyond Being†). Theology must also acknowledge the failure of human experience to allow this access in the first place. For many of these thinkers the ‘God of the theologians' had died on the battlefields of Europe during World War l. To thus define God in negative terms was not only a semantic step. It was to couch Thee-logos as the discour se of absence par excellence.And certainly through the eyes of the other religious existentialists (Aggregated, Bereave, Dostoevsky, Auber) the search for God was the reaffirmation of the absurd, its crucifixion in the mystery of human suffering, not its resolution. Another exemplar, the Catholic convert Simons Well, had expressed it through the figure of Mary Magdalene on Easter Saturday: one moves towards the tomb motivated by death, an expectation of the corpse, not an optimistic pop in life. It is human suffering that motivates our movement â€Å"towards reality', and the mystery in which God (through his absence) is to be found.Likewise, influenced heavily by Nietzsche, Italics described the true act of faith of the believer as one who does not attempt to square the existentialist crisis of despair but who has â€Å"the courage to look into the abyss of nonbinding in the complete loneliness of him who accepts the message that â€Å"God is dead†. 38 A difficult God to f ind, to be sure, since for Well, Italics and others, the problem of nihilism was not to be squared by the gift of faith. It was to be lived in the paradox of human suffering – in the seeking, not the finding, of an answer to suffering.Perhaps The Road shares some features of these attempts to grapple with the death of God. But it is only really with Dermis's exploration of the messianic and time that deconstruction, to repeat, attempts to go beyond philosophy and society's obsessions with talking of the ‘end' of thinking, metaphysics, God, politics, Marxism, etc. Deconstruction tries to counterbalance this fascination with definitive ends by announcing the end of a â€Å"electronic† crisis rhetoric itself. Deride thus highlights the err possibility of crisis discourse as the last form of meaning that one clings to, and whose loss signals a truly existential death.The true crisis is that there may no longer be a â€Å"philosophy of crisis† : â€Å"there is perhaps not even a ‘crisis of the present world'. In its turn in crisis, the concept of crisis would be the signature of a last symptom, the convulsive effort to save a World' that we no longer in habit: no more kiosks, economy, ecology, livable site in which we are ‘at home†. 39 One recalls, in the light of this, the discussion in The Road of the possibility of both knowing, and not owing, preparing, and not preparing, for the â€Å"event†, the brief glimpse of which holds an elusive taint of horror over the narrative.Ely confides in the man: I knew this was coming. You knew it was coming? Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it. Did you try to get ready for it? No. What would you do? I don't know. People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there. 40 This intervention into crisis thinking problematical the very status of event – its u ndesirability, its uncertain definitiveness. It mirrors Dermis's critique of an Aristotelian, favored presence of the â€Å"event† itself.Ultimately, such a critique leads to Dermis's ability to pose a distinctively Jewish opposition to this privileging of the event: namely, the reassertion of a certain messianic, a therefore mystical, mysterious return to a revelatory messianic. It is, however, a messianic â€Å"without messianic†; â€Å"stripped of everything†,41 or in other words unbounded by the specificity of this or that dogmatism, religion, and metaphysics of salvation. In deconstruction, then, we can no longer speak of the privilege of the ‘contemporary. 2 What does that concept imply in the context of McCarthy narrative?It opens out the analysis to the concept of redemption without the guarantee of the ‘event' that would guarantee salvation in the manner of the promises of institutional religion. Such a sentiment recalls the â€Å"iconoclas tic† reformulation of hope that was prevalent in post-war Jewish critical theory (particularly in Ernst Bloch). This meant a redemption without reference to the face of God; only the notion of promise itself. 43 Deride expresses a notion of the future as being not a future-present' but as something perpetually out of reach.It produces, like death, the effect of interminable non-occurrence, perhaps in the manner by which the â€Å"event† of The Road is announced: â€Å"The clocks stopped at 1 Time itself, like discourse, and like belief, is suspended; shorn of its referent. The messianic impulse that survives even a book binding to the commitment of expectation: more akin, once again, to the suffering of the waiting Vladimir and Estrogen. The apocalyptic element of The Road, then, might not be the announcement of some catastrophic event in time either in the past (since this is never dwelled upon) or the future.It is rather the revelation of traces, of remainders and re minders, of the God who might also be dying since he â€Å"fares no better† than men when men can't live. 45 The apocalyptic always appears with a hidden face, in the impossible or inconceivable encounter with the end of all things, of death itself. The consolation offered to the boy by his father is that he has always been â€Å"lucky'. 46 Beyond irony, the word â€Å"luck† seems shorn of its associations with providence, destiny, and blessedness, and more like an unhappy covenant: an unspoken agreement that the boy is bound to continue, to keep going.The continuation of life is a brute fact for the boy as much as for Ely (neither apparently aware what keeps them going). And yet the boy is very unlike Ely, not because of his innocence, but because of his temporal language. What will happen, he asks of his father, to the other boy? To the man they abandoned? To the people imprisoned in the house? The conundrum for Ely is otherwise, and framed in the time that was. Wha t has happened; did we see it coming? What were we thinking? Even if we did, how could we have been expected to choose?If there is redemption in The Road, perhaps all we can say of it is the ability o ask questions of the future, as opposed to only those of the past, of mourning that which cannot be put right. Redemption without redemption The ‘event' is indeed problematic for post-apocalypse. But it is problematic not simply because finality is put off indefinitely (as Berger claims). It is problematic for its revealing, or disclosing, our lack of control over its arrival. Apocalypse is temporal catastrophe: a disruption of our chronic desires, time we possess, can control.The future is certainly terrible, but it is agonizing particularly for our thorniness into its uncertainty. Redemption, then, if it is relevant at all, must be seen as the ability to imagine that what one sees now is not all that there is. In the book of Revelation calamities are predicted that meticulously symbolism the passing of apportioned periods of time according to divine order, not those of powers and principalities. 47 In The Road, however, the father is possessed by his responsibility to Judge the ‘right time' of his son's end, and so spare unbearable life.The crisis recalls Abraham's struggle with God's command to act out the unthinkable, here repeated in the Father's own self-doubt: â€Å"Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. â€Å"48 One passes over it easily, but by the end of the novel, the father's command to his son to leave him occurs by way of an admission of weakness; an apology for entrusting life with him: â€Å"l can't hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I can't†49.Is this the conclusion thought to give some sort of redemptive lift to the narrative – a â€Å"fog leaf† to the unacceptable narrative of total disaster? 50 1 would argue cynical pe rspective, rather than the consolingly messianic one. In this view the ether's committal of the son to the future is not performed out of faith in the persistence of goodness. His commitment is, more simply, in the inability to cease suffering, to cease walking along the road. The father's sense of an open future is not hard to grasp in itself: it is the only thing left to offer his son.Yet what is the most significant imaginative turn in what follows? I would argue that it is not that the boy subsequently finds fellow travelers we are to believe are also the good guys who are â€Å"carrying the fire†. Nor even is it that they, like the woman, are also those that cosines the persistence of the divine in the world. Rather, it is an admission by all characters of a disestablishing uncertainty about that road that lies ahead. It is there in the implied pause of the man's response to the boy at the end of the novel: â€Å"He looked at the sky. As if there were anything to be see n.Yeah, he said. I'm one of the good guys. † 51 There is no evidence in what precedes this moment that any place the new community will reach can support life. Nor, I think, are we meant to intuit such a turn towards the future. One cannot ignore, in any case, the terrifying allusions that lie underneath McCarthy choice of the word â€Å"fire†. Cabochon is quick to point this out: the new hope for human community are people â€Å"carrying fire in a world destroyed by fire†. 52 But we can go further than this, since the irony recalls the central theme of another classic of the post-apocalypse genre.In William Miller's A Canticle for Leibniz, the scattered survivors of global nuclear war attempt to construct the new civilization by destroying all forms of scientific knowledge. They do this on the premise that such knowledge will lead inexorably to the same situation of nuclear terror. A secluded community of monks become the last guardians of ancient knowledge, pre serving it for such a time that knowledge will once again be responsibly applied. But the fear is vindicated by the recapitulation of humanity to a second wave of nuclear apocalypse at the novel's horrifying conclusion.

Free Essays on The Impact Of The Cold War On American Foreign Policy

The Cold War emerged out of the post-World War II struggle between the United States (US) and its allies and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies. During the Cold War period, which lasted from the mid-1940s until the end of the 1980s, American foreign policy and international politics were heavily shaped by the intense rivalry between these two great blocs of power and the political ideologies they represented: democracy and capitalism in the case of the United States and its allies, and Communism in the case of the Soviet bloc. The principal allies of the United States during the Cold War included Britain, France, West Germany, Japan, and Canada. On the Soviet side were many of the countries of Eastern Europe- including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Romania- and, during parts of the Cold War, Cuba and China. American journalist Walter Lippmann first popularized the term cold war in a 1947 book by that name. By using the term, Lippmann meant to suggest that relations between the USSR and its World War II allies (primarily the United States, Britain, and France) had deteriorated to the point of war without the occurrence of actual warfare. Over the next few years, the emerging rivalry between these two camps hardened into a mutual and permanent preoccupation. It dominated the foreign policy agendas of both sides and led to the formation of two vast military alliances: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), created by the Western powers in 1949; and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, established in 1955. Although centered originally in Europe, the Cold War enmity eventually drew the United States and the USSR into local conflicts in almost every quarter of the globe. It also produced the Cold War arms race, which became an intense competition between the two superpowers to accumul ate advanced military weapons. Hostility between the United States and the USSR had i... Free Essays on The Impact Of The Cold War On American Foreign Policy Free Essays on The Impact Of The Cold War On American Foreign Policy The Cold War emerged out of the post-World War II struggle between the United States (US) and its allies and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies. During the Cold War period, which lasted from the mid-1940s until the end of the 1980s, American foreign policy and international politics were heavily shaped by the intense rivalry between these two great blocs of power and the political ideologies they represented: democracy and capitalism in the case of the United States and its allies, and Communism in the case of the Soviet bloc. The principal allies of the United States during the Cold War included Britain, France, West Germany, Japan, and Canada. On the Soviet side were many of the countries of Eastern Europe- including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Romania- and, during parts of the Cold War, Cuba and China. American journalist Walter Lippmann first popularized the term cold war in a 1947 book by that name. By using the term, Lippmann meant to suggest that relations between the USSR and its World War II allies (primarily the United States, Britain, and France) had deteriorated to the point of war without the occurrence of actual warfare. Over the next few years, the emerging rivalry between these two camps hardened into a mutual and permanent preoccupation. It dominated the foreign policy agendas of both sides and led to the formation of two vast military alliances: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), created by the Western powers in 1949; and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, established in 1955. Although centered originally in Europe, the Cold War enmity eventually drew the United States and the USSR into local conflicts in almost every quarter of the globe. It also produced the Cold War arms race, which became an intense competition between the two superpowers to accumul ate advanced military weapons. Hostility between the United States and the USSR had i...

Financial statements Patton

Financial statements Patton Introduction This paper is based on the Patton Fuller Community Hospital’s Annual Report for the year 2009. Physicians work at the hospital and own it too. They also govern the hospital together with the CEO and CFO. Despite sitting on the board, the CEO and CFO have no voting rights. This hospital aims at making a profit from its operations. The hospital obtains most of its revenue from in-patients rather than outpatients.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Financial statements: Patton-Fuller Community Hospital Virtual Organization specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More In the current year, the hospital took on additional debt. This debt was issued at an adjustable interest rate. Thus, the CFO has had to create a contingent liability in the financial statements in case the debt interest increases. PFCH has some investments that performed poorly this year. The loss has been recognized in the financial statements. On th e up side, the hospital will receive some funds from a deceased benefactor’s estate. The auditor’s report was unqualified. Audited vs. Unaudited Financial Statements Patton Fuller’s audited and unaudited financial statements are similar except for one line item. The expense ‘Provision for Doubtful Accounts’ had been understated in the unaudited accounts. This was adjusted in the annual report. Prior to the adjustment, the Statement of Revenue and Expenses indicated that the hospital had met its goal of profit-making and made $689,000. Unfortunately, after the adjustment, the hospital’s profit was reduced to a loss of $373,000. Net profit was overstated by double the amount. Clearly, the hospital is doing quite badly financially (Atrill, 2011). This increase in provision for doubtful debts also affected the Balance Sheet. The amount under receivables was adjusted downwards. To complete the double entry, retained earnings were also adjusted dow nwards. This difference is material as it can affect a decision made based on the financial statements. Supposing the financial statements were not audited, they would have misled readers to believe that the hospital was profitable. Revenue and Expenses Patton Fuller obtains its revenue from patients who use its services. Most of the revenue is from inpatients. However, in the current year, some third parties have been introduced. They will cover the patients’ hospital fees, but at a different rate than the normal. They are likely to pay less than the patients owe. This is the reason for the $1,000,000 adjustment. The Balance Sheet shows the amount of receivables owed to the hospital by patients. PFCH’s receivables are approximately 20% of revenue. The hospital needs to improve is debt collection. The fact that the revenue will now be received from a third party has affected Financial Reporting.Advertising Looking for essay on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More It has resulted in the increase of the allowance for doubtful debts (Barrow, 2011). The major expenses are Salaries, Benefits, Physician, and Professional Fees. It is possible that the physicians are paying themselves at a rate higher than the market rate. However, Professional fees are fixed and unavoidable. PFCH has organized its revenue into three different categories. Net Patient Revenue is obtained from the hospitals core business, while investment revenue is obtained from its stocks and other assets. Expenses are organizes by function. Conclusion Financial reporting provides useful information for investors and management to use in decision-making. The integrity of Financials can be increased by subjecting them to an audit. In the case of PFCH, audit adjustments reduced the supposed profit to a significant loss. The hospital should consider allowing management professionals to sit in the board and ha ve voting rights. This might improve its financial management and lead to profit making. References Atrill, P. (2011). Financial Management for Decision Makers. Chicago: Prentice Hall. Barrow, C. (2011). Practical Financial Management: Key Financial Statements Tools of Financial Analysis Business Planning and Budgeting. New York: Kogan Page.

Timeline of the Ancient Maya

Timeline of the Ancient Maya The Maya were an advanced Mesoamerican civilization living in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and northern Honduras. Unlike the Inca or the Aztecs, the Maya were not one unified empire, but rather a series of powerful city-states that often allied with or warred upon one another. Maya civilization peaked around 800 A.D. or so before falling into decline. By the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, the Maya were rebuilding, with powerful city-states rising once again, but the Spanish defeated them. The descendants of the Maya still live in the region and many of them continue to practice cultural traditions such as language, dress, cuisine, and religion. The Maya Preclassic Period (1800–300 BCE) People first arrived in Mexico and Central America millennia ago, living as hunter-gatherers in the rain forests and volcanic hills of the region. They first began developing cultural characteristics associated with the Maya civilization around 1800 BCE on Guatemalas western coast. By 1000 BCE the Maya had spread throughout the lowland forests of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. The Maya of the Preclassic period lived in small villages in basic homes and dedicated themselves to subsistence agriculture. The major cities of the Maya, such as Palenque, Tikal, and Copn, were established during this time and began to prosper. Basic trade was developed, linking the city-states and facilitating cultural exchange. The Late Preclassic Period (300 BCE–300 CE) The late Maya Preclassic Period lasted roughly from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. and is marked by developments in Maya culture. Great temples were constructed: their facades were decorated with stucco sculptures and paint. Long-distance trade flourished, particularly for luxury items such as jade and obsidian. Royal tombs dating from this time are more elaborate than those from the early and middle Preclassic periods and often contained offerings and treasures. The Early Classic Period (300 CE–600 CE) The Classic Period is considered to have begun when the Maya began carving ornate, beautiful stelae (stylized statues of leaders and rulers) with dates given in the Maya long count calendar. The earliest date on a Maya stela is 292 CE (at Tikal) and the latest is 909 CE (at Tonina). During the early Classic Period (300–600 CE), the Maya continued developing many of their most important intellectual pursuits, such as astronomy, mathematics, and architecture. During this time, the city of Teotihuacn, located near Mexico City, exerted a great influence on the Maya city-states, as is shown by the presence of pottery and architecture done in the Teotihuacn style. The Late Classic Period (600–900) The Maya late Classic Period marks the high point of Maya culture. Powerful city-states like Tikal and Calakmul dominated the regions around them and art, culture and religion reached their peaks. The city-states warred, allied with, and traded with one another. There may have been as many as 80 Maya city-states during this time. The cities were ruled by an elite ruling class and priests who claimed to be directly descended from the Sin, Moon, stars, and planets. The cities held more people than they could support, so trade for food, as well as luxury items, was brisk. The ceremonial ball game was a feature of all Maya cities. The Postclassic Period (800–1546) Between 800 and 900 A.D., the major cities in the southern Maya region all fell into decline and were mostly or completely abandoned. There are several theories as to why this occurred: historians tend to believe that it was excessive warfare, overpopulation, an ecological disaster or a combination of these factors that brought down the Maya civilization. In the north, however, cities like Uxmal and Chichen Itza prospered and developed. War was still a persistent problem: many of the Maya cities from this time were fortified. Sacbes, or Maya highways, were constructed and maintained, indicating that trade continued to be important. Maya culture continued: all four of the surviving Maya codices were produced during the Postclassic period. The Spanish Conquest (ca. 1546) By the time the Aztec Empire rose in Central Mexico, the Maya were rebuilding their civilization. The city of Mayapan in Yucatn became an important city, and cities and settlements on the eastern coast of the Yucatn prospered. In Guatemala, ethnic groups such as the Quichà © and Cachiquels once again built cities and engaged in trade and warfare. These groups came under the control of the Aztecs as a sort of vassal states. When Hernn Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521, he learned of the existence of these powerful cultures to the far south and he sent his most ruthless lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado, to investigate and conquer them. Alvarado did so, subduing one city-state after another, playing on regional rivalries just as Cortes had done. At the same time, European diseases such as measles and smallpox decimated the Maya population. Colonial and Republican Eras The Spanish essentially enslaved the Maya, dividing their lands up among the conquistadors and bureaucrats who came to rule in the Americas. The Maya suffered greatly in spite of the efforts of some enlightened men like Bartolomà © de Las Casas who argued for their rights in Spanish courts. The native people of southern Mexico and northern Central America were reluctant subjects of the Spanish Empire and bloody rebellions were common. With Independence coming in the early nineteenth century, the situation of the average indigenous native of the region changed little. They were still repressed and still chafed at it: when the Mexican-American War broke out (1846–1848) ethnic Maya in Yucatn took up arms, kicking off the bloody Caste War of Yucatan in which hundreds of thousands were killed. The Maya Today Today, the descendants of the Maya still live in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and northern Honduras. Many continue to hold to their traditions, such as speaking their native languages, wearing traditional clothes and practicing indigenous forms of the religion. In recent years, they have won more freedoms, such as the right to practice their religion openly. They are also learning to cash in on their culture, selling handicrafts at native markets and promoting tourism to their regions: with this newfound wealth from tourism is coming political power. The most famous Maya today is probably the Quichà © Indian Rigoberta Menchà º, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. She is a well-known activist for native rights and occasional presidential candidate in her native Guatemala. Interest in Maya culture was at an all-time high in 2010, as the Maya calendar was set to reset in 2012, prompting many to speculate about the end of the world. Sources Aldana y Villalobos, Gerardo and Edwin L. Barnhart (eds.) Archaeoastronomy and the Maya. Eds. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. Martin, Simon, and Nicolai Grube. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. London: Thames and Hudson, 2008. McKillop, Heather. The Ancient Maya: New Perspectives. Reprint edition, W. W. Norton Company, July 17, 2006. Sharer, Robert J. The Ancient Maya. 6th ed. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Critical Review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Critical Review - Essay Example Although this explanation was devised, some studies have shown the feasibility to stabilizing the GHG at a desired low level, which implies that few information are available on the strategies that could reduce the global temperature through stabilization of GHG. Earlier studies discussed the mitigation options to lower levels of concentration of GHG through emission reduction by carbon capture and storage (CCS) (Sally Orr 303). After nearly four years, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) new-fangled Part 810 guidelines are finally in place. The need for grandfather endowment in the new regulation means that numerous corporations will need to be decisive—in the formula of written export submissions and/or written notifications—to uphold amenability with their expertise export obligations. This regulation was apprised in 1986, and the international civil industry market has expanded in recent times. The DOE faces numerous technological challenges to deal with such emission disputes in the United States. The department should plan accordingly the termini and undertakings that are largely accredited or subject to definite authorizations. Fossil fuels are the greatest contribution to the world’s source of energy. Burning of fossil fuels is the major contributor to electricity, heating, and transportation. However, the burning fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide (CO2), which is also the major contributor to the GHG that is affecting the planet. CO2 makes up 79% of Canada’s total emission (PWGSC, 2009). CCS is a mitigation approach in which its primary focus is reducing the CO2 emission from the burning of fossil fuels. The CCS could significantly reduce the carbon footprint of fossil fuels ultimately leading to the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG) that are emitted into the atmosphere affecting the ozone layer (Figure 1). CCS would

3short questions Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

3short questions - Assignment Example In addition, any government has a responsibility of protecting the rights and freedoms of her citizens which organizations tend to overlook so as to maximize their profitability. It is the duty of government agencies to ensure that workers’ rights and freedoms such as working conditions, salary and remunerations as well as working hours are observed. Government interference with business operations is also justified by the fact that this is one of the few ways in which business organizations can be forced to engage in operations that are legitimate (Macdonald 72). Such interference ensures that organizations restrict their operations as stipulated in the memorandum of association and article of association and do not engage in acts of lawlessness Businesses participate in politics through various strategies such as through the use of lobby groups and other business professionals. Business organizations sponsor lobbyists and professionals who act on their behalf to ensure that their organizations have made adequate contacts for with the politicians. Though there are rules and regulations that are made to prevent fraud and corruption, businesses through lobbyists end up breaking these rules particularly in the corrupt countries to bribe politicians (law makers) so that they can pass bills that favor their operations. The primary goals as to why business organizations involve themselves in politics are to get contact and to ensure that the elected political leaders are of their choice or are persons whom they share similar business ideologies. Politicians, who are in most countries law and policy makers can create a good business environment/climate that would make business organizations flourish or a hostile environment that would make it collapse (Macdonald 56). Government policies are some of the main factors that

Methods used to Analyze the Marketability of a Firm Essay

Methods used to Analyze the Marketability of a Firm - Essay Example Interviews, by mail and on-site, were conducted to determine the demographics and characteristics of the typical angler. Discovering the motives of paying anglers proved to be beneficial in the analysis (relationship). This analysis will assess needed requirements and how well they are suited to the company's capabilities. Organizations can use this data to choose ideas and products which match their technical support, leading to competitive advantages. This analysis will also help to determine whether in-house or external technical support is the most feasible. A number of methods can be used when conducting a technical analysis. Checklists, scoring tools, environmental scanning, and decision-making models (as used by the West Virginia Department of Forestry) are some of the most widely used methodologies. A company should not, however, make the technical analysis its main focus. The analysis may show the firm's marketability in a glowing light, but this opinion may not be equally shared by its customers. A case in point is RCA's introduction of their quadraphonic 8-track system in 1970. This product issued booming marketability for RCA; however, predictions for future technology were not illustrated on their then-technical analysis. Collection of market data on products and ideas are essential to determine marketability. ... This product issued booming marketability for RCA; however, predictions for future technology were not illustrated on their then-technical analysis. MARKETING ANALYSIS Collection of market data on products and ideas are essential to determine marketability. If a company isn't competent in marketing skills, it will not succeed. An example is the largely-populated country of China. They can offer numerous opportunities; however, it has been quite challenging for the Chinese to market their products in their own country. Marketing challenges must definitely be addressed. Each concept requires different marketing data and strategies. Very much like the technical analysis, checklists, scoring tools, and environmental scanning are effective tools. A decision-making resource, such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is also beneficial. Always keep in mind that a firm is never marketable without customers who are seeking your products or ideas. It's also crucial to analyze your target customer base and the demand and supply of your products. FINANCIAL ANALYSIS The primary goals of an organization are to produce a profit, increase sales and customers, and to show a return on their investment. To be marketable, a firm should set financial guidelines. To get an accurate financial analysis, much financial data is needed. Budget goals must be set and met. Benchmarks must also be laid down to agree with financial returns put in place. The most widely used financial analysis methodology is the Net Present Value method (NPV). This method associates the monetary benefits and expenditures against the products. The product's NPV is then weighed against the interest rates and the

Communication and Conflict Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Communication and Conflict - Essay Example It is hot and pounding and threatens to deform our lives. Conflict is a blacksmith’s forge. It is the process of going through searing fire and being hammered and pummelled and twisted into shape. It is struggling at the hand of the blacksmith but being helpless to defend oneself. It is undergoing tribulation to the point where one feels he could go no further, and then getting his second wind and finding he could go a bit further. But there is something good about going through the forge and suffering the blacksmith’s blows. The searing heat burns away the impurities to expose the glowing metal beneath. The blows shape and the grind sharpens until a metallic masterpiece materializes from the shapeless clump of matter. The challenge is to be brave enough to go through the forge. In this sense, conflict is good because it brings out the best in us. It makes us aware that we can go as far as we can, and then a bit further. It tells us that to be shaped into a work of art or a samurai sword, we have to first be malleable and compliant, and allow change to happen. Finally, conflict is beneficial, because it means we trust the Blacksmith to create a thing of beauty out of us that initially only He can see, and trust that He shall not pass us through the forge more than is necessary to bring out the remarkable strength hidden within us.

Any issue you are interested Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Any issue you are interested - Research Paper Example The variables covered by the article include the level of social media involvement in journalism, changes in the traditional media platform as a result of social media growth. The research question in the article is â€Å"has social media created a need for re-conceptualization of mass communication and journalism?† the sampling method employed is the use of surveys while the data analysis involved deriving measures of central tendency and regression analysis. The findings show that social media is reshaping journalism and the relay of information. The article lays a basis for the research on the influence of social media on news reporting. Fortunati, L., Sarrica, M., OSullivan, J., Balcytiene, A., Harro-Loit, H., Macgregor, P., . . . Luca, F. D. â€Å"The Influence of the Internet on European Journalism.† Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 38.2 (2003): 928–963. Print The article investigates the perception and evaluation of changes brought about by Internet integration in newsrooms. It evaluates how European journalists perceive the features and innovation in the digital media. The focus of the research is on the view and perception of European journalists about Internet usage in news rooms. The research questions are: How are the features and innovation associated with the Internet perceived by European journalist? What are the main changes that occurred or may occur in the various fields of the profession since the advent of the internet? Forty of the most read newspapers based on print sales were selected and participants cover 11 European countries. The research method employed was the use of questionnaires. The data collected was analyzed using regression and factor analysis. The findings show that the Internet has shaped journalism significantly. The article is the primary source for the research because it gives primary data of the study

Reflection on marketing practice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Reflection on marketing practice - Essay Example Ettore Bugatti and his son, Jean, synthesized both technology and art that, to this moment, have been the reason for the Bugatti’s dominance among the sports cars. While art describes the design philosophy of the Bugatti cars, technology defines their unequalled technical supremacy. Furthermore, David et al. make a situational analysis of the Bugatti cars by indicating that the current Bugatti model in the market is the Veyron 16.4. In accordance with the presentation, this version has a top speed of 253.81 miles per hour and a 16-cylinder combustion engine with 1200 horsepower. The presenters also mention that Bugatti makes sixteen different car models with a maximum price of â‚ ¬2,000,000. In addition, the presenters list the project’s principal objectives and further quote automobile enthusiasts, business people, industrialists, and the public as the target audience for the brand. For the target media, the presentation considers TV advertisements, car magazine, Auto shows, and social media as the means of reaching the target audience for this brand. David et al. also recognize community approach and investment into a share of both Formula 1 and fashion merchandise as the most practical marketing strategies Bugatti should utilize. The teaser campaign would involve the use of video teasers, billboards, and posters comprising of an attractive slogan. For the premier launching event, the presenters propose that Bugatti should display cars, which consist of two old Bugatti versions and three new models. At the end of the presentation, David et al. list the Bugatti campaign budget and the future of the new Bugatti. The presenters hold that the new Bugatti model woul d possibly have a top speed of 288 miles per hour. This presentation highlights the typical mistakes and inaccuracies that marketing agencies and individuals often make when preparing a teaser campaign for a new product. In keeping with Thorbjornsen, Ketelaar, Riet, and

Any issue you are interested Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Any issue you are interested - Research Paper Example The variables covered by the article include the level of social media involvement in journalism, changes in the traditional media platform as a result of social media growth. The research question in the article is â€Å"has social media created a need for re-conceptualization of mass communication and journalism?† the sampling method employed is the use of surveys while the data analysis involved deriving measures of central tendency and regression analysis. The findings show that social media is reshaping journalism and the relay of information. The article lays a basis for the research on the influence of social media on news reporting. Fortunati, L., Sarrica, M., OSullivan, J., Balcytiene, A., Harro-Loit, H., Macgregor, P., . . . Luca, F. D. â€Å"The Influence of the Internet on European Journalism.† Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 38.2 (2003): 928–963. Print The article investigates the perception and evaluation of changes brought about by Internet integration in newsrooms. It evaluates how European journalists perceive the features and innovation in the digital media. The focus of the research is on the view and perception of European journalists about Internet usage in news rooms. The research questions are: How are the features and innovation associated with the Internet perceived by European journalist? What are the main changes that occurred or may occur in the various fields of the profession since the advent of the internet? Forty of the most read newspapers based on print sales were selected and participants cover 11 European countries. The research method employed was the use of questionnaires. The data collected was analyzed using regression and factor analysis. The findings show that the Internet has shaped journalism significantly. The article is the primary source for the research because it gives primary data of the study

Brief history and Mission Statement Research Paper

Brief history and Mission Statement - Research Paper Example The mission statement of Southwest Airline is still applicable today and it reflects the main focus of the airline is to offer the highest quality services to its clients so that they can be satisfied. Thus, it reveals that satisfying customers and providing the highest quality services are the topmost priorities of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines started its businesses in 1967 with the name of Air Southwest Co however the name of the company was changed in 1976 to Southwest Airlines Co. in 1975, the company was first listed in American Stock Exchange and then it migrated to NYSE in the year 1977. Herb Kelleher became the Chief Executive officer and President of Southwest Airlines in the year 1981 and before that he was the chairman since 1978. In 1990, total revenues of the airline were recorded to be more than $1 billion thus making Southwest Airlines as one of the major players in the airline industry. In 1994, the airline acquired Morris Air and Arizone One to expand its services (Southwest Airlines). To satisfy the customers and provide them more facilities, the airline started online booking system in 1996. SWABIZ, a travelling plan for business travelers was introduced in 2000 with which business travelers could plan, purchase and track business travel. DING, an application was introduced in 2005 by Southwest Airline that notified customers about exclusive offers of the company. No such application was introduced by any other company in the airline industry before Southwest Airlines (Southwest Airlines). For sixteen consecutive years (1991 through 2006), the Department of Transportation Air Travel Consumer Report listed Southwest airlines as among the top five of all major carriers for on-time performance and fewest customer complaints. Southwest is the only airline to ever hold the Triple Crown (first in all of the categories) for its annual performance. No

“Ethics in Policing” Essay Example for Free

â€Å"Ethics in Policing† Essay In The Ethics of Policing, John Kleinig presents a broad discussion of the ethical issues that overwhelmed existing police organization and individual police officers. This debate is set surrounded by others that bring in the reader to basic approaches at present in support among moral philosophers (social contract, neo-Kantian and utilitarianthough thought of the recent efforts to widen virtue-oriented ethical theories is regrettably absent) and to many of the significant questions posed in the swiftly growing subfield of practiced ethics (such as whether professional ethics are constant with or in clash with so-called ordinary ethics). The discussions are consistently even-handed, broad and extraordinarily rich in detail. Kleinig sets out typologies of the kinds of force used by the police as well as variety of dishonesty in which they occasionally engage range of distort exercise, alternative actions for holding police responsible, and the like. He offers wide-ranging debate of the role and history of police codes of ethics, the changes made on the personal lives of police, and the challenges to police management facade by unionization and confirmatory action. In short, this book is much more than a directory of police ethical issues with reference for their solutionit is that, of course, but it is also an beginning to professional ethics in general, a articulate staging of important existing moral theories, a outline of the key legal decisions affecting police work, and a rich representation, both understanding and essential of the police officers world. Kleinig concentrates on his topic with a large idea of ethics, one that runs from meticulous problems (such as police judgment and use of force), through common problems (such as the ethics of misleading tactics and the nature of dishonesty), to deliberation of the effects of police work on police officers moral fiber (such as the regrettable inclination of police to distrust and hostility), all the way to organizational difficulty (such as those about the arrangement of answerability and the status of whistleblowers). Right through his rich and caring conversation, it seems as if the difficulty of ethical policing is just that of how the police can morally carry out the job they are assigning and putting into effect the laws they are furnished to implement. Kleinig considers that many of the ethical problems facing the police have their cause in (or are at least supported and assisted by) the trend of police to appreciate their own role as that of law enforcers or crime-fighters. This promotes over trust on the use of force, predominantly lethal force and enhances police officers sense of hostility from the society they are sworn to serve. Furthermore, this self-image makes police doubtful of, hostile to, and commonly unhelpful with police administrations inspired programs such as community policingthat aim to redesign the police into a more comprehensible organization. Amusingly, the police self-image as crime-fighters continue in the face of practical studies showing that law enforcement per se, the engaging and catching of criminals, takes up only a small number of police officers work time. Much more time is in fact spent by the police doing things like crowd and traffic organizing, dispute resolution, dealing with medical tragedies, and the like. Consider Kleinigs argument of police dishonesty. Kleinig takes up Lawrence Shermans view that allowing police to agree to a free cup of coffee at a diner starts the officer on a slippery slope toward more serious graft because, deliberating he has accepted a free cup of coffee makes it difficult for the officer to stand firm when a bartender who is in action after legal closing hours presents him a drinkand this in turn will make it harder to resist yet more serious attempts to bribe the officer to not enforce the law. Sherman then suggests that the only way to fight corruption is to get rid of the kinds of laws, first and foremost vice laws that provide the strongest lure to corruption of both police and criminals. In opposition to Shermans view, Kleinig believe sthat of Michael Feldberg, who argue that police can and do differentiates between minor gratuities and bribes. Kleinig consent. Kleinig takes corruption to be a topic of its motive (to misrepresent the carrying out of justice for personal or organizational gains) relatively than of particular manners. This is a nice difference that allows Kleinig to detach corrupt practices from other ethically problematic practices, such as taking gratuitiesof which the free cup of coffee is an example. Quoting Feldberg, Kleinig writes that what makes a gift a gratuity is the reason it is given; what makes it corruption is the reason it is taken (Kleining, 1996, 178). Gratuities are given with the hope that they will encourage the police to frequent the organization that give them, and certainly, the police will often stop at the diner that gives them a free cup of coffee. Thus, Kleinig follows Feldberg in philosophy that recieving coffee is wrong because it will tend to draw police into the coffee-offering business and thus upset the democratic value of even-handed distribution of police protection. Kleinig takes up the question of entrapment by first allowing for the so-called subjective and objective advances to determining when it has occurred. On the subjective approach, entrapment has happened if the government has rooted the intention to commit the crime in the defendants mind. So implicit, the defence of entrapment is overcome if the government can show that the defendant already had (at least) the outlook to perform the type of crime of which he is now blamed. On the objective approach, anything the intention or disposition of the real defendant, entrapment has arised if the governments contribution is of such a character that it would have made a usually law-abiding person to commit a crime. Kleinig condemns the subjective approach by indicating that the behaviour of a government cause that constitutes entrapment would not do so if it had been done by a classified citizen. Thus, the subjective approach fails to clarify why entrapment only relay to actions performed by government means. For this grounds, some turn to the objective approach with its stress on improper government action. However, as Kleinig skilfully shows, this approach experience from the problem of spelling out what the government must do to, so to converse, create a crime. It cannot be that the government agent was the sine qua non of the crime since that would rule out lawful police does not entice operations; nor can it be that the government agent simply made the crime easier since that would rule out even undisruptive acts of providing public information. The objective approach seems based on no more than essentially controversial intuitive judgments about when police action is excessive or objectionable. The reason is that this account is susceptible to the same opposition that Kleinig raised in opposition to the subjective approachit fails to explain why entrapment only relates to actions carried out by a government agent. Certainly, the problem goes deeper because Kleinigs account supposes that government action has a particular status. As Kleinig point to, the same actions done by a private citizen would not comprise entrapment. It follows that actions done by a government agent can dirty the evidentiary picture, while the same actions done by a private citizen would not. But, then, we still need to know why entrapment refers only to actions carried out by government agents. To answer this, Kleinig must give more power to the objectivist approach than he does. When it does more s Kleinig notes but fails to integrate into his accountthe government becomes a tester of virtue rather than a detector of crime (Kleining, 1996, 161). Indeed, much practical crime fighting is wrong because it does not so much fight crimes as it fights criminals, taking them as if they were an unseen enemy who need to be drawn out into the unwrap and take steps. As with corruption, it seems to me that Kleinig has measured entrapment with active criminal justice practice taken as given and thus, by default, as not posing a confront to ethical policing. Kleinig suggests that as an alternative of law enforcers or crime-fighters, police ought to be consider and think of themselvesas social peacekeepers, only part of whose task is to put into effect the law, but whose larger task is to remove the obstruction to the even and pacific flow of social life. (Kleining, 1996, 27ff) Kleinigs disagreement for significant the police role as social peacekeeping has three parts. The first part is the gratitude that, while social agreement theories lead to the idea of the police as just law enforcers, the information is that we have (as I have already noted) always likely the police to play a larger role, taking care of a large diversity of the barrier to quiet social life. The second part of the quarrel is that the idea of the police as peacekeepers, in totaling to equivalent to what police essentially do, reverberates adequately with practice, in exacting with the idea of the kings peace, the organization of which might be thought of as the predecessor of modem criminal justice tradition. Kleinig thinks will flow from this preconceiving of the police role: a less confused, more helpful and pacifying relationship between the police and the society; a compact dependence on the use of force, particularly lethal force, to the point that force is sighted as only a last alternative among the many possessions accessible to the police for eliminating obstacles to social peace. The very fact that police are armed (and dressed in military-style uniforms) for law enforcement makes it just about overwhelming that they will be used for crowd and traffic control. Subsequently, if a small group of persons is to keep a large, volatile and potentially dodgy group in line, it will surely help if the small group is armed and in distinguishing dress. As for the other jobs allocated to the police, it must be distinguished that these jobs are not generally executed by the police for the community as a whole. Middle class and wealthier folks do not turn to the police for dispute resolution or help in medical emergencies. Ignored in this way, the poor call on the police when there is problem and reasonably so. The police are at all times there, they make house calls, and they do not charge. Practices that outcome from our negligent treatment of the poor should scarcely be lifted to normative position in the way that Kleinig in cause does by speaking of what we have allocated to the police. Only some have had the authority to assign the police these additional jobs, and even those influential few seem more to have deserted the jobs on the police than considerately to have assigned them. Most significantly, however, distinguishing the police as peacekeepers has the trend to cover over what is still the most important truth about the police, the very thing that calls for extraordinary good reason and for particular answerability, namely, that the police have the ability to order us around and to use aggression to back those orders up. For example, when Kleinig takes up the police arguments that they should be treated like proficiently and thus standardize themselves, Kleinig objects only on the position that It is uncertain whether police can lay claim to such focused knowledge not available to lay persons as renowned professions, such as medicine and law do. (Kleining, 1996, 40) Similarly, in explanation why police may correctly be focused to civilian review boards, Kleinig says that the police provide a society service at a cost to the society and thus ought to be answerable to the public they serve. (Kleining, 1996, 227) The police are precisely subject to remote review to a level that the local authority company is not, and the grounds are the particular authority and authority the police have and the suitably tense relation involving that power, essential as it is, and the free public it both defend and threatens. Conceivably, after all, the cops are right in opinion of themselves as law enforcers and crime fighters. Reading John Kleinigs book is an extremely good way for anyone to learn just how uncomfortable that situation is. References Kleining, John (1996) The Ethics of Policing, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Plato :: essays research papers

As a psyche in the ancient Greek cosmos, I have become aware of the logos of the cosmos. The cosmos becomes knowable to me through the virtues of truth, goodness, and beauty. Logos is Greek for measure and cosmos, a Greek word, can be translated as meaning totality. When I encounter the Greeks, they claim that there are three elements to cosmos. The first factor is anthrapoi which is Greek for human-like. The word anthrapoi resembles the English word, anthropology, which is the study of human life. The second element is polis, which is Greek for the political city. The final element is the psyche, which in Greek means the soul or the mind. The psyche enables thinking. According to the Greeks, there is no separation; there is only unification between mind and thoughts, which is the psyche part of things in the world. One Greek philosopher, Parmenides posits that to think is the same as to be and that knowledge is certainty. Like Descartes, Parmendies believes that to know is to know with certainty. However, Descartes’ method of attaining knowledge is through doubt, whereas Parmendies’ manner is through identifying with the circumstance. One can associate Parmendies’ definition of knowledge as being eternal, unchanging, single, and homogeneous. Parmendies lays out the two requirements for achieving knowledge both which involve the psyche. The first requirement is that one cannot be completely certain of knowledge obtained through the senses because the things that one senses are constantly changing. Moreover, the idea that the senses are in a states of flux concurs with his notion of knowledge is unchangeable. His second necessity is that since senses give relativism then sense perception will always be changing. Parmendies also claims that the only world that truly exists is the world that occurs. Present in his theories are two realms, the Realm of Nous (Greek), which can be translated into English as reality or knowledge and the Realm of Soma which is Greek for appearances. Characteristics existent in the Realm of Reality are changeless, immutable, individual, homogeneous, and singular. On the contrary, in the Realm of Appearance are factors that are plural, heterogeneous, and changeable. When Parmendies exists and is in being, he is in the Realm of Reality, also referred to as the Realm of Knowledge. In addition, the only thing he is certain of is in his mind or psyche. Therefore, Parmendies definition is only applied in the Realm of the Mind.

China Between The Fall Of The Kmt And Mao Tse-tungs Death :: essays research papers

China Between The Fall Of The KMT and Mao Tse-Tung's Death The time from 1949-1976 was a time of transition for China. Many social and economic changes occurred through this period. When the Kuomintang government collapsed and Mao Tse-Tung assumed control, this marked the beginning of massive reformation for what would become the People's Republic. With Mao Tse-Tung's rule came governmental reform which led to social betterment. His first years of rule included careful development and reorganization backed by Soviet support. The landlord class was wiped out with the nationwide land reform and the land was divided among the peasantry. Equality prevailed for women and attacks where made on official corruption. Efforts were made to improve sanitation and literacy among the people. These changes generated patriotism during China's involvement in the Korean War. While social reforms proved to be beneficial to China, attempts for industrial and agricultural growth were not as successful. From 1953-57 industrial production was expanded and agriculture was collectivized. But disappointing agricultural production led to the frenzied Great Leap Forward of 1958-60. This program, initiated by Mao, was designed to step up industrial production to a level with Britain and create a truly communal society without Russia's aid; all in the course of 15 years. The project was a failure and Liu Shao-Ch'i temporarily took over Mao's position as head of state. When differences between party leaders arose, and Mao Tse-Tung began feeling that the revolution was exhausted, he launched the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69. This was intended to stir up the conservative government/military and add more revolutionary elements, ridding the nation of the 'four olds': old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. These revolutions often turned into violent acts. When stability was restored, foreign relations was

Learning theories Essay

Learning and development theories are conceptual frameworks that are looked at how information is absorbed, processed and retained during learning. Through using different learning theories you are able to teach children in the classroom and develop and strengthen them as a person not only intellectually but socially as well. Theories provide information that can help teachers influence children’s learning by providing developmentally appropriate practice. In practice theories help to improve, enable, inform, provide for and explain, but too many theories can create a very confusing picture. Neuroscientists believed that the genes we are born with determine the structure of our brains and that with the fixed structure determines the way we develop and interact with the world. However it has since been proven that it’s not the case at all and that we are only born with the framework and what we put inside this framework is completed over time and completely our own choosing. Carol Dweck, who is widely known as one of the worlds leading researchers in the field of personality, social psychology and developmental psychology, believes that everyone has a growth or fixed mind-set. She believed that if you have a fixed mindset you would only achieve what you think you are good at. People with a fixed mindset are usually ‘smart’ but won’t challenge themselves anymore if they think they may fail at something. Where as with a growth mindset they will challenge themselves and stretch their brains and achieve goals they at first found challenging. â€Å"So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It’s about becoming smarter† (Dweck, 2012:17). During placement I witnessed and followed the learning theories of Carol Dweck. Growth mind-set was widely used in the Year 2 classes and children were thinking about and developing their own learning. There was a display on the wall where each child had written their own learning challenge down on how they were going to grow their own brains. These were displayed at the front of the class where the children could read them everyday. I found this to be very inspiring as the children set their own learning challenge and reflected on this quite often to see how they were developing towards their own learning challenge. They had a challenge mountain and when a child was progressing towards their learning challenge they would climb the mountain. The children completing this were only six and seven years old. The challenges might of only been something as small as ‘learn to write smaller’ or ‘use finger spaces’ but these were challenges that they needed to develop in order to help them progress with their own learning challenges. â€Å"People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it. † (Dweck, 2012:21) Children in the year two classes could make the choice of challenging work or work they knew they would find easy. The children responded well to this by wanting to complete the more challenging work and you would hear them say they wanted to ‘grow their brains’. This was really pleasing to see as you could see children who wanted to learn and wanted to grow their own mindset. The children were more positive about their own learning and really enjoyed challenging themselves in order to grow their own brains. There were the children however that didn’t think they needed to challenge themselves as they already thought they were smart enough and knew everything. These children really didn’t like it when they were wrong and really saw themselves  as a failure to the point they would get upset. This really reflected what Carol Dweck had said about fixed mindsets and how they see themselves as failures unlike growth mindset where they would just learn from it and see it as a challenge of how they can improve their work next time. This is something the children would do at the end of each lesson. They would write themselves a challenge at the bottom of their work of how they would improve their work next time. â€Å"Entity theorists (fixed mindset) are performance and achievement oriented, and so they personalise failure, blaming their own lack of ability. In future, their mindsets say, avoid any situation in which you might fail, as you will no longer look clever. They will therefore become risk-adverse in their learning, choosing options which are easily attainable so that they can continue to define themselves as clever. Failure undermines motivation for these students and achievement-related praise will only reinforce this self view. † (Robins, 2012:55). In subjects the fixed mindset children had seen previous failure, you would see them become much quieter and fade into the back ground unlike lessons they would know they achieve more in. The difference between the fixed and growth mindset children was that the growth mindset children would throughout any lesson thrive to learn and challenge themselves even if they did make mistakes. They would be the ones answering questions even if they were unsure of the answer and challenging the teacher with their own challenging questions. The fixed mindset children would only answer questions they definitely knew the answer too. At the end of each lesson children would mark their own work using the success criteria they had created as a class, and then set themselves a challenge to help to  improve the work they had completed. This is something that has been inspired by the work of Shirley Clarke and her formative assessment work. The work of Shirley Clarke and Carol Dweck both work well together in the classroom and go hand In hand with the development of children and their own growth mindset. With the influence of Shirley Clarke and assessing your own work and then with Carol Dweck and thinking about how you could improve and grow your brain by improving the work you have completed. These two theories really reflected the overall work that the children had completed and the results were really inspiring to see. For some children they found this easy to set themselves a challenge, but for some they found it quite difficult as they would think their work doesn’t need improving. This is when you could see the fixed mindset children in the class. The children who already thought they were smart enough. The only down fall I found with the children writing their own challenges for their work was that they never got to act upon this challenge that they had set themselves all the time. The work would be completed but then never reviewed for improving this with the challenge they had set  themselves. One thing I did when I was teaching a lesson and I got them to write their own challenges was I got them to relook at their work and review the challenge they had written down at the start of the next lesson. This then really got the children to stretch their brains as they were actively improving their own work. The growth mindset is something I would take forward with my teaching career as I find it very inspiring that children are able to set their own challenges In order to grow their own brains. Doing this right and inspiring the children to think with the growth  mindset can really help children to develop more than they thought they could. I wish this was something that I had been introduced to in primary school as I may of challenged myself more and wouldn’t of not completed work I found to be too ‘hard’ for myself to complete. Going forward I set myself the challenge of reading and researching this theory more and going forward onto my next placement think of ways I could slowly introduce this when I am teaching a class and see if the results really do reflect how I feel this theory does work. Behaviourism is another theory that is widely used with in primary schools day in and  day out. Behaviourism (which is also known as stimulus-response) is based upon the simple notion of a relationship between a stimulus and a response, which is why behaviourist theories are often referred to as stimulus-response theories. Behaviour can be controlled with rewards and sanctions, rules or expectations and the role of the teacher and their own behaviour. Behaviourist experts such as Bruner, Skinner and Pavlov all have different theories of controlling behaviour and these have been used within a classroom environment. â€Å"In Pavlov’s famous experiments, when a bell rang, dogs salivated. Your pupils almost do the same. When the bell rings they instinctively pack up and try to leave the classroom, leading to the classic teachers’ phrase â€Å"the bell is for me and not for you† (TES (2014) Pavlov was born1849; his primary interests were the study of physiology and natural sciences. Pavlov used routine and using a bell with dogs to train them when it was time for their dinner. With this the dogs in time learned to salivate at the sound of the bell without even having to see the food in front of them. This is the same within a school environment to a certain degree. Children are taught that the whistle or bell  used in the play ground in the morning is the start of school. That each bell after that is a different time of day such as break time, dinner time, afternoon break or the end of school. You would have the children in year 2 asking you if it was 10. 40am yet. This is because even though they couldn’t tell the time properly they knew that at 10. 40am it was break time as this was something they had been told by the teacher. Children are taught routine of a the school week by using a diagram displayed as they come into the class in the younger classes, to the children in older classes knowing the school day by remembering. For example they might know that on a Monday that they start with the register, then its assembly, phonics, etc. With this children know the routine of the day and week. The only thing with this is that when the routine changes the children can become confused. During the week they had their Christmas rehearsals the children really couldn’t understand why they were not completing their normal subjects of phonics or literacy etc. Skinner was born1904 and was influenced by the work of Pavlov. He took what Pavlov used and influenced the use of rewards and sanctions to reinforce positive behaviour. â€Å"Skinner maintained that rewards and punishments control the majority of human behaviours, and that the principles of operant conditioning can explain all human learning† (Pritchard,2014). In the class of year two, they would be rewarded with their names on the smiley board if they were well behaved. You could see the children eager to get their names on the smiley board as after three ticks would result in the children having a visit to the head teacher. This was positive in the sense the children knew that with good behaviour and hard work they would be rewarded. The use of stickers is only a small  thing to an adult, but to children they are really happy to receive one for good behaviour and will show everyone who will look what they have received. I could also see the negative to this as well. The use of the smiley and grumpy board wasn’t always used to the best advantage. Some children would display the same behaviour as someone who had previously got their name on the board but then wouldn’t be rewarded the same way. For some children this then lacked the incentive to behave in the way they should and would become less interested. Rewards and sanctions need to be consistent in order to have the impact a teacher wants to  manage the behaviour and learning within the classroom. After seeing this on the first six weeks of placement I decided I needed to change the way in which I managed the behaviour of the children on my return for the last two weeks. â€Å"Skinner argued that if pupils were consistently praised (positive reinforcement) for learning or behaving in a certain way; they would behave in the same way again, thus creating ‘conditions which are optimal for producing the changes called learning’ and allowing the teacher to influence the behaviour of pupils at will without resorting to punishment†. (Robins, 2012:22) There was a seminar on behaviour management in the gap between placements and we were shown a video of an outstanding teacher displaying different positive techniques for controlling behaviour. He would praise good behaviour and also reinforce expectations if they were not being followed. I found this very inspiring as the teacher himself had a positive influence on the children and their behaviour not only towards him, but throughout taught lessons. I actually stole some of the techniques he had displayed and made them my own. When returning to placement I was given the challenge of teaching the other year  two class, which had a lot of lower ability and fixed mindset children in. I had a range of rewards and sanctions to help me manage the behaviour of the children. Buttons in the jar was a huge success as children really responded to the idea of a team effort and filling the jar up with buttons as a class rather than just an individual reward. Rewards need to have value to children otherwise there really is no point in them trying to achieve something they don’t really want. I asked the children what it was they would like to receive as a reward at the end of the two weeks. This was a  much better response and throughout the two weeks the children really worked together to collect the buttons in the jar. With this I wasn’t only rewarding the best in the class but also the children who had tried their hardest or had worked well with their talk partners. At the end of each lesson I would then reward these children with a raffle ticket. The more raffle tickets they collected the better the chance they had of winning a prize. This gave the element of chance to the children, meaning that even if you only had one raffle ticket you was still in with a shot of winning the prize. This  really got the children involved and throughout the two weeks the improvement in the behaviour had dramatically changed. The children would respond to me much quicker when I wanted them to look and listen to me and the way they worked together changed as well. They would really praise each other and if someone won a raffle ticket you would hear the rest of the class praising that child for their reward. Using these techniques really helped me to be seen as a teacher statues on placement and this is something I would moving forward really concentrate on, whether it’s on my next placement or in my teaching career. Behaviourism is something that has really helped teachers control and manages the class in which they are teaching. With the use of rewards and sanctions and positive reinforcement it is very clear to see that children will respond better and the learning will improve as children are much more positive towards their own learning. Following on from this I would like to set me the targets of researching and observing theories used within the classroom. This will not only ‘grow my brain’ on learning theories but will also strengthen me as a teacher going forward into my teaching career. I will have a better understanding of the learning styles of children and be better able to tackle the challenges teachers face everyday. Bibliography TES: Pedagogy: using theories in the classroom (2013) http://newteachers. tes. co. uk/news/pedagogy-using-theories-classroom/23183 (assessed April 2014) Gill, R (2012) Praise, motivation, and the child, Rout ledge. Dweck, S (2012) Mindset, Robinson. Pritchhard, A (2014) Ways of learning, Learning theories and learning styles in the CLASSROOM. 3RD EDITION, ROUT LEDGE. Doherty and Hughes (2009) Child Development Theory and Practice 0-11, Pearson Education LTD.