Multinational Company and Its Organizational Goals Case Study

Multinational Company and Its Organizational Goals - Case Study Example Organization structure should be chosen based on its strategy (Bartol and Martin, 1998, p. 251 - 278). For example, suppose an organization is making or delivering large volumes of only a few products or services in the same geographical area, and these are very similar to each other. All the organization needs to do is coordinate the various departments, then departmentalized or functional structure works best. Departmentalization allows people to specialize in a function, and achieve economies of scale. Suppose the organization is producing or delivering several products or services in the same geographical area, and these products are very dissimilar from each other. Then, it is better to organize along product lines. This is because one product does not have anything to do with the other, there are no economies in the functional structure for this case. On the other hand, giving each product its independent departments lets the product managers serve their customers more efficien tly. Suppose the organization is producing or delivering several products or services to several different customers whose demands are very different. Then it is better to organize along customer lines so that the managers can work towards satisfying each customer according to his or her needs. The same logic goes for organizing on the basis of country or region. If the organization is making products in several places with different tastes and demands, the organization should organize along geographical lines.

WestJet Airlines Ltd. WestJet and Air Canada Term Paper

WestJet Airlines Ltd. WestJet and Air Canada - Term Paper Example It also has a loyalty card and rewards program (WestJet, n.d.). Key Features and Benefits The company renders flight security services with also helping the people book flights, hotels and car rentals from airports online. In terms of special benefits the company renders special privileges for persons relating to special categories and also pertaining to the maternity category (WestJet, n.d.). WestJet in competition to Air Canada has introduced ‘premium economy’ seats to help the consumers enjoy an extra leg space that would be made available in the first four rows of the airlines. Though the booking of the ‘premium economy’ seats would tend to charge more from the consumers yet a comparison drawn reflects that the charge is half than charged by other premium airlines in the course of rendering boarding and on-flight amenities to its passengers. This premium seating model of the company helps WestJet to continue with its low cost position (Hasselt, 2012). We stJet’s Product Life Cycle The Product Life Cycle curve for a company has four stages like Introductory, Growth, Maturity and Decline. WestJet reflects a growth in terms of market revenues and passenger traffic along the periods ranging from 2007 to 2011 from $2127 to $3072 million and from 14,545 to 21,186 million respectively. Thus WestJet falls in the Growth stage (WestJet, 2011, p.6). Products Rendered by WestJet and Consumer Needs WestJet renders online booking of flight, hotel and other hospitality services for both business and corporate passengers along with vacationers. Along with insurance and security benefits the company also renders an extensive reward program catered to meet the needs of loyal consumers (WestJet, 2011, p.10-14). Passengers through the above services can book their flights and hotels associated with the airline company in an online fashion that helps in making their tour more comfortable. Insurance and security benefits help the passengers retrie ve their expenses related to their vacation and tours in cases of any emergency. Further the loyalty scheme of the airlines company helps the consumers avail special discounts and promotions rendered by WestJet during special occasions. WestJet’s Offerings vs. Its Competitors West Jet’s service offerings in comparison to other flight servicing companies operating in the Canadian landscape like Air Canada and American Airlines gain dominance in being able to provide the best quality of service at highly affordable or economic rates. Moreover the company operating on the basis of hub and spoke model reflects higher interconnectivity than its competitors (Grant, et al., n.d.). When, How and by Whom are the services of WestJet Procured Flight touring services and amenities rendered by WestJet are procured by people in times of deciding on vacations and also while planning to take short business tours. Services and amenities rendered by WestJet relating to booking of flight s, hotels, car rental services along with travel insurance benefits can be availed by the consumers through the help of online portals. The consumer or passenger traffic in WestJet consists thus of passengers that are frequent vacationers or are tending to visit places relating to their business and professional needs (WestJet, 2010, p.9; Lamb, 2011, p.571). Market Segments of WestJet WestJet mainly focuses on being a low-cost carrier rendering services to economy class passengers. Moreover the airlines company also caters to the needs of consumer segments through the transportation of cargo commodities on board (Aylen, 2012, p.250). Consumer or market segmentation of WestJet can be made in terms of Leisure Class Passengers that tend to avail flights for tour or vacation

Literature Review On Web Usage Mining Computer Science Essay

Literature Review On Web Usage Mining Computer Science Essay The Internet has become the largest database ever existed. During the early times of this decade it has been estimated that the internet is having more than 350 million pages [11]. But through a research conducted a few years ago it was found that the indexed part of World Wide Web alone consists of a minimum of 11.3 billion pages [12]. Also the number of people using the internet is growing exponentially. A survey conducted by Computer Industry Almanac itself is an evident for this fact. According to the results of the survey the number of online users had crossed one billion in 2005 while it was only 45 million in 1995. They had also predicted the number to cross two billion by 2011[13]. For the users of the internet finding the required information from this large volume of data has become extremely difficult. So it has become essential to find efficient ways for information retrieval. Also it has been found that more than 90% of the data is in unstructured format. So organizing and structuring this data has become a very important issue among researchers. With this large amount of information available on the web business processes needs to transcend from simple document retrieval to knowledge discovery. Business people were trying to get useful patterns from the available data which will help them for better understanding of their customer needs which in turn provides better customer satisfaction. Literature Review on Web Usage Mining Web mining helps the web designers in discovering the knowledge from the information available in the web. Also it helps the users in getting the fast retrieval of the information they are looking for. Three major areas of web mining are Web content mining- Trying to get useful information from the text, images, audio and video in web pages Web structure mining- Trying to understand the link structures of the Web which will help in categorization of Web pages. Web usage mining- Trying to get useful information from the server logs to understand what the users are looking for. It also helps in personalization of web pages. Though all the three categories of web mining are interlinked, in this research we were going to discuss about the web usage mining. Web usage mining helps the web masters to understand what the users were looking for so that they can develop the strategies to help the user to get the required information quickly. Web mining is generally implemented by using the navigational traces of users which give the knowledge about user preferences and behavior. Then the navigational patterns were analyzed and the users were grouped into clusters. The classification of navigational patterns into groups helps to improve the quality of personalized web recommendations. These web page recommendations were used to predict the web pages that are more likely to be accessed by the user in near future. This kind of personalization also helps in reducing the network traffic load and to find the search pattern of a particular group of users. Data mining techniques like, clustering, sequential pattern mining and association rule mining were used in web mining. All these techniques were used to extract interesting and frequent patterns from the information recorded in web server logs. These patterns were used to understand the user needs and help the web designers to improve the web services and personalization of web sites. Web Access Sequence Generally the web usage mining will be done based on the navigation history stored in the logs of the web server. This navigation history is also called as Web Access sequence which will contain the information about the pages that a user visit, the time spent on each page and the path in which the user traverse with in the website. So the web access sequences will contain all the details of the pages that a user visited during a single session. This data that we get from the log files will be subjected to various data mining techniques to get the useful patterns which can describe the user profile or behavior. These patterns will act as the base knowledge for developing the intelligent online applications, to improve the quality of web personalization, web recommendations etc The web mining can be generally classified in to two categories online mining and offline mining. In offline mining we use the data stored in the log files to find the navigational patterns while in online mini ng the requests of users in his current active session will be used. Current user profile will be decided by matching the recommendations from both the online and offline methods. Several systems have been designed to implement the web usage mining. Among many Analog is one of the first systems developed for Web Usage mining. It has two components online component and offline component. The offline component will reformat the data available in the log file. Generally the web server log will contain the information like IP address of the client, the time in which the web page is requested, the URL of the web page, HTTP status code etcà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ Then the data available will be cleaned by removing the unwanted information after which the system will analyze the users activities in the past with the information available in the log files of the web server and classify the users session into clusters. Then the online component will classify the active user sessions based on the model generated by the offline component. Once the user group is found then the system will give a list of suggestions to each user request. The suggestions will depend on the user grou p to which the user belongs. Clustering Techniques One of the important portions of web usage mining is the process of clustering the users in to groups based on their profile and search pattern. The clustering of the users session can be done in several ways. Christos et al. represents each page as a unique symbol which makes the web access sequence to a string [1]. Consider S as the set consisting of all possible web access sequences. Then the web mining system will process this set S in offline as a background process or during the idle time to group the pages in to clusters such that similar sequences were in the same cluster. The formed clusters were represented by means of weighted suffix tree. The clustering is done by constructing a similarity matrix [1] which then is given as input to k windows clustering algorithm [10] to generate the clusters with very similar Web access sequence. When two web access sequences have the same length then the global alignment has to be taken into account rather than the local alignment. Also the scores were calculated for both the local and the global alignment. A simple way to calculate the scores is to assign a positive value to a matching sequence and a negative value for a mismatch. Two web access sequences were said to be similar if they have the maximum alignment in their sequence. Some times the web pages listed in the sequence may be unimportant to the user. The user may have reached that page by a wrong click. In such cases the users will immediately leave that page. So the user will stay only for a short time in these kinds of unimportant pages. So before considering the web sequence alignment we have to take care of all these factors in order to get the useful patterns. C.Suresh et al had proposed an approach in which the clusters were identified based on the distance based clustering methods also they had developed a framework to compare the performance of various clustering methods based on the replicated clustering. In traditional methods, the distance between two user sessions will be calculated using the Euclidean-distance measure. But experiments show that the Sequence Alignment Method is better in representing the behavioral characteristics of web users than the Euclidean-distance method. Cadez et al [14] categorizes the users session as general topics and the behavior of each particular topic is represented by morkov chain. Fu et al. [15] uses Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering using Hierarchies (BIRCH) algorithm for clustering at page level. BIRCH is a distance-based hierarchical algorithm and it is used for clustering the web user sessions. It has been noticed that the increase in the number of pages is diminishing the performance of the BIRCH algorithm. Since each website contains hundreds of pages considering each page as a separate state will make the clustering unmanageable. To overcome this difficulty the authors proposed an approach to generalize the sessions using attribute-oriented induction. In this new approach the clustering of pages will be done at the category level. It is has been always a difficult job to map a particular page to a specific category but it can be done by using clustering algorithms. The commonly used algorithm for clustering is k-means algorithm but the major disadvantage of k-means algorithm is, we have to specify number of clusters to be found in advance which is not possible in real world scenario. To overcome this problem, researchers were using the fuzzy ART neural networks, an unsupervised learning approach. In this approach there is no need to specify the number of cluster in advance. The main issue with fuzzy ART neural network is the category proliferation which leads to the unrestricted growth of clusters. Sometimes the fuzzy ART network will produces a large number of clusters with only a few members in each cluster. After considering the merits and demerits of both the algorithms the authors had proposed a hybrid approach called FAK. The FAK algorithm has two phases in the first phase fuzzy ART is used as an initial seed generator to generate the clusters. From the identified clusters we will remove the cluster whose centroids were nearer to others t hereby addressing the category proliferation problem. The first phase will be followed by applying the k-means algorithm in the second phase to get the final clusters. They found that the FAK algorithm performs much better than the other methods. The most important to be considering during the clustering is the number of user sessions that should be taken into account for clustering. In most cases the designers will decide it is enough to consider the first N sessions of a user for the decent recovery of his web cluster. Also they will decide whether to consider or not the sessions with the short session lengths because those sessions may not be helpful in identifying the clusters. So the two main factors we have to consider while performing the clustering is the number of user sessions to be considered and the minimum session length. Combining the web content mining and web usage mining An experiment was conducted in order to extract the navigational pattern of the websites user [6]. The experiment aims at predicting the users gender and whether they are interested in certain website sections. The results of the experiment were analyzed and it is found that the model was only 56% accurate. The reason for low accuracy is found to be the failure to include the web content in the classification model. It is believed that exploring the content of the page will helps in better understanding of the user profile thereby the classification accuracy will be improved. The web usage mining and web content mining can be combined together and it is used in the area of web personalization. In the web personalization the contents of the web page will differ for each user according to their navigational pattern. In this technique the web links that the user may visit in the near future will be predicted based on their profile. Those predicted links will be dynamically displayed in the webpage that the user requested. Also web links of the frequently visited pages will be highlighted at the same time pages which were not visited for a long time will be removed. This hybrid approach is implemented by doing an initial clustering based on the contents of the web pages followed by the Web Access Sequence alignment. Text clustering can be done effectively by spherical k-means algorithm [10]. Since the multiple sequence alignment consumes more time and space it can be effectively replaced by the iterative progressive alignment. Weighted suffix tree is used to find the most frequent and important navigational pattern with little memory and computational costs. It has been proved that the content exploitation has improved the performance by 2-3%. In the model proposed by Liu [7] the contents of the web pages and the information from the web server log files is used together in order to extract the meaningful patterns. The extracted contents of the web page represented by means of character N-grams. The users of the web site can be classified by two approaches namely proactive and reactive approach. The proactive approach tries to map each request to a user before or during the users interaction with the site. While the reactive approach maps each request to a user after the user completes the interaction with the site. In order to use the proactive approach the browser cookies needs to be enabled and it is necessary that the user must be aware of cookies. So it is always easy to use reactive approach which does not require the user to have any prior knowledge. An experiment has been conducted with 1500 sample sessions to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the system is 70% accurate in classification and 65% i n prediction. The success of the website also depends on the user perceived latency of documents hosted in web server. It is obvious that short User Perceived Latency will have a positive effect towards the user satisfaction. This has been also proved by a study conducted by Zona Research Inc. in 1999. The study shows that if a web site takes more than eight seconds to download then a 30% of the visitors is more likely to leave the site [35]. User perceived latency is influenced by many factors like fast internet connection, increasing the bandwidth of ISP, etc One way to reduce the UPL is by using the browser cache. In this approach frequently accessed will be pre-fetched and stored in browser cache. Generally Web cache is implemented by using the proxy server. All the requests from the user to a web server will be interpreted by the proxy servers. If the proxy server has a valid copy of the response then it will give the results to the users. Otherwise the requested will be forwarded to the original server. The real server will send the response to the proxy server. The proxy server will retain a copy of the response in the cache and then send the results to the users. The main Problem with the web cache is if the cache is not up to date then the users will be provided with stale data. Also if a large amount of users access a web server simultaneously then it may results in severe caching problems which may results in the unavailability of the web pages. To overcome all these issues author suggested an approach which combines the web prefetching and caching together. In this approach we have to first identify the objects that needs to be pre-fetched in a web cache environment fr om the information available in the log files. After identifying the objects we have to group these objects into clusters for each client group. When a user requests for an object first he will be assigned to one of the client group then the proxy server will fetches all the cluster objects of that particular client group. Finally the requested object will be delivered to the user. To have a minimal UPL we have to predict the users preferences based on the pages he had already visited. The importance of the page is determined by the weights assigned to the page by the algorithm. If two or more pages have the same weight then we rely on the page rank. Page Rank [22] is A probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. Page rank can be assigned to the document of all sizes. If a document is having a page rank of 0.5 then it means that if a user clicks on a link randomly then there is 50% probability for the link to land on the particular document. Consider a web site consisting of four pages P1, P2, P3, and P4. Initially the page rank of all the pages will be same. Since there are four pages each page will be assigned with a page rank of 0.25. If all the pages P2, P3 and P4 posses link to only P1 then each of the three pages will contribute 0.25 page rank to P1. The page rank of P1 can be calculated by using the following formula. PR (u1) = PR (u2) + PR (u3) + PR (u4) If suppose page P2 is having another one link to page P3 and if P4 is having links to all the three pages then the link-vote value will be divided among all the outbound links of a page. So Page P2 will contribute 0.125 to page P1 and 0.125 to page P3. Similarly P4 will contribute one third of its page rank value to P1. The general formula for calculating the page rank value for any page is as follows. PR (u) =à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ PR (v) Bp is the set of all pages linking to page P L (v) is number of links from page v Web Page recommendation is an important section in web personalization. Weighted Association rule mining is used to predict the page recommendations. In this method we assign a weight to each web page. The importance of the page is determined by the weight assigned to the page. In this approach the weight for each page is assigned based on the frequency in which the page is visited by the user and the time spent by the user on a particular page. The frequency weight of a page FW is calculated using the following formula FW (p) =Number of visits on a page (P) Total number of visits on all pages X PR (P) Where PR is the page rank of p. Time spent on each page reflects the relative importance of each page for a user. Bcause the user will spend more time on the page he is interested in and he will quickly traverse the other unwanted pages. The two factors that we have to consider while calculating the actual time spent on a page is as follows. The size of the web page and the transfer rate, the assumption is that the transfer rate is constant for a user then the time spent on a page will be inversely proportional to the amount of useful information available to the user from that page. The weight of a page can be calculated using the following formula TW (P) =Time spent on a page (p)/page size of (p) Max pÆ P Time spent on a page (p)/page size of (p) Based on these two values the total page weight is calculated as follows W (p) =FW (p) +TW (p) According to the page rank algorithm, the link to important page will appear as an outbound link in many pages. Web prefetching reduces the latency. In prefetching the networks idle time is utilized to fetch the anticipated web pages. In [7] Chen et al. proved that the cache hit ratio had enhanced to 30-75% through pre-fetching. Also the access latency can be reduced by 60% when we combine the caching and pre-fetching techniques [8]. Pre-fetching takes place only if the network bandwidth is less than the predetermined threshold also only the web pages that are not available in the cache will be pre-fetched. Pre-fetching increases the network traffic but at the same time it helps in reducing the latency. Several approaches were available for web pre-fetching like Top-10 approach, Domain-top approach, etc In top-10 approach web proxies will be periodically updated by the web servers regarding the most popular document information. The proxies will then send this update information to the clients [9]. In domain-top approach the web proxies will first search for the popular domains and then it looks for the important documents in each domain. A suggestion list will be prepared for the user with the knowledge of the proxy server about the popularity of domains and documents and this list will be used for users future requests. In this dynamic web pre-fetching technique user preference list will be maintained for each user which will contain the list of web sites which will be available for immediate access to the user. This user preference list will be stored in the database of the proxy server. Dynamic web pre-fetching technique uses the intelligent agents to monitor the network traffic. When ever the network traffic is low then the system increase the pre-fetching similarly in a heavy traffic it will reduce the pre-fetching thereby helps in utilizing the idle time of the network also maintains the traffic constant. The number of web links to be pre-fetched depends on the usage of bandwidth and weights of the web pages. While assigning the weights to the web pages preferences will be given to the links which are accessed frequently and recently. By using this technique the cache hit ratio has been increased by 40-75% and latency is reduced to 20-63%. The log file modeling is the important task in web usage mining. If we use an accurate model for modeling the web log file then the accuracy of web page prediction scheme will also increase. The most commonly used model is Markov model. In markov model each page represents the state and the visited sequence of a pair of page represents the transition between two pages. The accuracy of the traditional first order markov model is less because of the lack of in-depth analysis. In contrast the second order markov model is more accurate but the time complexity of the model is high. In [11] they had proposed a hybrid approach called dynamic nested markov model in which the second order markov model is nested with in the first order markov model. In the dynamic markov model the insertion and removal of nodes is much easier. The node will contain all the information about the web pages like the web page name, inlink list which is a list that contains the name of the previous web page, count of the web page which will represents the number of times the current web page is reached from the previous web page and the outlink list contains the list of nodes which contains the name of the next web page and its count. In this model the number of nodes will be always same as the number of web pages. Since we have replaced the transition matrix structure in the traditional markov model with the dynamic linked list the time complexity of the proposed model is less than the traditional model. Also the model covers The experiment conducted with the web site that serves 1200 users and receives a minimum of 10,000 requests per day. The experimental data is split into three sets DS1 which contains 3000 pages, DS2 with 1000 pages and DS3 with 1500 pages. It has been shown that DS1 has taken 537 ms and DS2 has taken 62 ms and DS3 has taken 171 ms. So it is evident that time taken for DNMM generation is directly proportional to the number of web pages and the size of the log file. The latency can also be reduced by client side pre-fetching. A prefetching model proposed by Jaing [3] is based on the users search pattern and the access rate of all the links in a web page. Each link will have a counter which will be incremented whenever it is clicked by a user. The access rate is the ratio of the links counter value to the counter value of that particular page. The pre-fetcher will fetch the web pages whose access rate is high. The main advantage of this model is that this model can be executed independently in clients machine. But the disadvantage of this model is that it will increase the processing overhead of the clients computer. Initially the web pages will contain one HTML document it may include some images. But in recent days several HTML documents were embedded in to a single web page. In such cases the browser displays the embedded documents along with the requested documents. These embedded documents decrease the prediction accuracy of the system. Also if the user requests a page by typing the URL in the browser navigation bar then these requested will not be taken in to account by any link analysis method. To overcome these drawbacks kim has proposed a prefetching algorithm. In this algorithm the request patterns were represented by means of a link graph. The nodes of the graph represent the unique URL of the HTML documents and the edges represent the hyperlink or an embedded link and it is directed from the referring document to the referred document. When a user requests a webpage then the access counter value of the node corresponding to that particular web page or document will be incremented by o ne. Also when a user traverses from one page to another page then the access counter value of the corresponding edge will be incremented by one. It has been assumed that the user is browsing a page that is displayed on the browser if the user does not make another request within a minimum interval of time. By this time the prefetching module will be executed and the prefetched documents will be stored in the cache. Agarwal, R. (2010). An Architectural Framework for Web Information Retrieval based on Users Navigational Pattern. Time, 195-200. Dimopoulos, C., Makris, C., Panagis, Y., Theodoridis, E., Tsakalidis, A. (2010). A web page usage prediction scheme using sequence indexing and clustering techniques. Data Knowledge Engineering, 69(4), 371-382. Elsevier B.V. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2009.04.010. Georgakis, a, Li, H. (2006). User behavior modeling and content based speculative web page prefetching. Data Knowledge Engineering, 59(3), 770-788. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2005.11.005. Jalali, M., Mustapha, N., Mamat, A., Sulaiman, N. B. (2008). A new classification model for online predicting users future movements. Architecture, 0-6. Kim, Y., Kim, J. (2003). Web Prefetching Using Display-Based Prediction. Science And Technology, 0-3. Liu, H., Keselj, V. (2007). Combined mining of Web server logs and web contents for classifying user navigation patterns and predicting users future requests. Data Knowledge Engineering, 61(2), 304-330. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2006.06.001. Nair, A. S. (2007). Dynamic Web Pre-fetching Technique for Latency Reduction. Science, 202-206. doi: 10.1109/ICCIMA.2007.303. Nigam, B., Jain, S. (2010). Generating a New Model for Predicting the Next Accessed Web Page in Web Usage Mining. 2010 3rd International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering and Technology, 485-490. Ieee. doi: 10.1109/ICETET.2010.56. Pallis, G., Vakali, a, Pokorny, J. (2008). A clustering-based prefetching scheme on a Web cache environment. Computers Electrical Engineering, 34(4), 309-323. doi: 10.1016/j.compeleceng.2007.04.002. Park, S., Suresh, N., Jeong, B. (2008). Sequence-based clustering for Web usage mining: A new experimental framework and ANN-enhanced K-means algorithm. Data Knowledge Engineering, 65(3), 512-543. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2008.01.002. S. Chakrabarti, M. van der Berg, B. Dom, Focused crawling: a new approach to topic-specific web resource discovery, in: Proceedings of 8th Int. WorldWide Web Conf. (WWW8), 1999. A. Gulli, A. Signorini, The indexable web is more than 11.5 billion pages, in: Special interest Tracks and Posters of the 14th International Conference onWorld Wide Web, Chiba, Japan, 2005. A. Banerjee, J. Ghosh, Clickstream clustering using weighted longest common subsequences, in: Proc. of the Web Mining Workshop at the 1st SIAM Conference on Data Mining, 2001 I. Cadez, D. Heckerman, C. Meek, P. Smyth, S. White, Visualization of navigation patterns on a Web site using model-based clustering, in: Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2001), Boston, MA, 2000, pp. 280-284. Y. Fu, K. Sandhu, M.-Y. Shih, A generalization-based approach to clustering of Web usage sessions, in: B. Masand, M. Spiliopoulou (Eds.), Web Usage Analysis and User Profiling: International WEBKDD99 Workshop, San Diego, CA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1836, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2000, pp. 21-38.

AIDS in Africa :: HIV AIDS essays research papers

The AIDS epidemic has reached disastrous proportions on the continent of Africa. Over the past two decades, two thirds of the more than 16 million people in the world infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, live in sub-Saharan Africa. It is now home to the largest number of people infected, with 70 percent of the world’s HIV infected population. The problem of this ongoing human tragedy is that Africa is also the least equipped region in the world to cope with all the challenges posed by the HIV virus. In order understand the social and economic consequences of the disease, it is important to study the relationship between poverty, the global response, and the effectiveness of AIDS prevention, both government and grass roots. Half of the world’s cases are found in what is referred to as the AIDS belt, a chain of countries in eastern and southern Africa that is home to two percent of the global population. The main vehicle for spreading HIV throughout Africa is heterosexual intercourse. In contrast, this is the opposite compared to the U.S. where the virus is usually transmitted through homosexual intercourse or contaminated syringes shared by drug users. Besides heterosexual intercourse, HIV transmission through transfusion and contaminated medical equipment is common in sub-Saharan Africa. Africans infected with HIV die much sooner after diagnosis than HIV infected people in other parts of the world. In industrialized countries, the survival time after diagnosis of AIDS ranges from 9 to 26 months, but in Africa the survival time for patients is 5 to 9 months (UNAIDS 3). Factors, such as lower access to health care, poorer quality of health care services, poorer levels of average health and nutriti on, and greater exposure to pathogens that cause infection all contribute to the shorter survival in Africa. It is difficult to stop the flood of AIDS cases in Africa because it is not yet known by researchers the factors that contribute to outstanding prevalence of the disease among heterosexuals. This diagnosis will help determine how likely it is that heterosexual epidemics will spread to Asia or the West. Even though AIDS is heavily researched, its origin still remains a partial mystery. It is know that HIV is a zoonosis, a human disease acquired from animals. The virus evolved from a Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV): a type of slow virus found naturally in monkeys and apes which, while not harming the host, produces diseases in other primates (Caldwell 97).

Enhancement (Philosophy) Essay

Cognitive enhancement is the improvement of one’s mental capacity and or mental attributes such as personality, where it is considered optional and not medically necessary (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). Enhancement is different to treatment as treatment is linked to the curing of an illness, whereas enhancement is merely improving an already medically healthy body or mind, however, at times it is quite difficult to draw a line between the two (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). Types of enhancements include improving one’s athletic abilities through the use of steroids, undergoing cosmetic surgery which is deemed medically unnecessary, or, reducing one’s need to sleep through the consumption of drugs such as Provigil. Enhancements can even encompass things that are commonly availed of every day, such as the consumption of caffeine (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). There are many ethical and practical concerns in relation to cognitive enhancement and whether or not it should be allowed such as Authenticity (Keeping true to oneself), which is a key concern , with both proponents and opponents of cognitive enhancement interpreting authenticity in different ways (Parens, 2005). Two ethical frameworks have developed which try to answer the questions raised by cognitive enhancement and indeed enhancement in general, these frameworks are known as the existentialist model (Self creation) and the Rousseauean model (Gratitude) (Parens, 2005). These frameworks differ on whether or not cognitive enhancement should be allowed, the existentialist model being in favour of cognitive enhancement and the Rousseauean model opposed to the application of it (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). Along with authenticity there are other major ethical concerns that could arise from the widespread use of cognitive enhancing methods, namely drugs (Butcher, 2003). Such concerns include a possible increase in the gap between rich and poor and the possibility of the loss of values, namely the value of hard work, which helps make a human being what they are (Butcher, 2003). Philosophers and indeed people in general who favour the existentialist model value autonomy greatly and therefore believe that so long as a human being does not harm another, they should be free to do with their body or mind what they please. If these things may be quite ridiculous and inadvisable, existentialist still believe that they should be condoned, so long as the person in question is well informed on the issue (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). There is also a view that Humans not only have the ability but may also have the responsibility to enhance their condition, not only through normal everyday enhancements but also through artificial means, which are not seen as qualitatively different (within existentialist circles) to everyday enhancements (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). There are, however, some problems with this framework. For instance, in many cases the individual who is given a cognitive enhancement, is not always fully autonomous (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). This is the case in many poor urban areas in the United States, in many schools in these areas up to a third of boys now take Ritalin, even though a large portion of them do not suffer from ADHD (Farah et al. 2004). Using enhancements to simply subdue easily distracted and unruly children could be seen as ethically wrong, this is because a large percentage of children simply are naturally unruly and easily distracted (Farah et al. 2004). To change this, could be seen as changing the personality of the child in question to such an extent that they are essentially no longer the same child, here we see the question of authenticity rise again (Parens, 2005). It is in situations such as these that we see a clear divide between the two frameworks. Most proponents of framework one (self-creation) would be in favour of this sort of cognitive enhancement as they would view the child as essentially the same person, only improved, while the opponents of this framework hold a different belief (Parens, 2005). Proponents of framework two, or the Rousseauean model, place huge importance in the value of â€Å"the given† (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). In other words, they believe we should not tamper past our natural potential. This however gives rise to problematic questions, such as, where can we draw the line between natural and artificial enhancements? (Schmidt-Felzmann, 2012). Framework two argues that cognitive enhancement ignores fundamental facts about the human mind and its limits, it asserts that these limits should be respected. These beliefs could also be seen as a breach of authenticity. When we think of the effects that cognitive enhancement could have on human authenticity we think of the effects it might have on the identity of an individual. While this is important, it is also important to look at the human race as a whole and how cognitive enhancement and enhancement in general might affect its authenticity. From the Stone Age right up to the current social age, humans have constantly strove to improve themselves and their quality of life. In recognition of this, it could be argued that to not enhance our current state of being would be in violation of our nature and of our identity as human beings. When this view is taken it becomes clear that the Rousseauean model can also lead to a breach in authenticity, this, along with other reasons is perhaps why a large portion of philosophers show a certain level of ambivalence towards the two frameworks when it comes to major ethical matters (Parens, 2005). Enhancement, cognitive enhancement in particular, raises many ethical concerns. As already discussed, authenticity is a prime concern, however there are also other important matters which need to be considered before any decision is made on whether or not cognitive enhancement should be allowed. For instance, the introduction of cognitive enhancing drugs could lead to a widening in the gap between rich and poor (Butcher, 2003). This would be that case as such drugs would likely be out of reach (financially) to the lower classes of society. In the long term further problems would arise, as the poor would likely have little or no access to these cognitive enhancing drugs, the upper class would essentially develop into generally more intelligent beings. This would make it far harder for a member of the lower class to compete for college places or jobs (Butcher, 2003). It has been argued, however, that the risk of a widening of the gap between the wealthy and the poor should not be a factor to stand against the introduction of cognitive enhancers as enhancers such as third level education already do this (Butcher, 2003). Another ethical issue is the possibility of the loss of the value of hard work (Butcher, 2003). While this may not seem like such a pressing issue, one must first fully consider the implications this may have in the long term. Humans may use there increased level of intelligence irresponsibly due to a lack of experience gained from having to work hard to overcome obstacles. Along with these issues the safety of such drugs is also an important matter (Farah et al. 2004). It is clear from these observations that the possibility of distribution of cognitive enhancers amongst the public is a very contentious issue, which makes the question â€Å"Should cognitive enhancement be allowed? † a very difficult one to answer. In my opinion, cognitive enhancement should be allowed, although only under certain conditions. The production of such enhancers should be undertaken only by the government so as to ensure the fair and equal distribution of cognitive enhancers amongst all social classes. Drugs should be extensively tested before mainstream introduction in order to assure the safety of the product. These measures may, however, not be enough. Governments would have the means to manipulate the public by introducing other properties to cognitive enhancing drugs, For instance they could use certain ingredients to create a more patriotic and docile population this would be a prime concern in politically unstable countries or in those of communist leanings. Should the entire population of a country regularly take a drug, which was deemed essential to take, untold damage could be done to the human condition. A world without free will could develop, with the world population under the control of one drug, and those who produced it. Perhaps the cognition of the human race is not yet evolved enough to consider its enhancement. Bibliography: Parens, Erik. (2005) â€Å"Authenticity and Ambivalence: Toward Understanding the Enhancement debate† Hastings Center Report, Vol. 35, Number 3, May-June, pp. 34-41. Schmidt-Felzmann, Heike. (2010) â€Å"Personal Identity and Human Nature: The Enhancement Debate, Heike Schmidt-Felzmann 12/10/12. † Philosophical questions & issues. [online. ] Available at: https://nuigalway. blackboard. com/webapps/portal/frameset. jsp? tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_31108_1%26url%3D%252Fwebapps%252Fblackboard%252Fexecute%252FdisplayIndividualContent%253Fmode%253Dview%2526content_id%253D_419734_1%2526course_id%253D_31108_1 (Accessed: 03/12/12.) Butcher, James. (2003) â€Å"Cognitive enhancement raises ethical concerns† The Lancet, Vol 362 (9378) p. p 132–133. Farah, Martha J. Illes, Judy. Cook-Deegan, Robert. Gardner, Howard. Kandel, Eric. King, Patricia. Parens, Eric. Sahakian, Barbara & Root Wolpe, Paul. (2004) â€Å"Neurocognitive enhancement: what can we do and what should we do? † Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol: 5. P. p 421-425.

Exploiting the Network: Synergy, Product Placement

The media industries have a suggestive and coercive power on society, embodied within the artifacts, images, and brands we consume. As these industries diversify, so do the products and the avenues in which they are offered. Synergy allows corporations the power to maximize advertising through a variety of cross-market promotional mechanisms, proliferating their products or logos exponentially. Initially, this essay requires an explanation of the use of synergy and cross-market advertising. Subsequently, I will illustrate how television shows such as Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV’s The Osbournes and Total Live Request (TRL), use the vast internal synergistic network of their parent company Viacom. Such programming appears to exploit its viewer-ship through commodification – product placement, branding, and celebrity endorsements. Synergy: The True Meaning of Cross-Market Advertising â€Å"We are reaching a position where the challenge for the 1990s should be to seek a greater understanding of the best ways, creatively, to exploit the potential for media synergy†(Confer, 10) The concept of synergy is not new, however evidence suggests it has only been fully realized and exploited over the last decade. Synergy is created through the integration or combination of different but complimentary business interests, each feeding off the other. Ultimately, large corporations or conglomerates are diversifying their market interests rather than specializing. This diversification benefits the company by offering a new strata of opportunities thereby complimenting its existing functionality. An example of this is a movie production company allying or buying out a major video game provider. The synergy created from such a merger allows for a film and a video game to use the same characters, story line or premise. Synergy works for two reasons. Primarily, synergy is an engine that provides cross-marketing and cross-selling opportunities, which would allow for greater sales, exceeding what would be possible from each division separately. (Hesmondhalgh, 141). Secondly, corporations also â€Å"plan and design texts, in order to encourage subsidiary spin-off texts† (Hesmondhalgh, 239). Even if these texts or preplanned products are not of great quality or a commercial success, they will still sell thus generating profit. This is because there is a pre-existing, underlying product network that has already been established through the fan base. If synergy can be classified as the â€Å"the ability to keep cash flows inside a corporate family† (Klein, 148), through its internal use of cross-market production, promotion, and sales; Sumner Redstone’s Viacom is a perfect example of synergy at work. The Viacom Empire has tapped into many markets throughout the entertainment and media industry. Viacom’s major subsidiaries include: Nickelodeon – children’s cartoon network; MTV – music network; NBC – television network; and Paramount – movie production company, which also runs numerous theme parks all over North America. Klein, 2000, comments on this phenomenon as â€Å"synergy nirvana† (160). According to Klein, ‘synergy nirvana’ is attained when a conglomerate works internally to â€Å"successfully†¦churn out related versions of the same product, like molded Play-Doh, into different shapes: toys, books, theme parks, magazines, television specials, movies, candies, CDs, CD-ROMs, superstores, comics, and mega-musicals† (161). Basically, ‘synergy nirvana’ is the proliferation of standardized products in different packaging, through a preexisting framework of cross-market advertising; which is done on a vast scale through the exploitation of many different mediums and industries in the name of profit. ‘Synergy’ is Viacom’s number one marketing tool for it allows them to link the vastness of their empire together, into a culmination, dissemination and consumption of products, images, ideals, and brands. Furthermore, ‘synergy’ in programming, such as SpongeBob SquarePants and The Osbournes, has evident implications for the viewer-ship. SpongeBob SquarePants: The Future of Product Placement â€Å"Nickelodeon has more children between the ages of two to eleven watching than the four major networks combined†¦ This is significant in the competition for the children’s advertising market, which averages about $500 million a year† (Roman, 223). SpongeBob SquarePants is a lovable, animated sea sponge that manages to find himself in undersea trouble during every episode. The â€Å"cartoon† (Mittell, 18) runs every â€Å"Saturday morning† (Mittell, 18) on Nickelodeon and is syndicated to most major television networks due to its incredible popularity among children viewers. What started out in 1999, as a comical concept for a children’s television program, has grown seemingly overnight into a ‘juggernaut’. Nickelodeon cannot only boast that it is â€Å"the number one rated program among children 2-11†, but according to Nielson ratings, â€Å"53. 7 million viewers tune into the show each month†¦including 22. 1 million kids 2-11, [and] 12. 7 million between 9-14† (Olson, blogcritics. rg). With such commercial success and an immense viewer ship, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants uses synergistic principals of massive product placement to have free rein and ‘seep into every pore’ of consumer culture. SpongeBob employs Viacom’s cross platform synergies to network and gain access to most children’s homes. The motivation is a given when children between the ages of 2 – 11 are not only watching between 24 – 28 hours of television a week (Roman, 74), but are â€Å"responsible for either spending or influencing the spending of $100 billion annually† (Roman, 74). This is clearly an influential and lucrative market. SpongeBob SquarePants should be the archetype for synergistic corporate product placement. With SpongeBob’s insurgence into popular culture, there have been similar synergistic trends of product placement. Support for this notion is found through looking back to 2004, days before the premier of the SpongeBob SquarePants movie in New York. Paramount, another Viacom subsidiary, launched a brand new SpongeBob SquarePants amusement park theme ride to coincide with the movie launch. Additionally, Burger King (also owned by Viacom), released a SpongeBob SquarePants value meal that comes with SpongeBob SquarePants plastic figurines from the movie – ‘collect all 42. ’ Nickelodeon, the Viacom subsidiary that operates SpongeBob must not be ignored. Nickelodeon aired a 24-hour SpongeBob SquarePants Marathon that hyped up kids for the movie and forced unsuspecting parents to shell out $12 a ticket. Furthermore, during the Marathon’s commercial breaks, SpongeBob advised the viewers to eat SpongeBob value meals, collect all 67 figurines, and go to Paramount Theme Parks to try his new ride. SpongeBob has saturated the market with his yellow sponginess, which must be overpowering to any parent; he can be found everywhere, in every nuance of daily life. Since the movie, product placements and cross-promotional marketing have skyrocketed. SpongeBob now has a line of clothing, DVD box sets, bed linens, and bowling balls with a real tenpin set. Of course a 5 year old needs a bowling ball and set of bowling pins with SpongeBob SquarePants on them – SpongeBob said so! MTV: Branding a Nation â€Å"MTV is associated with the forces of freedom and democracy around the world. When the Berlin Wall came down, there were East German guards holding MTV umbrellas† – Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom MTV is known for hosting different music video programs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In 1998, MTV was watched in â€Å"273. 5 million household worldwide† (Klein, 120), where it was reported, â€Å"85% of them watched everyday† (Klein, 120). The station offers a host television shows, including TRL and The Osbournes, that entrance its youthful audience through flashy music videos and the celebrities portrayed. MTV’s popularity, since its inception in the early 1980s, is as a self-perpetuating â€Å"fully branded media integration† (Klein, 44). Klein, 2000, writes: From the beginning, MTV has not been just a marketing machine for products it advertises around the clock; it has also been a twenty-four-hour advertisement for MTV itself†¦[where] viewers didn’t watch individual shows, they simply watched MTV†¦Advertisers didn’t want to just advertise on MTV, they wanted to co-brand with the station (44). Today, advertiser branding can be seen throughout MTV. As MTV endeavors to diversify in a changing market place, video shows like TRL are coupled with reality-based television shows intimately linked to ‘celerity’ including The Anna Nichol Smith Show or The Osbournes’. Beyond these shows lack of merit, their entire function is product branding and celebrity endorsements. Even though The Osbournes’ are a revival to the â€Å"original early 1950s format of the American sitcom† (Gillan, 55), I cannot fathom that product branding, product placement, and celebrity endorsements were as prevalent on national television in the 1950s as they are in modern programming. Within the first ten minutes of the show, the audience can blatantly see a mansion full of expensive electronics, furniture, and cars – at a closer look, the brand names facing the camera and are a part of the Viacom conglomerate in a myriad of ways. All The Osbournes offer the predominately teen audience (other than a few less brain cells) is copious amounts of product branding though celebrity endorsement. Product branding on MTV is a big issue. Much like the red carpet on Oscar night, where the predominant question on everyone’s lips is ‘who are you wearing? ’ MTV offers its audience the same intellectual stimulation, especially when all that its audience sees are ‘hella-cool’ rock stars and all the ‘bling’ they wear throughout their music videos, interviews, and award ceremonies. No wonder the Y generation is all about over consumption and bad taste. As we have entered the 21st Century, multi-media conglomerates have risen to great power in our society. They offer the consumer the media and entertainment that they desire. However through internal synergistic networks, these companies, such as Viacom, can link the lucrative children’s market or the 24-hour advertising nature of MTV, to all other aspects of their company. As consumers, we neglect what these companies are telling us to do – to consume – in order to watch our favourite programs. We refuse to witness how the realities of consumerism, and sickening nature that these corporations control the very artifacts and images that we relate to and enjoy for their own personal profit.

Free Essays on By Our Deaf Students Well Be Taught

Hearing people have a lot to offer to the deaf when it comes to language, such as the teaching of sign language, proper English, ways to communicate effectively, and much more. What they don’t realize is that deaf people can indeed return the favor. For instance, one could say that the majority of deaf people acquitted their knowledge of sign language from a hearing teacher. There are times where, after being taught, deaf people would give their teachers little cues that allow them to communicate with them more effectively. Helen E. Meador, in her article, tells of several encounters with deaf students. In one of her many experiences, she explains how she learned to sign what she means in order ensure that her students understood what she meant, not what she signed. In one of her classes, for example, she was reading them a book and upon completion, asked them to close their books and to her amazement, they didn’t. When inquiring why they didn’t do as told, one of her students told her that she didn’t say it like she meant it, since her eyebrows weren’t raised. This clearly showed that the deaf not only relied on signs to communicate, but also facial expression. After this incident she learned to use more facial expression to ensure that her students understood what she meant while she communicates with them. In another encounter, Meador learned to be creative with her signing. In one of her reading classes, after completing a short story, she asked the class their opinion of the story. One student replied, â€Å"2-4-8†. Puzzled, Meador asked the student what she meant and the student told her that it simply meant, â€Å"very interesting†. That day, Meador learned to use sign language at a different level. One of the many things Meador learned from the deaf was language tolerance. In one situation a deaf student taught her the visual mode of communication. She tells of a teacher who experienced a communicat... Free Essays on By Our Deaf Students We'll Be Taught Free Essays on By Our Deaf Students We'll Be Taught Hearing people have a lot to offer to the deaf when it comes to language, such as the teaching of sign language, proper English, ways to communicate effectively, and much more. What they don’t realize is that deaf people can indeed return the favor. For instance, one could say that the majority of deaf people acquitted their knowledge of sign language from a hearing teacher. There are times where, after being taught, deaf people would give their teachers little cues that allow them to communicate with them more effectively. Helen E. Meador, in her article, tells of several encounters with deaf students. In one of her many experiences, she explains how she learned to sign what she means in order ensure that her students understood what she meant, not what she signed. In one of her classes, for example, she was reading them a book and upon completion, asked them to close their books and to her amazement, they didn’t. When inquiring why they didn’t do as told, one of her students told her that she didn’t say it like she meant it, since her eyebrows weren’t raised. This clearly showed that the deaf not only relied on signs to communicate, but also facial expression. After this incident she learned to use more facial expression to ensure that her students understood what she meant while she communicates with them. In another encounter, Meador learned to be creative with her signing. In one of her reading classes, after completing a short story, she asked the class their opinion of the story. One student replied, â€Å"2-4-8†. Puzzled, Meador asked the student what she meant and the student told her that it simply meant, â€Å"very interesting†. That day, Meador learned to use sign language at a different level. One of the many things Meador learned from the deaf was language tolerance. In one situation a deaf student taught her the visual mode of communication. She tells of a teacher who experienced a communicat...

How to ask for a letter of recommendation

How to ask for a letter of recommendation At every professional stage in life (job searching, job switching, promotion seeking), there will come a time when you need to ask someone to write you a letter of recommendation. Though not as common as they once were, many would-be employers still want to know that someone vouches for you. If the thought of asking someone to say nice things about you makes you nervous, don’t worry- it’s awkward for everyone. Here are a few tips on how to make the asking as easy as possible for everyone involved.Ask someone who really likes you.This seems like a given, but it’s worth stressing: only ask people you are certain will say wonderful, glowing things about you. Just because you worked for someone and did the bare minimum doesn’t mean he or she thinks fondly of you. If you were forgettable, you’re going to get a bland and generic letter.Remember, this doesn’t always have to be a former (or current) boss. A colleague at your level is fine; so is some one you’ve worked with on volunteer projects outside of work. The key is that he or she can vouch for the exact skills the person receiving the letter wants in an employee.Offer to clarify.The more information you give, the easier it is for someone to knock out a letter. After you receive a â€Å"yes,† get specific. After saying thank you (always say thank you), describe in detail the specific job you’re applying for and what talking points would be most useful. You can give a list of skills the hiring manager wants in an applicant and remind the person you’re asking about how you have exhibited those skills in the past. It can also be helpful to outline some of your recent and past achievements for them to reference without having to look them up or ask.Be prepared to draft it yourself.A lot of times busier people will ask you to sketch out (or write entirely) the letter by yourself. Always say yes. Take the list of achievements this person knows youâ₠¬â„¢ve accomplished, match them up with the list of requirements from the job posting, and go to town. In most cases, he or she will  look it over, make a few cosmetic changes, and then sign it. You’ve made everyone’s life easier!Respect people’s time.Waiting until the last minute and then saying, â€Å"Please get this to me tomorrow,† is rude and inconsiderate. Your letter of recommendation is not among the most important things in someone’s life, and no one should have to drop everything just because you were too lazy to ask in advance. Give someone at least a week (and ideally two or three) to get you a letter.Just ask.Popping the question can be hard, but you won’t get a letter if you don’t ask for it. Yes, you might feel uncomfortable asking someone to do a favor for you, but if you’re smart about who you ask and pick someone who only has glowing things to say, chances are he or she will be more than happy to do it. Give the key details, throw in a little flattery, and ask away.

Should You Ever Apply to a College Before Visiting?

Visiting a college can tell you a lot about the school’s culture and whether you’ll fit in there. Many students visit every school on their preliminary list, but for some students, doing so may be difficult and costly. So, can you—and should you—ever apply to colleges before visiting? The biggest reason why a student might choose to wait to visit a college until after being admitted is the cost. Visits can be very expensive, especially when your list is long and contains many out-of-state colleges. You could also be wasting time on the wrong schools . This is, of course, why you should make sure to research each school before you visit. If you visit after being admitted, you know that you have the option of attending that school. If you perform thorough research, you can probably gather together enough information through means other than visiting. Make sure to talk to plenty of current or former students, look online, peruse forum, and research through other vehicles. Learn how to research schools in Can’t Do a College Visit? Here’s How to Review Colleges Online . Also, keep in mind that your college list will be shorter—and therefore less expensive and time-consuming to tackle—after you’ve been admitted. This means you can truly make the most of each experience by talking to professors, sitting in on classes, and experience the college firsthand . You’ll likely have a more meaningful experience after you’ve been accepted as well. Often, colleges offer experiences such as overnight visits to admitted students, but not all prospective students. Estimating your chance of getting into a college is not easy in today’s competitive environment. Thankfully, with our state-of-the-art software and data, we can analyze your academic and extracurricular profile and estimate your chances. Our profile analysis tool can also help you identify the improvement you need to make to enter your dream school. On the other hand, it can be hard to gauge your fit with a college and determine whether you can truly see yourself at a school without seeing firsthand. If you wait to visit, you might end up applying to schools that aren’t a good fit. Furthermore, colleges want to see you demonstrate interest . You need to show that there’s a high likelihood that you’ll attend the college if admitted. This is important for yield, the ratio of students who attend to all those admitted. If you can’t visit, you’ll need to demonstrate interest in other ways, such as attending college fairs and talking to admissions representatives. You also won’t be able to get a sense of the surroundings of the college in question. In addition to the layout of the campus , a college visit should take into account the surrounding town, conversations with students and professors, and other aspects aside of the school aside from campus tours and orientations. Finally, it might be overwhelming to leave all your visits until after acceptance. Visiting earlier allows you to spread out your visits over months and even years and enables you to narrow down your list earlier. If you wait, you’ll need to pack in several visits in a short span of time. There are some other factors to take into account when deciding when to visit colleges including: Fly-in programs allow a small number  of diverse, high-achieving students to visit campuses. Colleges pay for their expenses, including airfare, room, and board. Some schools , such as Columbia University, enable qualified students to do so before they’re even admitted. If you don’t visit before applying, make sure you visit each school thoroughly. Some research vehicles include eCampus Tours , which allow you to explore colleges virtually, and the College Board’s Big Future , which helps you organize your college planning. Remember to talk to current and former students, go to college fairs, and speak to admissions representatives as well. Ultimately, it depends. Carefully weigh the pros and cons of your decision. Have you looked into all your options? Have you researched each school carefully? Do you have a good idea of your fit with each college? Are you able to connect with students at the colleges? How are you demonstrating your interest in the colleges on your list? These are considerations you should take into account when making your decision. Whether you decide to visit before applying or not, do make sure to visit a college before committing to attending it, because you need to make sure it’s a place where you can truly see yourself. Looking for help with your college applications? Check out our College Application Guidance Program . When you sign up for our program, we carefully pair you with the perfect admissions specialist based on your current academic and extracurricular profile and the schools in which you’re interested. Your personal application specialist will help you with branding, essays, and interviews, and provide you with support and guidance in all other aspects of the application process.

Among all of the political leaders studied in class who do you think Essay

Among all of the political leaders studied in class who do you think represent the true characteristics of a good leadership and why do you think the rest of t - Essay Example A leader should have a clear vision in his mind about where he is standing right now and how far he has to go to pursue his dreams. He must have the quality to translate his vision into solid form. Without having a clear picture in his mind one cannot achieve the desired goal. Only vision is not sufficient to get the job done. The leader should form a team of experts who will deliver. The erstwhile chairman of General Electric Company has very rightly pointed out that "Good leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion." The leader should be disciplined, hard working and has the burning desire to pursue his dreams. Action can be termed as the focal point of a leader. A good leader always puts in efforts in pursuance of his vision and influences others to do with the same zeal and enthusiasm. A true leadership gives the credit where the credit is due. He takes the ownership of good or bad actions. He cannot be absolved himself from any failure. As a team leader, he passes on the bucket of fruits of success to his team mates and takes the blame of any of his follies. He treats himself at par with other fellow citizens. He believes in that only good deeds can make them popular amongst the people. In this respect, we may quote here the name of Asian Leader, Mahatma Gandhi. He should be good listener as far as the ideas of others are concerned. He has every right to accept the ideas or reject it but with cogent reasons. The openness policy surely opens the doors of mutual trust and respect between the leaders and the followers. Â   A good leader should be clear in his statement in order to avoid any misunderstanding. He should be firm in achieving the desired results. According to survey conducted by the Americans Psychological Association, the most common weaknesses found in the

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) Essay

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) - Essay Example The research explains the following design approaches: First, constructivist’s approach applied allowed the researcher to understand the practices and processes in emergency departments. Furthermore, the paradigm provides realism of the shared research. Second, the thematic analysis used was to enhance the inductive nature of the research and make sense of the responses on perceptions. Group interviews provided the interactive opportunity for relations and shared meanings to manifest themselves. The researchers conducted interviews in sixteen hospitals to select the participating emergency nurses. The advertisement of the recruitment drive took place through posters. All participants were registered, nurses. Some of the criteria applied in the selection process include at least one-year experience in emergency wing. The setting of the study was justified in that the researchers got the approval from the local health district research ethics committee. Data collection was accor ding to the National Health and Medical Council. Each participant filled a consent form. Prior to participation, the participants familiarized themselves with aims of the study. It is clear because there was the use of semi-structured open-ended questions. The lead researcher conducted the focus group interviews. Morgan’s 1997 guide for developing feedback was used within the focus groups. That is, covering the relevant topics, providing specific data, fostering interaction, and considering the personal context.

Introduction to macroeconomics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Introduction to macroeconomics - Essay Example However, during recessions, when unemployment rate rises, the demand will still be met by the supply, although the demand level will be lower. This is why in the goods market prices and quantity will settle at the equilibrium but high unemployment can still be present in the economy. This has been termed as the â€Å"Keynesian unemployment†. As what has been described earlier, in determining output to meet the demands, there are two views—the Keynesian and the classical view. The classical view argues that prices and wages are flexible, in such a way that excesses in either demand or supply will quickly be absorbed by the economy and resume full employment of resources after economic shocks—or abrupt changes in the aggregate demand and supply curves. The Keynesian view on the other hand argues, as apparent in its sticky theory of prices and wages which says that these two factors are sticky in the short run because of contractual rigidities such as agreements made with different interest groups such as the labor unions. In the latter situation, the one proposed by Keynes, higher levels of aggregate demands are needed for output to respond positively because aggregate supply curve is relatively flat especially when output levels are low. In this situation, the economy can have long periods of unemployment b ecause prices and wages are slow to adjust to shocks, and reaching full employment of resources is slow to reach. When classical economists argue that unemployment results from the interaction of the labor demand and supply curves, and lowering the wages will spread the labor supply which can curb unemployment in the process, Keynes argue that such is not applicable when unemployment is due to business cycle downturns, when because of lower demands of products in the economy, demand for labor is also low. The lower demand for goods results into lower demands for

European Competition Law - The Market for Industrial Filters Essay

European Competition Law - The Market for Industrial Filters - Essay Example From their study of the documents and as a result of interviews conducted with representatives of the manufacturers in question, the Commission is of the opinion that a number of actions taken in concert by manufacturers of industrial filters in the European Union are in breach of current Competition Law, with particular reference to Articles 81(a)1 and 822. We have been asked by the Commission to study the facts and evidence relating to the case in question and, after careful consideration and research, to advise them on the relevance of such issues in respect of their breaches of the European Unions Competition Laws. In the preparation of this report, we have studied the information in hand and undertaken extensive research, including reference to other relevant Competition cases. Our conclusion, outlined in depth within the main body of this report, is that there is reasonable evidence to confirm that the manufacturers of Industrial Filters have taken action in concert to artificially influence the market and that such action is in contravention of current Competition Law. We have been presented with all of the evidence that has been collected and collated by the Competition Director, where they are investigating the possible breach of EU Competition Laws by the manufacturers of Industrial Filters. In our opinion, there are two main issues to be addressed in reaching constructive conclusions within this report. 1) Does the combination of all the undertakings3 in this event represent a dominant force within the industry in which they operate? 2) Have the same undertakings, arriving at decisions made jointly between them, abused their dominant position and conducted themselves in a way which may affect4 the objectives of free trade within the EU and its member states and, by doing so, committed breaches of the EU’s Competition laws and In what specific areas of the Articles have such breaches manifested themselves? There are a number of  different and varied categories of undertakings as defined within Articles 81 and 82.  Ã‚  

Multijurisdictional tax (Inbound taxation and Outbound taxation Essay

Multijurisdictional tax (Inbound taxation and Outbound taxation assignment) - Essay Example IBM Corporation pays a regular quarterly dividend on the stock. Your previous research concluded that Joe T. is a nonresident alien of the US. 1. Is the income received US source income or foreign source income? What statute did you rely on for your conclusion(s)? Facts Joe T. is a non resident alien of the United States who has invested in 1,000 shares of common stock in IBM Corporation. IBM is registered in Delaware, United States and does most of its business within the United States. The stock owned by Joe T. represents less than 1% of the overall value of IBM Corporation. Interpretation Joe T. is a non resident alien in the United States which means that Joe T.’s income derived from sourced within the United States are liable to taxation. Since IBM Corporation executes most of its business from within the United States, so under Sections 861(a)(2) and 862(a)(2), the dividends released by such businesses are considered as income being derived from within the United States. ... , since dividends from purchased stock do not fall under any exception based category under Section 871(1), so income derived from such sources is liable to tax. 2. If the income is US source income, is it taxable income to the individual (i.e., is there an exemption or exclusion available)? What statute did you rely on for each of your conclusions? Facts Joe T. is a non resident alien of the United States who has invested in 1,000 shares of common stock in IBM Corporation. IBM is registered in Delaware, United States and does most of its business within the United States. The stock owned by Joe T. represents less than 1% of the overall value of IBM Corporation. Interpretation Most forms of income derived from sources within the United States are liable to taxation even if a non resident alien owns benefits from such sources. However, under certain circumstances exceptions may be provided to foreign investors in the United States as per taxation on income. No deductions may be taken on a foreign investor’s income from sources within the United States if it is covered by either Section 873 or Section 882(c). Income derived from a United States trade or business is exempt for taxation for foreign individuals but this applies to gross income only which does not apply to Joe T.’s case. On another note, dividends are clearly mentioned as being taxable for foreign persons under Section 871(a)(1) which makes Joe T.’s income liable to taxation. Exceptions to the current rule exist if the source of the income derived from the United States is either interest from a bank or other fiscal institution (under Section 871(i)) or if it is portfolio interest (under Section 871(h)). Joe T. may be provided with some relief, but not a complete exemption, under US Model Treaty

Introduction to macroeconomics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Introduction to macroeconomics - Essay Example However, during recessions, when unemployment rate rises, the demand will still be met by the supply, although the demand level will be lower. This is why in the goods market prices and quantity will settle at the equilibrium but high unemployment can still be present in the economy. This has been termed as the â€Å"Keynesian unemployment†. As what has been described earlier, in determining output to meet the demands, there are two views—the Keynesian and the classical view. The classical view argues that prices and wages are flexible, in such a way that excesses in either demand or supply will quickly be absorbed by the economy and resume full employment of resources after economic shocks—or abrupt changes in the aggregate demand and supply curves. The Keynesian view on the other hand argues, as apparent in its sticky theory of prices and wages which says that these two factors are sticky in the short run because of contractual rigidities such as agreements made with different interest groups such as the labor unions. In the latter situation, the one proposed by Keynes, higher levels of aggregate demands are needed for output to respond positively because aggregate supply curve is relatively flat especially when output levels are low. In this situation, the economy can have long periods of unemployment b ecause prices and wages are slow to adjust to shocks, and reaching full employment of resources is slow to reach. When classical economists argue that unemployment results from the interaction of the labor demand and supply curves, and lowering the wages will spread the labor supply which can curb unemployment in the process, Keynes argue that such is not applicable when unemployment is due to business cycle downturns, when because of lower demands of products in the economy, demand for labor is also low. The lower demand for goods results into lower demands for

Multijurisdictional tax (Inbound taxation and Outbound taxation Essay

Multijurisdictional tax (Inbound taxation and Outbound taxation assignment) - Essay Example IBM Corporation pays a regular quarterly dividend on the stock. Your previous research concluded that Joe T. is a nonresident alien of the US. 1. Is the income received US source income or foreign source income? What statute did you rely on for your conclusion(s)? Facts Joe T. is a non resident alien of the United States who has invested in 1,000 shares of common stock in IBM Corporation. IBM is registered in Delaware, United States and does most of its business within the United States. The stock owned by Joe T. represents less than 1% of the overall value of IBM Corporation. Interpretation Joe T. is a non resident alien in the United States which means that Joe T.’s income derived from sourced within the United States are liable to taxation. Since IBM Corporation executes most of its business from within the United States, so under Sections 861(a)(2) and 862(a)(2), the dividends released by such businesses are considered as income being derived from within the United States. ... , since dividends from purchased stock do not fall under any exception based category under Section 871(1), so income derived from such sources is liable to tax. 2. If the income is US source income, is it taxable income to the individual (i.e., is there an exemption or exclusion available)? What statute did you rely on for each of your conclusions? Facts Joe T. is a non resident alien of the United States who has invested in 1,000 shares of common stock in IBM Corporation. IBM is registered in Delaware, United States and does most of its business within the United States. The stock owned by Joe T. represents less than 1% of the overall value of IBM Corporation. Interpretation Most forms of income derived from sources within the United States are liable to taxation even if a non resident alien owns benefits from such sources. However, under certain circumstances exceptions may be provided to foreign investors in the United States as per taxation on income. No deductions may be taken on a foreign investor’s income from sources within the United States if it is covered by either Section 873 or Section 882(c). Income derived from a United States trade or business is exempt for taxation for foreign individuals but this applies to gross income only which does not apply to Joe T.’s case. On another note, dividends are clearly mentioned as being taxable for foreign persons under Section 871(a)(1) which makes Joe T.’s income liable to taxation. Exceptions to the current rule exist if the source of the income derived from the United States is either interest from a bank or other fiscal institution (under Section 871(i)) or if it is portfolio interest (under Section 871(h)). Joe T. may be provided with some relief, but not a complete exemption, under US Model Treaty

A Comparison of Mac OSX Tiger and Microsoft Windows Vista Essay Example for Free

A Comparison of Mac OSX Tiger and Microsoft Windows Vista Essay Introduction: Microsofts Windows and Apples Mac OSX are one of the most prominent Operating Systems in the world. Both have millions of Active users and are considered as major rivals. Both Operating systems have their specific advantages as well as some disadvantages. Both operating systems have evolved throughout the time in a specific manner and has managed to create their own identity. This paper will compare the latest releases of both software giants i.e. â€Å"Microsoft Windows Vista† and â€Å"Mac OSX Tiger†. A Comparison of Microsoft Windows Vista and Mac OSX Tiger: Mac OSX Tiger 10.4x is the latest release of the OSX series of operating systems released by Apple Corps. This version was released in spring 2005. Like its predecessors Tigers foundation is laid on the Unix Kernel â€Å"Darwin†. The Unix foundation has made Tiger more secure and reliable than its non Unix rivals like Microsofts Windows. There are no known Viruses, Worms or Spywares which can force Tiger to compromise . Vistas predecessor Windows XP has been under attack by the hackers and viruses since its release for the first time which compelled Microsoft to fix the loopholes in the form of service packs. That why its successor Vista has been developed with security in mind. Though Vista seems to be more secure than XP or other earlier Windows releases but it has not achieved 100% immunity against viruses and worms. Apple has maintained a policy of releasing new versions roughly after every 18 months. Due to this approach the changes and innovations made in the new versions were not that prominent to confuse the users. On the contrary Microsoft has not released any new version after the release of Windows XP in 2001. Thus the change in Vista is more dramatic than change in Tiger. Speaking about the GUI and its features Tiger and Vista share many similarities. Because Tiger is a couple of years older than Vista seems to draw many features and ideas from Tiger. Some notable similarities are in icons. Vista has also change the names of â€Å"My Documents† and â€Å"My Computer† folder to â€Å"Documents† and â€Å"Computer† same as in Tiger. The term Vista Aero Interface is very similar to Tigers Aqua interface in terminology. The buttons and other interface details have the same shiny round look as in Tiger. Tigers most amazing feature is its spotlight search technology which is borrowed by Vista in such a way that even the search button is identical to it, only the magnifying glass turns on the opposite side. But along these similarities Vista is more advanced and sophisticated than Tiger in a number of ways. Vista provides a more sophisticated file previewing technology not found in Tiger. It can even preview text files. Moreover Vistas folder give the preview of the files located inside them a feature not found in Tiger. Moreover Vista can scale icons and previews up to 128 by 128 pixels. Regarding file management and searching Vista and Tiger share many similarities. Vistas new file searching technologies are very similar to Tigers spotlight technology, but Vista goes further ahead and provides the facility of adding meta data in Internet Explorer directly. Vista provides multiple fields for searching and adding meta data a feature not available in Tiger. Vista has also borrowed the idea of Tigers smart folders renaming them as virtual folders. But Vista has also developed some advanced file management features not found in Tiger. Vista provides a new backup system which record changes in the backed up files time to time and save them in a protected folder. Vista has also developed a feature available in Mac OSX since its earlier times. OSX has the ability to create any document in PDF. Vista on the other hand has given support to change any document in Metro an universal XML document format. Regarding networking Vista is far more superior than Tiger. This is basically because Vista is more compatible to Microsoft servers than Tiger. Vista has also provided the facility to connect to a project on the network and send presentations to it. Vista is also introducing Ipv6 protocol, a feature which is available in OSX since Panther. Vista also has a better support for RSS feeds, Weblogs etc. Media Center is a feature which can certainly be called the pride of Microsoft in the world of Desktops and operating systems. Because neither Tiger nor any other competitor such accomplished media center facitlities as provided by Microsoft. The feature first introduced in Windows XP Media Center edition has shown further enhancements and innovations in this regard. Conclusion: Though Vista is a major innovative change for Windows users many new features introduced in Vista are not that new in the world of desktops. Tiger and some other operating systems have introduced them a couple of years ago. But Vista has gone further beyond. There are many features and advances in Vista which are not found in any operating system currently. Security is the key problem thats why Vista provides more sophisticated security features than Tiger. Vista also has the advantage of the largest number of software support which Tiger doesnt. But Tiger has support of open source softwares thanks to its Unix foundation. One can conclude that each operating system is superior to its rival in some characteristics and lacks some features found in the other. References James Fallows (2006), Microsoft Reboots: A Preview of the New Versions of Windows and Office, The Atlantic Monthly. Volume: 298. Issue: 5 The Atlantic Monthly Magazine J.V. Bolkan (2005), Facing the Future: Computer Hardware Is Getting a New Set of Standards. Find out How They Will Affect Your Future Purchases, Learning Leading with Technology. Volume: 33. Issue: 3, International Society for Technology in Education. Royal Van Horn (2006), The Perfect Computer and Web Browser Updates, Phi Delta Kappan. Volume: 88. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 2006. Page Number: 7, Phi Delta Kappa, Inc

Four quartets

Four quartets Four Quartets in the Light of Eliots Critical Theory Four Quartets is one of the most serious and longest poems of T S Eliot. It is very much philosophical in its tone and theme. Eliot considered Four Quartets his masterpiece (Johnston: 2005), as it draws upon his knowledge of mysticism and philosophy of life. It consists of four long poems, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, each in five sections or movements. The five sections are said to be symbolically representing particular elements like air, earth, water and fire; and they also suggest Christian holy days Ascension Day, Good Friday, the Annunciation and Pentecost respectively (Sexton. 279). Although they resist easy characterisation, they have many things in common: each begins with a reflection on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect-theological, historical, physical, and on its relation to the human condition. Talking about the subject matter of the poem, Rees (64) remarks that the essential focus or unifying idea, of the Four Quartets is describing eternal reality which the poet tries to search through mortal time. He says that Eliot has tried to give a kind of philosophic cum artistic summary of his various social concepts and beliefs in these quartets. A reflective early reading suggests an inexact systematic approach among them; they approach the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, although they do not necessarily exhaust their questions. Eliot proclaims that the Four Quartets are straightforward, told in the simplest language possible (Bellin: 2003). However, Bellin argues whether the poets claim of simplicity i.e. acceptable or not. He quotes a few other critics who agree on the point that because the subject matter in the Quartets is not an ordinary thing, so the language used to describe such ideas mostly avoids simplicity. Dallas (193) gives her opinion, with special reference to Four Quartets, about Eliots consistency with his poetic stan dards in the practice of his own poetry. She writes that T. S. Eliots in his prose and plays or poetry has maintained an increasingly developed understanding and usage of the doctrines that an indivisible association is found there between form and substance in his work of art. She has specially written about the association between Eliots critical thoughts and poetic practice. She compares the content and structure of different poems especially of the Quartets and finds an appropriate correlation in them. The form of a poem develops and takes its shape from the order which is inherent in the material, or substance of the poem (Dallas, 194). From various angles this long poem of four sections has been commented upon by critics. Many critics have found the Eliots proclaimed characteristics of impersonality in the poem. The relationship of mater and form of any poem is considered very significant to show artistic expertise objectively. Fussel (212) finds a correlation between the content and the form of this long poem. He says that the structure of Four Quartets as compared to its subject matter is both a innate and expected consequence of techniques and concepts formerly used by Eliot and, at the same time, exceptional not only in Eliots own poetry but also in the entire English literary tradition. However Fussel is also of the opinion that in the Quartets, what we are offered to view is not what every individual can perceive on his own but it is rather the eyes of a single personality that shows us what we see. Even then the critic concludes that such is the skill to develop the theme that a reader feels himself as the p art of the experience. His poetic works are a kind of externalization of aesthetic and emotional images mixed together with explanation and annotation by the interpreting understanding, a combination of personal contemplation and open public dialogue (Fussel. 213). He further says that the structure of Four Quartets is outcome of the poets experience, which is artistically developed by intellectual analysis and the depiction of emotional state. Fussel also talks about Eliots concept of unification of sensibilities but with mixed comments of achieving it. He says: In the Quartets, the opposites of intellect and sensibility, thought and feeling, do achieve union, but the gulf is deepened while the bridge is under construction (214). He means to say that in comparison to Eliots early works, the poem Four Quartets shows a delay resolution of the unifying devices, which the poet does on purpose. He says that Eliot knows the limitations of the modern man to understand the universal realities not so easily, therefore, first of all, he had to take to direct description of his religious thoughts and, then, by describing the concept of incarnation, Eliot achieves the union of the opposites in the Quartets. Dallas (6, 7) writes in detail Eliots use of opposite images to describe the opposite universal forces at work. She quotes lines from the different sections of the Quartets, which simultaneously mention life and death, cold and hea t, haze and light, dead, and living and the beginning and the end. All this is to depict impersonally the dual effects of the subtle universal laws. The poet, here, requires the intelligence and concentration of the reader to feel and understand the undertone of the message of the poem. Written between 1935 and 1942, they mark the end of Eliots major poetic achievement. As a poet, Eliot was by no means prolific. So much greater his merit of creating, in quite a few great poems, an imaginary world which has haunted poetry ever since. If he has not got whole shelves of books to boast of, he is, in exchange, an accomplished master of concentration and ambiguity. We have seen him as an innovator, as a difficult poet, a magician of the understatement. The Four Quartets are his last feat of magic (Vianu). The effect is mystifying. Soothing is the first attribute that comes to mind in connection with Eliots Four Quartets (Vianu). If anything, then, these soothing Quartets are first and foremost poems of the mind. Emotion mastered, love reconsidered, sensibility dissected by serene thought. The Quartets have many names for their mystical goal of knowledge outside language still point, pattern, love, consciousness (Bellin: 2003). The masterly use of language plays very impo rtant role in bringing forth the desired meaning in a situation especially describing an abstract phenomenon. According to Bellin, Eliot has adequately used most of the language tools, which has made it possible for him to pronounce his mental feelings agreeably although, the poet has been denying his mastery over the adequate use of words. Bellin further says that such a paradoxical use of language can well be seen in Burnt Norton-the redemptive power of language and the distaste for language: Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness (li. 137-142) Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. (li. 149-153) Bellin (2003) quotes Hay who comments, One critic proposes that the poem uses a stream-of-consciousness methodthough whose consciousness is a crucial question (Hay; 161); and he swiftly proclaims that in the poetry produced at some later stage, the perception and consciousness are clearly Eliots own (Hay 161). In case of the Quartets, the poets consciousness and the quality of the Quartets impersonality come under question. Bellin, then, quotes Thompson who suggests finding out a certain formula as to read the Quartets impersonally as desired by the poet. Melaney (151) appreciates Eliots mastery over the use of befitting language in Quartets. With particular reference to the Quartets, he says that Eliot usually enjoys adopting a style of expression that facilitates him to put forward abstract and theoretical proclamations as crystal clear and indisputable truths. The illustration of the time paradoxes in this poem is so h3 that it constitutes a kind of poetics for the young poets especially regarding the use of the appropriate language. Boaz (32), by quoting Ruth Berges, says that Eliot wanted to write poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry. And this is possible only through the use and application of a language that should be most befitting to convey the poet to the readers not only aurally but visually too. Speaking about the start of the poem, Brown (2003) says that the imagery of the rose garden takes the readers along with the poet. He says that the world created by the poet becomes the imagined world of the readers; it is all because, à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦the poetry creates the conditions to fulfill its own inter-personal invitation. This is the relation between the poem and the readers, not between the poet and the readers. The poet has to be an observer as before the composition of his poem so he has to remain after its composition. This is what is skillfully done by Eliot in his Quartets. To come back to the late summer of Burnt Norton, the poem goes on with memories of youth silenced by the lullaby of elderly thoughts. There is a trilling wire in the blood, and this blood still sings below inveterate scars. But the old wars are long forgotten, or, in Eliots words appeased. A still point is mentioned. It reminds the reader of the prayer to the silent sister in Ash Wednesday: Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still He reiterates, time and again, all is always now, and it looks difficult for him to forget what he wants to forget i.e. the loud lament of the disconsolate fantasy. They are all there in a poem which, though is determined to forget certain things and events (old ideal of Ash-Wednesday), has not yet performed this task of forgetting things. Obstinate recollections of old troubles and excitements enliven it: Quick now, here, now, always Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after It is not only memories that hurt the poet, but also his struggle with the words, which should express them. In Burnt Norton, serene as the tone may be, peace of mind is wishful thinking, and the poets words reveal a restless mind trying its hand at relaxation, but Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. East Coker (1940), title of the second quartet, is the name of a Somerset shire village.   T.S. Eliot desired that, at the time of his death, his body should be cremated, and the ashes buried at East Coker. Which his second wife dutifully accomplished. This place was visited and inhabited by Eliots ancestors also. That is why we find the start and the main theme of the poem as, In my beginning is my end, reversed later into In my end is my beginning. The specifically literary twist here is that the simple revelry of the imagined rustic men and women is largely rendered in the words and spelling of a probable ancestor of the poet Sir Thomas Elyot (Brown: 2003). In daunsing, signifying matrimonie A dignified and commodious sacrament. (178) This observation shows that Eliot has tried to present a bygone time or persons in their own typical surroundings. This masterly skill of Eliot has been a great means of success to achieve the impersonal tone in his poetry throughout these fragmented poems. The main space of Burnt Norton is, however, the still point of the turning world. Imaginary or not, who cares? Fact is that deep below, at the bottom of the poem, stillness and restlessness coexist. The poet has described here his past, his life philosophy, his achievements, his wishes and disappointments. A dynamic view of life has been mentioned in poetic style. A number of universal contrasting ideas have been put together in fantastic antithetical statements. Vianu, speaking of such opposite facts, says, They sadly go hand in hand, with Eliot inertly watching: Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. A tendency of detachment and aloofness encompasses certain sections in the Four Quartets: in East Coker where Eliot puts the metaphor of Christ, the wounded surgeon, in The Dry Salvages, where he mocks augury, in Little Gidding where he transforms German dive-bombers into the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit. Bottum (1995) confirms this wave of detachment in the quartets and says that this lack of involvement starts off as a final point in Eliots desire to turn his knowledge and experience into metaphorical symbols. The development of the performance of an artist, Eliot wrote when he was younger, is a continual extinction of personality. To him the poet is not experiencing his experiences here; he is only standing self-consciously outside experience in order to watch himself experience. In the Four Quartets the self- conscious poet stands outside his temporal experiences in order to find in them a metaphor for the temporal facts he has not experienced. The fundamental experienc e in The Four Quartets that experience to which all other experiences are ordered as metaphors-Eliot always describes in the conditional or the subjunctive or the future (Bottum:1995). And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. But here the views of Stevens (2004) are slightly different. He says, though, in poems like Prufrock and The Waste Land, Eliot is considerably successful in applying his theory of impersonality, but it is certainly Eliots own voice that we hear in the later poetry such as Four Quartets. Stevens is of the opinion that the poet, in Quartets, has become subjective and speaks personally of his own life experiences. He does not find the element of detachment but rather a h3 presence of the poets personality in the Quartets. Finally, Stevens says that Four Quartets, being a religious affirmation, gives way to certain discursive and expository elements that we do not find in his earlier poems. Any how according to many other well reputed critics, Eliot has, in the Quartets, used the kind of images and symbols that as those in The Waste Land and Prufrock, bring forth the poets inner thoughts in an objective manner. Eliot has shown great skill of using characteristic images to expose very abstract concepts in the Quartets. Rees (65) is of the view that it is the use of images that has helped Eliot relate and yoke together the opposite themes in the quartets. He writes, Dry Salvages provide an excellent illustration of how Eliot presents his two related but contrasted themes in the form of dominant images. He points out to the images of river and sea, which represent the concepts of the temporal mutability and eternity respectively. Esty (2003) is of the opinion that Eliots striving after objective style is a successful attempt to bring forth the intended impression of the poem impersonally. He says that the poets effort to make inner voice surrender to outer authority paves way for the artistic impersonality in his poem. For Esty the poetic techniques of Eliot are a practical show of his critical canons. Dennis Brown (2003), talking about the psychological effects of the Quartets, experiences, My own feeling is that the most powerful passages are those which engage the reader in an epiphanic experience which creates a transitional area. He speaks about the readers involvement in feeling the poets thoughts and says that the musical and the therapeutic effects while the description of times hold grips of the reader and engages their mind to be one with the poet. Brown calls this Eliots genius.   Morris Weitz (1952) opines on the use of several symbols in Eliots poetry. He especially takes the symbol of rose garden and says that Eliot has used the symbol of rose garden at several places in his poetry to depict the temporal experiences, which exhibit the immanent character of the ultimately real. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind Weitz is of the opinion that though the critics have defined the symbol of rose garden with different connotations, the essential meaning has the double impact rose garden as an actual place and the symbolical use of the poets worldly experiences and their possible relation with the Absolute. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦.the rose garden symbolizes those moments that show, more than any others, the meeting of the Eternal and the temporal (Weitz:1952) These Quartets are termed as a death and life effort with the words and their meanings. The poetry in them does not seem to matter, at first sight. It does matter a lot, at the deeper level of the poets mood and spirit of innovation (Vianu). Here it is stated that Eliot is not giving preference to how to say out the things but he is more concerned with what to say. It is actually extracting out the emotion from the poets mind in its entirety in the shape of words. In doing so, though, the poet tries his best to put forward everything in the best possible way, the occasional lack of befitting words must not impede the true expression of the ideas especially in an impersonal way. That was a way of putting it not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter. The irony falls back on the reader who sees nothing but poetry in the poem (Craven: 2004). In the above quoted lines of the poem, Eliot seems to be talking modestly of his own genius. His critics are of the view that the Quartets do not exhibit only the sublimity of his poetic thoughts but his technical aspect is also at its heights in the Quartets. Craven further says that the readers are compelled to work through the traditional suspension of disbelief while going through this poem. This again tells us Eliots skill of involving the readers to feel, understand and interpret his poetry in an objective way. However, according to Roger Bellin (2003), Karl Shapiro and George Orwell hold contrary views. Bellin reports that Shapiro accuses the Quartets of the complete abandonment of poetry (247), and Orwell insists similarly: Perhaps what we need is prayer, observance, etc., but you do not make a line of poetry by stringing those words together. Bellin also quotes Thompsons opinion saying that a careful reading of the Quartets reveals the poem personalizing the poet as a protagonist in order, in reading, to participate in his struggle (Thompson 83). Talking about the use of adequate images in Four Quartets, Vianu refers to Ash Wednesday and says: Ash-Wednesday is not far behindà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦. We feel we are drifting together with the poem on the waves of a whimsical sea. Our life, like anybodys, is a drifting boat with a slow leakage. Here the learned critic understands the feelings of the poet who is trying to convey his thoughts. He speaks of horrors in a blank voice. We do hear about wailings, withering, wreckage, unprayable prayers, failing powers, wastage, primitive terrors, and sudden fury One thing, however, is changed, and this change makes all the difference. Eliot is no longer trying to terrify. He shuns away his anger and revolt. He tries to look resigned (Vianu). Sexton (280) has pointed out Eliots making of Cross in the Quartets. the four quartets respectively concern the way up, the way back, the way forward and the way down as spoken of by Eliot in Dry Salvages III. We first see these four directions in Burnt Nor ton II. With these directions or movements in mind Sexton finds the traces of the making of Christian Cross in the poem. This shows a subtle way of portraying religious images in an objective way upholding the poetic concept of impersonality. Eliot, the literary critic, repeatedly put aside from him the flights of abstruse reasoning. Of course, literary critics will go on dissecting the philosophy of the Quartets. Eliots wish was that poetry should be felt before it was understood. This is one of the reasons why these quartets should be handled carefully. We must learn to protect the fleeting feelings they delicately outline. Philosophy may have had a part in these poems, but only as a discipline of mind. The main thing is that these Quartets reveal something unique in Eliots poetry: a warm directness. This evidence of attachment to man and life in Eliots creation can hardly be stressed enough. Reading these lines, we realize why Eliot hated those critics who called him learned and cold. The more the poet writes about indifference, peace of mind, detachment and so on, the more attached he feels to everything. His former ties to the world were grumbling. He kept feeling hurt and howled out. This new attachment is spiteless ; it is generous and warm. The warmth of a poet who hides in his poetry, a heart for all seasons. In his own words: music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. Danby (79,80), evaluating the over all impact and feeling of the Quartets, says that here the poet makes the reader move along with him for the full satisfaction of the three dimensional experience while reading the poem. He means to say that Eliots poetry is so encompassing that it leaves nothing go unfelt. In spite of several difficulties, the poet is successful in turning a whole generation of readers to experience the feelings. Danby further says: They (Quartets) are themselves both poems and criticism of poetry (80). Danby is stating here the corresponding accord between Eliots criticism and his poetry. They also practice what they preach(p.80). Towards the end of his article, Danby speaks about Eliots mastery of imagery. He says that the poet is quite capable of finding and using such comprehensive images that exhibit the complexities of the poets mood. They are used as objective correlatives to feelings or thoughts (Danby: 84). Although many critics have found the Quartets in keeping with the poets concept of impersonality, Melaney (148), like Stevens, parts his way with the rest of the critics. He writes, His (Eliots) canonization as a literary icon has prevented his readers from considering his poetry as a record of personal change. He says that the subject matter of the Quartets is not wholly in accordance with his critical canons. Here we find a great deal of his autobiographical account that makes the poem a personal life sketch. The account or subject matter may be personal, but it is the way of presentation that makes it personal or impersonal as defined by Eliot. Hence, if we look at the way things have been talked about in the Quartets, the impersonal tone is more obvious than the personal. Fussell (217) says, in the Quartets, on the other hand, he forges a more personal form by using only the first person, and yet he creates an illusion of the impersonal by splitting up the single personality into contrasting moods and by giving the speaker a public as well as private voice. Thus, apart from the observations of a few critics, most of the poem seems in conformity with Eliots concept of impersonality. The intended abstract idea of time has been presented in such an objectified manner that the reader feels one with the feelings of the poet while going through the poem. References: Bellin, Roger. The Seduction of Argument and the Danger of Parody in the Four Quartets. http://alum.hampshire.edu/~rb97/eliot.html> 29-10-2005 Bottum,J.WhatTSEliotAlmostBelieved. First Things, Vol. 55. (Aug. 1995). http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9508/bottum.html> 20-4-2006 Brown, Dennis. Literature Theology, Vol. 17. No. 1, March 2003 Craven, Peter. The Urbane Mysticism of Old Possum. Financial Review Oct. 01. 2001 http://afr.com/articles/2004/09/30/1096527854077.html 17-06-2005 Dallas, Elizabeth S. Canon Cancrizans and the Four Quartets. Comparative Literature, Vol. 17, No. 3. (Summer, 1965). Danby, J. F. Intervals During Rehearsals. Cambridge Jul. 02, 1949. Esty, Jed. Four Quartets, National Allegory, and the End of Empire. The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.1 (2003) 43 Fussell, B. H. Structural Methods in Four Quartets. ELH, Vol. 22, No. 3. (Sep. 1955). Melaney, William D. T. S. Eliots Poetics of Self: Reopening Four Quartets. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 22 (2002). Thes. PhD. (Abstract). Columbia University. 1980. Sexton, James P. Four Quartets and the Christian Calendar. American Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2. (May, 1971). Rees,Thomas R. The Orchestration of Meaning in T.S. Eliots Four Quartets. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28.1 (Autumn 1969): 63-69. Stevens. http://ieas.arts.unideb.hu/faculty/materials/usliterature.doc.> 19-10-2005 Thompson, E. (1963).T. S. Eliot: the man and his work.Carbondale: Southern University Press. Weitz, Morris. Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/norton.htm> 8-10-2005 Weitz, Morris. Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/norton.htm> 8-10-2005 Vianu,Lidia. T.S.Eliot:TheFourQuartets.