Monday, September 30, 2019

Comparative Study Between Ulysess and My Last Duchess Essay

Have a little read: †¦ Comparing ‘Ulysses’ by Lord Tennyson and ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning. â€Å"Ulysses† was written by Lord Tennyson and is a poem about a mythical Greek character and is a dramatic monologue. Another poem that is a dramatic monologue is â€Å"My Last Duchess†, by Robert Browning. Both poems are similar, for example they are both structured similarly, and are both different, one difference being their subject. In this essay I will compare the two poems, focusing on form, and how language helps to build up subject matter. Ulysses is a Greek mythical character, and was famous for being a pirate, ransacking villages and being a warrior. In Greek literature, Ulysses just seemed to disappear after he got home, and Tennyson decided to write about Ulysses and his thoughts after ‘retiring’ from fighting. The poem is written in verse, and seems to be either a dramatic monologue or monologue interior. It is hard to know which one, as a dramatic monologue must have a listener (other than the audience. Ulysses is talking to someone, his dead soldiers, but as they are deceased it is difficult to decide if they count as a listener to the poem. My Last Duchess† by Robert Browning was written in the same era as â€Å"Ulysses† and is written in Verse. This poem is different to â€Å"Ulysses† as this poem is about a fictional character which is created by Browning. This is a Dramatic Monologue, as the duke (the character created by Browning) is talking to the servant of the father of a possible bride. To create the effect of speech, Browning uses Iambic Pentameter, which helps to imitate the rhythm of conversational speech, and enjambment frequently. The use of language to present the subject matter is important for both poets. In Ulysses, the poet builds up a picture of the characters inactiveness by using words such as â€Å"still†, â€Å"dull† and â€Å"pause†. These adjectives create an understanding of what life is like for Ulysses, and this is then contrasted with words of his past such as â€Å"roaming†, â€Å"ringing† and â€Å"windy†. These words create a contrast between the activeness of the past, and the stillness of the present. This helps the reader imagine what life was like for the character when he was young.

Sunday, September 29, 2019

Should Hate Speech and Hate Sites Be Banned from the Internet?

Should hate speech and hate sites be banned from the Internet? | 1. Introduction Internet can be termed as one of the most revolutionary inventions of the 21st century. However, just like any other thing in the world, it has its positive points and a dark side as well. Some users have made a productive use of this invention while others use it in a harmful manner. One of the most popular and convenient mode of researching nowadays, is to find the relevant information on the internet. But due to the everlasting cruelty in the world, some information on the internet can prove to be harmful for the respective person. It might be some content that gives inappropriate information or try to influence its viewers to go on the wrong path. 2. Overview A website that promotes or uses hate speech against race, community, gender, person, religion, nationality etc is called a hate site. The people who are responsible for putting these things on the internet; not only take use text but graphics, sounds and animations are also used to influence their readers more. It might be used to convince people to join a certain group of people who work against some concepts or people, for e. . ; StormFront. org hosts a hate site against Martin Luther King, Jr who was an American activist and a leader. More House College (2008) states that he is famous for his contributions in the African-American civil right movements. In the above mentioned site, content full of hate is written about the activist and claim that there is a long list of wrong actions done by him. The website terms him â€Å"modern day plastic God†. Such offending content about the man is possible due to the much proposed concept of â€Å"freedom of speech†. This concept focuses on the freedom of writing or saying anything that an individual feels is correct. This verbal freedom also gives the writer the freedom of speech without being accountable for doing it. But what these people fail to understand is that with freedom of speech comes gereat responsibility as well. They have a responsibility to only convey the message which would not offend anyone or harm anyone in life. 3. Ways to Inhibit Hate Sites There are approximately 4 billion web pages on the internet therefore it is very difficult to ensure that no hate content is pated on them. There are different ways in which this problem is handled by different countries. For e. g. Media Awareness Network (2009) states that according to the Canadian Human Rights Act Section 13, any text communicated by any telecommunication means (including internet) that may promote hatred towards a person or any of the following things is prohibited; 1Race 2Nationality 3Religion 4Gender etc Akdeniz et al (2008) stated that the Turkish governments are very sensitive about the hate content regarding their state and officials. They also take action against the hate sites promoting racism and terrorism. Whereas United Kingdom have a relaxed attitude towards racist content but are very alert about any hate content regarding their royalty. 4. Effects of Hate Sites on the Society 4. 1Effect on Children Children of the modern age are also tech-savvy and explore the internet just like adult. Therefore they are liable to exposure to hate sites as much as we are. Children’s minds are like blank papers and form perception of things very easily. They tend to take effect of things more than adults. If they are exposed to such content, a degree of aggression and negativity is induced in their character. This negativity leads to a negative and hopeless attitude about everything in life which hinders in their achievements. The aggression in their characters leads to making them commit crimes when they grow up; thereby making the society unsafe and unproductive. Therefore hate sites should be prohibited to ensure that our youth develop into successful and positive individuals. 4. 2Communal Groups It is a common practice for people to form small groups and communities on the basis of their similar ideas and concepts. The problem arises when they start being vocal about their ideas in an aggressive manner. Such an example is of the Knights Party (2010): The Ku Klux Klan organization in the United States; it is one of the biggest hate group organizations in the country. Their aim is to safeguard the rights and interests of the white American, may it be through violent or aggressive means. Their site is recorded to host content full of hate against the African-Americans, Jews and other minorities. They try to influence people to join them in their aims and also use this medium to promote their aggressive rallies. Such inappropriate sites should be banned from the internet. Fig. 1: KKK during their rally 4. 3Terrorist Organizations Nowadays, terrorist organizations also host sites. They convey their objectives to other people and openly state hate content for their enemies. This might influence the innocent people in the society and influence them to join these organizations thereby increasing terrorism in the society. They might state incorrect facts about their enemies just so that the people get influenced by the information and join their groups. 5. Sites Chosen for Analysis The sites that were analyzed for the hate speech are as follows; http://www. kkk. com/ – The official site of â€Å"The Ku Klux Klan† main site; advertises hate content against the minorities of the society and claims to safeguard their White supremacy at every cost. http://www. martinlutherking. org/ – Content full of hate against Martin Luther King, Jr 6. Conclusion After a comprehensive analysis of the topic under discussion, it can be concluded that hate sites on the internet are liable to cause harm to humanity and the peace and harmony of our societies. Therefore appropriate laws and regulations should be implemented to shut down the sites which ex0pose people to such inappropriate content. It is also the responsibility of the citizens of the society to report such hate sites to the concerned authorities so that we can hope for a safe future on the internet for our youth. References StormFront. org, Matin Luther – A True Historical Examination, [Online] Available at: http://www. artinlutherking. org/ More House College. (2008). Martin Luther King Jr Collection, [Online] Available at:http://www. auctr. edu/mlkcollection/ Media Awareness Network. (2009). Online Hate and Free Speech, [Online] Available at: http://www. media-awareness. ca/english/issues/online_hate/hate_and_free_speech. cfm, Akdeniz. Y, Altiparmak. K. (2008). Internet: Re stricted Access: A Critical Assessment of Internet Content Regulation and Censorship in Turkey, [Online] Available at: http://www. cyber-rights. org The Knights Party, (2010), [Online] Available at: http://www. kkk. com/

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Fear Is Inevitable

Change is inevitable, no one can avoid it, but the way you deal with the change and the emotions that come along with it can alter the outcome of the change, either in a positive of negative way. This comes under the aspect of change, known as fear. We are always fearing change, fearing how and what its going to change our path in life. You will find that inâ€Å"The Book Thief† by Marcus Zusak and â€Å"Rain Man† by Barry Levinson both explore how if we fear change or push it away, it wont get you anywhere the change will always happen. I have also shown my aspect of change through my visual representation. You can have the power to alter the way you percieve change you can fear it, or push it away. But you can also accept the change. If you go with the change, you might even be able to percieve the change in a more positive and accepting way, changing it from a negative situation to a positive situation. For example in my visual representation, there is someone who has been diagnosed with cancer, if they take on a positive outlook and want to help themselves by getting treatment, the outcome is more positive. Acting in a certain way can almost defnately help to change your situation of change into a positive one, just like how in the film rainman Charlie adapts to raymonds need for his t. v programs so he doesnt fight this and buys raymond a portable t. v. Accepting the change is also explored through the book theif, when leisel accepts max the jewish fist fighter into her family, Leisel looking at this change in a positive way lead her down that positve path as she had now formed a loving bond with him, as he has in some respects morphed into a surrogate brother for leisels dead brother. The alternate way you can percieve change is to fear change and fight against it. In my visual representation if you did decide to fight against this cancer and almost tell yourself that it isnt happening,will get you no where, because no matter how you look at the diagnoses you still have canceer and the healthier option would to deifnately go and get treatment. Fearing change is understandable, as it is something that will change who you are and where you are headed as, charlie from rainamn discovers. Charlie fears the change that Raymond might make on his life, as he cannot connect with him due to his disability. Charlie's way of displaying his fear of this is to act out and get frustrated at his brother on many occasions, as he comments â€Å"You know what I think Ray? I think this autisticism is a bunch of shit! Because you can't tell me that you're not in there somewhere! † Acting out, and getting frustrated was soon realised by Charlie that he was scared of facing the reality that this was his brother and he had to accept him for who he is and there for accepting the change and getting over the fear. The main fear displayed in â€Å"The Book Thief†, is central to the character of Max the Jewish fist fighter the Hubbermanns were hiding from the Nazis. They feared that they were going to loose this important person who had just lifted their life. Fearing this change wasn't the best thing that they could have done, if instead they had just gone with this change realising that he would have to leave him at some point would have maximised their time with max. My visual representation illustrates that change can be percieved in two different ways leading you down two completely different paths. If you see the massive change of being diagnosed with cancer in a more accepting light, you will head down the positive path. Although if you see this change as something your stuck with and nothing can help you and you wont let anything of anyone help you, you are pushing this change away and not accepting it. By doing this you are more than definitely not going to help yourself and will head down the negative path. My visual representation explores how just by changing your attitude towards the change, the outcome can vary massivly.

Friday, September 27, 2019

Image edge detaction - Sobel Method Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 10000 words

Image edge detaction - Sobel Method - Essay Example aim of the whole ‘Edge Detection’ process is the conversion of 2D Images into Curves or a collection of curves; this in turn highlights the boundaries of the objects that tend to produce specific changes in colour intensity. Hence all the information (geometric information) in an image; more commonly termed as objects such as the Colour, hue and brightness is attained by the properties of intensity changes in images. The history of Image Edge Detection includes not only the basic methods that like Gradient Method and Laplacian Method but also those methodologies that were based on these two techniques. The time-period of 1960 – 1980 was specifically significant for the formulation and the development of the Discrete Gradients and Laplacians where as another method was introduced in the 1980s and was known as Marr – Hildreth; Laplacian of Gaussian. In the year 1983 Canny Edge Detectors and their basic principle of working surfaced and joined the lists of Image Edge Detectors. ‘Linear and non – linear Scale Space’ was another mode that surfaced in the year 1985. ‘Morphological Gradient and Laplacian’ is yet another term that represents an image detection method; originated in 1979. What history the process of Image Edge Detection has, saw a boom in the research work applied to the field and the development it made in the late 20th century and still is underway in the 21st century. This boom had its peak displayed magnificently in the late 1980s and the level of research is maintained till the current day thus enabling progress and expansion in the field. Edge Detection procedures not only identify but also point out the location of the Discontinuities in a subject image which are fundamentally based on the difference between the intensity levels of ‘Pixels’, which determine the limits or, to be more precise, ‘Edges’ in the constituents of an image. Edge detection operators employ the use of different variables to which they are sensitive

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Report in phonology and pronunciation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Report in phonology and pronunciation - Essay Example On the other hand, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has 28 consonants ranging from fricatives, stops, lateral nasals, trill and semi-vowels. In addition, the Arabic consonant system is divided into two distinctive classes, which are emphatic and pharyngeal phonemes. Moreover, Arabic also has emphatic consonants such as /t/, /d/, /?/, and /s/. The table below 1 represents distribution of Arabic consonants Initial Medial Final /b/ bajt ?abd ba?b /t/ tarjama Xatama bu?t /d/ darb izdija?d Suru?d /k/ kam masku?n sikak /q/ qumtu baqqAl Dalq /?/ ?an ja?s bari /b?/ - qabbala dubb /t?/ - qAttala batt /d?/ - qaddama madd /k?/ - taSakkur Sakk The table below shows the plot of English consonants On a closer observation, Arabic has 13 phonemes, for instance, /t ?/, /t ?/,/s/, /x/, /?/, /d?/, /d?/, /q/, /?/, /?/, /?/, /?/, and /r/. Though Arabic and English share some phonemes, they differ in phonological rules, which limit concurrence of some allophones. For example, in English, the phoneme /l/ is co nsidered a velarized allophone at the end of words while in Arabic the same phoneme is realized as non-velarized at the end of words. In addition, the distribution of allophones is different in English and Arabic whereby the bilabial [p], which is voiceless and the bilabial [b], which is voiced occur as allophones of two phonemes in English (Amer 2010). In contrast, in Arabic the [p] occurs prior to the voiceless consonant, but [b] occurs somewhere else. Others such as /d/ and /t/ in Arabic are dental, but in English are alveolar while /v/ does not occur completely in Arabic. This may cause difficulties for Arabic learners of English due to contrasts in English such as /f?n/ fan and/v?n/ van. The sound /l/ occurs both in Arabic and English; however, in Arabic /?/ it is restricted to words like /a:h/. Therefore, /l/ in Arabic is used in positions of medial, final and initial while in English, /l/ is used in the position of initial and medial (Watson, 2002). Another sound that is enti rely different in English and Arabic languages is /r/ whereby it is a tongue tip trill in Arabic and a back alveolar in English. Therefore, this may present a problem for learners of English from the Arabic language because they attempt to the English /r/ with the Arabic one. b. Consonant Clusters Consonant cluster is also another element of phonemic that presents several differences among the two languages. In English, two or more consonants may follow one another to create consonant clusters or sequences. For example, for three consonant clusters: sleep, dogs, cuts, for three consonant clusters: risked, plunged, street, for seven consonant clusters: tempts strangers. Consonants can occur at the final position or initial position in English words, for example, â€Å"some of the consonants at the beginning of word are /b/ followed by /l, r, j/ as in bright, blame, beautiful, /g/ followed by /l, r/ as in gross, glare and /k/ followed by /l, r, w, j/ as in queen, clip, queue, crimeâ €  (Ladefoged 2001, p.56). On the other hand, there are other consonants that appear at the end of English words, for example, /t/ and /d/ as in wished, plunged, raised, risked, /s/ and /z/ as in yields, eats, risks and gives and /s/ and /z as in facts, fields, dogs, and books. In Arabic, there is no particular sequence for two or more consonants occurring in final and medial position. Arabic cluster involves breaking of the consonant cluster by an intrusive

Manager shadowing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Manager shadowing - Essay Example Managerial functions are a complex set of activities and involve a variety of people including internal as well as external associates. Tremendous information on management and managerial roles is available from literature; however, without practical application one cannot realize the intricacies involved in manager’s role. Shadowing provides a fair idea of the practical application of managerial concepts although one may not be directly involved in applying the principles. For a budding management professional, this shadowing activity for 3 days each with a bank manager and a manager at a phone shop provided good amount of information on day-to-day managerial activities along with an insight of managers’ behaviours determined by various factors. The following report elaborates on my observations and learning from the shadowing activity. Learning obtained from observations is based on my theoretical understanding of management concepts. As management concepts are numero us, this report is drafted based on few management models, like that of Stewart’s, Mintzberg’s and Drucker’s concepts. Further, it includes a comparison of managerial activities and behaviours of both the managers and the kind of roles each of them exhibited in similar and different situations. My understanding of management until now is based on what Peter Drucker once said, ‘Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. This is what organisation is all about, and it is the reason that management is the critical, determining factor. We depend on management for our livelihoods and our ability o contribute and achieve (cited by Mullins, 2007; 413). Nevertheless, to manage, the process comprises of a complex set of activities, policies, procedures, culture, systems and

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

TOURETTE SYNDROME Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

TOURETTE SYNDROME - Essay Example The purpose of the paper is to identify and describe the most typical causes and symptoms of TS, explain how it affects a patient psychologically and describe current treatment methods and medication applied to patients with TS. Speech and language difficulties have also been implicated. Recent research has focused on linguistic aspects of vocal tics, suggesting that such tics do not occur randomly but are located according to the clausal boundaries or at points of low information within sentences. Other research indicates word finding and speech volume regulation difficulties. The incidence of TS appears to be unrelated to race or socioeconomic status, although individuals of Jewish or East European heritage may be more commonly affected. People with these origins may have a greater genetic predisposition toward TS, but it seems more likely that referral bias and other cultural factors affect the expression and tolerance of the symptoms. There is no apparent relation of TS to birth weight, birth order, parental age, medical history of individuals or families, or psychiatric history. TS is understood generically to be a complex tic disorder with a lifelong course. A triad of components is necessary to make the diagnosis; the presence of generalized tics and involuntary utterances that may be obscene or suggestive, onset in childhood, and a course that involves a fluctuation of signs throughout the life span but typically is not severely disabling (Heyman and Chowdhury, 2004). The factors that influence the continuity of tic disorders from childhood to adol escence to adulthood are not well understood. Researchers (Waltz, 2001) assume that there is probably an interaction between maturation of the central nervous system and emotional distress along the maturational course. Environmental factors (e.g., toxins and infections) and genetic factors have been cited as possible etiologic factors in this group of disorders. Also, â€Å"and physical exhaustion will

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

In-school Suspension and Off-school Suspension Essay

In-school Suspension and Off-school Suspension - Essay Example On the other hand, out-of-school suspension (OSS) is an act to keep away the student from school for short-term periods (Saint Helens , 1998). This temporary keeping away of the student is in lieu of investigation that can lead to removal of the student from the school itself, or pending the implementation of some definite measures such as internment through the action of the court, or mental or physical assessment. When the student is suspended, he or she is informed of the acts that constitute the charges, and also the fact of suspension on account of these charges (Saint Helens , 1998). In-school suspension (ISS) has several benefits over out of school suspension. An obvious important benefit is that the student does not have to break off his or her learning by being suspended from the school. The benefits of ISS include (District of Columbia , n.d.): The students who face suspension continue to be taught though in an atmosphere that is restrictive. Everyday they are also provided counseling individually and in a group. They are provided with the opportunities at identifying remedies for their problems (Collins, 1985). The objectives are to pro-actively lead the students to come back to the normal group of students as fast as possible and lastingly too, raise self-worth, heighten the consciousness of oneself, and lessen the troublesome and disorderly conduct. A change in outlook of these students to those who are in authority, increasing their capacity to identify their own strong and positive abilities, enhancing their confidence to own up and be responsible for their actions and improving those areas that they lack or are deficit in (Collins, 1985). They are also encouraged to seek ways to resolve any problems that they may have at home. Attendance is not improved by ISS and it shows a high recidivism rate. However, ISS does not seem to show a decline in disruptive behaviors especially in those students who have behavioral disorders (Yancey, 2001). According to Stage (1997, p.72), "There were no apparent effects of the in-school suspension interventions on classroom disruptive behavior, since there were no systematic differences in disruptive classroom behavior by in-school suspension phase. In fact, the rate of student disruptive behavior remained rather constant across the four in-school suspension interventions, indicating that no type of in-school suspension generalized to classroom behavior any more efficaciously than another" (cited in Yancey, 2001). Pros and Cons of OSS OSS is resorted to mostly in offences that are both trivial and avertable like breaking of the rules of the school which actually does not in any way pose a threat or lead to any violence; at best this is a device to retain a safe school environment (Bruns, Moore, Stephan, Pruitt & Weist, 2005). On the contrary, there are clear indications that OSS, in

Monday, September 23, 2019

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets Essay

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets - Essay Example In addition to the challenges and support systems for SMEs in emerging markets, technology is another focus of attention and how it can be used to enhance the growth of SMEs in emerging markets. This is because the global market today is mainly influenced by constant changes in technology. Further, the development SMEs within developing markets also require R&D as a way of enhancing innovation to ensure that products from emerging markets compete at the same level with products from industrialized nations. This paper also discusses how the information from the literature can be used in future to improve the prospect of entrepreneurs and that of SMEs within emerging markets. SMEs today contribute towards new investments across the globe and thus, the need for various stakeholders to shift their focus in this emerging sector. SMEs normally lack the resources at the disposal of large firms to invest in difficult markets. However, numerous opportunities exist for SMEs in terms of investing in developing markets. For example, South Sudan, a new entrant in the global market presents abundant opportunities for SMEs. In industrialized nations, SMEs have a significant impact on the economy; however, this is not the same in the emerging and underdeveloped countries. This is because SMEs are faced with a number of constraints that include poor infrastructure, collateral requirements that are sometimes considered unrealistic and high administrative costs. In addition, financial constraint is seen as a major hindrance for the development of SMEs in emerging economies1. On another note, where the SME sector is weak, this also impact negatively on job opportunities, innovation and a country’s GDP. In this sense, establishing support structures for SMEs result in various benefits for the emerging markets. This is because supporting SMEs growth

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Settling the Northern Colonies Essay Example for Free

Settling the Northern Colonies Essay The Protestant Reformation Produces Puritanism Martin Luther . He declared that the Bible alone was the source of Gods words. He started the Protestant Reformation. John Calvin He spelled out his doctrine in 1536 called Institutes of the Christian Religion. He formed Calvinism. King Henry VIII formed the Protestant Church. There were a few people who wanted to see the process of taking Catholicism out of England occur more quickly. These people were called Puritans. A tiny group of Puritans, called Separatists, broke away from the Church of England. King James I had them exiled from England. The Pilgrims End Their Pilgrimage at Plymouth Separatists in Holland settled in Plymouth Bay in 1620. Pilgrim leaders drew up and signed the Mayflower Compact. This was a simple agreement to form a crude government and to agree to the majority under the regulations agreed upon. It was signed by 41 males. It was the first attempt at a government in America. In the Pilgrims first winter of 1620-1621, only 44 of the 102 survived. In 1621, there was the first Thanksgiving Day in New England. William Bradford- elected 30 times as governor of the Pilgrims. The Bay Colony Bible Commonwealth Charles I dismissed Parliament in 1629 and sanctioned the anti-Puritan persecutions of the Archbishop William Laud. In 1629, a group of non-Separatist Puritans secured a royal charter to form the Massachusetts Bay Company During the Great Migration of the 1630s, about 70,000 refugees left England for America. Most of them were attracted to the warm and fertile West Indies. John Winthrop- the Bay Colonys first governor. Building the Bay Colony Governor Winthrop of the Bay Colony did not like Democracy. The freemen annually elected the governor and his assistants and a representative assembly called the General Court. Visible Saints was another name for the Puritans. John Cotton- a very devoted Puritan. Trouble in the Bible Commonwealth Anne Hutchinson- challenged the Puritan orthodoxy; was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of her challenges to the Church. Roger Williams- Salem minister who challenged the Church; Separatist; banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Rhode Island Sewer Roger Williams fled to the Rhode Island area in 1636. He then established religious freedom for all kinds of people. New England Spreads Out Hartford and Connecticut founded in 1635. A group of Boston Puritans came to the Hartford area lead by Reverend Thomas Hooker. In 1639, the settlers of the new Connecticut River colony drafted a document known as the Fundamental Orders. New Haven was established in 1638. In 1641, New Hampshire was taken by the Massachusetts Bay. The king took it back and made New Hampshire a royal colony in 1679. Seeds of Colonial Unity and Independence In 1643, 4 colonies banded together to form the New England Confederation Each colony had 2 votes, regardless of size. King Charles II gave rival Connecticut in 1662 a sea-to-sea charter grant, which legalized the squatter settlements. In 1663, the outcasts in Rhode Island received a new charter, which gave kingly sanction to the most religiously tolerant government. In 1684, the Massachusetts Bay Colonys charter wastaken away by London authorities. Andros Promotes the First American Revolution In 1686, the Dominion of New England was created by royal authority. In 1688 it was expanded to New York and East and West Jersey. Sir Edmund Andros He established headquarters in Puritanical Boston. Andros stopped the town meetings In 1688-1689, the people of old England engineered the Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution. They dethroned Catholic James II and enthroned the Protestant rulers of the Netherlands, the Dutch-born William III and his English wife, Mary, daughter of James II. In 1691, Massachusetts was made a royal colony. There was unrest in New York and Maryland from 1689-1691. Old Netherlands at New Netherland Late in the 16th Century, the Netherlands fought for and won its independence from Catholic Spain with the help of England. In the 17th Century, the Dutch (the Netherlands) became a power. Golden Age. It fought 3 great Anglo-Dutch naval battles. The Dutch Republic became a leading colonial power, with by far its greatest activity in the East Indies. The Dutch East India Company was nearly a state within a state and at one time supported an army of 10,000 men and a fleet of 190 ships, 40 of them men-of-war. This company hired an English explorer, Henry Hudson, to seek great riches. He sailed into the Delaware Bay and New York Bay in 1609 and then ascended the Hudson River. He filed a Dutch claim to a wooded and watered area. The Dutch West India Company was less powerful than the Dutch East India Company, and was based in the Caribbean. It was more interested in raiding than trading. In 1628, in raided a fleet of Spanish treasure ships and stole $15 million. The company established outposts in Africa and Brazil. In 1623-1624, the Dutch West India Company established New Netherland in the Hudson River area. It was made for its quick-profit fur trade. The company also purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for worthless trinkets. The island encompassed 22,000 acres. New Amsterdam, later New York City, was a company town. The Quakers were savagely abused. Dutch Residues in New York In 1664, the Dutch were forced to surrender their territory (New Netherland) to the English when a strong English squadron appeared off the coast of New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam was named New York, after the Duke of York. Penns Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania A group of dissenters, commonly known as Quakers, arose in England in the mid-1600s. Officially, they were known as the Religious Society of Friends. Quakers were especially offensive to the authorities, both religious and civil. They refused to support the Church of England with taxes. William Penn was attracted to the Quaker faith in 1660. In 1681, he managed to secure from King Charles II an immense grant of fertile land, in consideration of a monetary debt owed to his deceased father by the crown. The king called the area Pennsylvania. The Middle Way in the Middle Colonies The middle colonies New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, were known as the bread colonies because of their heavy exports of grain. These colonies were more ethnically mixed than any of the other colonies. The people were given more religious tolerance than in any other colonies. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1706. He moved to Philadelphia at the age of 17.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Data Mining Techniques in Airline Industry

Data Mining Techniques in Airline Industry Purpose and Scope All around the world, the airline industry could be described in few words, which is intensely competitive and dynamic. The airline industry generates billions of dollars every year but still has a cumulative profit margin of less than 1%1. Many Airlines are trying to recover from deep debt. The reasons for these are multifold- fuel prices, high cyclicality and seasonality, fierce competition, high fixed costs and many other issues related to security and passengers safety. To ensure for the best economic outcome, Airline companies are trying with their most creative asset data. Data used in conjunction with data mining techniques allows comprehensive intelligent management and decision-making system. Achieving these benefits in a timely and intelligent manner may help in resulting lower operating costs, better customer service, market competitiveness, increased profit margin and shareholder value gain. This purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applications of data mining techniques on multiple aspects of airline business. For example, to predict the number of domestic and international airline passengers from a specific city/airport, to dynamically price the tickets depending on seasonality and demand, to explore the frequent flyer database to prepare for CRM implementation, to makes the operational decisions about catering, personnel, and gate traffic flow, to assist the security agencies for secure and safe flights for the passenger specially after 9/11 incident. Predict the Number of Passenger by applying Data Mining Technique Forecasting is critical to any business for planning and revenue management, especially in the Airline industry, where a lot of planning is required to buy/lease new aircrafts, to hire crew members, to find the new slots in busy airports and to get the approvals from many aviation authorities. In the case of Air travel, lot of seasonality and cyclicality involved. Passengers are more likely to fly to some destinations based on the time of the year. Business travelers are likely to travel weekdays than weekends. Early morning and evening flights are desired by business travelers who want to accomplish a days work at their destination and return the same day. To forecast the number of passenger, artificial neural network (ANN) can be used. The purpose of a neural network is to learn to recognize patterns in a given data. Once the neural network has been trained on samples of the given data, it can make predictions by detecting similar patterns in future data. The growth factors which might influence the air travel demand depend on several things. Mauro Calvano2 in his study of transport Canada aviation forecast 2002-2016 considered 12 major socio-economic factors as follows: GDP Personal Disposable income Adult Populations US economic Outlook Airline Yield Fleet/route structure/Average Aircraft Size Passenger Load factors Labor cost and productivity Fuel cost/Fuel efficiency Airline cost other than Fuel and Labor Passenger Traffic Allocation Assumptions New technology Factors 1 to 5 are related demand side of the forecast Factors 6 to 10 are related to operations and supply side Factors 10 and 11 represent the structural changes This historical data is called the estimation set. A fraction of the overall available data is reserved for validating the accuracy of the developed forecast model. This reserved data set is called the forecasting set because no information contained in it is used in any form during the development of the forecast model. The data in the forecasting set are used for testing the true extrapolative properties of the developed forecast model. The estimation set is further divided into a training set and a testing set. Information in the training set is used directly for the determination of the forecast model, whereas information in the testing set is used indirectly for the same purpose. Figure1: Forecasting Process Model For a given ANN architecture and a training set, the basic mechanism behind most supervised learning rules is the updating of the weights and the bias terms, until the mean squared error (MSE) between the output predicted by the network and the desired output (the target) is less than a pre-specified tolerance. Neural networks are can be represented as layers of functional nodes. The most general form of a neural network model used in forecasting can be written as: Y = F [H1 (x), H2 (x), à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦. , Hn (x)]+ u Where, Y is a dependent or output variable, X is a set of input/ influencing variables, F Hs are network functions, and u is a model error. This input layer is connected to a hidden layer. Hs are the hidden layer nodes and represents different nonlinear functions. Each node in a layer receives its input from the preceding layer through link which has weights assigned, which get adjusted using an appropriate learning algorithm and the information contained in the training set. Figure2: ANN Architecture Abdullah Omer BaFail3 did the study to forecast the number of airline passenger in Saudi Arabia. He selected the most influencing factors to forecast the number of domestic passengers in the different cities of Saudi Arabia. For Dhahran he selected factors like: Oil gross domestic product for last 6 years, private non-oil gross domestic product, Import of goods and services for last 10 years, and population size for last 2 years. The domestic and international actual and forecasted number of passengers for the city of Dhahran for the years 1993 through 1998 is shown below. Forecasts underestimated the actual travel. The Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for domestic travel is about 10%, while for international travel is about 3%. Figure3: Forecasting results from Abdullah Omer BaFail3 The take away from the Abdullah Omer BaFail3 for me is that the efficient forecasting model can be invented using ANN if we using the right influencing indicators. In this study some indicators which influence are oil gross domestic product and per capita income in the domestic and international sectors. In view of the fluctuating nature of the passenger usage of airline services in Saudi Arabia, certain suggestions were made. Most of these recommendations were in order to improve the flexibility of the system to the fluctuations in demand and supply. Hub and spike model was also suggested as solutions in certain sectors to increase the flexibility in adjusting their capacity allocations across markets as new information about demand conditions become available. Application of Data Mining technique to predict the Airline Passengers No-show Rates Airlines overbook the flights based on the expectation that some percentage of booked passengers will not show for each flight. Accurate forecasts of the expected number of no-shows for each flight can increase airline revenue by reducing the number of perishable seats (empty seats that might otherwise have been sold) and the number of involuntary denied boardings at the departure gate. Typically, the simplest way is to go for average no-show rates of historically similar flights, without the use of passenger-specific information. Lawernce, Hong, Cherrier4 in their research paper predicted the no-show rates using specific information on the individual passengers booked on each flight. The Airlines offer multiple fares in different booking class. The number of seats allocated to each booking class is driven by demand for each class, such that revenue is maximized. For example, few seats can be kept on hold for the last-minute travelers with high fares and number of seats sold in lower-fare classes earlier in the booking process. Terms and conditions of cancellation and no-show also vary in each class. The no-shows results in lost revenue if the flight departs with empty seats that might otherwise have been sold. Near accurate forecasts of the expected number of no-shows for each flight are very much desirable because the under-prediction of no-shows leads to loss of potential revenue from empty seats, while over-prediction can produce a significant cost penalty associated with denied boardings at the departure gate and also create customer dissatisfaction. In the simplest model, the overbooking limit is taken as the capacity plus the estimated number of no-shows. Bookings are offered up to this level. No-shows numbers are predicted using time-series methods such as taking the seasonally weighted moving average of no-shows for previous instances of the same flight. Figure4: No-show trend over days to departure Source: Lawernce, Hong, Cherrier4 The simple model does not take account of specific characteristics of the passengers. Lawernce, Hong, Cherrier4 in his study used classification method, similarly Kalka and Weber5 at Lufthansa used induction trees to compute passenger-level no-show probabilities, and compared their accuracy with conventional, historical-based methods. I tried to summarize Lawernce, Hong, Cherrier4 approach and results briefly below. Whenever a ticket is booked the Passenger Name Records (PNRs) is generated and all the passenger information is recorded. The PNR data includes, for each passenger, specifics of all flights in the itinerary, the booking class, and passenger specific information such as frequent-flier membership, ticketing status, and the agent or channel through which the booking originated. Each PNR is also specified whether the passenger was a no-show for the specified flight. In the simplest model the mean no-show rate over a group of similar historical flights is computed. The mean in turn used to predict the number of no-shows over all booking classes. The passenger-level model given by can be implemented using any classification method capable of generating the normalized probabilities. The PNR records are partitioned into segments, and separate predictive models are developed for each segment. In the passenger-level modeling we characterize each using the PNR details. Let Xi; i = 1à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦..I denote I features associated with each passenger. Combining all features yields the feature vector X = [X1à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Xi ] Each passenger, n = 1à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦.N, booked on flight m is represented by the vector of feature values xmn = [xmn, 1à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ xmn, ià ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦Ãƒ ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦.. xmn, I ] We know the predicted no-show rate from the historical model; it is assumed the passenger inherits the no-show rate. The passenger level predictive model is then stated as follows: given a set of class labels cmn a set of feature vectors xmn and a cabin level historical prediction  µmhist predict the output class of passenger n on flight m: P(C = cmn |  µmhist , X= xmn ) We are specifically interested in the no-show probability, cmn = NS, and write this probability in the simplified form P(NS |  µmhist , xmn ) The number of no-shows in the cabin is estimated as à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ P(NS |  µmhist , xmn ) The summing of probabilities for each passenger in the cabin, gives no-show rate for the cabin. An analogous approach can also be used to predict no-show rates at the fare-class level. Lawernce, Hong, Cherrier4 compare results computed using the historical, passenger-level, and cabin-level models. The models were built using approximately 880,000 PNRs booked on 10,931 flights, and evaluated against 374,900 PNRs booked on 4088 flights. The figure shows a conventional lift curve computed using the three different implementations of the passenger-level model. Figure 5: Gain Charts Source: Lawernce, Hong, Cherrier4 Each point on the lift curve shows the fraction of actual no-shows observed in a sample of PNRs selected in order of decreasing no-show probability. The diagonal line shows the baseline case in which it is assumed that the probabilities are drawn from a random distribution. The three implementations of the passenger-level model identify approximately 52% of the actual no-shows in the first 10% of the sorted PNRs. This is one of the way the Airlines can incorporate data mining models incorporating specific information on individual passengers can produce more accurate predictions of no-show rates than conventional, historical based, statistical methods. Application of Data Mining technique to Strategies Customer Relationship Management In the current time most of the industries using frequency marketing programs as a strategy for retaining customer loyalty in the form of points, miles, dollars, beans and so on. Airlines are a big fan of this Kingfishers Kingmiles, Jet Airways Jet Privilege, American Airlines AAdvantage, Japan Airlines Mileage Bank, KrisFlyer Miles etc. they all seemed to have carved their own identities. Frequent Flyer Program presents an invaluable opportunity to gather customer information. It helps to understand the behavioral patterns, unveil new opportunities, customer acquisition and retention opportunities. This helps Airlines to identify the most valuable and the appropriate strategies to use in developing one-to-one relationships with these customers. The objective of data mining application over the frequent flyer customer data could be many, but ideally it is as follows: Customer segmentation Customer satisfaction analysis Customer activity analysis Customer retention analysis Some of the examples in each category are: Classify the customers into groups based on sectors most frequently flown, class, period of year, time of the day, purpose of the trip. Which types of customers are more valuable? Do most valuable customers receive the value for money? What are the attributes and characteristics of the most valuable customer segments? What type of campaign is appropriate for best use of resources? What are the opportunities to up-selling and cross-selling, for example hotel booking, upgrade to next class, credit card, etc. Design packages or grouping of services Customer acquisition. Yoon6 designed a database knowledge discovery process consisting of five steps: selecting application domain, target data selection, pre-processing data, extracting knowledge, and interpretation and evaluation. This study refers to the Yoon process to deal with three mining phases, including the pre-process, data-mining, and interpretation phases for airlines, as illustrated in figure below. Figure 6: database knowledge discovery process Source: Yoon6 Some straightforward solution can be implemented that can also be scaled-up in future like K-means, Kohonen self-organizing networks and classification trees. In the case of K-means algorithm, it is applied on customer data, assigning each to the closest existing cluster center. The K- means model is run with different cluster number until K-means clusters are well separated. In the case of classification trees (C5.0), we derive a simple rule set to uniquely classify the complete database. Again, we have to generate the attributes, resulting from the sequence of flight segments. The accuracy of the forecast for each segment is provided by balancing the training set according to equally sized clusters. We regulate the number of subsequent rules, while determining a minimal numbers of records given within each subgroup. Maalouf and Mansour7 did the study based on 1,322,409 customer activities transactions and 79,782 passengers for a period of 6 years. They prepared Data based on Z-Score Normalization and ran the multiple queries and transformed the data to create the clustering input records. They used K-means and O-Cluster algorithms. The result generated by clustering provides customer segmentation with respect to important dimensions of customers needs and value. The table below is the result is a summary of the profile produced by k-means clustering that includes: revenue mileage, number of services used, and customer membership period. Figure 7: Clustering result on Airline Customer Data Source: Maalouf and Mansour7 The results generated by k-means clustering are used as a basis for the association rules algorithm. Two different scenarios have been applied. The first scenario is based on Financial, Flight, and Hotel activities with 1,896 records. The second scenario is based on the flight activities especially the sectors, with 1,867 records. Figure 8: Association rules for best customer activities Source: Maalouf and Mansour7 Some of the take way from Meatloaf and Mansour7 study. Clustering using k-means algorithm generated 9 different clusters with specific profile for each one. From the cluster analysis it can be found which are the best customer clusters (higher mileage per passenger) than other clusters. Need a retention strategy for these clusters. Cross Selling strategies can be formulated between the clusters (for example between: 15 and 11; 13 and 17 because they are close in services value. The cluster analysis provides an opportunity for the airline to produce more revenue from a customer. For example, the airline could apply an up-selling strategy by selling a higher fare seat depending on the clusters. From the cluster analysis Airline may adopt an enhanced strategy for customers in clusters in order to increase services usage and revenue mileage per passenger. Plan for marketing campaign or special offers by analysis through association rules, for example, the customers using the Flight and Financial services never use the Hotel Services and the customers using the Flight and Hotel services never use the Financial Services. By analyzing the services used in different clusters, Airline can characterize services integration. It enables the airline to serve a customer the way the customer wants to be served. Application of Data Mining Application technique to understand the Impacts of Severe Weather Severe weather has major impacts on the air traffic and flight delays. Appropriate proactive strategies for different severe-weather days may result in improvement of delays and cancellations. Thus, understanding en-route weather impacts on flight performance is an important step for improving flight performance. Zohreh and Jianping8 in their study proposed a framework for data mining approach to analysis of weather impacts on Airspace system performance. This approach consists of three phases: data preparation, feature extraction, and data mining. The data preparation phase includes the usual process of selection of data sources, data integration, and data formatting. Figure 9: Framework proposed by Zohreh and Jianping8 He used three data sources: Airline Service Quality Performance (ASQP), Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS), and National Convective Weather Forecast (NCWF) supplied by National Center for Atmospheric Research. He used NCWF data from April through September 2000 to represent the severe weather season. These data-sets included the scheduled and actual departure and arrival times of each flight of ten reporting airlines, tail number, wheels off/on times, taxi times, cancellation and diversion information, planned departure and arrival times, actual departure and arrival times, planned flight routes, actual flight routes, and cancellations, flight frequencies between two airports, intended flight routes between two airports, flight delays, flight cancellations, and flight diversions. The image segmentation phase resulted in a set of severe-weather regions. Then for each of these regions, a set of weather features and a set of air traffic features are extracted. A day is described by a set of severe-weather regions, each having a number of weather and traffic features. As a result of this study it was found that there is strong correlation of blocked flights, #of bad weather regions, bad weather airports, blocked distance, bad weather longitude, by pass distance, bad weather latitude, # of bad weather pixels with flight performance. Similarly the clustering algorithms (like K-means) can be applied. The expectation is that the same clusters have similar weather impacts on flight performance. Zohreh and Jianping8 generated clusters for the entire airspace It was found that a cluster with worse weather almost always had bad performance. The clusters with large percentage of blocked flights, bypass distance, and blocked distance had a worse performance. These results were promising and showed that days in a cluster have similar weather impacts on flight performance Other data mining approach which can be applied is Classifications. Application of Classification can help us discover the patterns/rules that have significant impact on the flight performance. Discovered rules may be used to predict if a day is a good or a bad performance day based on its weather. For example Rule for Good: if %BlockedFlights and BypassDistance then Good (n, prob) There can be different ways where we can apply data mining approach to analysis of weather impact on airline performance. It seems to be that results obtained from clustering and classifications were very meaningful for airline and passengers to plan ahead. Application of Data Mining techniques to ensure safety and security of Airlines passenger The reaction of the terrorist attack on 26/9 and 11/9 resultant in increase Security at airports: It ends up allowing only ticketed passengers past the security gates, screen carry-on luggage more carefully for possible weapons. The question is whether these steps could have avoided the attacks, the people involved in the attack had legitimate tickets, and carrying box cutters and razor blades (like in any other normal person would do). The uncommon was the combination of their characteristics, like none were U.S. citizens, all had lived in the U.S. for some period of time, all had connections to a particular foreign country, all had purchased one-way tickets at the gate with cash. With the amount of data available about the passenger during ticketing, the can be reviewed to characterize relevant available passenger information. Given a passengers name, address, and a contact phone number, various data bases (public or private) can identify the social security number (SSN), from which much information will be readily available (credit history, police record, education, employment, age, gender, etc.). Since there is large number of characteristics available on both individual passengers, it will be important to identifying signals within the natural variability or noise. If predicted wrong, this may lead to either falsely detaining an innocent passenger or failing to detain a plane that carries a terrorist. The airlines already collect much data on various flights. When the data come in the form of multiple characteristics on a single item, exploratory tools for multivariate data can be applied, such as classification, regression trees, multivariate adaptive regression splines/trees. The security of the air transportation can be improved substantially through modern, intelligent use of pattern recognition techniques applied to large linked databases. Similarly Data mining techniques can be used for the Safety of the passenger. An air safety office plays a key role in ensuring that an aviation organization operates in a safe manner. Currently, Aviation Safety offices collect and analyze the incident reports by a combination of manual and automated methods.. Data analysis is done by safety officers who are very familiar with the domain. With Data mining one can find interesting and useful information hidden in the data that might not be found by simply tracking and querying the data, or even by using more sophisticated query and reporting tools. In a study done by Zohreh Nazeri, Eric Bloedorn, Paul Ostwald10 it was found that finding associations and distribution patterns in the data, bring important inside. The other finding is Linking the incident reports to other sources of safety related data, such as aircraft maintenance and weather data, could help finding better causal relationships. SumMRry Business Intelligence through efficient and appropriate Data mining application can be very useful in the Airline industry. The Appropriate action plans from the data mining analysis can result in improved customer service, help generating considerable financial lift and set the future strategy.

Friday, September 20, 2019

Comparative Study Of The Electoral Systems Politics Essay

Comparative Study Of The Electoral Systems Politics Essay A democracy cannot exist without elections which represent the will of the people, and elections cannot function without an electoral system that sets fair and transparent rules that govern the structures of elections. The study of electoral systems is a field of research that aims at analyzing the different electoral systems used in the world and how they put democracy into practice by making the different voters of the country represented in the parliament. A voting system can simply be defined as the procedures by which we cast votes and elect our public officials,  [1]  or that part of the electoral law and regulations which determine how parties and candidates are elected to a body as representative.  [2]  However, the importance of the electoral system lies in its consequences on the political scene of the country especially when choosing one type of electoral system over another, because electoral systems are, according to Sartori, the most speci ¬Ã‚ c manipulative instrument of politics.  [3]   In general there are twelve electoral systems that fall under three categories: majority, proportional representation and mixed systems. First, the voting systems that fall under the majority system are: first past the post, block vote, party block vote, alternative vote, and the two round systems. Second, under the proportional representation lie two systems: list proportional representation (List PR) and single transferable vote (STV). Third, the mixed system includes two systems: mixed member proportional and parallel systems. Finally, three other voting systems cannot be classified into one of the three systems mentioned above, there are: single non-transferable vote (SNTV), limited vote and borda count.  [4]  The main concern [of electoral systems] is [the] balance between decisiveness of government and representation of various minority views.  [5]  And sometimes, if not always, governments have to choose either one of these because of the difficulty of encompassing bot h those strong government and full representation in one type of electoral system. Regarding my thesis the two electoral systems that are important for my study are: list PR which is used in both Morocco and Algeria and SNTV which is used in Jordan. According to Samuel Huntington, the world has experienced three waves of democracy, the first one on the eve of the twentieth century until 1926; the second one emerged with the end of World War II until 1962 and the third one started in 1974.  [6]  The region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) seems to be one of the few areas of the world where democratic waves did not arrive, or to be more accurate did not flourish, as there are few countries who are ranked by the Democracy Index of the Economist as either hybrid systems and many as authoritarian regimes. In the MENA region, few countries hold free and fair elections, among them are Morocco where proportional representation is used to elect the members of the parliament, Jordan, where the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system is used and Algeria where proportional representation is used in parliamentary elections. However, in all these three countries the elections were characterized by low turnouts, invalid votes and boycott in addition to producing fragmented governments. The choice of those three MENA countries has to do with their similarities in terms of geography, culture, religion, language and their relative free and fair elections, according to international observers. On top of that, Having two kingdoms and one republic makes my comparison more interesting with Morocco at the focal point sharing similarity with Jordan in terms of the regime type and with Algeria in terms of the voting system. The objective of my thesis is to test two hypotheses: a) electoral systems in the MENA region are manipulated to produce fragmented governments and b) the geographical concentration of the vote for pro-regime parties in rural areas in contrast to the opposition base in urban areas. My thesis will compare the components of the electoral systems of the three countries and come up with patterns regarding the political party structure, the electoral reforms requested by the political parties and the elections results. Literature Review According to Andreas Schedler in his article The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections, electoral law can be used to prevent an eventual loss of votes from translating into a loss of power.  [7]  The major aim of the manipulation of the electoral system is the containment of its uncertain outcomes, therefore fair and free elections are allowed as long as the results can be predicted or controlled. In his book Rethinking Arab democratization: Elections without Democracy, Larbi Sadiki invented the terms electoral fetishism  [8]  and routinization  [9]  to describe the elections in the Middle East because their outcomes do not translate into major changes in society. However, even the manipulation of the voting system is not enough to guarantee an unsurprising outcome from the ballots as exemplified by the elections of 1991 in Algeria and 1989 in Jordan. The two cases of Algeria and Jordan show the autonomy of institutions exemplified by the electoral system that produ ces results that can either empower or weaken the candidates. So if the election results cannot be controlled they can at least be maneuvered to prevent a landslide victory of the opposition. Refraining from cancelling the result of elections is explained by the need of the regimes to obtain foreign aid and avoid international criticism. According to the author electoralism, being the creation of regimes, has become another state resource that the ruling elites use for legitimation purposes within and without.  [10]  The term electoralism refers here only to one of the three requirement of democracy; therefore having election is not enough for democracy to emerge. Therefore, the election`s main goal is to legitimate the regime and provide a way for the opposition to participate in the political life of the country but of course after guaranteeing its fragmentation. Moreover, According to Lise storm, a democracy is based on three core elements: holding free and fair elections, re specting civil liberties and strengthening the power of the elected government to govern. The aim of my study deals with the first core of the democratic principles, the free and fair elections which are instituted by the electoral law. Lise Storm stated that a country that provides for one of the three principles can still be deemed to be a democratic country, however if none of the principles is available then the country is authoritarian. Concerning the literature on the comparison of electoral systems in MENA, Ellen Lust-Okar and Amaney Ahmad Jamal analyzed the electoral systems in MENA, in their article Rulers and Rules: Reassessing the Influence of Regime Type on Electoral Law Formation. by differentiating between monarchies that prefer PR system in order to balance the strength of parties and republics that opted for plurality system in order to prevent the opposition from being elected. I will add the regime typology and election mode to make a pattern on the MENA that monarchies prefer proportional system while republics passed laws to enable the pro-regime parties to win a landslide victory. The article`s findings do not explain the use of PR in Morocco with more laws being passed to raise the threshold that will hinder small parties or the Jordanian change from a proportional system of plurality (bloc vote) to SNTV, which means one man one vote, which is supposed to reduce gerrymandering but did not. Many authors used the new institutionalism framework to analyze electoral systems. The theory is advanced by J. G. March and J. P. Olsen in their article The New Institutionalism: Organized Factors in Political Life. The theory is used in the field social science such as sociology and political science to account for the crucial rules of institutions in influencing the behavior of individuals based on norms, prohibitions or simply because an alternative does not exist. The basic aim of the theory is to prove that the organization of political life makes a difference,  [11]  which entails that those institutions are endogenous entities that benefit from an autonomy to exert its influence on individuals either by empowering them or confining their power. The institutions can be reinforced by third parties to exert actions that protect their interest without being in power. Andreas Shedler applied the theory of new institutionalism on the authoritarian regimes so that instead of ruling with coercive and undemocratic means; authoritarian rulers can use institutions to survive. The new institutionalism can be observed in four major ways: imperatives, landscape, containment, ambivalence. Regarding my study I will focus on the containment area regarding the electoral system and political parties. According to Shedler the electoral system can be manipulated by disempowerment or excluding sensitive areas from the hands of the elected officials; supply restriction which limits the choice available to the voter by banning, subverting or fragmenting certain parties; demand restriction by restricting the opposition access to the media; suffrage restriction by controlling the voting age ; preference distortion through the use of both violence such as intimidation and money such as vote buying; and vote distortion and rigging under the supervision of biased institu tions.  [12]  Regarding the legislative the manipulation includes disempowerment, agent control by directly appointing members of legislature and fragmentation.  [13]   My study will include the categorization made by the author and apply them to the three countries. The theory of new institutionalism will be useful to analyzing the electoral system in all the three countries and how the system influences the behavior of both the voters and candidates. The electoral system and constitution are institutions that have an immense influence on individuals. Who decides the winner from the loser in elections is not the regime nor the elections but rather the electoral system which has autonomy but it still can be manipulated. In the case of Morocco, George Joffe, in his article Moroccos Reform Process: Wider Implications, argued that the aims of the political reforms introduced by the regime were not due to external pressure or the triumph of the opposition to insert them, but rather to ensure the survival of the dynastic rule of the ruling family. As a result, the multiparty political system was adopted since the first constitution of 1962 to induce the political fragmentation in the country culminating in the hegemony of the palace over the political process of the country. Another interesting view of the Moroccan electoral system is by Andrew Barwig who argued, in his article How Electoral Rules Matter: Voter Turnout in Moroccos 2007 Parliamentary Elections, that the lower voter turnout in the election of 2007 was not only due to sociological factors but also to the electoral system as it produced an artificial and highly fragmented political landscape regardless of who wins the largest share of the na tional vote.  [14]  He pointed also to the aim of a multiparty system for the regime to divide and rule by preventing the emergence of a strong opposition, in addition to the role of the Ministry of Interior in controlling the electoral process since 1958 instead of assigning it to an independent commission. Third, John Grumm, the author of the article Theories of Electoral Systems, stated that the electoral system used in Morocco prevents a landslide victory of any party. The author indentified that the combination of largest remainder formula and gerrymandering induced a fragmented government and a situation whereby parties ended up with fewer seats compared to their amassed votes especially the major parties, In the case of Jordan, Glenn E. Robinson stated, in his article Can Islamists Be Democrats? The Case of Jordan, that the fear of the opposition, mainly the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, had motivated the king to have an electoral system that favors tribal affiliation rather than partisan one. Moreover, the same scholar in another article Defensive Democratization in Jordan, affirmed that the new electoral system adopted in 1993 benefited the tribal areas, mainly Eastern and Southern Jordan at the expense of urban areas, mainly the region of Amman-Zarqa which is Palestinian-dominanted. The authors conclusion is that electoral systems can be managed and controlled to prevent undesirable outcomes. In the case of Algeria, Ayln Guney and Aslihan Celenk, in their article The European Unions Democracy Promotion Policies in Algeria: Success or Failure?, stated that the Algerian regime passed a new electoral system before the election of 1991 by increasing the number of seats and districts in rural areas. The basic aim of the changes was to allow the pro-regime party, FLN, to win the elections but ironically the electoral system benefited the Islamist party of FIS instead. Mohand Salah Tahi, in his article Algerias legislative and local elections: Democracy denied (1997), indentified the Algerian military as the institution in control of the political life exemplified by the creation of parties such as RND and introducing changes to the constitution and electoral system that would not challenge its authority. For instance, to pass an amendment to the constitution the opposition needs the vote of three quarters of the upper house, in which one third directly appointed by the preside nt. These laws exemplify the fear of the regime from creating the same outcome of 1991, therefore passing some amendments both to the electoral system and the constitution allowed the regime to be in a position to control and manage the outcomes of elections without the need to annul them. What emerges from the literature review concerns the criteria that define the fairness and freedom of election, having international observers and abiding by the electoral law make is it apparent that the elections are transparent but what if the issues that undermine the fairness of the elections relate to the electoral system itself. The literature reviewed above shows that Jordan and Algeria introduced two electoral systems in the early 1990s believing that they would be suitable for making the pro- regime party the obvious winner in the case of Algeria and tribal candidates in the case of Jordan. However, the outcome of the elections persuaded the two countries to adopt different electoral system: PR in Algeria and SNTV in Jordan. Regarding the case of Morocco the shift from Plurality into PR in 1997 did not produce surprising results therefore the electoral system was kept. So the question here is why did three countries diverge in terms of the electoral system used, especially regarding Jordan and Morocco? There is huge body of literature written about electoral systems arguing about the list PR as the most propositional system in terms of allowing smaller parties to be represented in the parliament, the high turnout due to the absence of the wasted vote phenomena in contrast to the plurality system, more representation for women and a higher proportionality between seats and votes. However, from the elections results in both Morocco and Algeria the PR did not produce the same results expected of the system exemplified by the low turnout, high invalid votes, a high threshold that prevents small parties from gaining seats in the parliament while the negative outcome of PR which is a fragmented government seems to be present in both cases. In the case of Jordan, the resentment of the SNTV system pushed many parties to ask for a reform debate with Islamic Front Action (IFA), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, asking for PR system and other parties asking for a mixed system. My thesis will analyse the abnormalities of the three systems that generated much discussion about the ineffectiveness of the voting system and the need to reform it. According to Andrew Reynolds , Ben Reilly and Andrew Ellis, the electoral system is the easiest political institution to be manipulated and the choice of the electoral system determines the winners. However, the usual distinction between Plurality and Proportional systems as the former encourages two party systems while the other induces multi-parties is not always accurate as many examples contradict these findings such as Spain, Namibia, South Africa and India.  [15]  This has to do with many variables besides the electoral system used such as the socio-political context of the country. Therefore, The electoral system cannot be seen in isolation of other political institutions such as the constitution, the political parties among other socio political variables, thus a PR system can have two different outcomes in two countries .The case of the three countries of Algeria, Morocco and Jordan have quasi-similar political context so the outcome of particular voting system will have the same effect based on the elections results in 2003 and 2007. Theoretical Framework According to   Gallagher and Mitchell: Government is representative government, in which the people do not govern themselves directly but rather delegate the task of political decision-making to a smaller set of public officials. In democratic societies these representatives are elected.  [16]  In order to understand how governments are elected, we need to understand the system that allows them to be elected which is the voting system: The set of procedures that determine how people are elected to office. These procedures include how the ballot is structured, how people cast their votes, how those votes are counted, and how the winners are decided.  [17]  The electoral system does not only determine how people are elected to the office but also serves as a link between the voter`s preferences and the policies of the government; at least, theoretically speaking, the majority of the voters will have their opinion respected in terms of the parties and candidate they elected.  [18]   Based on these two quotations, the electoral systems are accurate examples to assess democracy, because electoral systems can tell more about the country. Reynolds, Reilly and Ellis divided the different aspects represented by electoral systems into four categories: geographic representation, which means that the different regions of the country are represented in the parliament; ideological representation, which implies that all the different political doctrines are represented in the parliament and at least the minor, ones, can compete in the elections; party-political situation which denotes that power is not in the hand of one party while excluding other parties from participating in the elections;  [19]  and descriptive representation, which entails that its different ethnic, linguistic, religious and gender components are represented; or, as Reynolds, Reilly and Ellis put it, serves as the mirror of the nation.  [20]  My thesis will include those four categories to anal yze electoral systems of the three countries based on the parliamentary elections held after 2000. On top of that, I will also use the theory of new institutionalism with the framework of Andreas Schedler which will be useful in identifying the reasons behind choosing a particular type of electoral system and targeting the areas that were manipulated. Aims of the Study My aim is to explain that it is possible to have free and fair elections but that does not mean that the country is democratic as the elections are based on the choice of the electoral system that produces fragmented government through the use of such policies as rising the threshold, gerrymandering and requiring difficult measures to pass an amendment to the electoral law. My thesis will analyze the electoral systems in MENA region by identifying three case studies: Morocco, Jordan and Algeria. My aim is to study the development of electoral systems in those three countries; the reason behind choosing those three countries has to do with their similarities. All of those countries are newly-formed democracies that gained their independence or emerged as a state in the second half of the twentieth century: Jordan in 1946, Morocco in 1956 and Algeria in 1962. All those three countries share geographic, linguistics and religious similarities. According to the findings of Freedom Houses Freedom in the World 2009 Survey, the only free country in the MENA is Israel, while only 6 countries are qualified as partly free: Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Lebanon and Yemen and the rest of the MENA is classified as not free. Another index that ranks countries in terms of their democracy is the Economist Index of Democracy which ranked Jordan, Morocco and Algeria a s authoritarian regimes. Based on these indexes, I chose two monarchies: Morocco and Jordan and adding one republic: Algeria. On top of that, while Morocco and Jordan share the same political regime, Morocco and Jordan share the same voting system. I want to prove that the lack of democracy in MENA is not due to cultural, religious or colonial history but rather to the manipulation of the electoral system to prevent a certain group from gaining majority, this manipulation is driven by the fear from the rise of the opposition such as the leftist and Islamist parties. My hypothesis is that the lack of democracy is not only due to the falsification of the election results but also by the manipulation of electoral systems. Therefore, even if the elections are organized in a free and fair environment with the presence of international observers, the electoral system used will prevent a group from attaining a majority. This hypothesis will back up my second hypothesis regarding the concentration of the pro-regime parties-vote in rural areas. The second aim of my thesis is to find the rationale behind the selection of a particular election mode by those three countries and the reasons behind its change, in addition to analyzing the di fferent amendments passed to the electoral system and reforms that are pressed for? Finally, my thesis will compare between the three countries to find if there are similarities in terms laws that fragment or exclude the opposition, the geographical concentration of the vote, the election results in terms of winners and losers, the turnout, the categorization of parties. The electoral system used in both Morocco and Algeria is PR (Proportional representation) while the SNTV is used in Jordan. The chart below identifies the different components of the electoral system of each country: Morocco Jordan Algeria Electoral System Plurality PR in 1997 Block Vote inherited from Britain SNTV in 1993 by a royal decree Absolute Majority Run-off in 1999 PR in 1997 Threshold 2% in 2002 6% in 2007 N/A 7% in 1997 5% in 2007 Quotas 10% women: 30 seats 6 seats for women, 9 for Christians, and 3 for the Circassian and Chechen minorities. Turnout (Latest Legislative Election) 2007 election 37% 2007 election 54% -80% in rural areas and 28% in some constituencies in the capital 2007 election 35% Invalid vote and blank vote 2007 election 19% 2007 election 15% Parliamentary System Bicameral: -The Chamber of Counselors: 270 seats. -The Chamber of Representatives: 325 seats. Bicameral: -The Assembly of Senators: 55 seats -The Chamber of Deputies: 80 seats Bicameral: -The Council of the nation: 144 members, 96 members elected by communal councils and 48 members appointed by the president. -The National Peoples Assembly: 380 seats. Political System Monarchy Monarchy Republic System of Counting the Votes Largest Remainder N/A Hare Formula Electoral Districts 2007: 95 2007: 45 districts -3 closed tribal electoral districts. 2010: 45 districts divided into 108 sub-districts 1997: 56 electoral districts : 48 and 8 for the Algerian Diaspora District magnitude Between 1 and 5 1 Ballot structure Nominal/categorical Nominal/categorical Reforms of the electoral law -2009: law number 9: from 110 to 120 Addition of sub-districts Constitution -1962 -1970 -1972 -1980: article 21, 43 and 95 -1992: increasing the seats of the parliament from 306 to 333 -1996: bicameral systems, 162 seats for the upper house indirectly elected, 81 by chambers of commerce and 27 by trade unions The 325 for the lower house directly elected. -1952 -1963: single party system -1976: socialism -1986: free market reforms -1989: multi party system -1996: banning parties formed under religious, regional or linguistic crtieria -12 November 2008: article 74 amendment and giving more rights to women Political parties categorization -Pro-palace: RNI, MP and UC -Conservative: PI -Leftist: USFP and PPS -Islamist: PJD -right: -Leftist: JCP -Islamist: IAF and MCP Pro-regime: FLN and NRD -Right: FNA -Leftist: PT and FFS -Islamist: MSP and MRI Voting Day Friday Tuesday Thursday Voting list closed N/A Closed Electoral reform asked for -Rising the threshold -changing the highest remainder formula -two systems: plurality in rural areas and PR in urban areas -PR -Mixed system: 2 votes one for the district and one for the bloc Number of independents -2002 -2007 -2003 -2007 -2010 -2002 -2010 Women representation in the lower house -34/10.5% (2007) -13/ 10.8% (2010) -30/ 7.7% (2007) By-elections The DesignMethods and Procedures   -Analyze the recent legislative election results of Morocco, Jordan and Algeria in 2002 and 2007. -Identify electoral systems as the independent variable while the outcomes are the dependent variables in addition to using correlation analysis to see if there is a relationship between those two variables. This will be helpful in testing the theory that PR systems produce fragmented governments and plurality systems produce strong governments. -Since my data is mostly qualitative, I will use nominal level of measurement. -do a simulation of the three recent elections using different electoral systems -count the wasted vote Hypotheses Voting systems are manipulated to produce fragmented government Votes supporting pro-regime parties are geographically concentrated in rural areas in contrast to the opposition which is based in urban areas Research Questions What are the differences and similarities between the electoral systems of Morocco, Jordan and Algeria? How representative are electoral systems in MENA? Is there a relationship between government type and electoral system? Is there a relationship between the electoral system and the turnout? Is there a relationship between the electoral system and the number of parties? Can we make some conclusions based on the case studies and apply them to all Arab countries? What is the electoral system that best suits the region of MENA? How is the dilemma of Strong and Well-represented government dealt with? Why is the lower turnout and invalid vote prominent in urban areas in contrast with rural areas? Partition of Thesis My thesis will be divided into five chapters; the first one will be about an introduction about the electoral systems and their importance in sustaining democracy. The second chapter will be devoted to the electoral systems in Morocco and the analysis of its recent legislative election in 2007. The third chapter will include the analysis of Jordans electoral system and its recent legislative election in 2007 and 2010. The fourth chapter is devoted to the electoral system in Algeria and its recent 2007 legislative election. The fifth chapter will serve to connect the three case studies by comparing their similarities and differences and making some concluding statements on the relationship between the type of electoral system, government type and democracy. Data Collection Primary Data Sources: The constitution, electoral law and the amendments passed in the three countries. The Moroccan and Algerian 2007 legislative election results and the Jordanian 2007 and 2010 legislative election results Geographical maps of the elections results Secondary Data Sources Interviews with some political parties in Morocco -analysis of interviews conducted with politi

Thursday, September 19, 2019

Alls Fair in Love and War Essay -- American International Relations

Today’s society, so focused on defining, coveting, attaining, protecting and fighting for freedom and justice globally, still always seems to fall short. While the majority of American’s would agree that they live in a generally free country, there will always be those who demand even more freedoms. Abraham Lincoln called on poet John Lydgate’s now famous words, succinctly stating, â€Å"†¦you can’t please all the people all the time.† Never has a phrase been truer than in these times. For along with the people’s cries for freedom and justice, they still want to maintain their right to bear arms and freedoms of speech and expression. While each of these things in and of themselves seem harmless and basic, trying to balance them all together gets tricky, and sometimes dangerous. Where does the balance lie to keep the peace and protect our country? Can we really maintain just our own borders and not be concerned with the lands beyon d? In Arundhati Roy's "Come September," she recounts atrocities of passing decades, including those against the Palestinians and Japanese, to highlight war's failures, forgetting that in America there is an innate responsibility to do whatever is necessary, including war, to maintain democracy, to ensure freedom and justice within, and to limit the spread of injustice and tyranny to countries unable to fight for themselves. Roy details the suffering the Palestinian people have endured not only to survive, but to even be recognized as a people. Giving a generalized history of Israel and Palestine, she details conflict and ongoing violence in the pursuit of their homeland. While this is not a battle that America seems to be involved with, it is fairly well known that the United States gives a sign... ...ther countries affect our own. As the world evolves and grows, there will continue to be conflict, but hopefully along the way there will be more education and all will learn from mistakes of the past. One day we may be able to mutually think outside the box and avoid many conflicts altogether. Until then, the United States must maintain our own democracy, ensure freedom and justice within our own borders, and go beyond those borders when needed to prevent injustices to those countries unable to fend for themselves. Works Cited Roy, Arundhati. â€Å"Come September.† Reading the World: Ideas that Matter. Ed. Michael Austin. New York: Norton, 2007. 254-266. Print. Amnesty International Public Statement. AI Index: MDE 15/033/2005 (Public). News Service No: 134. 23 May 2005.

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Germany under Bismarck :: essays research papers

Germany under Bismarck The Historical Debate The view of Bismarck over the years has changed and it is the historical debate surrounding our perception of him and his intentions that often shapes our interpretation of the German unification. No 19th century figure has attracted the attention and controversy that surround the achievement of Otto von Bismarck, with the exception perhaps of Napoleon Bonaparte. The success of Bismarck’s work in unifying Germany has shifted from a determinist to a dialectic approach. Early historiography had portrayed him as a master statesman, leading Germany to her rightful destiny. However, dissent from this thesis was at first from non-German historians who re-interpreted later events to conclude that there were more sinister implications to the work of the ‘Iron Chancellor’, making him a more Machiavellian and immoral politician. Later historians, after the Second World War adopted a teleological interpretation of Bismarck accusing him of leading the way for the disastrous era of Nazism by crippling the development of democratic institutions in Germany, he laid the country open to future dictatorships however, some historians have argued that Bismarck could not be held for all future developments. They cite his semi-feudal brand of conservatism, arguing that along with his religion and his limited Pan-German view, these factors all distanced him greatly from the principles of Nazism. Recent developments have tended to move away from the study of ‘Grand Policy’, to diminish the role played by great men such as Bismarck, but to stress the wider context in which they operated. Themes and Problems of 19th century Europe The collapse of the Napoleonic empire in 1814-15 brought the statesmen of Europe to provide for he political future of France and those territories conquered by France. In addition they had to reestablish the balance of power shattered by the Napoleonic campaigns, and to ensure against any similar disruption. France was forced to accept a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, and a large war indemnity and an army of occupation was imposed. The justifications were manifold however, few do come to mind. Firstly, the Allies sought to prevent future French expansion by the creation of a cordon of relatively strong states around her borders. To this end, a new United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created, consisting of the old Dutch Republic and the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). Secondly, this cordon was backed and supported by a loose confederation of 38 states known as the German confederation which was established to compensate for the collapse of the old Holy Roman Empire which would ensure that a mass of small German states would be less easy prey for a future expansionist power.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Cost Cutting Essay

Most of us spend more than we need to for a lot of things. If you really can afford luxuries such as gourmet teas or designer clothing and still save for your future, you’re lucky. However, if you’re struggling to meet the financial goals you’ve set on your retirement roadmap, it’s time to look for ways to cut expenses—daily, monthly, and long-term. Start by seeing if you’d benefit from either of these big cost-cutting strategies: †¢If you’re paying high interest on a mortgage and you plan to stay in your home for a few years, consider refinancing.  Be sure to do your home- work to avoid closing costs that might make the move less attractive financially. †¢Reduce your credit card debt. Call the bank and try to negotiate lower finance charges. Then pay down the debt as fast as you can, starting with the high-interest debt. (See AARP’s Tip Sheet, â€Å"Managing Debt. †) It’s easy to spend money without realizing how much it adds up to over a week, a month or a year. So, to make other cuts in your expenses, try reviewing what habits, like eating lunch in a restaurant every day or buying expensive clothes, can add up to in the course of a year. Here are some places to look for cuts. Meals and Entertainment Americans love to eat out, whether it’s a daily break- fast at a pricey coffee shop or fast-food dinners when you feel too tired to cook. Keep track of where you’re eating your meals and what they cost. Bringing your lunch to work and cooking your meals for dinner are good ways to reduce food expenses on a regular basis. Movie fans can save money by renting DVDs, instead of paying admission to the theater and eating that expensive popcorn. Household and Transportation Expenses  Cable television, phone service—including your cell phone— and Internet service can add up to a tidy sum every month. Make sure you have the most economical plans available. If you’re in an area with more than one provider, comparison-shop. Energy costs are climbing and will probably continue to do so. Do an energy review of your home. Plug up drafty windows and doors with weather-stripping, insulate them with blinds or curtains, and then turn down the winter temperature inside by a couple of degrees. Consider solar heating and cooling if it’s feasible where you live. If you have central air, try to use it less. Install ceiling fans in some rooms, so you don’t have to cool the entire house. During the summer months, avoid using the clothes dryer, dishwasher, etc. during peak hours to lower your energy bill. Your biggest transportation expenses probably come from one or more vehicles. Here are some ways to cut back on those costs: †¢Car-pool to work with neighbors or colleagues. †¢Use public transportation. †¢Talk to your insurance company about ways you can lower your rate. On the highway, save money on gas by driving 55 miles per hour instead of faster. Shopping Thoughtful planning, before you shop, is a good way to reduce expensive impulse buying. Whether you’re going to the grocery store, shopping for holiday gifts, or looking for a new pair of shoes or a party outfit, make a list and decide what you can afford to spend ahead of time—and don’t buy something unless you really need it. In the supermarket, read the unit prices: is it cheaper to buy a 16-ounce box of crackers for $3. 0, or 12 ounces for $3. 10? For larger expenses such as a winter coat or a washing machine, check prices at more than one store before you make a decision. You should also check out thrift shops, especially if you know of one in an upscale neighborhood where you might get some good bargains. For Internet purchases, in addition to comparison-shopping on prices, check shipping charges. Some sites make you pay the whole cost; others will offer a deal to entice you to buy from them.

Monday, September 16, 2019

Social Responsibility

Sole proprietorship This business is an individual owned organization. This business is the most attractive because of its simplicity and control over the business. * Liability-. This business has unlimited liability. The owner is responsible for everything. If the business begins to fail personal assets and business assets can be sought after to pay off debts. There is no distinction between the two assets. * Income taxes- Business owners in a sole proprietorship file a 1040 as well as a schedule C (â€Å"profit or loss from a business or profession†). The Proprietor’s personal income is supplemented by all profits of his business. This form of taxation is known as pass-through taxation, meaning there is no separate federal income tax reporting for the proprietorship. * Longevity/continuity: In the event the sole proprietor dies and planned steps were not properly carried out the business will cease. Sadly the family’s source of income is no longer available. Life insurance is an important need to the proprietor, it may be the family’s only source of income. Secondly a will is a must have with precise details on to whom and how the business should be carries out. It’s also important to pre-plan with his chosen representative, teaching them how the business is managed. Control: The sole Proprietor may choose to directly run his business or hire others to manage for him. Being in total control of the business the proprietor is solely responsible for the major functions of his business. Leaving him with the responsibility of guiding his business down the path of success. * Profit retention: Al l profits belong to the owner. There is sole gain, no partners or stockholders to share proceeds with. * Location: One of the best things about a sole proprietorship is there are no limitations on the business. If the owner wishes he can expand, down size, move locations, or sell his business at will. Convenience/Burden: A sole proprietorship has the convenience of absolute freedom of action. A downfall to the Proprietor is the responsibility of running a business that â€Å"pays the bills†. In the event he were to die become ill or injured the business could no longer run. General Partnership This form of business consists of two or more partners. The partners are the founders of the organization. * Liability: Being co- owners, the partners have equal rights to the possession of the partnership assets. They can’t sell, assign, or transfer their individual shares of the ownership. Each partner is unlimited liable for the firms obligations. Partners are responsible for the debts. Any debt not covered could be made up from personal assets. Partners are responsible for one another. * Income taxes: There is no federal income tax imposed on the partnership. Individuals must file an informational tax return. Each partner must include his share of the profits. Partners can take advantage of the partnerships losses to offset their personal income. * Longevity/Continuity: If a partner were to die, sell, or retire his or her part of the partnership would be dissolved. Exception would be the â€Å"buy sell† agreement. Meaning the surviving partner must buy the deceased partners’ interest from the heirs. Personal ownership dies but the deceased interest possess to the decedent’s personal representative. * Control: Each partner has equal authority. In partnerships with more than two members the majority will rule. Each partner becomes an agent of the other. A partner may not assign or sell partnership property, admit another to the firm without the consent of all associates, or sell their interest to another without consent of the partners. Profit: All profits and losses are distributed evenly throughout the partnership. * Location: The rules and regulations vary from state to state . General partnership should use Schedule R to apportion income between the states. * Convenience/Burden: The main advantage of this form of buisness is low volume of paperwork needed for registration and its cheapness. Limited Partnership This busine ss has two or more partners much like the general partners. There is a few key differences though. * Liability: There is a partner that carries full liability and the others are limited liability. Income Tax: Income taxes are paid after the partners have received their share. There is four characteristics that would make a limited partnership have to pay corporate taxation. They only need two of the four to qualify. * Longevity/Continuity: In the case of a death the partnership would most likely end. * Control: The general partner would control the daily business for the partnership and the limited partners just have control over the investments. * Profit Retention: All profits are distributed evenly through the partnership. * Location: Partners should pay taxes according to the amount made in each state. Convenience/Burden: The ability to have funds from the limited partners and not having control. On a negative side there would be a risk if a partner dies or leaves the partnership . C-Corporation This corporation is also known as the regular organization. They have an unlimited amount of stockholders, allowing both residents and non-residents in. * Liability: Owners are limited to the amount of his or her investment. All personal assets are safe. * Income taxation: The C- Corporation is taxed as a corporation. Net income is paid to shareholders for dividends. They also pay personal income tax, thus meaning they are double taxed. Longevity/Continuity: The life period is unlimited, as long as they have the money to back up the debts they will not be affected by the death of a stockholder. * Control: Shareholders do not directly manage the business they elect the board of members that will manage the business. * Profit Retention: Profit can be used in two ways. One it can be invested in the business or can be paid out in dividends to shareholders. * Location: Corporate taxes are equal in all states. * Convenience/Burden: The ability to raise money for funds is a n advantage. It also benefits from the ability to continue if a shareholder leaves the business. And obviously the double taxation is a big negative. S-Corporation This corporation has all the advantages of the previous businesses but also has its own disadvantages. * Liability: Shareholders liability is limited to the amount of investment. * Taxation: Company doesn’t get taxed itself, only shareholders pay taxes. * Longevity/Continuity: Company is unlimited same as an S-Corporation. The shareholders will not affect the organization. * Control: The company is ran by the board of directors. Stockholders have corporate meetings. * Profit Retention: Same as the C-Corporations, pass through tax. Location: Must be domestic in any state. * Convenience/Burden: Business that are starting up usually pick this type of business because of the losses endured. There is a lot of paper work and the meetings are very inconvenient. Liability Limited Company Each member owns his or hers amount of shares according to their contributions. * Liability: An LLC functions much like a corporation . It’s members are unlimited liable. * Taxation: An LLC has a pass through taxation and only the shareholders are taxed individually. * Continuity/Longevity: There is a 50% rule in a LLC . If a member owning more than 50% of the business leaves or dies the LLC will end. But if a member owning less than 50% of the business the business will continue. * Control: There is two types , member –managed and managed – managed . * Profit Retention: Profits are distributed among members according to their stake. * Location: Most states allow an LLC . Different paperwork is required in different states. * Convenience: A LLC may federally be classified as a sole-proprietorship, partnership, or corporation for tax purposes. Classification can be selected or a default may apply.