Not-So-Familial Bonds The Fall of a Dynasty - 1082 Words

There is an old saying that says that blood is thicker than water but I believe that many of the characters that were depicted in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet are not in support of this claim. There is Hamlet’s father, who was actually the king of Denmark up until his untimely demise, which was orchestrated by his own brother – the villainous Claudius. Hamlet’s mother Gertrude then goes on to marry his uncle, which shifts the power that would’ve been in Hamlet’s favor to Claudius, who then becomes the king of Denmark. The actions of Claudius and Gertrude send Hamlet through a whirlwind of emotions, from grief to revenge. He dislikes his mother and her decision of marrying Claudius so soon after his father dies and he loathes Claudius after he soon discovers what he has done. When one things of family, one thinks of good qualities like loyalty and love but when it comes to this royal family there is everything but. Certain members of this fami ly operate from a place of greed, gluttony, envy and jealousy, one appears to operate from naivetà © and the other operates from pure angry, hatred and revenge. When Claudius is first introduced to the reader he comes off as an extremely intelligent, noble character. He addresses the kingdom and the court with a stirring speech in regards to the death of his brother and how the court is going to be taken under his leadership. Claudius comes off as very likable person to the public after this but is a different man behind the faà §ade. InShow MoreRelated The Sound and the Fury Essay6993 Words   |  28 Pageschronology, another area focused on by critics. Chronology in The Sound and the Fury moves to a completely different beat than the traditional notion of chronological order. Jean Paul Sartre argues that Faulkner did not first conceive this orderly plot so as to shuffle it afterward like a pack of cards; he could not tell it in any other way (87). Benjy’s section of the novel contains Faulkner’s finest manipulation of chronological order. Told through the eyes and mind of a thirty-three year old handicappedRead Moretheme of alienation n no where man by kamala markandeya23279 Words   |  94 PagesPolynices, a decent burial. She consciously risks her life with this action, which violates both Creon’s unjust decree, as well as the ancient custom of denying burial to enemies of the state. She obeys only the laws of the gods and the dictates of familial loyalty and social decency. Antagonist King Creon regards only the requirement of political expediency. Soon after the civil strife between Eteocles and Polynices ends in their deaths, he announces a decree denying Polynices’ burial. He is unrelentingRead MoreOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 Pagesbroadly. As the essays in this collection document in detail, paradox pervades the time span we call the twentieth century, no matter how it is temporally delineated. Never before in history, for example, had so many humans enjoyed such high standards of living, and never had so many been so impoverished or died of malnutrition and disease. If the period from the 1870s is included in a long twentieth century (and perhaps even if it is not), migration served as a mode of escape from oppressionRead More THE IMPACT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES65118 Words   |  261 Pagesfocus of the thesis. Knowledge management builds upon a human-centred approach that views organizations as complex systems that spring from the unique organizational contexts in which they are developed. It is still a nascent organizational practice, so as of yet there is no agreed upon definition for knowledge management. Therefore, it is generally described as broadly as possible, such as the following specified by Prusak (1997): knowledge management is any process or practice of creating, acquiring

The Geographic, Political, and Ethnic Impact European...

There is an ongoing debate on how the current political and economic failures in Africa can be traced back to the advent of colonialism. There is a great deal of evidence that illustrates the impact that colonialism and foreign intervention has had a negative effect on the development of present history of Africa. This essay will attempt to examine the geographic, political and ethnic impact European colonialism has played on the development of the African, and how these contributions have put Africa on its current trajectory. Initial European interest in Africa appeared humanitarian. Many of the imperial nations seemed interested in acting on behalf of Africa, on issues ranging from the prohibition of slavery to development and†¦show more content†¦Several European nations took it upon themselves to assimilate the people of Africa to what the Europeans considered as civilized. Peter Schraeder put it best in his essay, Political and Economic Impacts of Colonialism, when he said, â€Å"Britain’s portrayal of its efforts as the ‘whites man’s burden’ and France’s pronouncement of its â€Å"mission civilisatrice†, were offered to justify European domination over peoples deemed ‘backward,’ ‘ignorant,’ ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbaric,’ ‘savage,’ and ‘godless heathen.’† It certainly makes one wonder why a nation would take the role of a protectorate if it viewed the people they were tr ying to protect in that light. This may also explain the why Britain established the institutions and practices they did during colonial rule. One of the most significant institutions introduced by the colonial powers as a method to civilize the Africans was the implementation of the nation-state system. Pre-colonial African was full of nations and kingdoms, which varied in respect to their polities and general structure. For instance, some lived in small families or clans, with authority and leadership assigned to the elders, while others governed under kingdoms that encompassed large areas. In pre-colonial Uganda, there were several kingdoms ranging from the Buganda to the Ankole and even the Toro. However, before the advent of present day Uganda, the area â€Å"was a heterogeneous area, with a variety ofShow MoreRelatedCultural Erasure5591 Words   |  23 PagesTrinidad and Tobago Carnival, edited by Ian I. Smart, and Kimani S. K. Nehusi. Washington: Original World Press, 2000. The Caribbean can be many things to many people: a geographic region somewhere in America’s backyard, an English-speaking outpost of the British Empire, an exciting holiday destination for North Americans and Europeans, a place where dirty money is easily laundered, and even an undefined, exotic area that contains the dreaded Bermuda Triangle, the mythical lost city of El Dorado,Read MoreNotes18856 Words   |  76 PagesChapter 4 Colonialism and the African Experience Virtually everything that has gone wrong in Africa since the advent of independence has been blamed on the legacies of colonialism. Is that fair? Virtually all colonial powers had â€Å"colonial missions.† What were these missions and why were they apparently such a disaster? Did any good come out of the African â€Å"colonial experience†? Introduction Colonization of Africa by European countries was a monumental milestone in  ­ the developmentRead MoreRepresentation of the Other in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre Essay4463 Words   |  18 Pagesand its impact on the representation of the’ Other’. I will also draw on Edward Said’s theorization related to race, representation, and resistance in my analysis. I am going to examine and explore the meaning of representation and its enormous power of construction of social reality especially if it is allied with political and imperial conquests. For that reason, we have to put into our account the historical and theoretical relations between Western economic –political dominationRead MoreGender Marginalization5547 Words   |  23 Pageshandicapped in delving contribution to society. A vicious circle is set up whereby their lack of positive and supportive relationships means that they are prevented from participating in local life, which in turn leads to further isolation. This has a tremendous impact on development of human beings, as well as on society at large. As the objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy a productive, healthy, and creative life, it is important to address the issue of marginalizationRead MoreOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 a nd 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 PagesBrier, and Roy Rosenzweig Also in this series: Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life Lisa M. Fine, The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., History and September 11th John McMillian and Paul Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited David MRead MoreInstitutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run14323 Words   |  58 Pages6.7. 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. The efficient institutions view - the Political Coase Theorem The ideology view The incidental institutions view The social conflict view Hold-up Political losers Economic losers The inseparability of efficiency and distribution Comparative statics The colonial experiencein light of the comparative statics Reassessment of the social conflict view Labor markets Financial markets Regulation of prices Political power and economic institutions 6. Sources of inefficiencies Read MoreInstitution as the Fundamental Cause of Long Tern Growth39832 Words   |  160 Pagesinstitutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two quasi-natural experiments in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the world by European powers starting in the fifteenth century. We then develop the basic outline of a framework for thinking about why economic institutions differ across countries. Economic institutionsRead MoreDubais Political and Economic Development: Essay38738 Words   |  155 PagesDUBAIS POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: AN OASIS TN THE DESERT? by CHRISTOPHER DeNICOLA A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts MAY 10,2005 Table of Contents I Persian Gulf Development Literature Oil Curse Literature Arab and Islamic Factors Regional Ovemiew and Historical Background Dubais Development History I1 PI1 ExplainingRead MoreExploring Corporate Strategy - Case164366 Words   |  658 Pagesthe illustrations and the short case examples at the end of each chapter (in both versions of the book) this increases the reader’s and tutor’s choice. For example, when deciding on material for Chapter 2, the case example, Global Forces and the European Brewing Industry, tests a reader’s understanding of the main issues inï ¬â€šuencing the competitive position of a number of organisations in the same industry with a relatively short case. For a case that permits a more comprehensive industry analysis

Facebook Social Networking Site Free Essays

string(55) " disillusioned and wonder off as our attention drifts\." Against – Individuals connect through faceable to their co-workers or colleagues which helps them to remain up to date. – Faceable is used to advertise products which are relatively new in the market and can be easily purchased through faceable. – It is good way to update people about the recent events taking place nearby or in the world. We will write a custom essay sample on Facebook: Social Networking Site or any similar topic only for you Order Now – Faceable being a quick and effective way of communicating (people separated by time zones) can not be termed as a time pass activity. – Faceable teaches a lot of new aspects about different websites. Faceable is Just a fad that will pass Yes because†¦ No because†¦ The Web Is something rich and strange and Faceable Is not Back in 1988 before the Web arrived we used to play a lot of image based games around the internet, passing encoded images back and forth and basically working hard to make some sense of this dark network where no-one could see anyone else. From that point on for me the internet and the web have been a rich and strange something unknowable to the sum total of where we worked and played. Faceable doesn’t really do any of that. It’s a nice tidy ‘bur where everyone has more or less the same house, same garden, same car, same attitude. Sure, we can all add friends and Join networks and add applications, but it’s always clear that there is no curtain behind which strange things might lurk. Faceable is the Auber controlled environment – useful and wanted by many, but not pregnant with potentials. Faceable is more about the known than the unknown – and that’s a good thing. Who but the most insecure of us cares about having 429 ‘friends’, most of whom we wouldn’t talk to twice if we met them in real life. Faceable provides a way of connecting to the people you already know – but for one reason or another don’t stay in regular contact with. As we get older, settle down, have kids and spend more time at work, those little catch up chats or times hanging out with friends dwindle to almost nothing. That’s not to say you don’t like the people you don’t see as much, Just that they’re not in your immediate circle and the genuine desire to ‘meet up soon’ Just never gets realized. Faceable allows us to keep in contact with them through their status updates, when they add pictures, when someone they know tags them in a picture, when they add an app and ask a question – or in a hundred other ways. This is a way of connecting to them and of ensuring we know what they’re up to. It is therefore easier to send a quick note about their daughter or wish them a happy birthday. These small things break down the distance between us, they make the barrier of getting in touch smaller to cross – and they make the real world meetings more easy to make happen. Furthermore, faceable lacks clarity in who you are actually becoming friends with Faceable is Just a fad that will pass There are only so many new people Faceable is experiencing a huge wave of migration. This is held up as proof of the genius of Seersucker, and indeed in many ways they have played a blinder. From a closed College based network, they have taken a gamble to open up to anyone and everyone and seen it pay off begrime. The viral nature of Faceable is supreme, with member get member raised to a new artwork. Eve read dozens of articles about how all of someone’s friends have arrived in Faceable in the very recent past, usually it looks safe in here and there are lush pastures for the cattle. Then everyone else takes up residence, and as they overlap with other social groups, the process repeats itself. There is something engaging and exciting about arriving in n easy to understand social network, with tools to explore and people to Poke (ooh, the underlying sexual thrill of it all, it reminds me of my first disco, I didn’t know what that was all about either, but by God it turned me on). Face it, when someone invites you to Join Faceable and be their friend, its a cheap thrill to sign up and be that friend. If people want a social networking site there are millions, faceplate, hi, bebop, namespace etc†¦ Casebook IS a fad that will pass, as some person eventually will outdo it, one of these pages will take all it’s features and make something better, as yuccas has done with bebop, as bebop has done with faceplate, etc.. Anyone could log onto namespace, and minus a few ‘pokes’, they can pretty much do the same, look at their friend’s status updates, chat to their friends etc. Why should faceable be THE social networking site? And also, namespace is the site that seems to get all the hype for getting musicians noticed. So what’s the fad for bands? Namespace! Faceable is Just a fad that will pass There Just are no sophisticated tools in Faceable I’m used to some level of sophistication in my tools. I don’t mind using your online lolls, after all, it’s your community. But ifs, all I can do in my Groups is write on the wall? And then you can write on the same wall back to me. I can upload photos? Every time someone does something, I get sent an email without the content. There Just are no sophisticated tools in Faceable – everything is like a shallow version of what we’re used to on the outside. For sure, the APS have started to put some depth back into the system, but it’s hard to imagine that we’ll en masses abandon our email and our IM and our other contact and memory tools and use the stubs that Faceable offers. Not for a while anyway, we’ll get disillusioned and wonder off as our attention drifts. You read "Facebook: Social Networking Site" in category "Papers" Getting an email without the content was annoying, though this has now changed, and there are bound to be other parts of the site which don’t work as well as tools which are specifically designed for the Job. But if there is a demand for features not currently provided someone out there will provide them. And some of the features Faceable does provide, such as tagging photos, inviting others to events, and garnering support for a great cause, are great It’s also worth considering the value of Faceable as a social aggregation tool for non- chess. Sure you’re used to some sophisticated tools, but the majority of internet users aren’t. They’re people with non-technical Jobs who Just want things to work. Faceable works without anyone leaving the comfort of a great LU and the safety blanket known as a privacy controls. There are other colors I know this will sound very shallow and pathetic, but I really can’t imagine living with #baobab only for the rest of my life. As someone who was working with the web when there was not even any right align, let alone fancy layouts or the CSS wonders we see today, it pains me to have to use such a limited interface. With respect, it is the sort of interface that the East German government would have commissioned for their citizen network if they had lived to see in the true glory of the web. Where I come from we call this color Navy Blue and with good reason, children grow up to hate it. Allied to the fixed layout, baobab is the antithesis of everything that design stands for and everything that the web has taught us – that we are individuals and that we make and remake our environment to work with our needs and desires. Even Google, that great interface reducer, has relented and offered multiple funky interfaces to heir start pages. So what’s with the fascist control freakier? Don’t you trust me to change things the way I like ‘me? Think I might, like, go mad with funky colors? So what, that’s my freedom. Hammy, Faceable or Namespace which is the easiest to use? Given most people’s inability to create a readable web page I’m happy that Faceable restricts the look of its pages to one recognizable format. Give people free reign over the look of their page and they’ll go the flashy, blinks, confused way of Namespace. And there are friends I’d rather keep than lose for the knowledge of what they think looks cool. Call that a network? I live in Brighton Hove, East Sussex, UK. So for some reason that’s my network. It has 54,384 members who, I guess, live in Brighton and Hove. The total population of Brighton is 247,820, which means my network contains approximately one sixth of the entire population of this town. There are only 117032 15 to 44 year olds, which means that almost 50% of them are members of my local network. Huh? I mean, this is some kind of groovy town, but I find that rather unlikely. Every single sentient being between the ages of fifteen and forty-five in my town? I see I can go to a costume making event at pm or GUILFORD MONDAY UNITE at pm that’s Guilford, not Brighton, but hey). Popular in Brighton and Hove includes the faceable wide food fight and Britton’s Largest Water Fight. The Discussion Board has 164 discussion topics, starting with ‘How Many Wap To Say I Love You? , but frankly life’s too short. And then there’s The Wall. 754 posts starting with a bit of spam from Ben Williams. To say the will to live deserted me at this point would be an exaggeration, but to say the will to live in Brighton and Hove fled my feeble frame Just about sums it up. Why am I in this network? I am a sophisticated online denizen, I partake of and participate n hundreds of online societies and for a of all kinds. Some are good, some are bad, some are essential to life. But none are as depressingly pointless as this all consuming Brighton and Hove Network. And yes, I know I can change my regional network, but what exactly would be the point of that? I quite like seeing my local friends’ faces peering out at me from the sidebar – but that’s not quite enough to make it worthwhile. I guess this approach worked quite well when it was a college based network, but imagine what it is like to be a London or Shanghai network member – they’ve elevated inanity to a whole new level. Faceable offers a unique perspective to social networking in that you can friend people you know and the people they know to an extent. I find Faceable most useful for college because it helps the organizations I’m a part of invite people to our events. I can also find out about other group’s events on campus and even Join a greater cause to support Darker, let’s say. I’ve been able to keep in touch with people I went to kindergarten with! Granted most of them went to school with me since eighth grade, but it’s interesting to see where hey are based on how they were way when (the ass for us young folks). It’s cool to see how they’ve changed and how they’ve stayed the same. I’ve also been able to keep in touch with high school friends who I get to visit a few times a year back in California while I go to school in Philly. No matter what my URL is I’m still unique. Having a long URL with a combination of random numbers and letters doesn’t decrease individuality at all. Sure I have a lot of friends I don’t really talk to and some I have never met, but at least it opens the door to a conversation: â€Å"Hey we’re Faceable friends, right? In fact I was walking down the street yesterday, no Joke, and I saw two of my friends with one of their friends. We’d never met, but we were Faceable friends through each other. It was great to meet the guy and get to know him in person as much as it is to get to Basically the regional network lets you see people in the same one as you and helps people know where you’re from. I keep my network as Los Angles even though I go to school in Philly. It lets my friends know where I’m from. High school and college networks help you know who that person is trying to friend you and if you actually now them from somewhere. For now Faceable rocks. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into another Namespace. Gaining Revenue for Networking Sites is Extremely Difficult Faceable, like Namespace, has not been able to successfully fund itself via advertisements. Click through rates are low, and Namespace has tried desperately to salvage funds from these ads. Menace’s home page is filled with ads that most users don’t click on. Case in point: http://www. Businesslike. Com/technology/ content/ Feb../tc2008024 252834. HTML? Chant=search Unless Faceable can gain revenue from ads it will suffer and possibly go bankrupt. Faceable knows how old I am, what interests and hobbies I have, where I live, what my social network looks like and even what my educational and work history is. Are you telling me that’s not a potential goldmine for advertising? Sure at the moment you get the generic breast enhancement and zany college t-shirt ads (or perhaps they’re not generic and faceable has decided that’s what I most want in life), which are going to generate as much response as any other banner and popup ads. But if Faceable can utilities it’s main resource, information, it will make Microsoft’s revenues look tiny. Faceable has been slow at incorporating music It can be argued by some that Faceable has taken over from Namespace in terms of which is the better social networking site. Although this may be valid, there is one area in which Faceable is clearly lacking – and that is music. One of the main building blocks of Namespace is the close links with music – bands can have pages on which they are able to upload their music and reach out to a new crowd, members may add a song to their profile which gives other users more of an idea what the person likes and there is even the Namespace record label, getting physical copied of USIA out. Although Faceable are now beginning to add pages for artists, these are not as built on the foundation of music so it will be more difficult now to lure over music lovers from similar social networking sites (such as Namespace, Purposeful and Buzzed) that cater more to their tastes. Admittedly it would seem that, thanks to it’s emphasis on music, Namespace is more popular amongst wannabe rock stars than Faceable. On the other hand almost every university student in the I-J (and I’m assuming the US, Australia etc) has a faceable account, in 10 to 15 years time that will mean that he majority of the best paid 50% of society in the English speaking world have faceable accounts. Let’s see which contributes better to the long term survival of the respective business models. People have been put off by scandals concerning identity fraud If a ‘fad’, then Passbook’s passing will only have been hastened by the widespread concerns over identity theft as reported in the UK national press. Perhaps more importantly, people have grown increasingly aware and scrutinizing of Passbook’s capacity to allow potential employers to ‘snoop’ on one’s character as an employment suitability exercise. In short, people grow less and less eager to share their lives on the web, curiously perhaps because Faceable has been thrown open to wider and wider groups of people. Privacy controls? My friends get annoyed that they can’t trawl idly through photos of me surging drunkenly at a camera, but it means I’m less likely to get fired in the future. And I also highly suspect that the potential employer snooping is a little bit of an urban myth, seeing as even if you drag all the privacy slider bars down to their minimum your profile is still only visible to those in your network. Just bad luck if you .NET to the same Nun as your prospective boss I guess. If celebrities are punished more severely then surely other influential people should also be. There are many people within society who make huge decisions regarding our country and who have the potential to endanger thousands of lives with their decisions if those decisions were influenced by drugs and alcohol. It has been speculated for many years that highly trained professionals such as consultant doctors, airline pilots, and managing directors who have huge responsibilities also punished for their influential status surely it would only be fair to find these individuals as well and severely punish them ? There is a trend and acceptance regarding drug taking among celebrities but celebrities lives often require them to speak in front of millions of people, they are Judged constantly by society and the media and anything short on perfection is publicly ridiculed. It might be that they choose this fate for fame and fortune however if other people who benefit from this national recognition are found to be taking drugs this argument implies they too should be punished and although it might be wrong for these people to take drugs ND alcohol I doubt that our country would work in the same way if these people were punished in a way that prohibited them from working for an extended period of time. Many of our greatest, artists, musicians and composers took a wide and varied selection of drugs some of which used these substances to influence their work. How in this day and age can we separate artist from celebrity. This point does not even remotely relate to faceable will have a large impact on coming generations†¦ Face book and other socio s will probably be adding to the knowledge of the youths all over the world especially the teens.. TTS the time when the teenagers absorb the special interest on getting connected through some or the other way with their friends and contacts†¦. What is actually binding everyone to face book is the likes of its easy and simple networking process . Ace book uses a very simple way of connecting a person to another which makes it a very advanced and widely proffered compared to the others. Faceable with its such wide network would be difficult to end or quit but surely be fading out because of advancements and dynamism in peoples lives. It helps me to communicate and stay in touch with friends However you have to have the acceptance of the friend you wish to be in contact with. In any case, some day, another site will pop up that makes it Just as easy to communicate with people, and everyone will flock to that. Namespace usage plummeted when Faceable became popular, and when another â€Å"next big thing† emerges, no doubt Faceable usage will go the same way. It’s accusable and easy, it’s a free way to remain in touch with people. Internationally especially. It enables people to get in touch with old friends If you’ve fallen out of touch with people it’s usually for good reasons. Not to say that our old friends are bad people Just that you’ve both moved in different directions. I’ve had a few different emails from long-lost friends and after the initial wonder of seeing them again there’s not much which really connects us. You can find people that you haven’t been in contact with for years, or maybe went to school with. Faceable is good too for students based in a university environment as they can keep in touch with friends, online. Not only at university, but School contacts too. Its a useful way to find out how your school friends have got on in life and to even arrange a reunion. If, after all, relationships made in school fizzled out once the connection of going to school together is lost – they wouldn’t have added you would they? As a university student, faceable is simply, but wonderfully, a device to contact friends about meeting up, homework etc rather than spending phone credit by testing. Faceable. A cheapskates haven. It’s free and easily accessible What’s wrong with calling them or going to visit them. We spend far too much of our time online and far too little in the real world. Faceable Just makes this worse. Faceable is ‘at home in your boxers’ Faceable is not real world socializing. People should hang out and visit friends not scribble something on their ‘wall’ or go ‘poking’ around complete strangers. It is cost effective and has made keeping in touch with my friends from home while I’m at nun much easier. Also sometimes real-time communication is less than practical. If someone lives in a different time-zone it may be difficult to Just phone the person. People invest too much time in Faceable to let go. The same was said of Namespace and Friends before it. Faceable is an addiction that will run out of steam and it is one that annoys many schools colleges and universities, so much so that is has been banned from being accessed either completely or during teaching hours. I think faceable possibly has a time and a place but it annoys me when people are taking up computer suites Just to chat, applicant or poke people on faceable. Students are the biggest users of faceable and spend hours on it unknown to them that half the day has gone. I think it is something which Faceable has its pros and its cons. However, the matter of fact is that most Faceable users spend hours, days, weeks and even months customizing their profiles, finding rinds, adding photos and videos, creating groups and events. This is a heavy investment and most users will never seriously consider closing their faceable accounts. People have begun to identify themselves with their Faceable profiles. Hence, it is close to impossible for people to Just get off Faceable. Passbook’s Terms of Service ensures that people’s social information never leaves the walls of Faceable and therefore the social network will remain very popular and influential. Faceable has many practical applications and raises many more concerns. We have read quite a few of these in this debate. However, the question remains whether â€Å"Faceable is a fad that will Just pass†. I beg to differ. Social Networking is a whole new form of communication, of which Faceable is the most successful. Your argument is invalid. Did you even read the topic before posting? Its not saying social networking will die out, its saying (like namespace) Faceable will fade to the next amazing social networking site If you want to communicate with someone, in the old days you would either talk face to face or send a letter. Then came the telephone. Then came emails, further revolutionaries communications. Now there is social networking. Social networking is different. It can be very private, or very public. People have their own ‘space’ or ‘profile’ online, which people can search for as long as they know the persons name. No number or address is required or needs to be stored (and potentially lost). When you have a persons profile, you can add them as a friend in order to socially interact with them – which they must accept to facilitate the interaction (ensuring mutual consent of communications). When you are friends with someone, you can invite them to an event (along with an assortment of any or all of our friends) with a single click, and dispense information about that event. You can publicly display as much or little personal information about yourself as you wish. You can write on people’s walls to tell them information, which other people will freely be able to see. Suddenly people become so much more informed within their social circles, and for a social animal this is broadly positive. Faceable facilitates the spread of social information (or gossip) and people often consider faceable profiles to be an authority on a person (whether they are in a relationship, etc). How to cite Facebook: Social Networking Site, Papers

Price elasticity of Demand

Question: Discuss about the Price Elasticity of Demand. Answer: Demand and supply helps in analysing the mechanism in which market works. It helps in achieving the equilibrium state where the goods and services are produced and sold based on the decisions taken by the two phenomenons. In accordance with the demand and supply conditions, elasticity plays a major role in determining the effectiveness of the law of demand and supply (Rader, 2014). This report deals with the analysis of elasticity of demand. According to the law of demand, quantity demanded of a product decreases with an increase in price and increases with a decrease in price. Elasticity if demand helps in analysing the effectiveness of the change in quantity demanded with respect to change in price. It measures the magnitude of the change in quantity with the change in demand of the product (Nicholson Snyder, 2014). The aim of this report is to utilise the concept of elasticity of demand in explaining some real world examples. In order to do so, two articles have been chosen. One of the articles deals with the issue of housing prices and the other deals with comparison of change in demand for tobacco in developed and developing countries with the imposition of tax. In order to analyse both the cases, two different economic explanations has been provided which would help in understanding the concept of elasticity of demand with a better overview. Article 1 According to the news article published by the globe and mail on 13th march,2017, there has been a rise in the price of the houses in Toronto, not because of the shortage in the supply of houses, but due t the future expectations of the further rise in prices. According to josh Gordon, professor of Simon Fraser University, the rate of construction of the new houses and condominium units has been able to keep the pace with the rise in the population of the country; hence, there is a shortage in the supply of houses. It has been stated that the pre-existing homes in Toronto has not been able to come up for sale so far in the same volume as it has been in the past. Owners are waiting for the prices to soar up more in order to sell their houses, hence, new houses are being built in order to overcome the existing rise in demand. The expectation of future houses are being held as the major factor leading to further rise in the housing prices (Mail, 2017). According to the elasticity of demand, an effective change in the quantity demanded of the product due to the change in its price could be measured. Depending upon the type of good, being eth normal, luxury, inferior or necessity in nature, the elasticity of the product could range from zero to infinity (Rios, McConnell Brue, 2013). Houses are considered as luxury goods. With the expectation of the further rise in the Price of luxury product, it could be settled that the current price is considered lesser than the future process. Hence, with an elasticity of the product being greater than one, it could be stated that at the current prices of the houses, the change in the quantity demanded would be quite greater. This could be explained with the help of figure 1, below. Figure 1: Elasticity of Demand for Houses (Source: As Created By the Author) In figure 1, the relatively elastic in nature. A relatively elastic demand curve is flatter as drawn in the diagram and is market d. Let the price for future expectation be p1 and current price be p2. It could be seen that the corresponding demand for p1 is q1 and that of p2 is q2. As the elasticity of demand is more than one in this case, it could be seen that the difference between the changes in price is lesser than that of the magnitude of change in quantity demanded. Hence, it could be stated that with a slight expectation of a raise in price of the houses in future leads to a massive rise in the quantity demanded for the houses at the present state. Article 2 An article posted by tech featured on 30th January 2017, deals with the comparison of price elasticity of demand for tobacco in developed and developing countries. In this article it has been stated that the impact of tax on tobacco would raise the price of tobacco in the countries. Yet, the effect of change in the price of tobacco has not been able to generate similar responses in the change in quantity ended. With an increase in the price of tobacco there has been a higher fall in the quantity demanded of the product in developing countries than in the developed countries ("Price Elasticity Of Demand And Tax On Tobacco - Tech Featured", 2017). This could be explained with the aspect of elasticity of demand. Elasticity of demand measures the effectiveness of the change in quantity demand with respect to change in its price. A product which is less elastic for a group of people tends to show lesser change in the quantity demanded than with for the people who tends to be more elastic in nature (Acemoglu, Laibson List, 2017). In figure 2, there are two diagrams drawn. In the first one, the scenario if the developed countries has been taken into consideration whereas, the second part deals with the developing countries. The demand curve faced by the developed countries seems to be less elastic in nature than the demand curve for tobacco faced by the developing countries. In the case of developed countries when the price increase from p1 to p2, there is a slight fall in the downward for products from q1 to q2. Elasticity of demand for developed countries is less than one. In developing countries, ads the price of the product increase from p1 to p2, there is a considerable fall in the demand for tobacco from q1 to q2. This therefore shows that the elasticity for the demand of tobacco in such countries is more than 1. Both the scenario could be explained with the help of figure 2 below. Figure 2: Elasticity Of Demand For Air Travel (Source: As Created By The Author) Both the articles has been taken into consideration in order to frame the effect of elasticity of demand on real world examples. This helps in acknowledging the behaviour of the consumer depending upon the type of the goods. Whether the goods is considered as more elastic or less elastic in nature is completely dependent upon the consumers perspective. Real world example is considered to be more precise in analysing the elasticity of demand. Reference Acemoglu, D., Laibson, D., List, J. (2017).Microeconomics. Pearson. Mail, T. (2017). Demand fuels Toronto house prices, not lack of supply, study finds. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 3 April 2017, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/toronto/demand-fuels-toronto-house-prices-not-lack-of-supply-study-finds/article34279980/ Nicholson, W., Snyder, C. (2014).Intermediate microeconomics and its application. Nelson Education. Price Elasticity Of Demand And Tax On Tobacco - Tech Featured. (2017). Tech Featured. Retrieved 3 April 2017, from https://techfeatured.com/5528/price-elasticity-of-demand-and-tax-on-tobacco Rader, T. (2014).Theory of microeconomics. Academic Press. Rios, M. C., McConnell, C. R., Brue, S. L. (2013).Economics: Principles, problems, and policies. McGraw-Hill. Price Elasticity of Demand Question: What is the Price Elasticity of Demand ? Answer : Introduction A model can be defined as a framework that allows an easier explanation of complex economic processes. While the models may be true, others are false. The difference between the two is explained by certain conditions that has to be fulfilled for a model to be termed as positive. According to Ouliaris (2017), the job of the modern economy of the allocation of limited resources and the distribution of output to many agents makes it a complex machine. The agents include the government, individuals and firms. The action of any of the agents have an influence on the others either directly or indirectly. He noted that economists of today build models that acts as roadmaps to reality that helps in the understanding of the operations of the modern economy. The statement about the economic models being false is not accurate. The government should therefore continue using them for future predictions. The argument is that, predictions through economic models have been in most cases be positive. They help in simplifying the interpretation of various economic predictions. Measurable signals are emitted by economies in their allocation of goods and services which is an indicator of drive to complexity. For instance, the growth of output has been used as an explanation for the growth of an economy which is true since its as a result of improved investment level and increased level of employment. The models of inflation shows that it has a negative relationship with the unemployment rate; this has empirically been tested to be true. Formal explanations are invited in the case of empirical regularities given that the economy is complex. Models are important for prediction as they give the theorys implications and infer the consequences of makin g various assumptions Odekon (2006). The inner working of the economy could be understood better if the economists and the policy makers learnt more on the various processes that result in various stylized facts. The economy could be directed towards achieving a more desirable outcome when such knowledge is applied in the future predictions. This may include issues like the avoidance of a global financial crisis. Bearing the fact that economic outcomes lack objective measures, economic models are made subjective in design which acts as a very important feature. The forms taken by economic models according to Dwivedi (2006) are either mathematical equations, graphs or logical statements. Odekon affirms that business firms, individuals and governments need economic prediction in the planning of their future course; this is facilitated by applying various models. Economic models are divided into two broad categories the theoretical and empirical models. The theoretical models analyses economic behaviors and derives verifiable implications with an assumption of objectives maximization given various constraints clearly explained in the model. The answers provided by the theoretical models to specific questions are qualitative such as ways of handling market failures. The aim of the empirical models in contrast is to verify the theoretical models qualitative predictions by converting them to precise numerical outcomes. For instance, when considering the behavior of an agents consumption, the theoretical model indication that the expenditure is positively related to the agents income. On the other hand, the empirical models does a deeper analysis and tells us facts like the extent by which expenditure changes when income rises by specified units. According to Carr-Hill Stern (1977), the relevancy of economic models is raised by the fact that th ey allows for additional of new variables which improves the accuracy of results. Economic behavior theory is described by an economic model through a mathematical equation set. Useful clues about the behavior of rational agents or rather the working of the economy is derived from the inclusion of many equations in the economic model. The economic models could either be simple or rather complex. A simple model is for example when you consider how the demand for a specific product is influenced by its price. The higher the price of that product, the lower its demand and vice versa. The complex models include for example the prediction of an economys real level of output. Lipsey Chrystal (2011) noted that a model is accurate since it is developed from real economic observations. The economic models are useful in the real world if they are based of accurate assumptions Dwivedi (2010). He also noted that the behaviors of agents tend to be similar which improve the accuracy of an economic model. Source: https://spot.colorado.edu/~kaplan/econ2010/section4/section4-main.html The figure above shows that products such as gasoline have a low price elasticity of demand. A rise in the price of gasoline from $1 to $1.10, is a 10% increase. The resulting fall in the quantity demand is very little; from 20 to 19 gallons, its a 5% decrease. The result of dividing the % change in quantity demanded and the % change in price is 0.5. This is observed in the short run. In 2016, the PED for gasoline was -0.26 (Moffatt, 2016). This is a small magnitude of responsiveness. Source: https://spot.colorado.edu/~kaplan/econ2010/section4/section4-main.html The figure above shows that products such as sodas have an elastic price elasticity of demand. A rise in the price of six-pack sodas from $2 to $2.20, is a 10% increase. The resulting fall in the quantity demand is very little; from 1000 to 850 gallons, its a 15% decrease. The result of dividing the % change in quantity demanded and the % change in price is 1.5. The PED for a six-pack soda is relatively elastic (Kaplan, 2002). In 2015, the PED for soft drinks was 1.06 and that for sugar-sweetened beverages was 1.16 (Colchero, et al., 2015). This is a greater magnitude. In 2016, the PED for apples was -0.58 (usda.gov, 2016). This is a small magnitude owing to the fact that the substitutes to fruits are so many. References Carr-Hill, R. Stern, N. (1977). Theory and Estimation in Models of Crime and its Social Control and their Relations to Concepts of Social Output. Colchero, M., Salgado, J., Unar-Munguia, M., Hernerndez-Avila, M., Rivera-Dommarco, J. (2015). Price elasticity of the demand for sugar sweetened beverages and soft drinks in Mexico. Sciencedirect.com. Retrieved 15 March 2017, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X15000611 Dwivedi, D. (2006). Microeconomics: Theory and applications. New Delhi: Pearson Education. Dwivedi, D. (2010). Macroeconomics: Theory and policy. New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill Education Pte Ltd. Kaplan, J. (2002). Principles of Microeconomics: Section 4 Main. Spot.colorado.edu. Retrieved 15 March 2017, from https://spot.colorado.edu/~kaplan/econ2010/section4/section4-main.html Moffatt, M. (2017). Would a Gasoline Tax Cause People to Buy Less Gas?. ThoughtCo. Retrieved 15 March 2017, from https://www.thoughtco.com/price-elasticity-of-demand-for-gasoline-1147841 Lipsey, R. Chrystal, K. (2011). Economics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ouliaris, S. (2017). Economic Models: Simulations of Reality. Imf.org. Retrieved 14 March 2017, from https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/models.htm Odekon, M. (2006). Encyclopedia of world poverty. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications. usda.gov. (2016). USDA ERS - Food Demand Analysis. Ers.usda.gov. Retrieved 15 March 2017, from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-choices-health/food-consumption-demand/food-demand-analysis/

Jeffrey Santos Essays (1232 words) - Literature, Comics, Raw

Jeffrey Santos Professor Shrivastava Experiencing Literature 10/15/17 The Complete Maus Essay Prompt In English class we read a book called "The Complete Maus" by Art Spiegelman. I have been given an assignment that is based off of Spiegelman's use of the famous comic strip. He uses the comic in many different ways but with one main way being, to help the reader fully engage into his thoughts. The Washington Post stated that what Spielgelman did was "impossible to achieve in any medium but comics." Comic strips help the reader dice into the small but important details of the story by giving them interesting drawings that spark their attention. Comics also come with words to give the reader more of an easy understanding of what he or she is reading. This being said, my goal of this paper is to prove the Washington Post in a positive way and to help their statement be correct. To help explain my stand on this, in my first paragraph I will talk about Spielgelman's representation and reliability of his story. Since he relies on his father's thoughts, some may think that the reliability of the drawings may not be valid enough to fully believe. In the second paragraph I will discuss the multiple time frames and how he shifts from one time frame to another but also has multiple present things within one time frame. And in my final paragraph I will discuss the shifts of point of view and how he runs two parallel points of views and still achieves his goal in the story. Representation and reliability is something all if not most people worried about with Spiegelman's comic strip. The main difference in Spiegelman's representation of memory vs other authors is his use of drawings and intriguing images. Even though he relies on his father's thoughts and memories, he also uses real images to help us understand and solidify his father's memories to be true. On page (75) in Spielgelman's book he draws his father's family sitting around a dinner table discussing the hardships of the time that they were living in, and shortly after that there is an image of his son dumping his food onto the table. Clearly his father and his family are very self-giving and protective of everyone still breathing. Although Artie and his father had a rough relationship in the beginning, the comic helps us understand that by the second comic story, Art and his father become close again and begin to understand each other like they used to. With the two of them bonding through hi s father's memory filled talk, it helps us believe that Artie actually helped us readers understand his father's memories and a more diverse and interesting way. He represents his father to his best ability and helps us readers understand fully. He uses his representation within the comic extremely well and it would be hard to tackle all of these things in a written novel. When writing a comic strip you must pay attention to your use in change of time frames and Spiegelman does that and then some. The reader moves through several different historical positions throughout the whole story. They also move through narrative events such as pre Holocaust, the Holocaust, and the post Holocaust, but also, within one time frame there can be multiple times present and co-resent. Maus intertwines the past and the present extremely well to the point where they are simply parallel to each other. He combines the different subject histories of each protagonist, and the different Nazi views located in Rego Park, New York. Artie manages to add many small narratives within the bigger pictures throughout the story. For example, Arties struggles to understand his family's origins and himself as well. Although Artie was talking about the Holocaust through the whole story, he uses small examples to show his struggles in the story as well. Artie asks Vladek for Antje's diaries and Vladek then tells him that the diaries are gone. The interesting part of this story is that Artie then remembers that he burned them himself and this memory puts him into a deep depression. The way Artie showed us his depression through the comics really showed how hurt he

Concept Essay

Concept Essay Steps for Writing Concept Essays The aim of Concept Essays is to inform readers about a particular topic. The purpose of such an essay is to explain a concept without influencing your readers. When you write this type of essay, you do not adopt a stance or provide a point of view on the essay topic. Even if you write about a controversial topic, you need to explain all the sides of the controversy instead of taking one particular side. This type of essay can be written on any essay length. If you are writing a concept paper for the first time, follow these simple steps to get started: 1. Select a Topic You may be given a specific essay topic or you may be told to write your essay on a topic of your choice. If it is the latter, look for a topic that you find interesting. Writing about an interesting theme will lead to you writing your essay in a way that interests your readers. Keep in mind that topics for Concept Essays are more abstract than other types of essays. Examples of such topics would be racism, wisdom or communication. 2. Conduct Research Make a note of the information you possess on your topic and then start collating information on the parts that are missing. As you will be educating your readers on your chosen topic, it is important that you know all that you can find out about it. After carrying out all the research, decide what information you are going to use. You don’t have to write about your topic in extensive detail; however it should be detailed enough to provide thorough understanding of the concept. 3. Determine your Audience Before writing your Concept Essay, you must have an idea of who your target audience is. It is not possible to write an essay effectively without determining the type of readers you are writing for. Knowing who your readers are will help you decide what materials to include, the order of ideas and the best way to support the arguments made. 4. Create an Outline Creating an essay outline is a great idea as it will help you organise your thoughts and information. Once you organize your thoughts, you will get an overall view of how your essay will look. This will help you group similar ideas together and eliminate unnecessary ones. 5. Begin Your Essay The introduction to an essay is very important. The essay intro introduces readers to the subject of the essay and indicates the areas of importance. This opening paragraph must contain your thesis statement. This statement must be explained briefly in one or two sentences and must convey the main idea of your essay. Follow your introduction with the essay body paragraphs in which every paragraph discusses one main point. 6. Write Your Conclusion Conclude your Concept Essay with a paragraph that reminds readers of your essay’s main idea. This paragraph must summarize the main points in a fresh and interesting way. If you find it difficult to write this type of paper, you can buy an essay or read a couple of free sample essays online for guidance.

Book Report Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

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Definition Argument Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Definition Argument - Essay Example The thought of a private word used in my generation is awesome. If an older person gets online, they will not know what woot means. The term "w00t" (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, "woot"; IPA pronunciation: [wuË t]) is a slang interjection used to express happiness or excitement, most often expressed via the Internet. (Wikipeida 2006) An interjection similar to "YAYE!" or "Woohoo!" used to express joy or excitement, usually about some kind of accomplishment. Primarily used by gamers, spreading rapidly to anyone who chats online. (URBAN dictionary 2006) The current-day use of the word w00t stems from hackers in the early to mid 80s.While communicating with each other groups of hackers such as Razor1911 would need lingo which nobody else would be able to understand to express milestones in their hacking. One such milestone was gaining root access, but the term rooted or "gained root access" was easily understood so the term was changed to w00t to help disguise. Because of the difficulty of "rooting" many times the term w00t would be much in a celebratory tone. It later evolved to simply be a celebratory remark rather than a hacking milestone. (URBAN Dictionary 2006) One game on the Internet is â€Å"World of Warcraft†. I enjoy playing this game. Whenever someone wins, they furiously typed woot. Even though at first I did not know what it meant, I would reciprocate. Eventually woot has become part of my online vocabulary. Woot became a word with meaning to me. Even if it is not in the dictionary, woot is real to me. That makes it a word to me, but not everyone plays games online. The reason I chose and like woot is its conveyance of my exact emotion, even though it is absent from the dictionary. How do you explain the ecstasy of defeating unseen people on the Internet? I know all of my friends’ screen names, but most I only know online. That feeling cannot be articulated by the â€Å"real world’s† dictionary. All of gamers my age use this

The presentation for nursing research PowerPoint

The for nursing research - PowerPoint Presentation Example Even though the author does not directly communicate a research question for the study, this can be deduced from the research objective and the title. The research question would therefore be, ‘what are the effects of alcohol consumption on sexual behaviour of young women, between 16 and 24 years?’ The article also lacks a research hypothesis but this can be implied from the research question and the research objective. The implied null hypothesis is the statement that alcohol consumption does not affect sexual behaviour of young women between, 16 and 24 years (McMunn, 2008). The article’s literature review is explorative and establishes sufficient background information for the research. It for example explores literature on alcohol consumption by age and gender to identify a specific interest in young women, and impacts of alcohol on their behaviour. The review’s findings are also consistent with existing literature that the group of women between the age of 16 years and 24 years are heavy drinkers. The literature review is therefore comprehensive enough to identify the research problem (Plant, 2009). Strengths and weaknesses of sampling procedures The research applied simple random sampling approach, based on attendance to a given care facility. This is defined by the fact that the young women who attended the facility were a sample of the entire population of women of the particular age group. Simple random sampling has a number of strengths and weaknesses in its application in a research. One of its major strengths is its simplicity that allows a researcher to implement a research design with ease. It therefore offers no technicality that may further induce inefficiency in the data collection process (Ellison, Barwick and Farrant, 2009). The sampling design also has the ability to be used even without a prior knowledge of the target population by the researcher. This also facilitates its ease of application (Aday and Cornelius, 2 011). Simple random sampling also has the strength of eliminating bias in sampling as the each element in the sample space has equal chance of being included in the sample and the researcher lacks control on specific members of the population to be sampled. In the case for instance, the research was limited to those women who attended the facility and the researcher could not study other women who did not register for the facility’s services (McMunn, 2008). The applied sampling procedure also has a number of limitations. While it is simple to apply, it may fail to generate a representative sample. Especially in cases where the target population has identifiable sub groups. Consequently, the applied sampling approach, simple random sampling, may not be suitable for making inferences. This is because in differentiated subgroup and in case the random approach only selects members of a few sub groups, then the generated results would be limited to such groups and not the entire p opulation (McMunn, 2008). Another weakness of the applied approach is the fact that it might not yield efficiency in sampling. This is a consequence of the possibility of a non representative data, especially in a quantitative research (Aday and Cornelius, 2011). Simple random sampling is also a weak approach in a time series research as well as in handling data whose

How Do Financially Distressed Companies Overcome Decline Economics Essay

How Do Financially Distressed Companies Overcome Decline Economics Essay The present paper analyzes the recovery process of 526 US firms facing an initial financial distress situation in order to determine the variables of influence on their final survival status. The proposed model of this recovery process implies that severity and reaction capability should be understood as initial conditions that will impose restrictions in the selection of strategies which will drive the performance during recovery, thus, determining the final resolution of long term financial distress process. We found that these variables have an impact on i) the ability of a company to overcome decline; ii) the efficiency of the selected strategies and iii) the results of these strategies on post-distress fit position. Keywords: Recovery process, financial distress, severity, Data Envelopment Analysis Introduction Every organization is inevitably exposed to ups and downs during its lifecycle (Krueger and Willard, 1991; Burbank, 2005) and failure is not a sudden event (Agarwal and Taffler, 2008). The ecological theory of organizations states that in a continuous process of firms, those who survive are better capable to compete. Kahl (2001) defines fittest firms as the ones that have greater chance to survive. In this way, the financial distress process should be understood as a selection mechanism by means of which good performers survive and bad performers do not. In this same line, Sheppard and Chowdhury (2005) consider that failure is a firms misalignment with its environment. Failure is a reversible process and not necessarily degenerative if the company is able to detect signs of underperformance and to achieve an effort in its economic performance. Firms facing a distressed financial situation usually share a series of common patterns which make it difficult to estimate a possible outcome of this situation (Barniv et al., 2002). Among the distressed firms, there are little divergences in the financial weakness indicators in the different failure processes (Ooghe and Prijcker, 2008). The dissimilarities between the failure stages and the turnaround effectiveness as well, become evident on the how quickly the indicators evolve and on the ability of the management to react when distress signals are detected. Ignoring these alert signals may lead to a continuous decline process which may end up in failure without even trying any recovery strategy (Burbank, 2005). Managing a crisis situation is a fundamental issue as it is not a spontaneous process. Moulton and Thomas (1993) affirm that the reorganizations during a financial distress situation are not a simple matter and the probability of a successful exit is very low. However, the percentage of firms that succeed in getting through decline cannot be disregarded. Barniv et al. (2002) found that 50% of the sample firms which filed bankruptcy from the Office of the General Council of SEC resolved their situation as emerged firms. One third of the financially distressed firms in Kahls (2001) study survived as independent companies. Moreover, Gonzà ¡lez-Bravo and Mecaj (2011) found that 22.5% of sample firms presenting a strong crisis situation were still active in the market 10 years later. Yet, we should consider that the exit from a difficult condition, as Moulton and Thomas (1993) sustain, is only the beginning of the story. Not all the successfully exiting firms manage to keep the new situa tion stable. For some firms, operating in a crisis situation constitutes their normal state of environment with crisis periods that can attenuate or loose up. Anyway, being able to maintain this kind of condition is also a manner to survive. In this sense, Kahl (2002) states that the financial distress should be considered a long term process that makes firms end up debilitated even after having recovered from decline. This weakness is observed in poor performance that inevitably may again drag the firms to a new financial distress situation. Hotchkiss (1995) attested that during the first five years after exiting a bankruptcy, 35 to 40% of firms show negative operating income and up to one third of the firms that manage to ease their distress through debt restructuring re-enter a financial distress situation a few years later. Several studies have shown that different factors may determine the exit from a crisis situation. These factors may have a direct influence on the recovery process or on the capacity of the company to develop appropriate redirection strategies. The initial severity degree is considered an important hurdle in implementing successful actions. In this line, Smith and Graves (2005) found that, among all variables of the study, severity and firm size were the only variables significantly important during a turnaround process. Other authors (Robbins and Pearce, 1992; Pearce and Robins, 1993; Harker and Harker, 1998) state that strategies oriented towards cost reduction and efficiency improvement were safe bets for a favorable outcome. However, Castrogiovani and Bruton (2000), Sudarsanam and Lai (2001) or Smith and Graves (2005) affirm that no positive relation could be found between certain strategies and successful outcome. These results indicate that severity, through its influence on th e selected strategy, could be an indirect factor in the turnaround process (Robbins and Pearce, 1992). More consensual results were obtained when stating that the performance in-distress is fundamental for the outcome of the difficult situation. In particular, it is observed that successful companies show better returns when compared to unsuccessful firms (Routledge and Gadene, 2000; Pearce and Doh, 2002; Kahl, 2001). The present paper analyzes the recovery process of 526 US firms facing an initial financial distress situation in order to determine the variables of influence on their final survival status. The proposed model of this recovery process states that severity and reaction capability should be understood as initial conditions that will impose restrictions in the selection of strategies which will drive the performance during recovery, thus, determining the final resolution of long term financial distress process. These variables have an impact on i) the ability of a company to overcome the difficult situation; ii) the efficiency of the selected strategies and iii) the results of these strategies on post-distress healthy position. The proposed model considers that final survival status measures the welfare quality of a firm based on its risk to re-enter in distress, so it discriminates well performers and best performers during the management of a crisis process. Overcoming a financial distress: Determinant factors Even though some weak crisis situations tend to show a natural evolution throughout the exit and may be solved by simply making routine decisions (Gonzà ¡lez-Bravo and Mecaj, 2011), recovery process is not a spontaneous event. The distressed firms will face a long term scenario involving a continuous effort of adaptation to the diverse situations through which a firm passes during the upturn. The effort invested in this process will allow the reestablishment of stakeholders trust, while the variables related to solvency and profitability gain stability (Burbank, 2005). Companies that do not have a long term orientation and just adopt patch strategies do not usually reach successful exits (Pretorius, 2008). However, certain initial conditions may affect the reaction capacity as well as the effectiveness of the measures taken by managers. Severity Similar to a disease process, the gravity of the initial crisis position not only conditions the measures to take but also their success possibilities. Firms that face worse starting situation need to make greater efforts. In this sense, Robbins and Pearce (1992) affirm that there exists a relationship between retrenchment strategies and performance in firms having a severe starting situation while this relationship is not observed in firms facing a weak crisis state. Although Smith and Graves (2005) indicate that the gravity of the starting situation is strongly associated with the probability of recovery, Kahl (2002) sustains that the financial distress diagnosis is an imperfect indicator of the economic feasibility of a firm. In the same line, Gonzà ¡lez-Bravo and Mecaj (2011) affirm that the severity of the initial situation, observed in widely accepted indicators, does not have to be a crucial factor in the outcome of the crisis. Perhaps, following Moulton and Thomas (1993), th e initial gravity status has an influence over the process of recovery more than on the final resolution. Thus, severity determines the rate of recuperation, so that the harder the severity, the greater the effort to react and the slower the process of healing the levels of solvency and profitability. This effort during the process, and not the starting situation, may be the main determinant of the final outcome. Moreover, solvency and profitability indicators such as continuous negative results, inability to generate income by means of operating activity, continuous solvency and/or liquidity problems or incapacity to generate cash flow which reflect problems in the health of the company, are widely accepted as measures of severity degree (Mutchler and Williams, 1990; Gilbert, Menon and Schwarz, 1990; Ponemon and Shick, 1991; Poston, Harmon and Gramlich, 1994; Geiger, Raghunandan and Rama, 1995; Raghunandan and Rama, 1995; Davydenko, 2007). Reaction capability The possible effect of severity on the initial state may be mitigated if the firm counts on appropriate resources which increase the probability of a successful recovery. The structural reaction capability may ease the recovery process to a safe position cushioning the possible actions to implement. The capacity to obtain additional funds or generate additional incomes to implement treatment strategies can soothe the prior pressure imposed by a deteriorated financial distress position. In this sense, Barker and Duhaime (1997) associate successful turnaround processes with increases in sales that make companies have more options to undertake change strategies. Similarly, Pearce and Doh (2002) affirm that firms in distress that used debt and supported their sales to improve profitability successfully solved their difficult situation. They also state that changes in activity and in leverage level are associated with different phases of a turnaround process. In turn, Jostarndt (2006) ide ntifies three factors which could be helpful to measure the risk of becoming financially troubled. An excessive leverage level, a poor firm performance, and an industry downturn may inhibit firms from obtaining the right amount of cash flow to operate normally. Firm operating performance trend dominates as the reason causing financial distress showing that a firm may fail but not only for financial reasons. This allows the author to consider an association between financial distress and economic distress. These results are comparable to the patterns evidenced by Gonzà ¡lez-Bravo and Mecaj (2011) when distressed firms with remarkable financial reaction capacity and/or a solid financial structure evolve mainly toward a healthy zone. However, concerning debt structure Kahl (2001) did not find evidence on if the debt level or the debt structure of a firm influences the final outcome of a crisis situation. Severity Status and Reaction Capability, as initial restrictions, could be moderated by firm size when considering the exit from a crisis situation (Moulton and Thomas, 1993; Barniv et al., 2002; Schutjens, 2002). Altman and Hotchkiss (2006) found that one of the most obvious factor that discriminates between firms that successfully restructure and those that liquidate, after being classified inside Chapter 11, was the firms size. Nevertheless, other works observe that this variable did not present any clear relation with the survival chance (Kahl, 2001; Ooghe and Prijcker, 2008). Possibly, firms size does not determine the final resolution of a distress situation but it influences the reaction capability to confront it, moderating /strengthening the drawbacks when additional support should be guaranteed and restructuring decision must be made. Performance in-distress Regardless of the initial state restrictions, the adopted strategies and the behavior of companies during a financial crisis are crucial for the exit process (Sun and Li, 2007). An inappropriate diagnosis of the firms weaknesses in order to act and react quickly may lead to a fast deterioration of the financial indicators (Barker and Duhaime, 1997). Beaver (1966) already stated that if a difficult situation was properly detected, measures that lead to an improved position could be taken, avoiding so a state of ultimate failure. A series of strategies and action plans should be implemented aiming to reduce the detected weaknesses of the company (Smith and Graves, 2005; Krueger and Willard, 1991, Robbins and Pearce, 1992; Pearce and Robbins, 1993; Arogyaswamy et al., 1995; Castrogiovanni and Bruton, 2000, Pearce and Doh, 2002 and Pretorius, 2008). The operating performance during the recovery process drives a successful evolutionary route towards a new healthy scenario (Kahl, 2001; Routledge and Gadenne, 2000). Improving efficiency through some actions like cost cutting and/or asset reduction is crucial in this sense, having a positive impact on firms performance despite the underlying weaknesses (Robbins and Pearce, 1992; Pearce and Robbins, 1993; Harker and Harker, 1998). Firms facing a distress situation and carrying out a retrenchment strategy are more likely to survive, even though the performance was statistically not greater than that of not retrenched firms (Castrogiovanni and Bruton, 2000). In this sense, Sudarsanam and Lai (2001) showed that the strategies applied by firms successfully recovering were not that different from the strategies applied by firms that did not recover. So, the implementation efficacy was the cause of these differences, even though more intensive restructuration was done by firms that could n ot redirect their situation. The effectiveness of efficiency oriented strategies is supported by the results showing that firms resolving a situation of financial distress are statistically more profitable than those who did not settle (Campbell, 1996; Routledge and Gadenne, 2000; Pearce and Doh, 2002). These authors found that operating efficiency was the only variable used in distinguishing successful turnarounds from unsuccessful ones that significantly persisted during the recovery process. Kahl (2001) also stated that, in-distress, operating performance has a strong positive relation with the survival prospect. In particular, the author shows that an improvement in the standard deviation of ROA during a crisis period can increase the survival probability up to 0.62. In the same line, Gonzà ¡lez-Bravo and Mecaj (2011) found evidence that the companies positioned in a safety zone, starting from a situation of failure status, are characterized by a strong managerial action measured by ROA ratio, generating fu rthermore higher operating cash flow. However, other authors such as Barniv et al. (2002) or Laitinen (1993) found that the ROA coefficients were statistically not significant in predicting the outcome of a crisis situation. The post-distress status The main objective of a firm facing a distress situation is to heal the crisis state. Some researches, oriented to modeling the variables that influence a recovery process, identify the final stage of this process when a firm objectively exits a failure situation emerging as an independent firm, leaving Chapter 11 classification or keeping a defined period of positive income (Smith and Graves, 2006; Barniv et al., 2002; Altman and Hotchkiss, 2006; Kahl, 2001). However, the accomplishment of this objective should have one necessary quality condition. The new post-failure position should be achieved in suitable conditions that would permit an appropriate and continuous growth and performance rate. A financial distress process could place a firm in a weak position, even if it had managed to solve its difficulties, inciting a poor performance that inevitably makes it enter again in an emergency situation (Kahl, 2002). If a firm does not emerge profitably in the restructuring phase, in order to achieve a long term success, the probability of a successful exit process is very low (Burbank, 2005). In this sense, Hotchkiss (1995) showed that up to one third of the firms that relieve their conditions by means of debt restructuring tend to go into a financial distress situation few years afterwards. With regard to post-distress position, Robbins and Pearce (1992) affirm that industry indicator variations should be considered in order to better identify the good performers or the exceptional good performers during turnaround. Despite of the assessment of Altman and Hotchkiss (2006) stating that the firms overcoming a Chapter 11 situation perform below firms of the same industry that di d not pass through that same situation, Kahl (2001) found that the post-distress operating performance of firms getting through a crisis situation is similar to the industry performance. The model of recovery When a firm is facing a distress situation and considering all the above analyzed dimensions, severity and reaction capability should be understood as initial conditions that will impose restrictions in selecting the strategies which will drive the performance during recovery, thus, determining the final resolution of long term financial distress process as shown in Figure 1. (Figure 1 here) The left side of the diagram gathers the initial determining factors to initiate the recovery process, outlining the firms ability to improve its future and overcome the difficult situation. Severity Status offers valuable information about the initial degree of gravity of a firms situation. This degree will condition the actions to be taken in a deteriorated situation and the possible outcome as well. Reaction Capability measures the firms capacity to apply such actions through: i) the possibility to obtain further resources without worsening its position, ii) the capacity of debt negotiation or iii) the ability to generate additional incomes which may facilitate the application of strategy changes. The right side of the above Figure 1 defines the final subsequent status of firms, once specific actions have been taken. Post-distress Status shows the effectiveness of the management effort in a crisis situation, not only because the firm solves the initial state, but also since the new position is reached evidencing a well performance to set a suitable continuity in the new balanced situation. Accordingly, Post-distress status assesses the quality of firms welfare accounting for the risk to re-entry into distress discriminating well performers and best performers in a crisis management process. In a distress context, a well-performer just achieves the objective (i.e. exiting the crisis situation) while best-performers are located in a new healthy scenario minimizing the likelihood to reenter in distress. Hence, considering the above model, the following hypotheses will be tested: H1: Severity degree of financially distressed firms is likely associated with the post distress status. H2: Reaction Capability of distressed firms is positively related to a fit final position after recovery process. H3: Performance in-distress is positively related with the welfare of the post distress status. H4: Retrenchment strategies have a positive influence on the outcome of a distressed situation. H5: Size of financially distressed companies is associated with the final position after recovery process. Methodology, sample and variables To test the hypothesis we use the financial data of US firms derived from the Compustat Database in an eight year period: 1993-2000 which is considered to be economically appropriate for the analysis. Smith and Graves (2005) affirm that in an economic expansion context distressed firms could easily perform a successful turnaround. Particularly, the US economy experienced an economic expansion during the analyzed period. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (2001), a peak in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in March 2001. A peak marks the end of an expansion and the beginning of a recession  [1]  . So, the year 2001 was marked by events like the Dot-Com Bubble, Stock Market Crash, the loss of investors confidence in the Stock Market or the emergence of corporate fraud and corporate governance. The September 11, 2001 attacks also, may have been an important factor in turning this decline in the economy into a recession. The financial data for the year s after 2000 would be, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by all these external factors. From a total of 1721 companies that offer complete data in their financial statements during all years, only the ones that presented a crisis situation in the first year of analysis, 1993, were selected. We consider a crisis status as a variety of enterprise adversity situations that threaten the future viability of the company (Turetsky and Mcwewn, 2001; Graveline and Kikalari, 2008), which show some incapacity to generate resources and/or to fulfill the payment of debts in time. This incapacity can be transitory and of a major or minor gravity and it can be observed through a series of symptoms alerting that the health and the future of the company are at risk. Considering this general approach and following Gonzà ¡lez-Bravo and Mecaj (2011), we classify a firm as financially distressed if, in the first year of our analysis, it presented one or more of the following criteria: Negative Net Income, Negative Operating Income, Negative Retained Earnings, Negative Working Capital, Negative Cash Flow, Negative Operating Cash Flow and Negative Shareholders Equity. In agreement with Gilbert, Menon and Schwartz (1990), to prevent the selection of firms that only had a poor performance in t he starting year firms presenting merely a Negative Net Income for the year 1993 were not selected. This criterion made possible that poor performers were selected only when they also showed a continued instable situation such as losses in previous years or solvency problems. As a result, our study is performed on a total of 526 companies that satisfied all the previous conditions. Table 1 shows the principal features of the analyzed sample. (Table 1 here) The number of observed symptoms permits an objective a priori classification based on the gravity of the starting situation. A firm would experience a weak crisis if it presents three or less criteria and, on the contrary, a strong crisis if it shows 4 or more. Following this further, in the first year of the analysis 77.38% of the firms encounter a weak crisis while 22.62% are facing a situation of strong crisis. Variables Severity Status, Reaction Capability and Fitness Status, as representative indicators of post-distress position, in the above proposed model (Figure 1) are built by gathering information given by some individual variable-indicators according to the features evaluated. The complete picture integrating the model and variables is showed in Figure 2. (Figure 2 here) Severity status (SEV_STAT) should be understood as an index assessing the degree of severity distress by seven financial ratios. These ratios correspond to the 7 symptom-indicators used to classify a firm as being in financial distress previously described, all divided by Total Assets in order to eliminate the size effect. Ratios such as: Net Income/Total Assets, EBIT/Total Assets and Retained Earnings/Total assets, representatives of the economic performance, are also commonly used to determine the existence of a decline phase in turnaround and recovery research (Pearce and Robins, 1993; Arogyaswamy et al., 1995; Smith and Graves, 2005). Negative Operating Cash Flow is also an indicator of liquidity deterioration and of financial distress probability (Anandarajan et al. 2001; Bell and Tabor, 1991; John, 1993). These seven indicators should be considered in a negative direction with respect to financial distress. That is, the lower value of the indicators, the worse the starting situ ation of the firm. In the same way, the more the number of negative indicators in a firm, the higher the crisis severity degree will be. Reaction capability is evaluated through three indicators: Sales/Total Assets (TURNOV), Shareholders Equity/Total Liabilities (FIN_AUT) and Current Assets/Current Liabilities (SOLV). The first one reflects the capacity of the company to enhance profitability while the other two indicators are linked to the financial structure of a firm and enable us to value its self-sufficiency and solvency. Together, these three variables measure the capacity of a firm to obtain external and additional funds or to reorganize its debts, the short term response capacity and the ability to generate resources. Fitness status (FIT_STAT) is defined as an index measuring the final health position on an objective and on a quality base as well, by means of 4 variables. Final Position is a categorical variable which indicates the existence or not of a crisis situation, when the firm still presents any symptom of distress. This variable takes value 0 if the firm exits successfully and doesnt present distress signals or value 1 otherwise. Additionally, to measure the health quality of this position, we follow the approach of Jostarndt (2006) when he identifies three factors that could cause financial distress: excessive leverage, a poor firm-specific operating performance and an industry downturn. These factors could be interpreted as indicators of the incapacity of a firm to generate cash flow which may influence a continuous economic and financial deterioration. The variables are defined as follows: (For further details on all variables calculation refer to Appendix B): Debt payment level: it permits the evaluation of the effects that a higher debt level of a firm has on cash flow generation, with respect to the industry where it operates. It indicates the level of interest payment the firm is paying compared to the median of the sector. If the level is above the median, the firm is paying more than other firms, so it should reduce it. Firm Performance: It measures the effects that a poor performance, lower than the median of the industry, has on cash flow generation. It measures the operating income of a firm compared to the median of the sector. It indicates if the firm is performing above or below the median of the sector. Sector performance: it allows analyzing to what extent the trend of the performance of the sector where the firm operates influences its capacity to generate cash flow if it behaved as the industry average. This item measures the improvement or the deterioration of a sectors performance, compared to its performance the year before. These three variables measure the risk of distress which could be the consequence of leverage problems or economic issues, including the downturn of the industry. The former three defined ratio-indicators should be understood in a negative sense, thus, the higher the three ratios are, the worse the quality position of the firm and the greater the probability of financial distress. Therefore, Fitness Status variable measures the position of a firm t years after the financial distress has been detected, allowing to evaluate the performance in managing a difficult situation. Severity Status and Fitness Status indexes could be interpreted as two composite indicators gathering the information of 7 and 3 individual ratios, respectively. To overcome some of the drawbacks of aggregated indexes, such as the degree of subjectivity in attribution of weights to each individual component (Munda, 2005; Messer et al., 2006; Munda and Nardo, 2009; Ramzan et al., 2008), we decided to use Data Envelopment analysis to summarize the complex information in just one index (Nardo et al., 2005a; Cherchye et al. 2008; Dyckhoff and Allen, 2001). DEA is a non-parametric performance measurement technique, based on a productivity approach, widely used to evaluate the relative efficiency of Decision Making Units (Cooper et al., 1999; Seiford, 1997; Gattoufi et al. 2004; Sherman and Zhu, 2006). However, this methodology has also been used to create indexes combining different components by means of an optimization process, when the structure of weights of these components is not kn own, and without making any assumption concerning the internal operations of a DMU (Cherchye et al., 2006; Zhu, 2000 and 2001; Puig-Junoy, 1998; Sexton and Lewis, 2003). Thus, both Severity Status and Fitness Status scores are obtained applying a DEA model without explicit inputs, called DEA-WEI models by Liu et al. (2011). This formulation, discussed by Lovell and Pastor (1999), considering a model with only outputs and a single constant input, has been used by Chen (2002) and Cooper et al. (2009), and it is similar to other approaches as DEA-R (Despic et al., 2007) or DEA-Index composite (Cherchye et al. 2008). Fitness Status use as DEA variables a series of indicators that measure negative features of a firm and they are also linked to the possibility of presenting a marked financial distress situation. This consideration is in agreement with the called pessimistic DEA approach, where the efficiency frontier contains, using Azizi and Ajirlu (2011) terminology, the worst-practisers as efficient in being poor-performers. In this way, DMUs scoring unity or close to unity levels will be the ones with higher degree of severity in their financial distressed situation. Furthermore, Fitness Score DEA manages a categorical variable Final Status indicating the existence or not of distress symptoms. In this sense we follow the approach of Banker and Morey (1986) concerning the treatment of exogenously fixed data. To measure the strategies and the behavior of firms during distress, profitability and downsizing actions have been included in the analysis. With regard to profitability, we use ROA in the last year of the analysis (ROA) and the average of its variations in the previous years (ROA_AVG) to measure the impact of efficiency oriented strategies to the final post-distress position. Concerning downsizing actions, variations in total assets during previous year are included to measure the impact of retrenchment strategies (RET_STG) Finally, to control the size effect (SIZE), natural logarithm of sales [ln(sales)] is included in the analysis in order to assess the influence of size on the possibility to return on a healthy scenario. Methodology The DEA score Fitness Status will be treated as a dependent variable in order to analyze to what extent post-failure position could be explained by issues such as severity, reaction capability or certain strategies implemented by the firms. Many different approaches can be found in the literature when a DEA score is used as a dependent variable of a regression to relate efficiency to the factors and study their influence on the former. The consideration of the DEA score as a censored variable (showing values between zero and unity) has been the argument for using regression censored models such as Tobit. On the other hand, Mancebà ³n and Molinero (2000) do not share this opinion and affirm that efficiency takes natural limits of zero and one and they estimate a model of the log type to explain inefficiency. In the same line, Puig-Junoy (1998) considers that DEA scores do not fit the theory of sampling censoring for Tobit models explaining inefficiency by a multiplicativ

Essay --

Christmas Markets around the World Christmas is a magical holiday and it is celebrated everywhere in the world by creating a fantasy scenery on the streets and in every shop and house. Around Christmas time, all the big cities in the world turn into a magical place, decorated with huge Christmas trees and with thousands of Christmas lights. But that is not all. In many cities around the world, no matter whether they are the capital city of a country or a small town, there are organized Christmas Markets every year. The Christmas markets fill the streets with a wonderful smell of traditional delicacies related to Christmas and so everybody is attracted to the markets by the wonderful, fantasy-like smell coming from there. In these markets, people can also find original, unique ideas to buy as gifts for their loved ones, as merchandisers usually sell hand-made items in these markets. And let’s not forget about the beautiful Christmas decorations, which you can also find at any of these markets. Austria is one of the countries in which Christmas Markets are an old tradition. There, you can find at least one Christmas Market in any major city or town, but the most famous of all remains, of course, Vienna’s Christmas Market. There are also plenty of other cities where the magical atmosphere of Christmas is sustained by the Christmas Markets, such as: Innsbruck, Graz, Salzburg and Linz. Belgium is another country which celebrates Christmas by organizing Christmas Markets in some of the greatest cities in the country. The smell of traditional Christmas food and the beautiful coloured Christmas trees attract the visitors to Christmas Markets in Belgium. Some of the most famous Markets opened for Christmas Holidays in Belgium are in A... ...er cultures. In the last few years, the Christmas Markets became popular in the USA as well, so that today you can enjoy the wonderful celebrations of Christmas at Christmas Markets in USA, where you will be delighted by beautiful music, tasty food and lots of entertainment. Canada is least famous for its Christmas Markets, yet it owns some. In the last few years, Christmas Markets flourished in Toronto, Vancouver, Quebec and other regions in Canada. People can find wonderful Christmas themed presents to buy from these Markets. The magical atmosphere of Christmas is flourishing with these very special and wonderful Christmas Markets around the world, where people can enjoy the beautiful Christmas Carols, huge Christmas Trees, amazing decorations and lights, tasty food delicacies for Christmas, as well as unique Christmas gifts that they can buy from the Markets.