Fat and Happy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Fat and Happy - Essay Example The essay begins by exaggerating common mistaken notions of how and why being fat is a personal, social, and medical liability, then provides evidence and examples for each to show why society developed the perception that the body defines and reflects who a person is. Facts expose and dispel the underlying viewpoint, proving fat people can be beautiful, gracious, elegant, strong, and healthy, just like you and me. The influence of these perspectives can pose a more serious health risk than fatness itself, insults and dieting "must certainly contribute to the shortening of many fat people's lives." (Worley, par. 8) The added stress and effort caused by worrying about your body's set point, means that some would be "happier and healthier not concentrating energies on weight change." (Curtis, ed., A1) Ignorance, inaccurate knowledge, and personal biases being the roots of these mistakes, the essay enhances our knowledge of "fatness" by sharing touching, personal experiences. In additio n to correcting the reader, she gives alternative solutions that cost less and are comfortable and enjoyable: to know and understand the body, to know why some are predisposed to being fat, and how to gain a deeper appreciation and acceptance of our bodies and who we really are. The essay is serious but entertaining, lighthearted but credible, full of evidence familiar to both sides in the issue: fat people who feel miserable and the not-fat who cause the misery. The essay is written to provoke a reaction from any reader with personal issues on the topic. She uses a large variety of argumentative techniques, filling the essay with analogies, assumptions, metaphors, and similes, using authority and common ground, appealing to emotions (pathos) and ethos (the author after all is fat), as well as stimulating the imagination with vivid descriptions of the inhabitants of the "planet" where fat is good and beautiful, as they socialize in swimsuits and show their talents like belly-dancing. Personally, I don't have issues against fat people, although I have friends who do. I also have fat friends whom I have observed to be suffering the miserable consequences of non-acceptance. I have, to be sure, been on the giving end of this lack of acceptance, if only unintentionally. Now that I am seven months pregnant, I feel I am on the receiving end of these biases, and can add my own personal experiences to Worleys list. The alternative to accepting the status quo is to help others see that being fat is as good and beautiful as any other body type, that fat people can be healthy and strong, and that being fat is neither a sign of weakness nor a disease. Understanding that these mistaken notions are the effect of faulty reasoning, I can avoid the same mistakes in the future and help others avoid them. These specious arguments appear, at first, to be logical, but are not. The essay shows that associating "fat" with "bad" is merely a prejudice, so people who think that way are gui lty of non sequitur. A product of careless thinking, the idea of fatness equating negatively is as incorrect as associating "slim" with "bad."

Securitization Pros Essay Example for Free

Securitization Pros Essay The introduction of financial sector reforms in India has led to innovations in financial markets and instruments. One of the most prominent developments in the international finance in recent times that is likely to assume even greater importance in future is ‘securitisation’. Securitisation is the process of pooling and re-packaging of homogenous illiquid loans into marketable securities. Increased pressure on operating efficiency, on market niches, on competitive advantages, and on capital strength, all provide fuel for rapid changes. Securitisation is one of the solutions to these challenges. 2. Reserve Bank of India, as a facilitator, has attempted to explore the intricacies of securitisation as a process of financial engineering and its applicability to the Indian financial system especially in the mortgage and infrastructure sectors. The in-house Working Group constituted by the Bank had the benefit of presentations of and interaction with market intermediaries, regulators, industry experts and international agencies on various aspects associated with securitisation. 3. The report defines asset securitisation and makes a reference to future flow securitisation. Motivation and benefits in the form of capital relief, improvement in return on equity and return on assets, use as a strategic tool, asset liability management, improved liquidity, upgradation in system, Originator discipline, etc. have been highlighted. 4. Various impediments viz. , lack of investors’ base, capital market infrastructure, regulatory framework, legal provisions, accounting and taxation issues besides good quality assets, past data and standardisation of documents have been identified. In the process of exploring opportunities in India, the ideal conditions for success of securitisation in USA and other countries are highlighted. 5. Experience of securitisation in a few developed countries (USA, Japan, Australia, etc. ) and emerging markets like Thailand, Argentina and Morocco has been discussed in detail. The report also identifies securitisation of impaired assets. 6. The disclosure norms and rating will provide touchstones. The Offer Document should give rating rationale which should seek to comment on the quality of the receivables, payment structures, adequacy of the credit enhancement, risks and concerns for investors and the mitigating factors, etc. Rating agencies have already acquired a fair degree of expertise in India through rating of structured obligations and other issues that are quite similar to securitisation. 7. True sale characteristics of securitisation transactions are required to be reflected in the books of accounts, statements to be furnished to the concerned regulators as also to the tax authorities. Since there are no guidelines for accounting treatment of these transactions, the accounting procedures with appropriate guidelines need to be framed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for the sake of uniformity. A background paper has been prepared in this regard and attached to this report which may serve as a guide in the interregnum. The background paper includes a few illustrations for the guidance of the financial entities. 8. The role of various regulators (RBI, SEBI, etc. ) and other agencies / entities has also been discussed. 9. The recommendations have been categorised into short-term, medium-term and longterm with definite timeframe in each category. The major recommendations on legal issues (short-term) are incorporated in Chapter 9. These include: i) Defining securitisation in the Transfer of Property Act to lend uniformity of approach and restrict the benefits provided by law/regulation for genuine securitisation transactions. ii) Rationalisation of stamp duty to make it uniform at 0. 1 per cent for all securitisation transactions. Attempts may be made to bring the subject under the purview of Indian Stamps Act 1889 from the State Stamp Acts. ii) Reduction of registration charges by amending Section 17(2) of the Registration Act. iv) Inclusion of securitised instruments in Securities Contract Regulation Act. v) SEBI may consider removal of prohibition on investment in mortgage backed securities by Mutual Fund Schemes. vi) Tax neutrality of Special Purpose Vehicle. Recommendations for tax reforms also in clude the spread of upfront income received by Originator over the tenure of the loan securitised, extension of benefits under Section 88 of Income Tax Act for repayment of housing loans after the loans have been securitised etc. 10. Other recommendations are summarised below: i) The most significant impact of securitisation arises from the placement of different risks and rights of an asset with the most efficient owner. The training institutes of the financial institutions should attempt to spread awareness of the benefits and scope of securitisation increasingly among financial community. ii) Spell out the risk weights and NPA norms on securitised paper. Insurance Companies and Provident Funds need to be encouraged to invest in the securitised paper. Besides, suitable regulatory framework may have to be evolved to encourage Foreign Institutional Investors. ii) Listing requirements for various securities to be issued may be stipulated which may include minimum issue size, eligible stock exchanges etc. iv) Include the securitised paper in demat trading. v) While identifying the key characteristics of special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to keep the structure â€Å"remote† from the bankruptcy of the Originator, t he Group recommends flexibility in the structure of SPV. SEBI may formulate detailed guidelines in this regard. vi) Accounting treatment should enable the ‘off balance sheet’ effect for securitised assets. Such treatment for future flow securitisation, credit enhancer etc. has been clarified. A Research Committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India is already working on minute details of accounting treatment. vii) Adequate disclosure norms are recommended for an ‘informed† decision by the investor. A model Offer document has been attempted by the Group to give information on description of assets, historical performance, end use of funds, transaction structure, and statement of risk factors. The Group also recommends continuous disclosures. iii) The report has suggested prudential guidelines for banks, developmental financial institutions, non-banking finance companies, etc. including broad creteria for true sale. Model prudential guidelines have been prepared which incorporate issues such as off balance sheet treatment, credit enhancement, servicing, etc. ix) Medium term measures include increased flow of information thorough credit bureaus, standardisation of documents, improvement in the quality of assets, upgradation of computer skills and exploration of the possibilities of securitising non-performing assets.

Solutions to Gang Violence in Society Essay -- Gang Violence Crimes Vi

Gang violence is a major problem in our society today. If nothing is done soon, gang violence could take place in our neighborhoods. MW Klein, a gang researcher, says that gangs are an aggregation of youths who perceive themselves as distinct, and that are viewed as distinct by the community. Klein also states that the gangs call forth a consistently negative image of themselves through their actions (Klein). To those involved in gangs however, gang membership provided a youth means of attempting to consolidate their gender identities (Douglas). Most of the early American street gangs have historically been ethnically based. Early gangs were mainly Irish, Polish, or Italian (Klein). Communities all over deal with gang violence. Criminologist and crime writer John E. Douglas, explained how the propagation of street gangs in America and the violence associated with them is disturbing. He mentioned that street gangs have a presence in 94 percent of all the U.S. cities with populations greater than 100,000 (Klein). A number of studies have been conducted dealing with gang violence throughout the world. One particular study in Chicago showed that five percent of elementary school children were affiliated with street gang, as well as 35 percent of high school dropouts (Klein). Elizabeth Van Ella of the Chicago Crime Commission, explained that in Chicago alone, 65,000 documented gang members account for 48 percent of the crime. A majority of the members thrive in business as a way to cover up their schemes (Hutson). They flourish in retail sales, computer sales, hospitals, office buildings, schools, transportation, and security firms. Practically, anywhere that pr ovides a cover for laundering money, and easy mobility (Hutson). Klein explains that another place that has been greatly affected is Los Angeles. Los Angeles has over 950 different gangs with more than 100,000 members. They are not just limited to inner-city ghettos, but are active in over 800 cities nation wide. Overall, nearly 100 cities with population’s less then 10,000 report active street gangs (Klein). Many stereotypes of gangs have been fabricated. The problem is that a majority of gang members do not fit these stereotypes, which, in turn, makes it hard for the to be caught (Klein). Traditionally they organize their group around a specific neighborhood, school or housing projec... ...versity Press. Fall 1995. General Reference Center Gold. 21 Jan 2007 Loeber R., and D.P. Farrington. â€Å"Serious and violent juvenile offenders: Risk factors and successful interventions.† Thousand Oaks. 1998. First Search. Feb 2007 Otero, Juan. â€Å"Curbing street gang violence,† National League of Cities. 21 Dec 1998. General Reference Center Gold. Jan 2007 Pfeiffer, Christian. â€Å"A toilet apart.† New Statesman. 2 Aug 1999. General Reference Center Gold. Mar 2007 Singer, Merrill. â€Å"Drugs, violence and moral panic in urban America,† American Anthropologist. Mar 1998. First Search. Feb 2007 Synder, Scott. â€Å"Movie portrayals of juvenile delinquency: part II—Sociology and psychology,† Adolescence. Summer 1995. First Search. Feb 2007 Walker, Hill M. et al., â€Å" The path to school failure, delinquency, and violence: Casual factors and some potential solutions,† Intervention in School and Clinic. Nov 1999. First Search. Feb 2007 Witt, Peter A. and Joni E. Baker. â€Å"Making A R.E.A.L. Difference,† Parks and Recreation. Mar 1999. General Reference Center Gold. Jan 2007 Wittmeier, Carmen. â€Å"Still no confession, but†¦,† Alberta Report. Aug 1999. General Reference Center Gold. Feb 2007

JP Morgan Chase Essay

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to discuss the effects of how JP Morgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank, announced trading losses from the decision make by its Chief Investment Office in the amount of $5.8 billion. It will also discuss actions taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the misconduct on the part of JP Morgan Chase. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Takes Action I would like to begin by briefly explaining the purpose and mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC was designed to protect investors, maintain, fair, orderly, and efficient markets and to facilitate capital formation. The SEC requires public companies to disclose significant and meaningful financial information to the public in order to guarantee security within the U.S. Federal prosecutors and the securities regulators filed charges against the Chief Investment Office (CIO) consisting of two JP Morgan Chase traders for the massive trade losses totaling $5.8 billion. The employees were charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, falsifying financial records and making false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Securities and Exchange Commission simultaneously filed a corresponding civil complaint in which the agency signaled it would hold the bank accountable for disclosing inaccurate information to investors about the trading. Elements of Valid Contract – Good Faith and Fair Dealing in Banking Relationships Chapter 7 of The Legal Environment describes the element of what is contained in a valid contract. â€Å"Every contract contains and implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing in its performance that imposes on each party a duty not to do anything that will deprive the other party of the benefits of the agreement. (The Legal Environment, (2013), p.190). I feel it is important for both consumers and bank to ensure they are acting in accordance with good faith and fair dealing. With complete understanding, the banks are ensuring they are doing everything necessary to conduct business with its consumers. As long as banks act in accordance with the terms of a contract or agreement, they should have contented with the covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Intentional and Negligent Tort Actions An intentional tort transpires when an individual intentionally causes damage or injury to another person their property. Some examples are abuse, kidnapping or assault. A negligent tort transpires when an individual causes damage or injure to another without the intent to do so. An example of this would be a car accident or if someone accidentally slips, falls and becomes injured. Interference with Contractual Relations, Participating in Breach of Fiduciary Duty – The tort of interference with contractual relations protects the rights of a legally binding contract and requires the intent to interfere if such agreement has been breached. In the case of JP Morgan Chase I would be able to succeed based on the fact that the act of intentional tort action was carried out. The employees of JP Morgan Chase intentionally falsified financial records and committed the act of fraud. Protection of Online Banking In today’s world of online banking, the technology is simply an amazing necessity. Wells Fargo, for instance has â€Å"implemented firewalls, anti-malware defenses, password encryptions, application security testing and activity monitoring†. This provides a great deal of comfort to the consumer in ensuring their banking information and online account is protected. As an added measure, I feel banks should take that extra measure in continuing to be innovative by implementing new and diverse solutions to protect online banking. References: McKoy, Kevin, (2013) USA Today Bernstein, Harry, (2009). Negligence and Intentional Tort Law Douglas, Danielle, (2012). Banks Layer up on Security to Protect Customers. The Washington Post

Advertising: Information or Manipulation Essay

Advertising, also known as a part of the marketing process, has a rich background. When we talk about marketing the first things that come to our mind are high profit, goods and services and of course consumers. Advertising’s role should only exist in order to help society by real information about products and services. Moreover, it helps consumers decide what to purchase according their actual needs. Advertisements are located everywhere and no one can avoid seeing them. Thus, every individual in exposed to seeing at least one advertisement. Advertising is a form of mass communication with the public. It is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade the potential customers to purchase or consume more of a particular brand of product/services. We could separate advertising in two categories. Giving information through advertising about a product is the first category that is innocent when facing the costumers. The second category has a manipulative effect on people. Thus, People exposed to specific advertisements are led to buy goods and services or do things that don’t actually want to do. And in order to attract audiences, some advertisers use different extreme technique that does more damage on the consumer’s life then with helping him. Therefore, we can say that advertising is based on manipulation and thus should be limited because it harmful. To start with, advertising reaches the mind of people and is dangerous when it is not real especially on children and youth. By unreal advertising we mean a shallow advertising that focuses on the desire and wants of people so the firms producing this product achieves sales and high profits. Young children are unable to understand advertising messages and the information given by these advertisements, therefore, children may consider these advertisements as the truth and the real world thus it will affect their behavior. According to the Washington post and their researches, â€Å"Federal regulators should restrict television advertising aimed at children 8 and younger because research shows youngsters lack the skills to question a commercial’s claims as anything but fact, the American Psychological Association said yesterday†. (Washington post article). Moreover, children will be affected by cartoons, kids’ shows†¦ Thus, manipulation is being forced on children by using the popular faces in cartoons like Hannah Montana, Dora†¦ For instance, during my childhood, there was a chocolate commercial for Disney (picture of the product) and the same chocolate bar was next to it. The price range was very apart since the chocolate by Disney was a brand name. And as a Disney fan I cried and begged for the chocolate bar that was by Disney. Thus, we can see here that manipulation in advertising is being implemented through the mind of children and is affecting their behavior.

THE REMOVALISTS A PLAY BY DA essays

THE REMOVALISTS A PLAY BY DA essays THE REMOVALISTS A PLAY BY DAVID WILLIAMSON David Williamson, widely regarded as Australias most successful playwright, has created a very controversial and very Australian glimpse of the Australian society during the early 1970s. A key theme in the play is the myth of the typical Aussie mateship, where every good mate stands by and helps another in need. Having said this, I believe that The Removalists simply cannot be adapted into the present day while retaining the strong sense of mateship. Throughout the past few decades, Australia has become more multicultural, more modernised and thus more independent. Some say that The Removalists characters are simply artificial and totally unbelievable, but the characters themselves are ideas, not dramatic creations. The composer has successfully divided the Australian society and represented them by just five characters which range from the removalist, a cold and money driven businessman and Kate a semi-upper-middle-class dentists wife who is accused surprisingly of having an affair. One of the funniest lines in the play was where Kates sister replied to her outburst: Kate: All this fuss about an affair. Anyone would think that Im a nymphomaniac! In The Removalists Williamson effectively dispels the myth of mateship in Australia. We are shown more than one type of mateship, some more obvious than others. We are first introduced to Simmonds; a beefy, fat and middle-aged sergeant readily abuses and embarrasses his lesser workmate Constable Ross on his first day in the force, with apparent relish. The ideal Aussie mate would show understanding and would always be happy to lend a helping hand to his lesser experienced partner. However, we are shown a few glimpses of Simmondss taking up a fatherly role towards Ross as if mocking him of his inexperience: I think the first thing you&apos...

Conflict Diamonds essays

Conflict Diamonds essays For thousands of years, diamonds have been an internationally recognized symbol of love, romance and marriage. However, a portion of the worlds diamonds come from areas where war and blood shed are an every day occurrence. In some countries, rebel groups use the profits made from the sale of diamonds to buy weapons for their military operations. In this paper, I will introduce you to conflict or blood diamonds and the rebel groups that mine them. I will also look at the horrific infringements on basic human rights that these groups commit on a normal basis. By definition, conflict diamonds are diamonds that originate from mines that are under the control of rebel groups who are fighting against their countrys government. Sierra Leone, a small country on the west coast of Africa, has for the last ten years been under the terror of an ever present civil war. This war is being fought between a rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front and Sierra Leones present government. The RUF took control of some of Sierra Leones richest diamond mines in the mid nineties. They now use the profits they make from these diamonds to buy weapons for their army, made up mostly of young boys forced to conscript. (United Nations: Conflict Diamonds) The Revolutionary United Front use many different and violent to inflict terror on the innocent people of Sierra Leone. These tactics include kidnapings, rape, torture and executions. Most of all, the RUF is known for amputating the hand, arms, feet or legs of people in the districts it controls.(A mnesty International) In many instances, they get innocent women, children and old men to line up and stick out their hands, then they cut off the peoples hands using machetes, they use it to instill fear in the hearts of civilians (National Geographic). These brutal and heartless techniques clearly violate the international code of human rights. ...

All about Être, a French Super Verb

All about Être, a French Super Verb Être  is an irregular French verb that means to be. The multitalented verb  Ãƒ ªtre  is omnipresent in the French language, both written and spoken and appears in a multitude of idiomatic expressions, thanks to its utility and versatility. It  is one of the  most-used  French verbs. In fact, of  the thousands of French verbs, it is among the top 10, which also include:  avoir, faire, dire, aller, voir, savoir, pouvoir, falloir  and  pouvoir. Être is also an auxiliary verb in  compound tenses and the passive voice. The ThreeMain Uses of'Être' The many forms of  Ãƒ ªtre  are busy binding together the French language in three essential ways: 1) to describe a temporary or permanent state of being, 2) to describe someones profession, and 3) to indicate possession.   1. Être is used with adjectives, nouns, and adverbs to describe a temporary or permanent state of being. For example:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Il est beau. He is handsome.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Je suis Paris. Im in Paris.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Nous sommes franà §ais. Were French.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Il est l-bas. Hes over there. 2. Être is used to describe someones profession; note that in French the indefinite article is not used in this type of  construction. For example:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Mon pà ¨re est avocat. My father is a lawyer.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Je suis à ©tudiant. Im a student.  Ã‚  Elle à ©tait professeur. She used to be a professor. 3. Être can be used with the preposition plus a stressed pronoun to indicate possession. For example:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ce livre est moi.   This is my book.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   qui est cet argent  ? Cest Paul. Whose money is this?  Its Pauls. Être as an Auxiliary Verb 1. For Compound Tenses: While avoir is the auxiliary for most verbs in the French  compound tenses,  Ãƒ ªtre  is the auxiliary for  some verbs  as well. The conjugated auxiliary verb is used with the past participle of the main verb to form the compound tense. For example:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Je suis allà © en France.   I went to France.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Nous à ©tions dà ©j sortis.   We had already left.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Il serait venu si...   He would have come if... 2.  For the  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹Passive Voice:  ÃƒÅ tre  in the present tense and the past participle of the main verb forms the passive voice. For example:   Ã‚  Ã‚  La voiture est lavà ©e.  - The car is washed.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Il est respectà © de tout le monde.   He is respected by everyone. Expressions With'Avoir' That Mean 'to Be' When does to have (avoir) mean to be (à ªtre) in French? In several idiomatic expressions, which are governed by the laws of use over time, as odd as the  use may seem.  For this reason, there are a number of state of being idiomatic expressions with avoir that are translated as  to be in English:   Ã‚  Ã‚  avoir froid to be cold  Ã‚  Ã‚  avoir raison to be right  Ã‚  Ã‚  avoir xx ans to be xx years old Weather Expressions Use 'Faire,' Not 'Être' Weather is another instance of odd  idiomatic usage. When talking about the weather, English uses a form of the verb to be. French uses the verb faire (to do or make) rather than à ªtre:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Quel temps fait-il  ? Hows the weather?  Ã‚  Ã‚  Il fait beau. It is nice out. / The weather is nice.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Il fait du vent. It is windy. Idiomatic Expressions with'Être' A multitude of idiomatic expressions using  Ãƒ ªtre exist.  Here are a few of the better-known expressions: à ªtre cà ´tà © de la plaque  Ã‚  to be way off the mark, to not have a clueà ªtre bien dans sa peau  Ã‚  to be at ease/comfortable with oneselfà ªtre bouche bà ©e  Ã‚  to be flabbergastedà ªtre dans le doute   to be doubtfulà ªtre dans la mouise  (familiar) to be flat brokeà ªtre dans la panade  (familiar) to be in a sticky situationà ªtre dans son assiette  Ã‚  to feel normal, like oneselfà ªtre de   to be at/in (figuratively)à ªtre en train de   infinitive   to be (in the process of) present participleà ªtre haut comme trois pommes  Ã‚  to be knee-high to a grasshopperà ªtre sur son trente et un  Ã‚  to be dressed to the ninesen à ªtre   to take part inà §a mest à ©gal  Ã‚  its all the same to meà §a y est   thats it, its donecest   it is (impersonal expression)cest   date  Ã‚  its (date)cestdire  Ã‚  that is, i.e., I meancest moi / toi / Paul   thats mine / yours / Paulscest à §a   thats it, thats rightcest cadeauà ‚  Ã‚  Its free, on the housecest dans la poche  Ã‚  Its in the bag, a sure thing, a done dealcest grà ¢ce   Ã‚  its (all) thanks to cest la vie!  Ã‚  thats life!cest le pied  Ã‚  its greatcest parti  Ã‚  here we go, here goes, and were offce nest pas de la tarte  Ã‚  its not easyce nest pas grave  Ã‚  it doesnt matter, no problemce nest pas la mer boire  Ã‚  Its not the end of the worldce nest pas mardi gras aujourdhui  Ã‚  what youre wearing is ridiculousce nest pas terrible  Ã‚  its not that greatce nest pas tes oignons!  Ã‚  none of your business!ce nest pas vrai!  Ã‚  no way! I dont believe it! Youre kidding!est-ce que  Ã‚  no literal translation; this expression is used to ask  questionssoit... soit...   either... or... Conjugations of'Être' Below is the useful present-tense conjugation of  Ãƒ ªtre.  For  a complete conjugation of  tenses, see  all tenses. Present tense je suistu esil estnous sommesvous à ªtesils sont

BUSINESS LAW Master Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

BUSINESS LAW Master - Case Study Example The contract also contained a clause that Supercool would not be liable for any loss or damage caused during stocking or maintainence of the show case by the staff of supercool. On the 30th of November 2008, Nick, now an employee of Supercool, made a delivery of the special lager to the bar at the football ground, and commenced to clean the glass case before stocking it. Unfortunately he stumbled and fell as he was cleaning the plate glass, causing several panes to break and crash to the ground. Falling glass caused damage to some bar furniture. One piece of broken glass caused a gash to the shin and right foot of Ethel, a member of the bar staff. Ethel didn't seek medical attention immediately, and, a week later the wound became badly infected, causing a permanent restriction of movement in her foot. John is now demanding compensation for damage caused to the bar area, and Ethel is claiming against Supercool for her injuries. Supercool have referred John to the clause in the contract, and have denied any liability to Ethel for her injuries on the basis that it was Nick and not the partnership who caused the injury and that, in any event, her failure to seek medical help immediately, has relieved anyone from legal liability for her injuries. I would advise Supercool that they have a bright chance to defend ... The Question of Compensation to John for the damage caused to the bar area. I would advise Supercool that they have a bright chance to defend the claim from John. As per the facts of the case on the 15th of November,2008, the partnership agreed with John, the manager of Inky Town F.C. to manufacture 5000 bottles of premium lager commemorating the club's 100 years in the football league. Under the terms of the contract Supercool would provide a large glass show case for six months, which would be both stocked and maintained by employees of Supercool in Inky's bar located at the football ground. The contract also contained a clause that Supercool would not be liable for any loss or damage caused during stocking or maintainence of the show case by the staff of supercool. According to the basic ingredients of the contract act there was a perfectly valid contract between John as the manger of Inky Town F.C. and Supercool. There was an agreement between John and Supercool and later on the agreement culminated in to a full fledged contract after both the parties co ming on an agreement on the terms of the contract. There was meeting of minds between John and Supercool in the same sense and no ambiguity regarding anything. The facts of the following case Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co.(1893)I.Q.B.256 amply demonstrate the principles as to offer, acceptance "Contract - Offer by Advertisement - Performance of Condition in Advertisement - Notification of Acceptance of Offer - Wager - Insurance - 8 9 Vict. c. 109 - 14 Geo. 3, c. 48, s. 2. The defendants, the proprietors of a medical preparation called "The Carbolic Smoke Ball," issued an advertisement in which they offered to pay 100 to any person who contracted the influenza after having used one of

Description and definition Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Description and definition - Assignment Example Harte, "In Our Own Hands: A Strategy for Conserving Biological Diversity in California," 1990). c. Watershed Management is a â€Å"process of managing human activities in an area defined by watershed boundaries in order to protect and rehabilitate land and water, and associated aquatic and terrestrial resources, while recognizing the benefits of orderly growth and development† (Watershed Planning Implementation PMC, 1997). A new and exciting hobby that entails hiding and seeking treasures is geocaching. The equipment needed to indulge in this hobby is a GPS devise or a Global Positioning System which is a â€Å"a radio navigation system that allows land, sea, and airborne users to determine their exact location, velocity, and time 24 hours a day, in all weather conditions, anywhere in the world† (GPS Resources, n.d.). The objective of this hobby is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, located outdoors through the GPS devise and to share one’s experiences online, through the worldwide

Job application letter( cover letter) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Job application letter( cover letter) - Essay Example This presented me with the chance to implement my educational acquired skills to action and operation. I am positive the skills and experience I acquired at Starbucks will be of great help to your organization. I will ensure that I perform at my best level and use my profession experience to enhance the operations of your company. Apart from marketing skills, I acquired leadership traits. I was head of the junior staff in the organization. While studying business I ventured my interest in learning marketing and advertising. I acquired the necessary skills to enable me to be a part of any marketing or advertisement strategy. Offered the opportunity I would offer my expertise to your organization. I would greatly and effectively apply my educational experience in marketing to promote the effectiveness of marketing in your organization. Working at Starbucks gave me a real picture of working in the corporate environment. I acted as a part time marketing officer. Additionally, I represented a junior department in the organization which gave me a chance to acquire leadership

Kant and the Simpson Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Kant and the Simpson - Essay Example The fulfillment of our desires is easier than the fulfillment of our goals. The Simpsons often emphasize the clash among the goals and wishes. A lot of episodes tell us that the Simpsons are better. In â€Å"dumbbell indemnity†, Homer is shown to have the ability to rationalize his desires while consulting moral duties. He is asked by his friend Moe to destroy his car so that Moe can get the insurance. Homer consults his conscience and decides to do it. This teaches us how not to act. In â€Å"war of Simpsons† when Homer deliberately hurts his wife, due to which she takes him to a marriage counseling session at cat fish lake, he is persuaded by the thought of General Sherman, a fish, to go fishing but in the end he renounces fame for family and frees the fish. In this way he prefers moral deeds on his desires. Flanders was also at the counseling session because his wife had underlined in his bible. As opposite to Moe, Flanders had no personal wants. In â€Å"Viva Ned Flanders†, Flanders hires Homer to teach him how to live and that gives a disastrous Drunken Double Marriage in Las Vegas. Homer has a desire for his personal life while Flanders is deep into m orality. Bart is a devilish boy just like his father. In â€Å"Bart’s girlfriend†, Bart is in love with the minister’s daughter, Jessica. Adversely, Jessica is only interested in him because she sees him as his partner in the theft from the collection basket. When she steals from the basket, Bart tries to convince her that it is wrong but instead he gets caught which makes him to return to his cunning. In another episode â€Å"Bart the mother†, Bart incidentally kills a mother bird but feels so guilty that he decides to take care of the orphan eggs which, unfortunately come out to be banned bird eating lizards. Although this was wrong but he gets fame because of it as they started eating the pigeons and the harvest was saved. Lisa, Bart’s sister tries to change his mind but he was too devious to listen to anyone. In â€Å"Reality Bites† Marge took up a job as an estate agent as a career to prove her values and abilities to herself and to sto p being taken granted by her family. The trouble is Marge sincerely wants to help her customers and is prepared to sacrifice her own interests for the sake of her perceived duty and she sticks to honesty in selling houses rather than falsehoods. But by the end of the story she learns that she can still do her duty for duty’s sake and still achieve her personal goals. No matter what others say but telling the truth do not always hurt. Lisa is a girl with a strong sense of moral duty. She can not tolerate things which are against proper ethical behavior and when ever she takes a stand for principles she has to suffer and she is forced to turn a blind eye towards it. In â€Å"Lisa stands up for principle† Lisa, while having a lamb chop in her meal, identifies that it is wrong to slaughter a defenseless animal. While fighting for her principles Lisa ruined homer’s barbecue party and is being shunned by her family. She then found refuge in the house of a Hindu store owner, Apu, where she met a new vegetarian family Paul and Linda. She finally thought that her ideas will be respected here but the mild reply which she got from Apu when she said that people can eat cheese made her realize that she was being arrogant and hard on many people. This accident created a mild and bearable sense of morality in Lisa. In â€Å"Lisa isolation† Lisa insisted on being enrolled in a military school with her brother Bart. As the first girl in the school Lisa felt very isolated even her brother

Sustainable Tourism Development in Turkey Literature review

Sustainable Tourism Development in Turkey - Literature review Example Tourism becomes couched in sustainable development, which is the ability to positively manage the assets inherent in the natural environment for the purpose of increasing the wealth and well being of the inhabitants of a certain region.   It should be possible to maintain this kind of management in the short and long run; hence the development ought to be sustainable. The problem Tosun finds with the definition of STD is that it proves idealistic in its assumption that all nations are able to effectively employ its tenets. STD was proposed by the WCED, predominantly made up of representatives from developed countries, which appeared not to consider the inferior capabilities of the developing nations to implement the schemes proposed by STD. The researcher argues that Turkey has not been able to sustain the development of tourism quite in the way proposed by the WCED. The heavy indebtedness of developing countries, on the whole, has made it necessary for tourism to be expanded in order to generate much-needed revenue (Teye, 2000, p. 2;). However, the concentration of power in the hands of a central government and the business owners of the tourism sector has prevented the wealth of tourism from being distributed â€Å"fairly† among the inhabitants of the tourist areas (Tosun and Timothy, 2001, p. 353). Tosun agrees with other researchers (Stoeckl et al. 2006) that planning is necessary for sustainable development, and lack of planning by weak local governments generates a host of problems for the tourist areas (Garlick, 2002). Population growth taxes the capacity of the environment as well as the infrastructure (Font and Ahjem, 1999), and far from integrating tourism into the â€Å"broader social environment† (Beeton, 2006), the erection by the elite of numerous hotels and large houses has pressured the sewage systems causing seepage into the groundwater. The tourists themselves, as well as others who take up second-homes in the tourist areas, have so encroached upon the land-space that overcrowding and marginalization of the indigenous people have resulted. Neither do many tourists nor business owners they seek to preserve the environment, but exploit the natural resources without thought of adverse effects. D’Sa concurs with this: â€Å"Ordinary Third World people (as opposed to the à ©lites) find tourism in its present form highly exploitative and socially damaging† (1999, p. 64).   Noise pollution from blaring horns and discos, land and water pollution by littering and waste disposal from yachts, resorts, etc. have also added to the strain on the environment.  

Kant and the Simpson Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Kant and the Simpson - Essay Example The fulfillment of our desires is easier than the fulfillment of our goals. The Simpsons often emphasize the clash among the goals and wishes. A lot of episodes tell us that the Simpsons are better. In â€Å"dumbbell indemnity†, Homer is shown to have the ability to rationalize his desires while consulting moral duties. He is asked by his friend Moe to destroy his car so that Moe can get the insurance. Homer consults his conscience and decides to do it. This teaches us how not to act. In â€Å"war of Simpsons† when Homer deliberately hurts his wife, due to which she takes him to a marriage counseling session at cat fish lake, he is persuaded by the thought of General Sherman, a fish, to go fishing but in the end he renounces fame for family and frees the fish. In this way he prefers moral deeds on his desires. Flanders was also at the counseling session because his wife had underlined in his bible. As opposite to Moe, Flanders had no personal wants. In â€Å"Viva Ned Flanders†, Flanders hires Homer to teach him how to live and that gives a disastrous Drunken Double Marriage in Las Vegas. Homer has a desire for his personal life while Flanders is deep into m orality. Bart is a devilish boy just like his father. In â€Å"Bart’s girlfriend†, Bart is in love with the minister’s daughter, Jessica. Adversely, Jessica is only interested in him because she sees him as his partner in the theft from the collection basket. When she steals from the basket, Bart tries to convince her that it is wrong but instead he gets caught which makes him to return to his cunning. In another episode â€Å"Bart the mother†, Bart incidentally kills a mother bird but feels so guilty that he decides to take care of the orphan eggs which, unfortunately come out to be banned bird eating lizards. Although this was wrong but he gets fame because of it as they started eating the pigeons and the harvest was saved. Lisa, Bart’s sister tries to change his mind but he was too devious to listen to anyone. In â€Å"Reality Bites† Marge took up a job as an estate agent as a career to prove her values and abilities to herself and to sto p being taken granted by her family. The trouble is Marge sincerely wants to help her customers and is prepared to sacrifice her own interests for the sake of her perceived duty and she sticks to honesty in selling houses rather than falsehoods. But by the end of the story she learns that she can still do her duty for duty’s sake and still achieve her personal goals. No matter what others say but telling the truth do not always hurt. Lisa is a girl with a strong sense of moral duty. She can not tolerate things which are against proper ethical behavior and when ever she takes a stand for principles she has to suffer and she is forced to turn a blind eye towards it. In â€Å"Lisa stands up for principle† Lisa, while having a lamb chop in her meal, identifies that it is wrong to slaughter a defenseless animal. While fighting for her principles Lisa ruined homer’s barbecue party and is being shunned by her family. She then found refuge in the house of a Hindu store owner, Apu, where she met a new vegetarian family Paul and Linda. She finally thought that her ideas will be respected here but the mild reply which she got from Apu when she said that people can eat cheese made her realize that she was being arrogant and hard on many people. This accident created a mild and bearable sense of morality in Lisa. In â€Å"Lisa isolation† Lisa insisted on being enrolled in a military school with her brother Bart. As the first girl in the school Lisa felt very isolated even her brother

What was the artistic ideology of the Bauhaus Assignment

What was the artistic ideology of the Bauhaus - Assignment Example According to the Bauhaus, art was supposed to bring creativity and modernity in modern architecture (Forgacs 197). This came in time when art and creativity in Germany has been overly suppressed by the previous leadership regime claiming that art in modern architecture was a form of communism. Bauhau’s idea was that art should be helpful to the society in all aspects including architecture. The ideology was that architecture could be approached from an artistic direction such that the resultant architectural designs would represent modernity and most importantly, be a tool of making more meaningful and useful buildings. However, the politics of constructivism, modernism were, evidently, behind Bauhaus conceptions of art and architecture. Bauhaus strongly argued that Bauhaus was apolitical in nature. However, the ideology came at a time when German was undergoing constructivism and modernism. These two functions were politically driven since the ideologies of German leadership at the time determined the future of Germany through supporting or suppressing such ideologies. Therefore, the desire of Bauhaus to shape the future of German architecture through art was based on politics of constructivism and modernism. Sadly, Bauhaus had to close down its Berlin institute in April 1933 following pressure from Nazi regime. Actually, the pressure for demobilization of Bauhaus began before even the Nazi regime came to power. They accused Bauhaus of â€Å"Un-German† approach to architecture and made claims of negative influence from the western nations. How did the World War One and its aftermath (inflation, rise of political extremism, etc) influence the artistic production of artists such as Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Laszio Moholy-Nagy? Interestingly, most of the German artists who were active after World War One were influenced by the war to express their ideas through art. For instance, Otto Dix was actively involved in World War One and was greatly affected by the war. Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Laszio Moholy-Nagy had one thing in common in that they all had ideologies that contradicted the ideologies of the Nazi regime. Therefore, their art of expressionism faced political extremism to the extent that some of them had to either quit their art or change it to a more favorable art depending on the political climate. For instance, Dix was branded a degenerate artist as was barred from producing art of expressionism against the ruling regime. These artists had to reduce their level of criticism of the Nazi ideologies. Dix's work including â€Å"The Trench  and  War cripples† were destroyed by the Nazi regime. Likewise, over 500 artwork pieces belonging to Max Beckmann were impounded during Hitler’s regime through claims of degenerate art. Laszio Moholy-Nagy felt the pinch of political extremism when Bauhaus was overly criticized and suppressed. Whereas inflation affected virtually everybod y in Germany, artistic productions were also affected. The most affected artists were George Grosz, Laszio Moholy-Nagy and other artists who were part of Bauhaus. Whereas modern and artistic architecture required heavy capital investment, funds became unavailable during the aftermath of World War One. Cost of production of artwork became high and therefore, the artists found it difficult to keep producing large volume of artwork during the inflation period. What is â€Å"Dada† and how did it both influence and reflect the Berlin of the 1920’s? Dada refers to an artistic and literary transformation that began during World War One. At the time, Switzerland being a neutral country acted as a safe haven for artists, intellectuals, and writers.

Close Adoption vs Open Adoption Essay Example for Free

Close Adoption vs Open Adoption Essay The concept of adoption was not legally recognized in the United States until the 1850’s, with the inception of the first adoption laws. While transfers of children to substitute parents or now known as â€Å"adoptive parents† had occurred informally since American colonial times, adoption laws legitimized the informal adoptive arrangements which previously existed. There are now two different forms of adopting a child: open or closed adoptions. Although there are two options for adoption, all adoptions should be considered closed until an adoptee is 21. The adoption process for closed adoptions differs from the open adoption process and has more benefits. The open adoption process, is in which the adoptive parents actually meet and usually stay in touch with the birthparents. Birthparents voice in choosing their childs adoptive parents. Both open adoption and closed adoption use agencies or a lawyer, but in open adoption the agency gives the birthparents biographies of prospective adoptive parents, and the birthparents pick the family they are most comfortable with or â€Å"click† (Winerip 1). Compared to closed adoption, the prospective adoptive family would put their name on a list, and wait for the social worker to make a match. This doesn’t involve the need of personalities between families to match, just the potential factor of a good child support system which is the most important aspect. â€Å"Conversely, if they want a closed adoption, they shouldn’t be pressured into an open adoption because adopters may find it harder to fulfill their side of the agreement such as: sending the birthmother photos or visiting† (â€Å"Family Education† 2). Also, in open adoption the birthparents and adoptive parents meet, and might be in touch frequently during the pregnancy while closed adoption the adoptive parents didnt know where the child came from, or who his or her birthparents were which gives them more of sense that the child belongs to them and deserves all their love as if it was given birth by the adoptive mother. Many times the adoptive parents in an open adoption are able to witness their childs birth and some of these families stay in touch through their adoption agency, especially on birthdays and holidays. Others become friends or create somewhat of an â€Å"extended family†. During closed adoption however, there is no contact between birth and adoptive families. This gives both families a sense of closure. Through the closed adoption process no identifying information is provided, giving a type of curiosity back to the adoptive parents on what their child may look like instead of seeing the birth mother and assuming that that child will look like her. They are only given non-identifying information (e. g. , height in the birth family, potential hair color, medical history, ect. is provided through the third party such as the agency or attorney. When adoptions are closed, the files are usually physically sealed until the age of 21 to the adoptee and the adoptive parents giving everyone a sense of closure (Thompson 1). Closed adoption and open adoption have a key difference including the involvement of the birthparents from their point of view that is more beneficial when the adoption is closed. Open adoption birth parents experience a sense of less guilt as a benefit (Gray 27) of the adoption but what benefit does the child rear? Adoption should be more for the child and less for the birth parents emotional ground. But closed adoption does give the birth parents privacy because â€Å"placing a child for adoption is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable choice. Having a closed adoption creates an opportunity for a stronger sense of privacy,† (â€Å"N. A. I. C. H. † 1) and it can also reduce fear because â€Å"some birth mothers are concerned about explaining their choice, and a closed adoption serves as a way to prevent them from a confrontation with a child placed for adoption† (â€Å"N. A. I. C. H. † 1). Closed adoption rids the birth parents of the responsibility they were not ready for in the first place and gives the child a chance at a better life with more responsible individuals. In some cases, closed adoption kills two birds with one stone by riding a birth parent of the embarrassment of not being prepared or financially stable for a child while giving the adoptive child a chance for a better life with an adoptive family that is looking for a child to give love and a good life too. Closed adoption is more beneficial from the Adoptive parents’ viewpoint rather than open adoption. Open adoption gives the birth parents the option to demand wants of the adoptive parents and those demands may cross boundaries. In a sense, an adoptive family may get the feeling of â€Å"affirmation- As an adoptive family, you may experience a sense of empowerment or encouragement knowing that you were chosen as the adoptive family† (â€Å"N. A. I. C. H. † 2) but birth parents may still want to be in the adoptee’s life as extended family but two mom’s and two dad’s? Would that not confuse a small child? With closed adoption, the adoptive parents have full responsibility and there is no answering to birth parents or any fuzzy oundaries of rules and expectations for a child such as â€Å"birth parent interference or co-parenting concerns† (â€Å"N. A. I. C. H. † 1). The adoptive family is given the full privilege of raising their adoptive child how they would like to and â€Å"family freedom- if the birth families are not involved, the adoptive family is free to have their family time without restraints of visitations and on-going communication† (â€Å"N. A. I. C. H. † 1). It is even up to the adoptive family to decide to tell child that he/she is adopted. Closed adoption is safer for the adoptive child rather than open adoption and has more benefits. Open adoptions give the child his/her identity and suppose that by chance the birth parents are properly functioning human beings, which would give the adopted child an extended family that was healthy (â€Å"American Pregnancy Association† 1). On the other hand though, what if the child doesn’t wish to know their birth parents because he/she was adopted or their birth parents have issues or mental problems that are not healthy for the child to be around or interact with? Closed adoption eliminates these possibilities. Unless the adoptive child specifically asks who they really are, the child could be completely fine without knowing they’re adopted and have a normal family with one mom and one dad. More often than none, the adoptee’s birth parents give them up for adoption for a reason. This includes the possibilities of an unplanned pregnancy, lacking financially, or just simply aren’t ready for the responsibility. The purpose of adoption is to give the adoptee a better life than it would’ve originally had. In the end, the child still has the option of finding their birth parents records when they are of the age to legally obtain that information.

Ethical Issues in Randomized Control Trials

Ethical Issues in Randomized Control Trials PROBLEM 1 A research team is conducting a Randomized Control Trial of a new drug to treat the common symptom of the Ebola virus (fever) over the past six (6) months. The experimental group consisted of female Ebola patients aged between 30 and 50 years to whom the new drug was administered. The control group consisted of male Ebola patients aged between 70 and 80 years. To this control group placebo, a substance that resembles medicine superficially and is believed by the patient to be medicine but that has no medicinal value was administered. Discuss ethical issues associated with this research design? Ebola virus disease also as (EVD) is a highly infectious and contaminating disease which has recently killed thousands especially in West African. This disease is a severe and most often fatal illness in humans. The Research design used Randomized Control Trial, however it does not state how it was able calculate the RCT sample size. The years in age of women and men are listed but we do not know how many participants the experiment had. This research conducted random sampling, was the randomization truly â€Å"random,† or are there really are two populations being studied here. It is very difficult to come up with two randomized age groups of men and women. As stated above Ebola is a very dangerous disease and one of the ethical issues in research is that vulnerable groups should not be used unless benefits outweigh the damages, the age group of men between 70-80yrs fall in that category as elderly. This research design would have been giving this vulnerable group a placebo m edicines (dumpy) to this group over a period of 6 months. How many individuals would have been lost to this fatal killer disease? The declaration of Helsinki states that in any medical study, every patient including those of a control group, if any should be assured of the best proven diagnostic and therapeutic method. The controlled group where not assumed of this, placebo control trials are justified when it comes to testing a new product like hair removing creams which has no permanent damage, with severe illness this cannot be acceptable .illness that are fatal and highly contagious when with a placebo control is not justifiable with Ebola because without any medical intervention they will die. The study design also shows large evidence of both allocation and performance bias, in a sense the women that were selection to the intervention group were specifically chosen to be in the intervention group, due to the fact that they will perform better, by facilitating quick and desirab le recovery compared to the elderly men whom their bodies cannot respond with the same efficiency. Lastly some of these elderly men are Husbands, Dads, Granddads, brothers of other people countless family will suffer endlessly over 6 months, whilst their relative is not getting any help at all. What modifications would you suggest on the research design in future? There is never a single way to follow when it comes to research, however they are research design which are more suitable and permit the evidence obtained to answer the initial question as explicitly as possible. In future I would use I would use Time series design. This is due to the fact that Time series design allows each participant to receive an intervention over a period of time and results are measured before and after any intervention. Hence reducing the fatality that are associated with Ebola but also making it less contagious if the medication is being effective. Another change I would introduce is to remove the placebo medication, one cannot be comparing a drug efficiency to a dumpy Placebo, and if it is a new medication then it will have to be compared to other similar drugs to assess its effectiveness instead of nothing, whilst humans are dying and others getting contaminated within that 6 months. Another change would be for the research not to use vulnerable elderly as the control group, hence using adolescent and young adult sample population, since they would give a clearer indication to the efficiency of the new drug. Lastly I would calculate a large enough sample size to increase the findings internal and external validity. Due to Ebola being fatal a sample size would help, by clarifying the total fatalities experience but most important the number of patients cured. PROBLEM 2 One of the leading causes of fast spread of HIV and AIDS in Africa is poverty particularly income poverty that forces unmarried women and girls to indulge in prostitution. In January2005, the IMF/World Bank designed a 10-year micro-finance targeting 1000 prostitutes. The aim of the project was to see a significant drop in the number of women or girls who indulge in this malpractice. To be registered as a beneficiary, interested women and girls were required submitted an application and pay a processing fee of MK500. A total of 2500 applications were received at the close of the deadline. To identify project beneficiaries, it was decided that a lottery be conducted and that all applicants be invited to witness the draw. After selecting the beneficiaries (i.e., treated group), a random draw was also conducted to select non-beneficiaries (i.e., control group). Discuss ethical issues associated with this research design? Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS develops from infection with HIV (human immunodeficiency Virus), which attacks the immune system and disables a person’s defenses against other diseases, including infections and certain cancers. This research used Random selection to find the 1000 participants it wanted to induct into the micro-finance program .Firstly the time frame of the project, the project was meant to run for 10 years and considering that this will have been an observation study design a lot of things can happen within the 10 years, which will affect the internal Validity of the findings. Secondly this Research design asked participants to pay for the application ,a sum of K500 which would total up to K1,250,000 million for the 2500 applicants. Research ethics prohibits payments that can potentially cause pressure, bribes and economic social disadvantages. Therefore many individuals who really need the help would have been excluded, subsequently them havi ng inability to source out the K500.It is also unethical asking money from a poverty group who happens to practice prostitution, they will engage in this malpractice to raise that K500, leading to the project not trying to stop prostitution but encouraging it on the other hand. Research designs have to respect the privacy and confidentiality of participants at all times. Conducting a Lottery where everyone is invited and dividing the treatment and control groups of prostitutes in front of a congregation hampers privacy and confidentiality ethics, this sort of exposure can result into the applicants looked down upon by community members. What modifications would you suggest on the research design in future? When it comes to payments, Research ethics promotes that participants should be suitably compensated for any expenses, compensated for effort, time or lost income, and acknowledged for their contribution.in total this research raised K1,250,000 million. The suitability of this money is not justifiable since IMF bank will actually be spending huge amounts monthly to sustain this project. I would remove this application fee so that its open to every suitable candidate without having financial hinders. The applicants were unmarried women and girls, I think that the focus should have been different since these are different age groups. The women can be put on the micro-financing plan whist the girls can be given a different option to continue on with education and the money directed towards their fees. To expand on that it would be better to teach the participants to fish rather than give them fish every time for 10 years, since when the project stops they will go back and continue with their malpractices (prostitution) .However if you can teach some of the women income generating activities and education for the girls then they will be able to become dependent and stop the prostitution altogether. This is known as transformative participatory monitoring and evaluation. Another change that I would install is the time span of the projects 10 years is a lot of time, I would change the Research design to Randomized Control Trial with Crossover design. This would allow all 2500 participants to partake, thus not having any control groups, but time sequence when they would be receiving the money, hence follow ups can be conducted to what the individuals are capable of with and without benefits. Futuristic speaking, I would change the design of the selecting process of the 2 groups, a Lottery selection were everyone is invited would be cancelled and conduct an expert panel to assess economic, social and health status of the applicants. Decisions would be made and benefici aries awarded to the real needy ones. REFERENCES Kazdin, A.E. (2010).Single-Case Research Designs: Methods for Clinical and Applied Settings, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Millum,J Grady C. (2013) The ethics of placebo-controlled trials: methodological justifications.. Contemp Clin Trials.36(2):510-4 Rothman KJ, Michels KB: The continuing unethical use of placebo controls.N Engl J Med331:394–398,1994

Street Racing Essay -- Research Racing Safety Cars Essays

Street Racing   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  To race or not to race, what will keep you safe? Racing can be safe but not always if you race illegally. There are a lot of safety items that some racers don’t even use, I mean they keep you safer but they don’t spot the buck for the equipment. They spend so much money on their cars to make them faster, yet most of them don’t spend money towards safety. I know what you’re thinking, THIS IS LUDACRIS but it is the truth and you will learn more by reading below.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Safety is a very important thing when you are in an object that weighs over a ton and could do over 100mph or more. A lot of racers do not spend enough money on safety, yet a surprising majority of racers do. Racers can have different combinations of these safety items; racing seats, racing harness, fire extinguisher or in some cases a roll cage (to prevent being crushed in a roll or flip). A racing harness goes hand in hand with a racing seat to keep you held to the very durable (usually aluminum) yet comfortable (padded) seat, also the fire extinguisher in case of a fire. A roll cage is in the more serious racers car to prevent the car from crushing you or being crushed in a flip or roll.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  There are many different types illegal racing, there is drag racing, stoop light races, and point to point races. Drag race is simply when cars line up and race a short distance usually between  ¼ mile and one mile. A stoplight race is something you could see on the road any time. This is when t...

Article Review Format Guide Essay

The article discusses whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the subsequence laws were the correct solution for the problems that arose from the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies. The article illustrates how the different rules and legislature affect different size business, and the ramifications that resulted for companies that must follow the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The authors of the article also conducted a study on whether or not fraud of the financial statements was in direct correlation of businesses filing bankruptcy (Nogler & Inwon, 2011, p. 68) like in the cases of Enron and WorldCom. The results found that the larger the company that filed bankruptcy the more likely that securities fraud litigation and general overstatement of the revenue and assets of the company occurred (Nogler & Inwon, 2011). LEGAL ISSUE Legal issues were rampant in the article. For instance, with the issuance of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, companies chose to â€Å"go dark† to â€Å"no longer trade publically,† (Nogler & Inwon, 2011, p. 67) in order to not have to comply fully with SOX. The article also address whether it is fair or just to make smaller companies follow the same exact rules and fines of such articles as Article 404 of the SOX Act. MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVE Fraud is a real threat to the financial stability of a corporation and even the country. The legal issues presented in the article show how damaging fraud truly is. Of the over 1,200 companies that filed for bankruptcy in the study, 77.8% had some sort of fraud (Nogler & Inwon, 2011). These numbers show that laws like Sarbanes-Oxley are justified in trying to stop the illegal actions within the finances of a corporation by making people responsible for their actions and the actions of those around us. The creative reporting methods that people use in ponzi schemes and recording of financial information needs to be highly monitored to prevent losses for stakeholders. Realistic solutions include more laws for the betterment of the corporate world. Laws that protect individual employees like auditors and Certified Public Accountants, because as it stands now all liability falls to only a few people like the CFO or CEO, when in fact there are instances when they too need protection. Smal l businesses that wish to go public should have similar laws designed for their size and not just an umbrella law that might prevent the company from growth. Reference: Nogler, G., & Inwon, J. (2011, May/June). Sarbanes-Oxley Act: Was the ’one-size-fits-all’ approach justified? Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance (Wiley), 22(4), 65-76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.20691

Changes to the United States from 1770-1870 Essay

The United States changed so many things from 1770 to 1870. The population increased drastically, from 2,148,100 in 1770 to 38,558,371 in 1870. The increase in population is caused by immigration of people to the US and slavery was another cause. Slavery and population had a big affect on the next 100 years of the United States history. The US also changed diversely with new innovations like roads, waterways, railroads, steam boats, and refrigerated railroad cars. A few new innovations that changed or improved from 1776 to 1870 are the roadways, waterways, railroads, steam boats, and refrigerated railroad cars. Roadways were an innovation that created a way for easier, and faster transportation. Waterways were also a way for transportation, to cut out a lot of land, and cut out time. Waterways are a faster way for trade and barter. Steam boats were what pioneers used to travel down the waterways to trade and sell goods. Railroads were still used for closer travel, with items that did not need to get there as fast as possible, because railroad cars do not move very fast, although the steam engine improved the speed of transportation also. The United States did make rather large changes over 100 years, from 1776 to 1870. It all started with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which lead to us fighting for our freedom. During this period of time the constitution was ratified, the Revolutionary war ends, and the Louisiana Purchase takes place. Factories advanced and cities were industrializing, and many different machines were invented that changed the way the industrial world worked. Women played an important role in the changes that were made in the US during this century. Women were not just the â€Å"stay at home and clean† women anymore, they were aloud to join the workforce and take on roles that before, only the men were aloud to have. The constitution was ratified during this time also. The United States changed in so many ways over a century. People grew in knowledge and ability to create these machines that changed the workforce. Factories were improved and the cities industrialized and caused many people to migrate to the US causing the population to increase drastically. Slavery had always been a big issue in the US, and it was decreased immensely, although the blacks were still segregated. The machines that were built innovated the way the people thought and created a new ball park for new innovators to create new things to keep the world moving forward.

World Trade Center: Bathtub

One of the famous structures ever built in the entire history of mankind is the World Trade Center. The said structure is said to have hold numerous offices and institutions that plays a vital role in running the economy of America and even to other nations. Moreover, the World Trade Center is also one of tallest buildings ever erected making it attractive to many people around the world. This might also be the reason why the said structure was attacked and was brought down by the alleged terrorists in the year 2001. The structure then was totally destroyed and what only remained was its mere foundation. A Brief History. In the year 1946, the New York state planned to build a structure that would serve as the center for trade and commerce in the said U. S state. Manhattan was chosen to be the location of the planned structure in the year 1962. Numerous professionals were tapped to facilitate the construction of the World Trade Center including Japanese architects and engineers leading the design and construction team. The construction started in the year 1966, starting with the first tower located in the northern part of the site. The north tower was completed after six years and the center accepted tenants even before the tower was totally furnished. A year after the construction of the north tower, another building finished its construction located in the southern region of the site. It was on the same year that the dedication of the World Trade Center commenced. During that time, the World Trade Center was considered as the tallest structure ever built with 110-storey with more than a thousand and three hundred feet in height. Structural Foundation The foundation of the World Trade Center twin towers was constructed with one of the deep foundations ever made. A deep basement was made to support the entire structure of these towers and all of the loads the structure handles. The said basement is also called as the bathtub. This refers to as the underground foundation area not only of the World Trade Center but also of the adjacent buildings located in New York. The bathtub is a distorted rectangle in shape with dimensions equal to almost a thousand feet by five hundred twenty feet with a depth of about seven-storey building. The bathtub is situated down to the rock layer of earth’s foundation. It is then further supported by strong, solid walls that served as the barriers to impede water from the Hudson River to enter the foundation. The said walls are also called as slurry walls. This foundation was made due to the fact that the site where the World Trade Center was erected was man-made. Moreover, the bathtub was built underground and submerged into water. The bathtub designers used pre-fabricated steel as framework of the main foundation of the building. The amount of steel used totaled about two hundred thousand tons to supply the needs for the foundation of the World Trade Center. Braces were placed to support the slurry wall aside from the supplemental support provided by the bedrock. The Foundation Design of the World Trade Center Source: www. wc7. net The Bathtub The foundation designed by the architects and engineers was seen to be massive, just as what should be considering the height of the buildings to be erected on top of the said foundation. It is a must for any gigantic structure to cling its foundation on the solid rock located beneath the earth’s ground. To attach the foundation to the bedrock, the construction workers dug enormous mass of soil and brought it up on the earth’s surface. Another challenge that was faced by the builders is that the site is near a body of water. The water coming from the river may interfere in the construction of the foundation of the World Trade Center. To resolve this problem, the workers used digging machines to create channels down to the solid rock area of earth. As they dig troughs, the workers placed a slurry wall made up of bentonite. Bentonite is an expensive type of clay that is effective in impeding water from flowing. The said material would go within the dug channels, which would effectively block the water coming form underneath the surface. Pictorial Representation of the Foundation for the World Trade Center Source: www. deepexcavation. com Slurry Wall Slurry walls, also known as diaphragm wall is a type of structure created and casted in a certain trough or channel. The trench was hinged by an expensive type of clay called as bentonite that is specified to impede soil erosions into the foundation. In other terms, slurry walls refer to a wall that is utilized to obstruct stream flow. There are equipments that are being used in applying the slurry walls in building foundations. Some of the tools used include hydromills, hydraulic clamshells and other trenching equipment. Slurry Wall History The first slurry wall that was constructed was in the year 1950 in Italy. Four years earlier, slurry walls undergone series of tests to assess its capabilities as a part of foundation of a big structure. In the year 1960, this technology was introduced in the United States of America by the European building designers. Various buildings in the US were built using the slurry walls which includes structures located in New York and California. It was only after the said structures were built that the World Trade Center was erected and used the slurry walls in its foundation. Other key states utilized the technology like Boston and Washington D. C. Slurry Wall Construction Slurry wall construction can be summarized into four steps, as shown in the figure below. The first procedure is to create a trench and applying the clays used in forming the slurry walls (A). After this procedure, a steel cylinder is inserted at the ends of the excavated areas (B). After that, a fortification cage is placed down the trench to add more support in the foundation (C). The last procedure is the concreting of pipes where the buildings would be attached. Pictorial Presentation of Slurry Wall Construction Source: www. deepexcavation. com Slurry Wall Applications There are numerous applications that can be associated with the utilization of slurry walls. One of its major applications is to serve as earth retention barriers for tunnels, subterranean vaults, and excavations. Another application of slurry walls is for blocking water penetration onto the foundation. Increasing the strength of the foundation of any structure is also one of the major applications of these slurry walls. Moreover, contamination prevention is also one basic application that is used by many architects and engineers. A gas leakage prevention form landfill is also one application that can be associated with the slurry walls. However, there are also limitations in using slurry walls in the construction of foundation. Construction of slurry walls requires heavy equipments that consume a lot of space in the construction site. Operational costs are also expensive because of the materials needed in the construction of slurry walls. Slurry Wall: After 9/11 Attack The attack made on the twin towers of the World Trade Center caused severe damage into the structure. Furthermore, after the fall of the entire structure down to the ground, many people worried about the possible damage on the slurry walls and the bathtub of the World Trade Center which can possibly affect the adjacent structures built near the vicinity of the World Trade Center. Water penetration from the Hudson River can provide damages on other structures and can also bring flooding in the nearby areas. Because of these concerns, a team of experts was sent to check the status of the said walls and inspected the entire foundation site continuously using various equipments like inclinometers and other monitoring devices. Rehabilitation of the said walls were made in order to maintain the strength of the foundation of the World Trade Center and to avoid recurring problems that might bring more harm to the people and properties in the said region.

The Pantheon Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The Pantheon - Essay Example The force of the presence of Pantheon as well as its environmental symbolism often works charismatically upon visitors who experience the beautiful reach of its canopied void while passing through its bronze door into the enclosing rotunda. The extensive and influential architectural effects of the Pantheon upon the subsequent buildings are incontrovertible, and documented widely for the design and various aspects of the architecture (Baker 30). The controversial designer of the architecture, Hadrian, had an in-depth architectural brilliance accompanied with deep interest in architecture. He demonstrated inexplicable impudence and superiority in his architectures. Literature reveals that the conception and design of the Pantheon was original. Notwithstanding the fair amount of data and information on the history of the building, the eventual meaning and impression of the building remains in its intricacy and mystery. The description of the Rome architecture, the Pantheon, is presente d with information on its history. The description will cover the interior and exterior descriptions. History of the Pantheon According to MacDonald, the architect of the Rome Pantheon is unidentified. MacDonald states that it is almost certain that Hadrian was not the architect of the Pantheon despite his name being widely suggested as the one. He argues that the construction of the building must have required a thorough going professional to create the drawings and models, calculate the design and construction details and supervise the complex and extracting work as it progressed. Whoever the architect of the Pantheon may have been, the architect stands in relation to the building of Hadrian as Justinian to the Hagia Sophia or Louis XIV to Versailles. Hadrian, the Pantheon as well as the cultural texture of the early second century are all interlinked inextricably. As a result, no doubt exists that Hadrian was the motivating personality behind the conception and design of the Pant heon (MacDonald 12). Hadrian was born in well established colonial family in Roman Spain during the reign of emperor Vespian in 76 A.D. Hadrian was made the emperor upon the death of Trajan who reigned between 98 and 117 A.D. Hadrian reigned between 117 and 138 A.D. The location where the Pantheon was built was earlier occupied by a rectangular sanctuary of similar dedication built by the great minister Agrippa of Augustus, and dedicated around 25 B.C. The building was burnt down twice prior to the accession of Hadrian, and replaced entirely by Hadrian with the current structure. Nevertheless, Hadrian reinstated the original inscriptions of Agrippa, â€Å"Marcus Agrippa the son of Lucius, three times consul, built this,† on his new building. This inscription has led to significant confusion. Up-to-date, the Pantheon is uncommonly said to have been constructed during the period of Augustus Caesar. This date is wide off the mark by approximately 150 years because the inscriptio n in bold bronze letters that spreads across the entablature of the great porch is modern (MacDonald 13). The appropriate date of building the Pantheon is approximated to be the first half of the reign of Hadrian. The architecture was not commenced prior to 117 A.D., and was most probably dedicated around 126 A.D. to 128 A.D. During the second century, the Roman brick makers stamped methodologically a

Contemporary Issues In Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 2

Contemporary Issues In Marketing - Essay Example Though the customers perceive the whole thing as a single offering but actually customers reacts differently to each element of the marketing mix. If each part of the marketing mix acts differently and contradicts each other, then it creates an ambiguous effect that makes the customers behave in a confused manner and they tend to purchase product from other companies who have defined brands (Foxall, 1981). The method of marketing mix is used by the marketing manager to produce optimal response in the target market. By creating a perfect blend of the marketing mix elements such that they are utilized in an optimum way. All the elements in the marketing mix are controllable variable and can be altered to meet the need of the target market and the environment. Hence marketing mix is most useful tool to design the strategy and achieve success in the target market (Bootwala, Lawrence and Mali, 2009; Botha, Bothma and Brink, 2005). This study focuses on the use of the marketing tool for a restaurant chain in London that aims to generate a positive experience for the customers. Marketing Mix for the service chain The marketing mix for the service industry deals with the 7P’s like product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence. Product The package or product in the service industry is seen as a bundle of benefits and features, which has a close relevance to the target market. This makes it important to develop the service product or the benefit package to meet the expectation of the customer. The products offered by a restaurant can be classified into five levels like core benefits, basic product, expected product, augmented product and potential product. Core benefit is the fundamental service or benefit that the customer is buying. Basic product indicates the basic functional attributes of the product that is offered by the service provider. Expected product is the attributes that are normally expected by the customers. Augmented produ ct indicates the facilities or services that are provided by going beyond the expectations of the customers. Potential product are those that are created by innovation and distinguishes the service provider from others operating in the market (Srinivasan, 2012). In case of the restaurant chain the core benefit will be the taste of the food and the Italian cuisine in which it specialises. Studies have shown that eating habit of the people of London has undergone dramatic changes due to the opening of restaurants of diverse tastes specially French, German, Italian, Australian etc (White, 2011). The basic product will be foods and drinks of diverse origin and taste. The expected products that the restaurant offers is cleanliness and good ambience that is perfect for family and official dining. Augmented services would include just in time services, aroma and music. The potential product that would make the restaurant most distinguishing is the Italian food and some dietary foods; since people of London are now getting more and more diet concerned and health conscious (Wheelock, 1997). Price Competitive pricing should be done in order to be acceptable to the customers. It is the general tendency of the customers to link the price with the product or services offered by the organization. In simple words it indicates that the pricing of any product or services is largely influenced by the quality perceived by the customer

Alessandro algardi Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Alessandro algardi - Research Paper Example With the landmark of Cardinal Millini (d. 1629) in Santa Maria del Popolo, the Frangipani landmark in San Marcello al Corso, and the bust of Cardinal Laudivio Zacchia (Berlin), Algardi developed as the main opponent of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the field of representation figure. Failing to offer Berninis dynamic imperativeness and infiltrating characterization, Algardis pictures were acknowledged for their temperance and surface authenticity. Algardis nearby companionship with Pietro da Cortona helped create his notoriety in Rome and likewise acquainted him with a classicizing style in figure that owed an extraordinary arrangement to Roman demeanor to authentic correctness and the impact of Christian antiquarianism. Maybe his most paramount requisition in the 1630s was for the marble tomb of Pope Leo XI in St. Dwindles (1644; raised 1652). Leo XI ruled as pontiff an insignificant 27 days in April 1605 (the requisition hailed from the popes incredible-nephew, Cardinal Roberto Ubaldini). Algardi accentuated Leos kindheartedness with figurative figures of benevolence and charitableness and the help model Cardinal de Medicis Legation to France. Dissimilar to Berninis tomb for Pope Alexander VII, which consolidated white and shaded marble with bronze, Algardis ecclesiastical tomb was etched altogether from white marble. After the decision of Pope Innocent X (1644), Algardi superseded Bernini in ecclesiastical support. Between this date and his demise in 1654, Algardi generated some of his most commended lives up to expectations, around them the situated statue of the pope now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori (1645) and a goliath marble easing of the Meeting of Attila and Pope Leo in St. Subsides (1646–53), which affected the improvement and advancement of illusionistic reliefs. Despite the fact that he was by and large less showy than Bernini, Algardi in this work viably made an overwhelming-size account whose foremost

Was the Marshall Plan an unqualified success Essay

Was the Marshall Plan an unqualified success - Essay Example It also peeps into the state of economic growth in European countries before the commencement of this plan, so as to examine whether or not the Marshall plan was an unqualified success. The economic, social and political state of European countries of had been greatly exhausted as the repercussion of the World War II. Even the most powerful countries, such as Germany, could not escape the devastations of war. The economic growth all over the Europe had stalled and various political factors were hindering the process of economic growth acceleration. Watt illustrates the condition of European countries as, "in the economic field matters were still worse. The economies of France and Germany were in ruins Industrial production was recovering but the volume of exports was nothing like adequate to finance the necessary imports to maintain the rate of recovery. In France and Germany the position was worse still. British recover was far ahead of that in Europe" 1. The desolating economic state did not only hampered the trade and industrial growth of war-striken European countries, but was also threatening for the American capitalism. The United States, rising as the world super power after the World War II, perceived the state of halted trade and investment activities as grievous to its industrial growth. This led the US to devise and implement an aid plan directed towards all the European countries, known as the Marshall plan or the European Recovery Plan. The program was aimed towards driving European cooperation towards enhanced trade, investment and industrial growth, as well as curtailing the political aspects hindering economic stability in the region. Hence, shaping the European economic growth on American foundations. Watt points out that the Marshall plan "was to be a projection of many American ideas and ideals onto a Europe that was in a state of economic and political difficulties"2. The Western Europe, desperately in need of funds and collaboration, quickly accepted the offer and proceeded towards its implementation. Vickers remarks that the "Marshall's speech was welcomed with open arms by all the Western European states, already moving into varying degrees of co-operation"3. Unqualified Success Of Marshall Plan- A Myth Or Reality The Marshall plan is said to have greatly stimulated the economic growth of West European countries after the Second World War. Researchers (such as Mee4 and Wexler5 etc) argue in the favour of Marshall plan to have successfully transformed the course of economic recovery in Europe and led those countries on the track of growth. Wexler goes on to the extent of saying that the Marshall plan was "one of the great economic success stories of modern times"6. Although it is true to the extent that the flow of dollars and US conditions through the Marshall aid accelerated the process of economic and industrial growth in the region, however the plan, exclusively, cannot be termed as an unqualified success in driving this progress. Vickers illuminate this point as, "it is because of the way that the Marshall Plan entered the psyche of post-war politics that there is still a danger of falling prey to the myth of Marshall Aid." 7 The amount of aid provided to the Western Europe during the Marshall plan was not sufficient to the extent that

Consumer perception between international and local brands - A western Dissertation

Consumer perception between international and local brands - A western vs asian perspective - Dissertation Example Managers face challenges because of lack of synthesis between managerial concepts of brand identity and socio-cultural conception of inter-group dynamics, which may result in ill-fitted brand identities is a given sociopolitical context. Singapore is one of the top shopping destinations in Asia and hence attracts numerous international brands. These brands operate in a highly competitive environment trying to attract the attention of consumers as well as gain recognition against other international brands. This is because Singapore is a multicultural city compromising of Chinese, Malays, Indians and Eurasians, and with one in four resident being a non-Singaporean (SEDB, 2009). Consumer companies have been trying to tap into the opportunities presented by Singapore’s strengths and unique positioning. 1.2 Rationale for Research Studies have been conducted by different researchers on the subject such on attitude towards foreign and local brands – uniqueness theory to diffe rentiate themselves from others (Kashi, 2013), consumer ethnocentrism (Rice & Wongtada, 2007) and on the influence of animosity (Fullerton et al, 2007). Researches on this subject have been conducted but most of the researches have been conducted in developed countries. No such study has been found that focuses on the Asian countries. This research aims to go deeper and compare local and international brands in Singapore to identify local consumers brand perception. Singapore has been chosen as the focus of this study because of her ability to attract a wide range of international brands. Besides, Singapore is a useful setting because it is strongly influenced by both eastern and western traditions. In fact this can serve as a guideline for other Asian nations as they adopt western habits and consumption patterns. However, there is a tendency in Singapore to support the home grown design talents to the extent that domestic fashion brands have been gaining international exposure with government support (The Straits Times, 2012). Renowned local brands that originated in Singapore include Raoul and TWG. This significantly shows that Singapore brands do have the ability to compete with international brands such as T.M. Lewin. Therefore, this research expands into Singaporean’s reaction and attitude towards branding and how they perceive the established international brands against renowned local brands in various sectors. This research emphasizes on how Singaporeans come about having a particular opinion towards brands and what factors may influence consumer’s choice of brand. Customers globally have developed enhanced ability to select local and foreign brands even in developing countries. Business environments being competitive, it has become imperative for sellers of both domestic and foreign goods to explore customer purchase behavior. 1.3 Research Aims and Objectives With the aim to explore Singaporean consumers’ attitude and perception t owards brands, the objectives of the research are: To identify what factors can affect consumer’s attitude to brands Identifying models to assess consumers attitude towards branding To find out the different perceptions between international and local brands Comparing the attitude towards

Gay Marriage Essay Example for Free

Gay Marriage Essay The issue of gay marriage remains controversial. Some people think that this trend has adverse effects on the society while others believe that it is seen as a natural trend and right for people to choose this type of marriage. My essay will discuss causes and effects of this problem. First, gay marriage is the result of psychological, legal, economic and biological effects. Medically speaking, if someone is born to be gay, the tendency is that he will not change his nature and want to live with people of the same sex. There are cases of men who marry the opposite sex and end up being unhappy till the day they decide to lead their own lives and stay with the same sex. Another reason is derived from economic drive. Despite not being inborn gay, several people, for sake of profit, opt for the solution to marry the similar sex. Besides, only after undergoing painful break-ups with so many people of the different sex do people lose their belief in love, and hence, choose to be by the side of the same sex. These people are believed to sympathize and care about them more. In addition, in such an open society where equality is recognized, it is inevitable that people can marry the one they love, despite the differences in age, race, family background and marriage notion. There are both positive and negative effects in this problem. As a result of recognizing the right of gay people in form of marriage, the society bestows upon these people the feeling of equity which makes them motivated to work as hard as other people. It is the acknowledgement of gay marriage that talented gay people continue contributing their best to social development, without bias. However, the fear is that no sooner has gay marriage become official than the society lacks the next generation since hardly could gay couples give birth. Another disadvantage is that children who are raised in gay families can rarely receive comprehensive education. Such purely male environment or female one is not enough for kids to develop normally, which might result in their mental disorders and sexual disorientation.

Identifying Clusters in High Dimensional Data

Identifying Clusters in High Dimensional Data â€Å"Ask those who remember, are mindful if you do not know).† (Holy Quran, 6:43) Removal Of Redundant Dimensions To Find Clusters In N-Dimensional Data Using Subspace Clustering Abstract The data mining has emerged as a powerful tool to extract knowledge from huge databases. Researchers have introduced several machine learning algorithms to explore the databases to discover information, hidden patterns, and rules from the data which were not known at the data recording time. Due to the remarkable developments in the storage capacities, processing and powerful algorithmic tools, practitioners are developing new and improved algorithms and techniques in several areas of data mining to discover the rules and relationship among the attributes in simple and complex higher dimensional databases. Furthermore data mining has its implementation in large variety of areas ranging from banking to marketing, engineering to bioinformatics and from investment to risk analysis and fraud detection. Practitioners are analyzing and implementing the techniques of artificial neural networks for classification and regression problems because of accuracy, efficiency. The aim of his short r esearch project is to develop a way of identifying the clusters in high dimensional data as well as redundant dimensions which can create a noise in identifying the clusters in high dimensional data. Techniques used in this project utilizes the strength of the projections of the data points along the dimensions to identify the intensity of projection along each dimension in order to find cluster and redundant dimension in high dimensional data. 1 Introduction In numerous scientific settings, engineering processes, and business applications ranging from experimental sensor data and process control data to telecommunication traffic observation and financial transaction monitoring, huge amounts of high-dimensional measurement data are produced and stored. Whereas sensor equipments as well as big storage devices are getting cheaper day by day, data analysis tools and techniques wrap behind. Clustering methods are common solutions to unsupervised learning problems where neither any expert knowledge nor some helpful annotation for the data is available. In general, clustering groups the data objects in a way that similar objects get together in clusters whereas objects from different clusters are of high dissimilarity. However it is observed that clustering disclose almost no structure even it is known there must be groups of similar objects. In many cases, the reason is that the cluster structure is stimulated by some subsets of the spaces dim ensions only, and the many additional dimensions contribute nothing other than making noise in the data that hinder the discovery of the clusters within that data. As a solution to this problem, clustering algorithms are applied to the relevant subspaces only. Immediately, the new question is how to determine the relevant subspaces among the dimensions of the full space. Being faced with the power set of the set of dimensions a brute force trial of all subsets is infeasible due to their exponential number with respect to the original dimensionality. In high dimensional data, as dimensions are increasing, the visualization and representation of the data becomes more difficult and sometimes increase in the dimensions can create a bottleneck. More dimensions mean more visualization or representation problems in the data. As the dimensions are increased, the data within those dimensions seems dispersing towards the corners / dimensions. Subspace clustering solves this problem by identifying both problems in parallel. It solves the problem of relevant subspaces which can be marked as redundant in high dimensional data. It also solves the problem of finding the cluster structures within that dataset which become apparent in these subspaces. Subspace clustering is an extension to the traditional clustering which automatically finds the clusters present in the subspace of high dimensional data space that allows better clustering the data points than the original space and it works even when the curse of dimensionality occurs. The most o f the clustering algorithms have been designed to discover clusters in full dimensional space so they are not effective in identifying the clusters that exists within subspace of the original data space. The most of the clustering algorithms produces clustering results based on the order in which the input records were processed [2]. Subspace clustering can identify the different cluster within subspaces which exists in the huge amount of sales data and through it we can find which of the different attributes are related. This can be useful in promoting the sales and in planning the inventory levels of different products. It can be used for finding the subspace clusters in spatial databases and some useful decisions can be taken based on the subspace clusters identified [2]. The technique used here for indentifying the redundant dimensions which are creating noise in the data in order to identifying the clusters consist of drawing or plotting the data points in all dimensions. At second step the projection of all data points along each dimension are plotted. At the third step the unions of projections along each dimension are plotted using all possible combinations among all no. of dimensions and finally the union of all projection along all dimensions and analyzed, it will show the contribution of each dimension in indentifying the cluster which will be represented by the weight of projection. If any of the given dimension is contributing very less in order to building the weight of projection, that dimension can be considered as redundant, which means this dimension is not so important to identify the clusters in given data. The details of this strategy will be covered in later chapters. 2 Data Mining 2.1 What is Data Mining? Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspective and summarizing it for getting useful information. The information can be used for many useful purposes like increasing revenue, cuts costs etc. The data mining process also finds the hidden knowledge and relationship within the data which was not known while data recording. Describing the data is the first step in data mining, followed by summarizing its attributes (like standard deviation mean etc). After that data is reviewed using visual tools like charts and graphs and then meaningful relations are determined. In the data mining process, the steps of collecting, exploring and selecting the right data are critically important. User can analyze data from different dimensions categorize and summarize it. Data mining finds the correlation or patterns amongst the fields in large databases. Data mining has a great potential to help companies to focus on their important information in their data warehouse. It can predict the future trends and behaviors and allows the business to make more proactive and knowledge driven decisions. It can answer the business questions that were traditionally much time consuming to resolve. It scours databases for hidden patterns for finding predictive information that experts may miss it might lies beyond their expectations. Data mining is normally used to transform the data into information or knowledge. It is commonly used in wide range of profiting practices such as marketing, fraud detection and scientific discovery. Many companies already collect and refine their data. Data mining techniques can be implemented on existing platforms for enhance the value of information resources. Data mining tools can analyze massive databases to deliver answers to the questions. Some other terms contains similar meaning from data mining such as â€Å"Knowledge mining† or â€Å"Knowledge Extraction† or â€Å"Pattern Analysis†. Data mining can also be treated as a Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD). Some people simply mean the data mining as an essential step in Knowledge discovery from a large data. The process of knowledge discovery from data contains following steps. * Data cleaning (removing the noise and inconsistent data) * Data Integration (combining multiple data sources) * Data selection (retrieving the data relevant to analysis task from database) * Data Transformation (transforming the data into appropriate forms for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations) * Data mining (applying the intelligent methods in order to extract data patterns) * Pattern evaluation (identifying the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some measures) * Knowledge representation (representing knowledge techniques that are used to present the mined knowledge to the user) 2.2 Data Data can be any type of facts, or text, or image or number which can be processed by computer. Todays organizations are accumulating large and growing amounts of data in different formats and in different databases. It can include operational or transactional data which includes costs, sales, inventory, payroll and accounting. It can also include nonoperational data such as industry sales and forecast data. It can also include the meta data which is, data about the data itself, such as logical database design and data dictionary definitions. 2.3 Information The information can be retrieved from the data via patterns, associations or relationship may exist in the data. For example the retail point of sale transaction data can be analyzed to yield information about the products which are being sold and when. 2.4 Knowledge Knowledge can be retrieved from information via historical patterns and the future trends. For example the analysis on retail supermarket sales data in promotional efforts point of view can provide the knowledge buying behavior of customer. Hence items which are at most risk for promotional efforts can be determined by manufacturer easily. 2.5 Data warehouse The advancement in data capture, processing power, data transmission and storage technologies are enabling the industry to integrate their various databases into data warehouse. The process of centralizing and retrieving the data is called data warehousing. Data warehousing is new term but concept is a bit old. Data warehouse is storage of massive amount of data in electronic form. Data warehousing is used to represent an ideal way of maintaining a central repository for all organizational data. Purpose of data warehouse is to maximize the user access and analysis. The data from different data sources are extracted, transformed and then loaded into data warehouse. Users / clients can generate different types of reports and can do business analysis by accessing the data warehouse. Data mining is primarily used today by companies with a strong consumer focus retail, financial, communication, and marketing organizations. It allows these organizations to evaluate associations between certain internal external factors. The product positioning, price or staff skills can be example of internal factors. The external factor examples can be economic indicators, customer demographics and competition. It also allows them to calculate the impact on sales, corporate profits and customer satisfaction. Furthermore it allows them to summarize the information to look detailed transactional data. Given databases of sufficient size and quality, data mining technology can generate new business opportunities by its capabilities. Data mining usually automates the procedure of searching predictive information in huge databases. Questions that traditionally required extensive hands-on analysis can now be answered directly from the data very quickly. The targeted marketing can be an example of predictive problem. Data mining utilizes data on previous promotional mailings in order to recognize the targets most probably to increase return on investment as maximum as possible in future mailings. Tools used in data mining traverses through huge databases and discover previously unseen patterns in single step. Analysis on retail sales data to recognize apparently unrelated products which are usually purchased together can be an example of it. The more pattern discovery problems can include identifying fraudulent credit card transactions and identifying irregular data that could symbolize data entry input errors. When data mining tools are used on parallel processing systems of high performance, they are able to analy ze huge databases in very less amount of time. Faster or quick processing means that users can automatically experience with more details to recognize the complex data. High speed and quick response makes it actually possible for users to examine huge amounts of data. Huge databases, in turn, give improved and better predictions. 2.6 Descriptive and Predictive Data Mining Descriptive data mining aims to find patterns in the data that provide some information about what the data contains. It describes patterns in existing data, and is generally used to create meaningful subgroups such as demographic clusters. For example descriptions are in the form of Summaries and visualization, Clustering and Link Analysis. Predictive Data Mining is used to forecast explicit values, based on patterns determined from known results. For example, in the database having records of clients who have already answered to a specific offer, a model can be made that predicts which prospects are most probable to answer to the same offer. It is usually applied to recognize data mining projects with the goal to identify a statistical or neural network model or set of models that can be used to predict some response of interest. For example, a credit card company may want to engage in predictive data mining, to derive a (trained) model or set of models that can quickly identify tr ansactions which have a high probability of being fraudulent. Other types of data mining projects may be more exploratory in nature (e.g. to determine the cluster or divisions of customers), in which case drill-down descriptive and tentative methods need to be applied. Predictive data mining is goad oriented. It can be decomposed into following major tasks. * Data Preparation * Data Reduction * Data Modeling and Prediction * Case and Solution Analysis 2.7 Text Mining The Text Mining is sometimes also called Text Data Mining which is more or less equal to Text Analytics. Text mining is the process of extracting/deriving high quality information from the text. High quality information is typically derived from deriving the patterns and trends through means such as statistical pattern learning. It usually involves the process of structuring the input text (usually parsing, along with the addition of some derived linguistic features and the removal of others, and subsequent insertion into a database), deriving patterns within the structured data, and finally evaluation and interpretation of the output. The High Quality in text mining usually refers to some combination of relevance, novelty, and interestingness. The text categorization, concept/entity extraction, text clustering, sentiment analysis, production of rough taxonomies, entity relation modeling, document summarization can be included as text mining tasks. Text Mining is also known as the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information from different written resources. Linking together of the extracted information is the key element to create new facts or new hypotheses to be examined further by more conventional ways of experimentation. In text mining, the goal is to discover unknown information, something that no one yet knows and so could not have yet written down. The difference between ordinary data mining and text mining is that, in text mining the patterns are retrieved from natural language text instead of from structured databases of facts. Databases are designed and developed for programs to execute automatically; text is written for people to read. Most of the researchers think that it will need a full fledge simulation of how the brain works before that programs that read the way people do could be written. 2.8 Web Mining Web Mining is the technique which is used to extract and discover the information from web documents and services automatically. The interest of various research communities, tremendous growth of information resources on Web and recent interest in e-commerce has made this area of research very huge. Web mining can be usually decomposed into subtasks. * Resource finding: fetching intended web documents. * Information selection and pre-processing: selecting and preprocessing specific information from fetched web resources automatically. * Generalization: automatically discovers general patterns at individual and across multiple website * Analysis: validation and explanation of mined patterns. Web Mining can be mainly categorized into three areas of interest based on which part of Web needs to be mined: Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining and Web Usage Mining. Web Contents Mining describes the discovery of useful information from the web contents, data and documents [10]. In past the internet consisted of only different types of services and data resources. But today most of the data is available over the internet; even digital libraries are also available on Web. The web contents consist of several types of data including text, image, audio, video, metadata as well as hyperlinks. Most of the companies are trying to transform their business and services into electronic form and putting it on Web. As a result, the databases of the companies which were previously residing on legacy systems are now accessible over the Web. Thus the employees, business partners and even end clients are able to access the companys databases over the Web. Users are accessing the application s over the web via their web interfaces due to which the most of the companies are trying to transform their business over the web, because internet is capable of making connection to any other computer anywhere in the world [11]. Some of the web contents are hidden and hence cannot be indexed. The dynamically generated data from the results of queries residing in the database or private data can fall in this area. Unstructured data such as free text or semi structured data such as HTML and fully structured data such as data in the tables or database generated web pages can be considered in this category. However unstructured text is mostly found in the web contents. The work on Web content mining is mostly done from 2 point of views, one is IR and other is DB point of view. â€Å"From IR view, web content mining assists and improves the information finding or filtering to the user. From DB view web content mining models the data on the web and integrates them so that the more soph isticated queries other than keywords could be performed. [10]. In Web Structure Mining, we are more concerned with the structure of hyperlinks within the web itself which can be called as inter document structure [10]. It is closely related to the web usage mining [14]. Pattern detection and graphs mining are essentially related to the web structure mining. Link analysis technique can be used to determine the patterns in the graph. The search engines like Google usually uses the web structure mining. For example, the links are mined and one can then determine the web pages that point to a particular web page. When a string is searched, a webpage having most number of links pointed to it may become first in the list. Thats why web pages are listed based on rank which is calculated by the rank of web pages pointed to it [14]. Based on web structural data, web structure mining can be divided into two categories. The first kind of web structure mining interacts with extracting patterns from the hyperlinks in the web. A hyperlink is a structural comp onent that links or connects the web page to a different web page or different location. The other kind of the web structure mining interacts with the document structure, which is using the tree-like structure to analyze and describe the HTML or XML tags within the web pages. With continuous growth of e-commerce, web services and web applications, the volume of clickstream and user data collected by web based organizations in their daily operations has increased. The organizations can analyze such data to determine the life time value of clients, design cross marketing strategies etc. [13]. The Web usage mining interacts with data generated by users clickstream. â€Å"The web usage data includes web server access logs, proxy server logs, browser logs, user profile, registration data, user sessions, transactions, cookies, user queries, bookmark data, mouse clicks and scrolls and any other data as a result of interaction† [10]. So the web usage mining is the most important task of the web mining [12]. Weblog databases can provide rich information about the web dynamics. In web usage mining, web log records are mined to discover the user access patterns through which the potential customers can be identified, quality of internet services can be enhanc ed and web server performance can be improved. Many techniques can be developed for implementation of web usage mining but it is important to know that success of such applications depends upon what and how much valid and reliable knowledge can be discovered the log data. Most often, the web logs are cleaned, condensed and transformed before extraction of any useful and significant information from weblog. Web mining can be performed on web log records to find associations patterns, sequential patterns and trend of web accessing. The overall Web usage mining process can be divided into three inter-dependent stages: data collection and pre-processing, pattern discovery, and pattern analysis [13]. In the data collection preprocessing stage, the raw data is collected, cleaned and transformed into a set of user transactions which represents the activities of each user during visits to the web site. In the pattern discovery stage, statistical, database, and machine learning operations a re performed to retrieve hidden patterns representing the typical behavior of users, as well as summary of statistics on Web resources, sessions, and users. 3 Classification 3.1 What is Classification? As the quantity and the variety increases in the available data, it needs some robust, efficient and versatile data categorization technique for exploration [16]. Classification is a method of categorizing class labels to patterns. It is actually a data mining methodology used to predict group membership for data instances. For example, one may want to use classification to guess whether the weather on a specific day would be â€Å"sunny†, â€Å"cloudy† or â€Å"rainy†. The data mining techniques which are used to differentiate similar kind of data objects / points from other are called clustering. It actually uses attribute values found in the data of one class to distinguish it from other types or classes. The data classification majorly concerns with the treatment of the large datasets. In classification we build a model by analyzing the existing data, describing the characteristics of various classes of data. We can use this model to predict the class/type of new data. Classification is a supervised machine learning procedure in which individual items are placed in a group based on quantitative information on one or more characteristics in the items. Decision Trees and Bayesian Networks are the examples of classification methods. One type of classification is Clustering. This is process of finding the similar data objects / points within the given dataset. This similarity can be in the meaning of distance measures or on any other parameter, depending upon the need and the given data. Classification is an ancient term as well as a modern one since classification of animals, plants and other physical objects is still valid today. Classification is a way of thinking about things rather than a study of things itself so it draws its theory and application from complete range of human experiences and thoughts [18]. From a bigger picture, classification can include medical patients based on disease, a set of images containing red rose from an image database, a set of documents describing â€Å"classification† from a document/text database, equipment malfunction based on cause and loan applicants based on their likelihood of payment etc. For example in later case, the problem is to predict a new applicants loans eligibility given old data about customers. There are many techniques which are used for data categorization / classification. The most common are Decision tree classifier and Bayesian classifiers. 3.2 Types of Classification There are two types of classification. One is supervised classification and other is unsupervised classification. Supervised learning is a machine learning technique for discovering a function from training data. The training data contains the pairs of input objects, and their desired outputs. The output of the function can be a continuous value which can be called regression, or can predict a class label of the input object which can be called as classification. The task of the supervised learner is to predict the value of the function for any valid input object after having seen a number of training examples (i.e. pairs of input and target output). To achieve this goal, the learner needs to simplify from the presented data to hidden situations in a meaningful way. The unsupervised learning is a class of problems in machine learning in which it is needed to seek to determine how the data are organized. It is distinguished from supervised learning in that the learner is given only unknown examples. Unsupervised learning is nearly related to the problem of density estimation in statistics. However unsupervised learning also covers many other techniques that are used to summarize and explain key features of the data. One form of unsupervised learning is clustering which will be covered in next chapter. Blind source partition based on Independent Component Analysis is another example. Neural network models, adaptive resonance theory and the self organizing maps are most commonly used unsupervised learning algorithms. There are many techniques for the implementation of supervised classification. We will be discussing two of them which are most commonly used which are Decision Trees classifiers and Naà ¯ve Bayesian Classifiers. 3.2.1 Decision Trees Classifier There are many alternatives to represent classifiers. The decision tree is probably the most widely used approach for this purpose. It is one of the most widely used supervised learning methods used for data exploration. It is easy to use and can be represented in if-then-else statements/rules and can work well in noisy data as well [16]. Tree like graph or decisions models and their possible consequences including resource costs, chance event, outcomes, and utilities are used in decision trees. Decision trees are most commonly used in specifically in decision analysis, operations research, to help in identifying a strategy most probably to reach a target. In machine learning and data mining, a decision trees are used as predictive model; means a planning from observations calculations about an item to the conclusions about its target value. More descriptive names for such tree models are classification tree or regression tree. In these tree structures, leaves are representing class ifications and branches are representing conjunctions of features those lead to classifications. The machine learning technique for inducing a decision tree from data is called decision tree learning, or decision trees. Decision trees are simple but powerful form of multiple variable analyses [15]. Classification is done by tree like structures that have different test criteria for a variable at each of the nodes. New leaves are generated based on the results of the tests at the nodes. Decision Tree is a supervised learning system in which classification rules are constructed from the decision tree. Decision trees are produced by algorithms which identify various ways splitting data set into branch like segment. Decision tree try to find out a strong relationship between input and target values within the dataset [15]. In tasks classification, decision trees normally visualize that what steps should be taken to reach on classification. Every decision tree starts with a parent node called root node which is considered to be the parent of every other node. Each node in the tree calculates an attribute in the data and decides which path it should follow. Typically the decision test is comparison of a value against some constant. Classification with the help of decision tree is done by traversing from the root node up to a leaf node. Decision trees are able to represent and classify the diverse types of data. The simplest form of data is numerical data which is most familiar too. Organizing nominal data is also required many times in many situations. Nominal quantities are normally represented via discrete set of symbols. For example weather condition can be described in either nominal fashion or numeric. Quantification can be done about temperature by saying that it is eleven degrees Celsius or fifty two degrees Fahrenheit. The cool, mild, cold, warm or hot terminologies can also be sued. The former is a type of numeric data while and the latter is an example of nominal data. More precisely, the example of cool, mild, cold, warm and hot is a special type of nominal data, expressed as ordinal data. Ordinal data usually has an implicit assumption of ordered relationships among the values. In the weather example, purely nominal description like rainy, overcast and sunny can also be added. These values have no relationships or distance measures among each other. Decision Trees are those types of trees where each node is a question, each branch is an answer to a question, and each leaf is a result. Here is an example of Decision tree. Roughly, the idea is based upon the number of stock items; we have to make different decisions. If we dont have much, you buy at any cost. If you have a lot of items then you only buy if it is inexpensive. Now if stock items are less than 10 then buy all if unit price is less than 10 otherwise buy only 10 items. Now if we have 10 to 40 items in the stock then check unit price. If unit price is less than 5 £ then buy only 5 items otherwise no need to buy anything expensive since stock is good already. Now if we have more than 40 items in the stock, then buy 5 if and only if price is less than 2 £ otherwise no need to buy too expensive items. So in this way decision trees help us to make a decision at each level. Here is another example of decision tree, representing the risk factor associated with the rash driving. The root node at the top of the tree structure is showing the feature that is split first for highest discrimination. The internal nodes are showing decision rules on one or more attributes while leaf nodes are class labels. A person having age less than 20 has very high risk while a person having age greater than 30 has a very low risk. A middle category; a person having age greater than 20 but less than 30 depend upon another attribute which is car type. If car type is of sports then there is again high risk involved while if family car is used then there is low risk involved. In the field of sciences engineering and in the applied areas including business intelligence and data mining, many useful features are being introduced as the result of evolution of decision trees. * With the help of transformation in decision trees, the volume of data can be reduced into more compact form that preserves the major characteristic Identifying Clusters in High Dimensional Data Identifying Clusters in High Dimensional Data â€Å"Ask those who remember, are mindful if you do not know).† (Holy Quran, 6:43) Removal Of Redundant Dimensions To Find Clusters In N-Dimensional Data Using Subspace Clustering Abstract The data mining has emerged as a powerful tool to extract knowledge from huge databases. Researchers have introduced several machine learning algorithms to explore the databases to discover information, hidden patterns, and rules from the data which were not known at the data recording time. Due to the remarkable developments in the storage capacities, processing and powerful algorithmic tools, practitioners are developing new and improved algorithms and techniques in several areas of data mining to discover the rules and relationship among the attributes in simple and complex higher dimensional databases. Furthermore data mining has its implementation in large variety of areas ranging from banking to marketing, engineering to bioinformatics and from investment to risk analysis and fraud detection. Practitioners are analyzing and implementing the techniques of artificial neural networks for classification and regression problems because of accuracy, efficiency. The aim of his short r esearch project is to develop a way of identifying the clusters in high dimensional data as well as redundant dimensions which can create a noise in identifying the clusters in high dimensional data. Techniques used in this project utilizes the strength of the projections of the data points along the dimensions to identify the intensity of projection along each dimension in order to find cluster and redundant dimension in high dimensional data. 1 Introduction In numerous scientific settings, engineering processes, and business applications ranging from experimental sensor data and process control data to telecommunication traffic observation and financial transaction monitoring, huge amounts of high-dimensional measurement data are produced and stored. Whereas sensor equipments as well as big storage devices are getting cheaper day by day, data analysis tools and techniques wrap behind. Clustering methods are common solutions to unsupervised learning problems where neither any expert knowledge nor some helpful annotation for the data is available. In general, clustering groups the data objects in a way that similar objects get together in clusters whereas objects from different clusters are of high dissimilarity. However it is observed that clustering disclose almost no structure even it is known there must be groups of similar objects. In many cases, the reason is that the cluster structure is stimulated by some subsets of the spaces dim ensions only, and the many additional dimensions contribute nothing other than making noise in the data that hinder the discovery of the clusters within that data. As a solution to this problem, clustering algorithms are applied to the relevant subspaces only. Immediately, the new question is how to determine the relevant subspaces among the dimensions of the full space. Being faced with the power set of the set of dimensions a brute force trial of all subsets is infeasible due to their exponential number with respect to the original dimensionality. In high dimensional data, as dimensions are increasing, the visualization and representation of the data becomes more difficult and sometimes increase in the dimensions can create a bottleneck. More dimensions mean more visualization or representation problems in the data. As the dimensions are increased, the data within those dimensions seems dispersing towards the corners / dimensions. Subspace clustering solves this problem by identifying both problems in parallel. It solves the problem of relevant subspaces which can be marked as redundant in high dimensional data. It also solves the problem of finding the cluster structures within that dataset which become apparent in these subspaces. Subspace clustering is an extension to the traditional clustering which automatically finds the clusters present in the subspace of high dimensional data space that allows better clustering the data points than the original space and it works even when the curse of dimensionality occurs. The most o f the clustering algorithms have been designed to discover clusters in full dimensional space so they are not effective in identifying the clusters that exists within subspace of the original data space. The most of the clustering algorithms produces clustering results based on the order in which the input records were processed [2]. Subspace clustering can identify the different cluster within subspaces which exists in the huge amount of sales data and through it we can find which of the different attributes are related. This can be useful in promoting the sales and in planning the inventory levels of different products. It can be used for finding the subspace clusters in spatial databases and some useful decisions can be taken based on the subspace clusters identified [2]. The technique used here for indentifying the redundant dimensions which are creating noise in the data in order to identifying the clusters consist of drawing or plotting the data points in all dimensions. At second step the projection of all data points along each dimension are plotted. At the third step the unions of projections along each dimension are plotted using all possible combinations among all no. of dimensions and finally the union of all projection along all dimensions and analyzed, it will show the contribution of each dimension in indentifying the cluster which will be represented by the weight of projection. If any of the given dimension is contributing very less in order to building the weight of projection, that dimension can be considered as redundant, which means this dimension is not so important to identify the clusters in given data. The details of this strategy will be covered in later chapters. 2 Data Mining 2.1 What is Data Mining? Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspective and summarizing it for getting useful information. The information can be used for many useful purposes like increasing revenue, cuts costs etc. The data mining process also finds the hidden knowledge and relationship within the data which was not known while data recording. Describing the data is the first step in data mining, followed by summarizing its attributes (like standard deviation mean etc). After that data is reviewed using visual tools like charts and graphs and then meaningful relations are determined. In the data mining process, the steps of collecting, exploring and selecting the right data are critically important. User can analyze data from different dimensions categorize and summarize it. Data mining finds the correlation or patterns amongst the fields in large databases. Data mining has a great potential to help companies to focus on their important information in their data warehouse. It can predict the future trends and behaviors and allows the business to make more proactive and knowledge driven decisions. It can answer the business questions that were traditionally much time consuming to resolve. It scours databases for hidden patterns for finding predictive information that experts may miss it might lies beyond their expectations. Data mining is normally used to transform the data into information or knowledge. It is commonly used in wide range of profiting practices such as marketing, fraud detection and scientific discovery. Many companies already collect and refine their data. Data mining techniques can be implemented on existing platforms for enhance the value of information resources. Data mining tools can analyze massive databases to deliver answers to the questions. Some other terms contains similar meaning from data mining such as â€Å"Knowledge mining† or â€Å"Knowledge Extraction† or â€Å"Pattern Analysis†. Data mining can also be treated as a Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD). Some people simply mean the data mining as an essential step in Knowledge discovery from a large data. The process of knowledge discovery from data contains following steps. * Data cleaning (removing the noise and inconsistent data) * Data Integration (combining multiple data sources) * Data selection (retrieving the data relevant to analysis task from database) * Data Transformation (transforming the data into appropriate forms for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations) * Data mining (applying the intelligent methods in order to extract data patterns) * Pattern evaluation (identifying the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some measures) * Knowledge representation (representing knowledge techniques that are used to present the mined knowledge to the user) 2.2 Data Data can be any type of facts, or text, or image or number which can be processed by computer. Todays organizations are accumulating large and growing amounts of data in different formats and in different databases. It can include operational or transactional data which includes costs, sales, inventory, payroll and accounting. It can also include nonoperational data such as industry sales and forecast data. It can also include the meta data which is, data about the data itself, such as logical database design and data dictionary definitions. 2.3 Information The information can be retrieved from the data via patterns, associations or relationship may exist in the data. For example the retail point of sale transaction data can be analyzed to yield information about the products which are being sold and when. 2.4 Knowledge Knowledge can be retrieved from information via historical patterns and the future trends. For example the analysis on retail supermarket sales data in promotional efforts point of view can provide the knowledge buying behavior of customer. Hence items which are at most risk for promotional efforts can be determined by manufacturer easily. 2.5 Data warehouse The advancement in data capture, processing power, data transmission and storage technologies are enabling the industry to integrate their various databases into data warehouse. The process of centralizing and retrieving the data is called data warehousing. Data warehousing is new term but concept is a bit old. Data warehouse is storage of massive amount of data in electronic form. Data warehousing is used to represent an ideal way of maintaining a central repository for all organizational data. Purpose of data warehouse is to maximize the user access and analysis. The data from different data sources are extracted, transformed and then loaded into data warehouse. Users / clients can generate different types of reports and can do business analysis by accessing the data warehouse. Data mining is primarily used today by companies with a strong consumer focus retail, financial, communication, and marketing organizations. It allows these organizations to evaluate associations between certain internal external factors. The product positioning, price or staff skills can be example of internal factors. The external factor examples can be economic indicators, customer demographics and competition. It also allows them to calculate the impact on sales, corporate profits and customer satisfaction. Furthermore it allows them to summarize the information to look detailed transactional data. Given databases of sufficient size and quality, data mining technology can generate new business opportunities by its capabilities. Data mining usually automates the procedure of searching predictive information in huge databases. Questions that traditionally required extensive hands-on analysis can now be answered directly from the data very quickly. The targeted marketing can be an example of predictive problem. Data mining utilizes data on previous promotional mailings in order to recognize the targets most probably to increase return on investment as maximum as possible in future mailings. Tools used in data mining traverses through huge databases and discover previously unseen patterns in single step. Analysis on retail sales data to recognize apparently unrelated products which are usually purchased together can be an example of it. The more pattern discovery problems can include identifying fraudulent credit card transactions and identifying irregular data that could symbolize data entry input errors. When data mining tools are used on parallel processing systems of high performance, they are able to analy ze huge databases in very less amount of time. Faster or quick processing means that users can automatically experience with more details to recognize the complex data. High speed and quick response makes it actually possible for users to examine huge amounts of data. Huge databases, in turn, give improved and better predictions. 2.6 Descriptive and Predictive Data Mining Descriptive data mining aims to find patterns in the data that provide some information about what the data contains. It describes patterns in existing data, and is generally used to create meaningful subgroups such as demographic clusters. For example descriptions are in the form of Summaries and visualization, Clustering and Link Analysis. Predictive Data Mining is used to forecast explicit values, based on patterns determined from known results. For example, in the database having records of clients who have already answered to a specific offer, a model can be made that predicts which prospects are most probable to answer to the same offer. It is usually applied to recognize data mining projects with the goal to identify a statistical or neural network model or set of models that can be used to predict some response of interest. For example, a credit card company may want to engage in predictive data mining, to derive a (trained) model or set of models that can quickly identify tr ansactions which have a high probability of being fraudulent. Other types of data mining projects may be more exploratory in nature (e.g. to determine the cluster or divisions of customers), in which case drill-down descriptive and tentative methods need to be applied. Predictive data mining is goad oriented. It can be decomposed into following major tasks. * Data Preparation * Data Reduction * Data Modeling and Prediction * Case and Solution Analysis 2.7 Text Mining The Text Mining is sometimes also called Text Data Mining which is more or less equal to Text Analytics. Text mining is the process of extracting/deriving high quality information from the text. High quality information is typically derived from deriving the patterns and trends through means such as statistical pattern learning. It usually involves the process of structuring the input text (usually parsing, along with the addition of some derived linguistic features and the removal of others, and subsequent insertion into a database), deriving patterns within the structured data, and finally evaluation and interpretation of the output. The High Quality in text mining usually refers to some combination of relevance, novelty, and interestingness. The text categorization, concept/entity extraction, text clustering, sentiment analysis, production of rough taxonomies, entity relation modeling, document summarization can be included as text mining tasks. Text Mining is also known as the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information from different written resources. Linking together of the extracted information is the key element to create new facts or new hypotheses to be examined further by more conventional ways of experimentation. In text mining, the goal is to discover unknown information, something that no one yet knows and so could not have yet written down. The difference between ordinary data mining and text mining is that, in text mining the patterns are retrieved from natural language text instead of from structured databases of facts. Databases are designed and developed for programs to execute automatically; text is written for people to read. Most of the researchers think that it will need a full fledge simulation of how the brain works before that programs that read the way people do could be written. 2.8 Web Mining Web Mining is the technique which is used to extract and discover the information from web documents and services automatically. The interest of various research communities, tremendous growth of information resources on Web and recent interest in e-commerce has made this area of research very huge. Web mining can be usually decomposed into subtasks. * Resource finding: fetching intended web documents. * Information selection and pre-processing: selecting and preprocessing specific information from fetched web resources automatically. * Generalization: automatically discovers general patterns at individual and across multiple website * Analysis: validation and explanation of mined patterns. Web Mining can be mainly categorized into three areas of interest based on which part of Web needs to be mined: Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining and Web Usage Mining. Web Contents Mining describes the discovery of useful information from the web contents, data and documents [10]. In past the internet consisted of only different types of services and data resources. But today most of the data is available over the internet; even digital libraries are also available on Web. The web contents consist of several types of data including text, image, audio, video, metadata as well as hyperlinks. Most of the companies are trying to transform their business and services into electronic form and putting it on Web. As a result, the databases of the companies which were previously residing on legacy systems are now accessible over the Web. Thus the employees, business partners and even end clients are able to access the companys databases over the Web. Users are accessing the application s over the web via their web interfaces due to which the most of the companies are trying to transform their business over the web, because internet is capable of making connection to any other computer anywhere in the world [11]. Some of the web contents are hidden and hence cannot be indexed. The dynamically generated data from the results of queries residing in the database or private data can fall in this area. Unstructured data such as free text or semi structured data such as HTML and fully structured data such as data in the tables or database generated web pages can be considered in this category. However unstructured text is mostly found in the web contents. The work on Web content mining is mostly done from 2 point of views, one is IR and other is DB point of view. â€Å"From IR view, web content mining assists and improves the information finding or filtering to the user. From DB view web content mining models the data on the web and integrates them so that the more soph isticated queries other than keywords could be performed. [10]. In Web Structure Mining, we are more concerned with the structure of hyperlinks within the web itself which can be called as inter document structure [10]. It is closely related to the web usage mining [14]. Pattern detection and graphs mining are essentially related to the web structure mining. Link analysis technique can be used to determine the patterns in the graph. The search engines like Google usually uses the web structure mining. For example, the links are mined and one can then determine the web pages that point to a particular web page. When a string is searched, a webpage having most number of links pointed to it may become first in the list. Thats why web pages are listed based on rank which is calculated by the rank of web pages pointed to it [14]. Based on web structural data, web structure mining can be divided into two categories. The first kind of web structure mining interacts with extracting patterns from the hyperlinks in the web. A hyperlink is a structural comp onent that links or connects the web page to a different web page or different location. The other kind of the web structure mining interacts with the document structure, which is using the tree-like structure to analyze and describe the HTML or XML tags within the web pages. With continuous growth of e-commerce, web services and web applications, the volume of clickstream and user data collected by web based organizations in their daily operations has increased. The organizations can analyze such data to determine the life time value of clients, design cross marketing strategies etc. [13]. The Web usage mining interacts with data generated by users clickstream. â€Å"The web usage data includes web server access logs, proxy server logs, browser logs, user profile, registration data, user sessions, transactions, cookies, user queries, bookmark data, mouse clicks and scrolls and any other data as a result of interaction† [10]. So the web usage mining is the most important task of the web mining [12]. Weblog databases can provide rich information about the web dynamics. In web usage mining, web log records are mined to discover the user access patterns through which the potential customers can be identified, quality of internet services can be enhanc ed and web server performance can be improved. Many techniques can be developed for implementation of web usage mining but it is important to know that success of such applications depends upon what and how much valid and reliable knowledge can be discovered the log data. Most often, the web logs are cleaned, condensed and transformed before extraction of any useful and significant information from weblog. Web mining can be performed on web log records to find associations patterns, sequential patterns and trend of web accessing. The overall Web usage mining process can be divided into three inter-dependent stages: data collection and pre-processing, pattern discovery, and pattern analysis [13]. In the data collection preprocessing stage, the raw data is collected, cleaned and transformed into a set of user transactions which represents the activities of each user during visits to the web site. In the pattern discovery stage, statistical, database, and machine learning operations a re performed to retrieve hidden patterns representing the typical behavior of users, as well as summary of statistics on Web resources, sessions, and users. 3 Classification 3.1 What is Classification? As the quantity and the variety increases in the available data, it needs some robust, efficient and versatile data categorization technique for exploration [16]. Classification is a method of categorizing class labels to patterns. It is actually a data mining methodology used to predict group membership for data instances. For example, one may want to use classification to guess whether the weather on a specific day would be â€Å"sunny†, â€Å"cloudy† or â€Å"rainy†. The data mining techniques which are used to differentiate similar kind of data objects / points from other are called clustering. It actually uses attribute values found in the data of one class to distinguish it from other types or classes. The data classification majorly concerns with the treatment of the large datasets. In classification we build a model by analyzing the existing data, describing the characteristics of various classes of data. We can use this model to predict the class/type of new data. Classification is a supervised machine learning procedure in which individual items are placed in a group based on quantitative information on one or more characteristics in the items. Decision Trees and Bayesian Networks are the examples of classification methods. One type of classification is Clustering. This is process of finding the similar data objects / points within the given dataset. This similarity can be in the meaning of distance measures or on any other parameter, depending upon the need and the given data. Classification is an ancient term as well as a modern one since classification of animals, plants and other physical objects is still valid today. Classification is a way of thinking about things rather than a study of things itself so it draws its theory and application from complete range of human experiences and thoughts [18]. From a bigger picture, classification can include medical patients based on disease, a set of images containing red rose from an image database, a set of documents describing â€Å"classification† from a document/text database, equipment malfunction based on cause and loan applicants based on their likelihood of payment etc. For example in later case, the problem is to predict a new applicants loans eligibility given old data about customers. There are many techniques which are used for data categorization / classification. The most common are Decision tree classifier and Bayesian classifiers. 3.2 Types of Classification There are two types of classification. One is supervised classification and other is unsupervised classification. Supervised learning is a machine learning technique for discovering a function from training data. The training data contains the pairs of input objects, and their desired outputs. The output of the function can be a continuous value which can be called regression, or can predict a class label of the input object which can be called as classification. The task of the supervised learner is to predict the value of the function for any valid input object after having seen a number of training examples (i.e. pairs of input and target output). To achieve this goal, the learner needs to simplify from the presented data to hidden situations in a meaningful way. The unsupervised learning is a class of problems in machine learning in which it is needed to seek to determine how the data are organized. It is distinguished from supervised learning in that the learner is given only unknown examples. Unsupervised learning is nearly related to the problem of density estimation in statistics. However unsupervised learning also covers many other techniques that are used to summarize and explain key features of the data. One form of unsupervised learning is clustering which will be covered in next chapter. Blind source partition based on Independent Component Analysis is another example. Neural network models, adaptive resonance theory and the self organizing maps are most commonly used unsupervised learning algorithms. There are many techniques for the implementation of supervised classification. We will be discussing two of them which are most commonly used which are Decision Trees classifiers and Naà ¯ve Bayesian Classifiers. 3.2.1 Decision Trees Classifier There are many alternatives to represent classifiers. The decision tree is probably the most widely used approach for this purpose. It is one of the most widely used supervised learning methods used for data exploration. It is easy to use and can be represented in if-then-else statements/rules and can work well in noisy data as well [16]. Tree like graph or decisions models and their possible consequences including resource costs, chance event, outcomes, and utilities are used in decision trees. Decision trees are most commonly used in specifically in decision analysis, operations research, to help in identifying a strategy most probably to reach a target. In machine learning and data mining, a decision trees are used as predictive model; means a planning from observations calculations about an item to the conclusions about its target value. More descriptive names for such tree models are classification tree or regression tree. In these tree structures, leaves are representing class ifications and branches are representing conjunctions of features those lead to classifications. The machine learning technique for inducing a decision tree from data is called decision tree learning, or decision trees. Decision trees are simple but powerful form of multiple variable analyses [15]. Classification is done by tree like structures that have different test criteria for a variable at each of the nodes. New leaves are generated based on the results of the tests at the nodes. Decision Tree is a supervised learning system in which classification rules are constructed from the decision tree. Decision trees are produced by algorithms which identify various ways splitting data set into branch like segment. Decision tree try to find out a strong relationship between input and target values within the dataset [15]. In tasks classification, decision trees normally visualize that what steps should be taken to reach on classification. Every decision tree starts with a parent node called root node which is considered to be the parent of every other node. Each node in the tree calculates an attribute in the data and decides which path it should follow. Typically the decision test is comparison of a value against some constant. Classification with the help of decision tree is done by traversing from the root node up to a leaf node. Decision trees are able to represent and classify the diverse types of data. The simplest form of data is numerical data which is most familiar too. Organizing nominal data is also required many times in many situations. Nominal quantities are normally represented via discrete set of symbols. For example weather condition can be described in either nominal fashion or numeric. Quantification can be done about temperature by saying that it is eleven degrees Celsius or fifty two degrees Fahrenheit. The cool, mild, cold, warm or hot terminologies can also be sued. The former is a type of numeric data while and the latter is an example of nominal data. More precisely, the example of cool, mild, cold, warm and hot is a special type of nominal data, expressed as ordinal data. Ordinal data usually has an implicit assumption of ordered relationships among the values. In the weather example, purely nominal description like rainy, overcast and sunny can also be added. These values have no relationships or distance measures among each other. Decision Trees are those types of trees where each node is a question, each branch is an answer to a question, and each leaf is a result. Here is an example of Decision tree. Roughly, the idea is based upon the number of stock items; we have to make different decisions. If we dont have much, you buy at any cost. If you have a lot of items then you only buy if it is inexpensive. Now if stock items are less than 10 then buy all if unit price is less than 10 otherwise buy only 10 items. Now if we have 10 to 40 items in the stock then check unit price. If unit price is less than 5 £ then buy only 5 items otherwise no need to buy anything expensive since stock is good already. Now if we have more than 40 items in the stock, then buy 5 if and only if price is less than 2 £ otherwise no need to buy too expensive items. So in this way decision trees help us to make a decision at each level. Here is another example of decision tree, representing the risk factor associated with the rash driving. The root node at the top of the tree structure is showing the feature that is split first for highest discrimination. The internal nodes are showing decision rules on one or more attributes while leaf nodes are class labels. A person having age less than 20 has very high risk while a person having age greater than 30 has a very low risk. A middle category; a person having age greater than 20 but less than 30 depend upon another attribute which is car type. If car type is of sports then there is again high risk involved while if family car is used then there is low risk involved. In the field of sciences engineering and in the applied areas including business intelligence and data mining, many useful features are being introduced as the result of evolution of decision trees. * With the help of transformation in decision trees, the volume of data can be reduced into more compact form that preserves the major characteristic