The Pros & Cons of In-House Versus Outsourced R&D Activity for Assignment

The Pros & Cons of In-House Versus Outsourced R&D Activity for Technology Firms - Assignment Example This research will begin with the statement that there is recent evidence showing that firms no longer depend entirely on in-house R&D to maintain their technological competitiveness. This development, in as much as it has been contended, in portions reflects technological and economical globalization, whereby there is an increasing correspondence in categories of technologies across countries of harmony. Consequently, cross border competition is growing which has resulted in fewer opportunities for profits despite higher costs in retaining technological resources to remain internationally competitive. On the other hand, there is evidence that outsourcing research and development (R&D) activities are on the increase too, for instance in the R&D Magazine January 2001 Issue reports according to a survey of the people reading, a significant portion of the total R&D would be outsourced. The term non – internal is a premeditated one and is proposed to comprise of both outer activit ies (arms-length relationships that include licensing, R&D contracts, outsourcing and other customer supplier relationships) and quasi-external activity like strategic alliances which is said to involve a good number of organizational methods. Non- internal activities are advantageous as they are a ‘reversible’ asset as well as benefits of exploring new areas prompting radical transformation. The funds needed are smaller and the dangers are to a great extent reduced and, in case of the organizational predicament of failure, the limited damage is imposed on primary operations of the firm.

Role Of The Citizen On Earth Essay Example for Free

Role Of The Citizen On Earth Essay The role of every element on earth is indeed found in its nature and it is the same for man, but instead of functioning exclusively as humans, we intentionally bludgeon our role as defined by nature trying to be something beyond our reach, and creating more problems than nature itself can solve, calling on us to reverse our course and get back to nature. The Earth is being destroyed by human actions. Deforestation, industrial factory, nuclear industry, dam construction, the use of chemical substances and poisonous gas that pollute the environment and are harmful to the ozone layer, mining, and so on are the dangers that the Earth is facing. Humans are who cause the problems, but they are also who find the solutions. Therefore, the destiny of the Earth is shaped by everyone. If we want to make a difference on the Earth and lead the Earth to the peace and happiness, we need to start now. A citizen could be described as an individual who is born into a country or acquires it through naturalization, which connotes the fact that it is your paternal right to contribute meaningfully towards the development of that nation or country. As far as this true, the context of this essay will enlighten as well as portray the impact and role that I have played as a universal citizen of our beautiful mother earth which is currently faced with environmental destruction, resource depletion, wars, conflicts, poverty among others.

Tri-State Water Wars: Impact on Metropolitan Atlanta’s Future Growth Es

Tri-State Water Wars: Impact on Metropolitan Atlanta’s Future Growth â€Å"Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting.† - Mark Twain Metro Atlanta is on a collision course with reality – and the shock of this collision will have profound political and economic implications for future growth throughout the Southeast. The core problem is that Atlanta’s runaway growth will soon outstrip the available water supply (Corps, 1998). And if Atlanta continues to increase its water consumption until the maximum limits are reached, the effects on downstream users will become catastrophic, both economically and environmentally. Without multi-state agreements concerning changes in usage patterns, this could bring about intervention by the Federal courts that would effectively halt Atlanta’s development until the usage disputes were resolved. By comparison, some western states water lawsuits have lasted for decades, typically freezing usage patterns â€Å"as is†. (Barr, 1999) The southeast can ill afford to have Atlanta – the region’s single largest engine of economic growth – brought to a standstill because of this issue. The root cause of the entire regional problem is the combination of Atlanta’s high growth and an inadequate water supply. No US city as large as Atlanta is founded on a river as small as the Chattahoochee. (NY Times) If Atlanta were the size of Birmingham, there would be no crisis whatsoever. In addition, the lack of a usable underground aquifer system in North Georgia limits the options for expanding the available supply. (ITT) The underlying granite subsurface prevents the formation of large underground water reserves, which are often a significant water source for other large cities. Only by transfe... ...raci. â€Å"Conservation helped avert more severe water limits.† USA Today. July 16, 2002 Web Sites: â€Å"Tri-state pact essential to growth.† Congressman Bob Barr. May 24, 1999, official web site http://barr.house.gov/newsdescr.asp?RI=435 â€Å"Atlanta's Unquenchable Thirst Sparks Dixie Water War.† By Marcello Ballve, Pacific News Service, Mar 11, 2002 http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2002/mar/0311water.html â€Å"Tri-State Water Wars.† Southern Environmental Law Center http://www.selcga.org/originals/water_wars/water_wars.shtml â€Å"The Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa Water Deal: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.† By Brad McLane, Executive Director, Alabama Rivers Alliance http://www.alabamarivers.org/tristatewars.htm ITT Industries – Guide to Global Water issues Atlanta and the Southeast, by Charles Seabrook http://www.itt.com/waterbook/atlanta.asp

Life Experience Growing Up Essay

It is hard to explain to most people the reason why even though I was born in the United States of America and had a complete set of parents at the time of my birth, I was still sent to Haiti to be raised by a surrogate family. Not everyone understands the crazy things that parents do when their marriage is failing and the family is falling apart, as my parents chose to do. I do not remember much about my childhood in the USA because I left when I was seven years old. All that I could remember about that time was that my mother came home one day really sad and she asked my two sisters and I to pack up our things because we were going on an airplane ride. When I asked her where we were headed, thinking that we were probably going to Disneyland or something, she told me that we were going to take a vacation at her sister’s house in Haiti. This did not strike me as strange at the time because I had never met my mother’s sister at that point in time so I was excited to meet her. Mom told us that we had cousins in Haiti and we would get to meet them for the very first time during this trip. When I asked my mom if Dad would be joining us on this trip, she said that he was too busy at work to come along but that he loved us and wished us a safe trip. So it happened that I left my country of birth in 1973 to embark on a life that was thrust upon me without a choice nor a reason why I had to live it. Our mother spent a whole month with us in Haiti. I have some vague recollection of my mother sitting at the dining table at night with her sister, crying and in need of consolation. At the end of the month, I remember seeing my mother packing her suitcase. I thought it was time to go home and that she had simply forgotten to tell my sisters and I to pack up our things. So I began doing so without being instructed to. When mom saw what I was doing, she asked me to stop and come out to the backyard to have a talk. We sat on the swing in the small backyard of my aunt’s house as my mother explained what our new family situation was. She asked me if I remembered how she and dad had been fighting a lot lately and sometimes he would not come home for days because of the arguments. I recall that at the time I had vague recollections of my parents voices breaking through the bedroom walls at night when they thought we were already asleep. Slowly, mom explained to me that the marriage was in trouble and that the family was falling apart. She assured me that they both still loved us more than life itself but that they felt it would be best if we stayed n Haiti while they finalized the divorce and they both tried to get back on their feet after. It hurt me a lot to be indirectly told that my sisters and I had no place in our parents lives anymore. I felt abandoned and betrayed by both my parents. I was angry that even though I was just a little girl, I would have to find a way to explain what was going on to my sisters and make sure that they would be able to adjust to a life without our real mom and dad. We were all born in New York City and were accustomed to its lifestyle and culture. O when we were forcibly left in Haiti by our mom, we had to overcome the culture shock and social difficulty of having to live in a different environment from what we were used to. My sisters and I also had to lowly began to adjust to life with our surrogate parents. That is, our aunt and her husband. We had surrogate siblings as well because they eventually had their own children. We were a large, convoluted, extended family. As time passed, we became less American and more Haitian. French became our mother tongue and English was a stranger to us. We were happy and well adjusted kids who saw no difference in the way we were treated by our guardians who loved and treated us as if we were their own flesh and blood. Our parents? We spoke to them separately over the phone 4 times a month. We were strangers who did not really know anything about each other and did not have much to talk about over the phone. Those times were more like mandatory duties that our aunt and uncle made sure we accomplished without fail.

How Effectively the Barnardo’s Website Presents it’s Campaign to Prevent Child Poverty Essay

* The layout of material * The way in which language is manipulated * The effect on the intended audience In this essay I will analyse how the use of graphics, language, lay-out and links in this website are effective in raising peoples’ awareness so that Barnardo’s can help to stop and prevent child poverty. Barnardo’s deals with many situations and projects such as day care and play schemes, after school clubs, advice and counselling for parents and parenting education. There are over three hundred of these projects, run by Barnardo’s, around the UK. In this website, Barnardo’s are appealing to a younger audience. In the text it tells us that they have launched an e-card campaign asking 1 million â€Å"children and young people† to respond. I think this is a good idea because most of the young people are on the Internet now as opposed to the older generation. The other aspect of the article that appeals to young people is the fact that it is related to people of the similar age groups and the case study can be related to more easily by younger people as it is about a young person. Although it is aimed at younger people it is going to get passed on to the adults anyway by asking for help on the Internet, telling a teacher as part of a school project. The idea of having this campaign on the Internet is more appealing as more people would look on the Internet for a campaign instead of calling in to a store and picking up a leaflet. In this campaign, Barnardo’s use pictures to try and persuade us to help. They persuade us by making us feel sympathetic towards the children, which will make us want to help the children. They do this by showing us pictures that we can relate to, pictures such as school halls and corridors, outer doors and swing parks. They show us these pictures because these are places that would be related to children. But the difference, however, is that they show them as being derelict and vandalised. The other thing they use is dull colours, which makes the pictures seem sad, lonely and also evil. By making them derelict and dull they make us think that the victims feel sad and lonely because that is the emotion the pictures give across and because of these emotions we feel entitled to help change their lives. The position, on the page, of the pictures also makes us feel different about helping the campaign. The photographs are placed in the centre of the page and the text is surroundin g them. This means that you cannot read the text without looking at the pictures and the emotion in the text with the emotion in the pictures makes it appeal more to us and makes us feeling even more obliged to help the children. At the top of each page Barnardo’s have placed their logo and slogan. It is placed at the top left-hand corner of each page and I think this is effective because people would look there first. The logo is a picture of what looks like two adults with a child and they look quite cheery which makes you think that the lives of children who are victims of child poverty will end up like that if they get the help from Barnardo’s and the nation-wide public. The slogan underneath this backs it up, it says † Giving Children Back Their Future†, which is what Barnardo’s are trying to do with this campaign. The slogan and logo are effective, when presented in this way, because they make you feel like you can trust Barnardo’s to give them a better future. Throughout the website, Barnardo’s keep mentioning the other facilities they operate, which reinforces its stability and reliability. On the first page it leans on the fact that it is safe and offers a safe environment, â€Å"safe and stimulating place to play†. The charity does this to show their audience that they are reliable and determined about stopping and preventing child poverty and about getting all the help they can with the campaign. You see can that they always are looking towards the future of the children. The case study that is included supports this. The case study is a human appeal about someone who was a victim of child poverty and the conclusion of the study tells us how Barnardo’s helped and how the boy is going to change his own life and turn everything around. People can relate to a case study like this because they want a better world and their instincts make them feel sorry for the boy and make them want to help others like him. The other techniques they use are the emotive phrases in the case study. They use phrases such as â€Å"neither of the adults had much time for Michael† and they tell us the boy had â€Å"no sense of stability†. These phrases are quite harsh and can make you think twice about not wanting to help, especially to an older audience because they wouldn’t want their children growing up like that. The links on the web page are very clear and helpful, they use FAQ’s (frequently asked questions) such as † who we are† and â€Å"what we do†. These sorts of phrases are also used as headings at the top of each page. The links also include a â€Å"support us† heading which you could take as a plea or cry out for help. The â€Å"contact us† link means that if you have any additional questions or need help with anything you can contact them easily and even help them more if they need it. The sort of support and help they want is for young people to send an e-card which is also a link at the concluding page. Because it is set out in this format means you don’t need to give any money and it means you have no way out of it because it is eye-catching and you would feel obliged to help because it is any easy thing to do. When people start to read about the campaign they might think they will have to give money but it appeals to the reader becau se it doesn’t involve an awful lot to change someone’s life. The language in the campaign is very simple and plain in the text. They don’t use a large variety of vocabularies so that younger people can understand it better because it isn’t difficult or challenging. The text has a lot of emotive language such as, â€Å"inescapable aspect† and â€Å"lacks local amenities†. The word â€Å"you† is used, in the context † You can be a force for change†, which makes you think that they are talking directly to you and makes you feel that the children’s lives are dependant on you. In the section headed â€Å"the facts† bullet points are used which makes the text a lot easier to read and you think that you are reading very little but you actually take in a lot of information. I think that the idea of a web page is very effective because I know that I would prefer reading something of the Internet than reading a leaflet on a campaign. The most effective technique, I think, is the case study because I thought it was very moving and after I read it I could slightly relate to it because the person seemed to be about the same age as me and obviously wanted to change his life around. What Barnardo’s did to try and change that boy’s life was spectacular. After I finished I sent an e-card because I was persuaded into doing the right thing which was the whole point of the campaign.

Risk of Diseases †English Descriptive Essay

Risk of Diseases – English Descriptive Essay Free Online Research Papers Risk of Diseases English Descriptive Essay Statistics of Canada has recently stated that less than 2% of overweight people living in Canada are overweight because of a thyroid problem and the other 98% are overweight because of their sedentary lifestyle. Working in the fitness industry as a personal trainer and fitness consultant, you get to train and work with a lot of people especially and predominately sedentary individuals who realize that they have to change theory lifestyle in order to decrease their risk of diseases and enable themselves to feel good about themselves. While working, I had the privilege of working with a 32 year old single women from Toronto named Wanda. Wanda like many of the overweight people I have helped for the past 5 years as a personal trainer and fitness consultant wanted to lose weight, she was concerned with her weight, wanted to fit better in to her clothes and wanted to eliminate her old lifestyle for a new improved one. When I first saw Wanda she was the typically sedentary women that I usually encounter. She had shoulder length blonde hair that was very obvious she had bleached, her nose was long and pointy and her she was very fair. When she talked to me I noticed that her thin lips wee cracked and need some lip balm on them. We discussed what she wanted to change about herself and the first thing, she mentioned was her weight. I took a good look at her rounded figure that was estimated to be about 200 lbs. and her height which she was about 5 feet 4 inches and informed her that by my observation of her I could tell that she was in the overweight catelgory according to the BMI which was a measurement of your weight divided my your height and let her know that this would be our main focus. As I had Wanda Atedp to take her skin fold, which was a mental caliper that slightly and gently pinched her skin to tell me how much body fat she had, I noticed het designer name clothes. She had on a red gap t-shirt that was obviously two sizesto small for her that it spaneded her skin was begging to have some fresh air, her belly was sticking out and she had sweat staines under her arms. She wore blue navy blue pants with pink flowers in the front of the tight pants and yellow bumbles on the back. Again theses were too small for her and thought out the skin fold assessment many times she would grasps her hands and squeeze them throughthe side of her pants to pull them up. After the skinfold, we talked about her lifestyle. I knew what she was going to say before any movement of her thin chapped lips open. She looked like the type of wome who ate a lot of unhealthy food like greasy French fries and over drenched ketchup on top of the fries making you double guess if she was eating French fries or kethup. When she got home from work, she would watch tv like the simpsons and the young and the restless then after wasting her whole evening oindulging her self in the tv, she would crawl herself to bed and start all over again. Research Papers on Risk of Diseases - English Descriptive EssayMarketing of Lifeboy Soap A Unilever ProductPersonal Experience with Teen Pregnancy19 Century Society: A Deeply Divided EraQuebec and CanadaAnalysis Of A Cosmetics AdvertisementHip-Hop is ArtThe Hockey GameEffects of Television Violence on ChildrenCapital PunishmentLifes What Ifs

Do People Truly Understand Vegetarianism Professor Ramos Blog

Do People Truly Understand Vegetarianism https://prezi.com/view/xloHLbey3DCpFCBp3v9M/

How to Write Without Really Trying

How to Write Without Really Trying How to Write Without Really Trying How to Write Without Really Trying By Maeve Maddox A paradox of our times is that, although schools no longer insist that students master standard writing conventions in order to graduate, more people are writing for publication than at any previous time in human history. According to one estimate, more than 152 million blogs populate the Internet, with more joining them every day. And then there are the books: in the years between 2007 and 2012, self-published titles rose 422 percent. As might be expected, much of this verbal outpouring is rife with nonstandard grammar, sloppy style, and a general lack of respect for the reader. Here, for example, is a notice written by an online purveyor of fan fiction: Please Note, alot of typoes and grammatical errors  will  be found. i just posted this recently and have not had a chance to edit yet. so  bare with me will  be eiditing soon. Professional journalists, on the other hand, might reasonably be expected to pay attention to the conventions of formal written English. Or so I thought, until I read an article about a spate of burglaries in a residential neighborhood in California. The article appears on the site of an ABC affiliate. Presumably, the writer was paid to write it. Here are a few extracts, with comments: It [a manhunt] started with a stolen getaway car that the burglars left behind when they took off to hide inside people’s homes. The expression â€Å"to take off† in the sense of â€Å"to leave in a hurry† is at best informal usage. I suppose the writer chose â€Å"took off† because he’d already used left in â€Å"left behind.† By replacing â€Å"left behind† with abandoned, he could have used left instead of took off to mean depart. The three burglary suspects were believed to be holed up in someone’s house. The expression â€Å"to hole up† or â€Å"to be holed up† is definitely slang. Conventional usage: â€Å"were believed to be hiding in someone’s house.† Snipers in camouflage climbed on roof tops and officers made sure every inch of the neighborhood was covered, from backyards, to front porches, dogs hunted for the suspects scent. i. The word rooftops is a closed compound. ii. A comma usually separates independent clauses joined by and: â€Å"Snipers in camouflage climbed on rooftops, and officers made sure† iii. The sentence is actually two sentences, incorrectly joined by a comma splice. The first sentence should end with â€Å"from backyards to front porches.† The next sentence is â€Å"Dogs hunted for the suspects’ scent.† iv. The dog sentence is less than satisfying. Did the dogs really hunt the scent? Or were they following the scent as they hunted the suspects? Police are praising the woman at the start of the day who called police when she heard the burglars inside her home. This is an example of a misplaced modifier. The hunt for the burglars began when the woman phoned the police that morning. Better: â€Å"Police are praising the woman who called police at the start of the day when she heard the burglars inside her home.† Shortly after writing this post, I heard about the availability of software applications designed to write articles with a minimum of human input. According to an online advertisement, one such revolutionary application includes templates and phrase lists that will enable a blogger to produce a 500-word article â€Å"on any topic in under a minute.† Who knows? A machine may have written the story about the burglars. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the General category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Masters Degree or Master's Degree?Yay, Hooray, Woo-hoo and Other Acclamations45 Idioms About the Number One

Introducing new brand into a market Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Introducing new brand into a market - Case Study Example (Auchan, 2008). Currently, Auchan has formed an alliance with the telecommunications operator Wind, in Italy, to build the strongest virtual operator, supported physically by Wind to offer telecommunication services as well as attractive promotions and fidelity options to give customers a reason to choose its supermarket over the current leader. This is an example of the "flanker strategy" - the objective of this strategy is to defend an exposed flank, which in business terms, is translated into a weakness in the leader's offering. "a follower may try to capture a leading share in a market segment with a differentiated product where the leader is not strong." (Avlonitis, 2006, p. 49). Attacking a non natural action field will give them an advantage over Carrefour that will require time for them to regain. Archos France is a company that produces electronic components, specifically those dedicated to multimedia applications. The role of Archos is the one of a company that follows the pace of the technology dictated by other leaders like Apple. Its strategy is based on producing almost cutting edge technological products at a lower cost than the concurrency but not trying to get the leadership position, since the company does not invest in innovation and advertising to the extent of the leaders in the industry. This is despite the fact that the company claims to have an objective of being an innovative company that brings pocket entertainment to customers (Archos, 2008). "Firms which undertake a good deal of innovation often have to recoup massive investment costs. Market followers are able to copy what the leading firms produce and save themselves the burden of massive investment costs. This means that they can operate very profitably at the going price in a market." (Proctor, 2000, p .109). An example of this strategy is the multimedia reader Archos 405 which is a product that resembles the iPod touch from Apple but with less appealing characteristics that allows it to be commercialized at half the price. Geox Italy is a firm that works in the shoe industry where other companies like Nike or Adidas are leaders. The difference with the strongest brands is that Geox was born based on the innovative idea of creating a shoe that allows transpiration to go out of the shoe through holes that do not allow water to come in. Its objective is to create shoes that guarantee those aspects giving the company a strong niche orientation, "A cardinal rule for successful entrepreneurs is "find a market niche." Specialization in a product area can make you the recognized expert." (Lesonsky, 2001, p. 45); the family of shoes that uses the Geox breathes patented system was a success among the customer that searched waterproof shoes that allowed the feet to remain dry, a sector of the market which was not considered by the market leaders and challengers such as Reebok, Le Coq Sportif or Avia. Essay 2 (Deena) An Overview Many companies consider launching new brands and products into the market with hopes that it will provide these brands sustainability and an increase in market share. While processes for dealing with competition differ from one region to the next, it is also important to recognize that for some brands, their competition might not require the same marketing competitive

Market Opportunity Analysis - Walmart Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Market Opportunity Analysis - Walmart - Essay Example Changing demographic data such as growing population, ethnic diversity, income, percentage of single parents and percentage of people living in metropolitan triggers four prospects—more food for growing population, more easy-to-prepare foods for single parent households, more variety of products for diversified people and more upgraded foods for individuals with higher incomes. (Umberger, Thilmany and Ziehl p9-13) Nowadays, consumers are changing their buying patterns to be online because of lower prices and available 24/7. Consumer tastes can be different based on another demographic factor: age. For example, consumers under 35 years old are most likely to be interested in domestics (73.3%), lawn & garden (71.4%), stationery (66.7%), personal care appliances (65.5%) and glasses and dishware (60.0%). (Negley) And the willingness to switch brands also depends on the age groups—for instance, consumers over 50 years old have strongest loyalties. Jennifer Negley also claimed that the loyalties of consumers were falling down. It could be seen in groceries and canned food products which possessed 84% loyalty in 1993 and shifted to 73% in 1997. Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, is operating in the highly competitive retail industry in both local US market and international market. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, and comprises of four separate retail segments namely Wal-Mart Supercenters, Discount Stores, Neighborhood Markets, and SAM’S CLUB. As of January 31, 2010, the company operated 2,612 Supercenters ,891 Discount Stores, 153 Neighborhood Markets and 602 SAM'S CLUB warehouses and in the United States. (Wal-Mart Annual Report, p 14) There are 3,615 Wal-Mart units outside US including countries such as Mexico, Canada, Brazil, UK, China and Germany. The retail products available at Wal-Mart include general merchandise such as household goods, apparels, jewelry, health & beauty products, electronics, toys, fabrics, shoes, garden appliances and crafts. Along with other retailers in the industry like Kmart and Sear, Wal-Mart is facing the changing consumer buying patterns and prefere nces. The essence of Wal-Mart’s success is its ability to purchase a huge amount of goods and re-sell them to customers with lower prices. It also intends to sell quality products at the same time. So, it would be a high risk if it could not predict correctly on which items to be purchased to meet the changing consumer tastes. As we learned that consumers from different places prefer separate items, it may affect on setting localization strategy for each international unit. Next, as Wal-Mart is selling many products across several product lines, it is more inflexible to change compared to its competitors who only focus on one or two product lines. If consumers change their tastes in one product line, the competitors can adapt with customers’ preferences more easily than Wal-Mart can. Moreover, it is vital to catch up with changing consumer’s online behaviors for the effects can be critical for how Wal-Mart’s online store should be shaped. 2. How well are these changes in customer tastes and preferences being reflected in competitive strategies in the industry? Changes in customer tastes and preferences are reflected in competitive strategies pursued by different retailers in the industry. Competitive strategies help an organization to build a competitive advantage which is the result of having superior performance over competitors. (Hill) And that advantage makes a

Coursework 1 Report Dissertation Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Coursework 1 Report - Dissertation Example The online access of products offered by the departmental stores has brought the consumers closer to the industry. The internet activities in context to the Japanese department store SOGO is one such example. The Japanese style department store is a preferred destination of consumers for style oriented products that are desired by the customers (Wordie 183). SOGO is a preferred destination and one-stop shopping centre for customers who could have the pleasure of shopping in an ideal environment. Leveraging on its brand name built over the years and the quality of its goods and services, the company has introduced internet based activities which created a change in the behaviour of the customers. Based on the emerging demands of their customers, SOGO has designed future strategies for implementation. The future strategies are inclusion of a wide range of customers through its services like internet based marketing which enable e-commerce for the consumers and also allows the company t o increase its customer base. Organisation Background SOGO is a Japanese style department store that includes Hong Kong and China as its major areas of operation. The company was founded by Japan’s SOGO. The style department store is currently owned by the Lifestyle International Holdings which is controlled by the billionaire brothers Joseph Lau and Thomas Lau of Hong Kong. Japan’s style department store SOGO started its operations in the Causeway Bay in 1985 but renovated its store to become JUMBO SOGO in 1993. The company increased its floor area and expanded its operations but in 2000, the company declared bankruptcy due to the burden of debt of $17bn. It was then that Japan’s SOGO was acquired by the Hong Kong based Lau brothers. The second department store was launched by the Hong Kong based group in 2005. Chow Tai Fook Enterprises which is owned by Cheng Yu-teng also has a controlling stake in the style department store. The SOGO Hong Kong departmental st ore is listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2004. The products offered the style department store are customised to suit the style requirements of its customers. The products sold the department store includes men’ and women shoes of different styles and fashion, watches of different categories for men and women, branded watches of various style statements, cosmetics and fragrances for both men and women, lingerie and underwear, etc. The departmental store also sells several food items of different tastes. The food items include the flavors of different region. The food items include delicious and specialised Vietnamese dishes and Italian food items. SOGO also publishes a weekly new magazine in which its advertises its foods and accessory items, products of daily use, handbags, cosmetics and other necessary things of different styles required for daily use. The departmental store holds a comprehensive range of products and goods that are customised to meet the style o f different segments of the customers. In order to advertise and promote its products and to spread its customer base, SOGO style departmental stor

Economics of Canadian Immigration Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Economics of Canadian Immigration - Essay Example In describing the political culture of Canada, certain recent happenings never fail to feature prominently. The Quebec separatist movement and the emergence of conservatism especially in the west are some of the issues that have had great impacts on the Canadian political culture especially in the last two decades (Little 112-125). The propositions in the Quebec agenda and the differences in these policies in relation to the federal policies that define the rest of Canada are indeed topical issues that greatly define the political culture in Canada. The Quebec separatists’ need to secede from the greater Canada was an issue that did not go down well with the Canadian government (Wiley 32). The fundamental concept that arises in the Canadian political analysis is the concept of immigration to Canada and its effects in shaping the political culture in Canada. Most Canadians, unlike Americans, strongly feel that their government should be involved in the political and economic aspects of life in the country (Jameson 78). This support of the government arises out of the historical experiences that marked the Canadian evolvement. Unlike the US, the resistance of republicanism in Canada created a culture of less individualism and more support for government activities (Russell 11). The adoption of British parliamentary and legal systems coupled with loyalist conservatism is certainly the idea behind the Canadians’ obsession with better forms of governance and good politics (Bond 34-42). Such a mindset has been very instrumental in creating a unique political identity in Canada. On the contrary, it has been noticed that most Canadians are never very keen in paying att ention and learning the overall history of their country and its effects on their present lives (Ballack 89). They instead focus majorly on the history of specific regions or the history of a specific people in Canada. Such an analysis does not inundate one with the very pertinent

CRM (Tesco) Statistics Project Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 7000 words

CRM (Tesco) - Statistics Project Example This dissertation basically aimed to achieve an understanding of whether the concepts of customer relationship management which are so effective in industries like banking, airlines etc can also be as useful as they are for the said industries. This research therefore focused on the broad categorization of whether CRM has the power to create customer loyalty and if yes can the same concept be imitated for the retail industry. The Dissertation describes the customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives undertaken by Tesco, the number one retailing company in the United Kingdom (UK), since the mid-1990s. The company's growth and its numerous customer service efforts are discussed. The dissertation then studies the loyalty card scheme launched by the company in 1995. It examines how the data generated through this scheme was used to modify the company's marketing strategies and explores the role played by the scheme in making Tesco the market leader. This dissertation also takes a look at the various other ways in which Tesco tried to offer its customers the best possible service. Finally, the company's future prospects are commented on in light of changing market dynamics, the company's new strategic game plan. Customer relationship management is not a new concept as many organisations have successfully implemented it to achieve better results. The business model of the Dell suggests that how delivering directly to the customers can create strong customer loyalty and help develop the effective customer relationship management within the organisation. In its essence, Customer relationship management is considered as an activity through which organisations try to maintain customer retention and try to develop customer loyalty through that. However information technology has played an important role in the development of CRM not only as a concept but also as a practical reality. However traditionally CRM has remained the domain of some typical and particular industries such as banking, airlines, automobiles, hotels as well as electronic commerce. Retail Industry such as large super stores such as Tesco, ASDA etc has not been able to initiate the same level of CRM as it should have been. As a case study we have chosen Tesco as our reference point for discussing the CRM with specific reference to Tesco. This study will aim to analyze and understand the role of CRM into retail industry and whether CRM can prove useful in Retail Industry. Accordingly research objectives such as the ability of CRM to create customer loyalty, whether CRM has the ability to create the same for retail industry and to finally evaluate the extent of CRM into current industry. Company History History of Tesco can be traced back to the second decade of last century when Jack Cohen started to sell grocessories from a stall in London. The business survived and soon it emerged as the leading grocery providers in the country. Tesco is now the largest retail organisation in UK in

Economics of Canadian Immigration Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Economics of Canadian Immigration - Essay Example In describing the political culture of Canada, certain recent happenings never fail to feature prominently. The Quebec separatist movement and the emergence of conservatism especially in the west are some of the issues that have had great impacts on the Canadian political culture especially in the last two decades (Little 112-125). The propositions in the Quebec agenda and the differences in these policies in relation to the federal policies that define the rest of Canada are indeed topical issues that greatly define the political culture in Canada. The Quebec separatists’ need to secede from the greater Canada was an issue that did not go down well with the Canadian government (Wiley 32). The fundamental concept that arises in the Canadian political analysis is the concept of immigration to Canada and its effects in shaping the political culture in Canada. Most Canadians, unlike Americans, strongly feel that their government should be involved in the political and economic aspects of life in the country (Jameson 78). This support of the government arises out of the historical experiences that marked the Canadian evolvement. Unlike the US, the resistance of republicanism in Canada created a culture of less individualism and more support for government activities (Russell 11). The adoption of British parliamentary and legal systems coupled with loyalist conservatism is certainly the idea behind the Canadians’ obsession with better forms of governance and good politics (Bond 34-42). Such a mindset has been very instrumental in creating a unique political identity in Canada. On the contrary, it has been noticed that most Canadians are never very keen in paying att ention and learning the overall history of their country and its effects on their present lives (Ballack 89). They instead focus majorly on the history of specific regions or the history of a specific people in Canada. Such an analysis does not inundate one with the very pertinent

Microeconomic Questions Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Microeconomic Questions - Essay Example How would, therefore, their profits differ from each other? 11 Is the elasticity of demand useful in terms of predicting the new equilibrium price and quantity in a market following a shock to the supply curve? When there is an increase or a decrease in the supply, the effect on the market is dependent on the elasticity of demand. The more inelastic is the demand curve, the less amount of quantity is sold as well as the price changes keeping all other things equal. When the demand curve is more elastic, the more changes in quantity bring fewer changes in price in a situation of ceteris Paribas. The magnitude of the effect of the supply side shock is not independent of price elasticity. In a situation of inelastic demand firms have the ability to raise prices as they will have to suffer from only a small drop in demand conditions. The responds of the producers as well as the consumers can affect the supply side shocks. The supply of fast food is elastic. The lesson from the elasticity concepts is more elastic is the curve, the more quantity changes and the more inelastic is the curve the more price changes. The elasticity is not only useful in order to predict the events of the markets but also to analyze the policies of the government. If a new subdivision is built near the shopping complex of a fast food company, the price of hamburger is not rise as much as the sales mainly because the fast food company is too small to generate such a demand that have the potential to increase the price. The elasticity of demand is of course useful in predicting the new equilibrium price as well as quantity because the shift or the trend of the demand curve because of the shock can be judged by the value of the elasticity. Under perfect competition, describe the long and short run outcomes if a demand curve were to shift to the left. A large number of small firms comprise the market for perfect competition. Each firm is small compared to the entire market. The comprising firm s set the identical products. The customers as well as the firms are well informed about the prices. There are no barriers to entry for other firms to enter into the market. In the short run the firms can change only the variable factor namely labor. The other decisions are predetermined. In the long run the firms have the potential to change their scale. In the short run when the existing price is less than the average cost curve it is better for the firm to close down. When the price is above the minimum point of average total cost, the firm makes profits. In the long run when a certain firm makes profits, new firms enter into the market. In the long run unlike monopoly or oligopoly it is not possible for a firm in perfect competition to earn economic profits. In a situation of perfect competition, the firm will be able to earn only normal profits and the demand curve will touch the total average cots curve at the minimum point. The firm must decide whether to continue with the bu siness in the long run and cover up the expenses. The decisions in the long run are based on the dependence between the price and the average cost curve in the long run. If the price is greater than or equal to average cots, the firm will continue to operate and close down otherwise. The above diagram represents a situation under perfect competition. In this case there is leftward shift of the market demand curve due to some reasons. The initial equilibrium price

Applications of virtual simulation and their impact in education and training Essay Example for Free

Applications of virtual simulation and their impact in education and training Essay By replicating experiences, simulations hold great potential for educating people or training professionals for almost any task. Research shows more learning is acquired through virtual reality than through reading or lectures. Different from other visual technologies such as film, television and photography, virtual simulation is very effective in education and training because it can provide interactive experience with theories and concepts. Students learn while they are situated in the context where what they learn is to be applied. They get immediate feedback as they explore their understanding of the material (Hitlab). Virtual reality transports learners and lets them explore places they are not able to visit or experience in the real world and could also allow them to visit different places in different time periods that they could not experience in one lifetime. Indeed, virtual reality evokes many possibilities for education and training across a whole range of disciplines. Despite prohibitive costs, more and more educational institutions are exploring simulation technologies as teaching aids and research tools (Byrne, 1993). However, the benefits far outweigh the high costs of simulation technologies. For example, virtual simulation could be used to avoid the physical, safety, and cost constraints that limit schools in the types of environments they can provide for learning-by-doing. To expose them to situated learning, Nuclear Engineering students could learn more about the nuclear reactor by studying simulated models with HMD and 3D gloves instead of a real nuclear reactor. Virtual reality technology facilitates constructivist learning activities and also supports different types of learners such as those who are visually oriented. Virtual simulation could also solve the limitations of distance learning in science and engineering education by providing virtual laboratories in place of hands-on experiments. Physical phenomena that are not easily perceived or measured in usual experiments can be presented in a virtual world and can be viewed in many different perspectives in a VR laboratory. Furthermore, virtual simulation could also address the problems of high costs and hazards of complicated experiments (Kim, et al. , 2001). Figure 2. Simulation offers interactive demonstration of the AC and DC generators (from Kim, et al. , 2001) Simulations in education focus on specific lessons or tasks and allow the replication of abstract concepts and ideas. Simulation techniques are used to create a microworld that simulates an abstract concept and allows the learner to experiment or construct objects to facilitate understanding. A good example of a microworld is the Global Challenge Award online STEM learning web site that teaches science concepts related to global warming and the future of energy. Virtual simulation could also be used, for example, by an ecology to study hydrology and population growth and decay for wildlife species in a given geographic region. An astronomer could also simulate the collision of galaxies and the formation of dark matter. Virtual simulation allows professionals to explore their fields without having to run extensive and costly physical, on site, experiments (Fishwick, 1995). The use of simulation environments has been found to be very effective educational tools because they support self-driven learning (Trindade et al. , 2002). Figure 3. Interactive demonstration of different types of waves (from Kim, et al. , 2001) Multisensory immersion would be the best way for science students to learn complex scientific concepts. In a study of virtual reality physics simulation (VRPS) conducted by Kim, et al. (2001), it was found out that students who were exposed to VRPS programs that provide rich interactive learning environments showed higher academic achievement and felt more satisfaction and interest in the learning process. In another study done by Jensen, et al. (2004), it was shown that 3D visualizations can improve learner satisfaction due to the vivid presentation, and at least maintain learning efficacy.

Environmental Sustainability Of Shrimp Farming In Malaysia Economics Essay

Environmental Sustainability Of Shrimp Farming In Malaysia Economics Essay The world shrimp production has rapidly expanded over the last decades. The expansion is mainly attributed to technological breakthrough from innovation (Ling, Leung, Shang, 1999; Shang, Leung, Ling, 1998) and vast consumption in the global market (Oosterveer, 2006; Shang, et al., 1998). The introduction of new production technologies such as antibiotics, antimicrobial and gene transformation are able to prevent infection of diseases and reduce mortality rate. Advanced production technologies also lowers the operating costs and increases the profits of shrimp producers. However, extensive usage of antibiotics in shrimp production has raised health concerns and has resulted in the banning of imported shrimps by major European importers. Imported shrimps from China has been banned by European Council (EC) in 2002 due to the over presence of antibiotics in the products. Another issue of advanced aquaculture technology is the introduction of new species into the wild population. For in stance, gene transformation creates new species of shrimp for commercial purposes but if the new species escapes into the wild population, it could be predator for certain sea creatures and destroy the ecosystem balance (Deb, 1998). Large global demand on shrimp is mainly due to high consumption in developed countries such asà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦. (Describe the statistics). The increase in demand in these economy is not only due to satisfy material needs but also to related to the consumption trend in that social, culture, and political term. For instance, Japanese consumption of high quantity of seafood in daily life is one of the Japanese cultures, and policies of European Union encourage the consumer to consume high quality seafood. Moreover, in the study of (Uddin, 2009) has been mentioned about once shrimp was considered as luxury foodstuff by many people. Hence, high demand in the international provides job opportunities to the people in developing countries; and due to the currency exchange rate, exporting the local products to developed countries would bring the producer higher revenue. From these points we could explain the perception of people in Bangladesh take shrimp production activity as a tendency of quick money-making as mentioned in (Deb, 1998). This statement supported by (Ali, 2006), the author outlined that Bangladesh shrimp export revenue has grown from US$4.0 million to US$360 million, the net profit from this activity is 12 times than that of high yielding variety rice. Henceforth, they dramatically shift their production from rice paddy to shrimp farming in order to obtain the opportunity of gaining higher revenue. China is the biggest shrimp producer since 1988 until 1992 and contributed about a million metric ton of the world shrimp production in 2000 (Biao Kaijin, 2007). The recent biggest shrimp producing nation is Thailand. Since 1991, Thailand has taken over China in world shrimp production, becoming leading producer and exporter by exporting up to 90% of his production (Huitric, Folke, Kautsky, 2002; Shang, et al., 1998). The other major shrimp producing countries are Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Ecuador by producing between 300,000 to 400,000 tons metric each (World Shrimp Market, 2004). Henceforth, those four major shrimp producing countries contributed more than 50 per cent of total world shrimp supply; in other words, Asia has competitive advantage in producing shrimp and competes in global market. Overview of Asia Shrimp Production Asia is the worlds most populous and largest continent; consist of 31,880,000 km2 and with approximately four billion people or sixty per cent of world human population. (More information) Asia is the major contributor in world shrimp market. In 1990s, Asia produced approximately 78% of world shrimp and the rest (22%) were produced by western countries(Shang, Leung et al. 1998; Ling, Leung et al. 1999). Asian cultured shrimp production mainly produces Penaeus Monodon, followed by Penaues Vannamei, to international market (Shang, Leung et al. 1998). Thailand is a leading producer and exporter; other major shrimp producing countries are China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Besides that, Japan is the world second largest in shrimp consumption. (Data of Japan shrimp C) The improvement of hatchery operation have reduced the price of hatchery-produced shrimp fry to competitive level is one of the main reasons of rapid expansion of shrimp production in Asia (Shang, Leung et al. 1998); whereas, with lower cost of fry, labor cost, and land (input), the shrimp producers are able to produce shrimp (output) to global market with lower prices. Now a day, the producer widely relies on the seed stock from shrimp hatcheries instead of wild seed stock is because of wild fry have proven limited and unreliable in supporting a rapidly expanding shrimp industry. Reference: Ling, B.-H., P. S. Leung, et al. (1999). Comparing Asian shrimp farming: the domestic resource cost approach. Aquaculture 175(1-2): 31-48. Shang, Y. C., P. Leung, et al. (1998). Comparative economics of shrimp farming in Asia. Aquaculture 164(1-4): 183-200. United Nation, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistics Division, 2008. Statistical Yearbook. New York 52 Fisheries Marine and Aquaculture. Percentage of marine and percentage of aquaculture production. Methods used for aquaculture. Work forces involved. An Overview of Malaysian Shrimp Production  [1]   The fisheries sector which included of marine capture fisheries and aquaculture produced approximately 1,650,000 tones of food fish worth RM6, 460 million in 2007. This sector recorded an increase in production by 4.17% and value by 3.65% as compared to the year 2006. Besides that, the fisheries sector contributed 1.2% to the GDP or worth RM6, 298 million. The majority fish production is produced from marine capture fisheries, contributing 83.51% to the total national fish production with a value of approximately five thousand million Riggit Malaysia; while the aquaculture sub-sector only contributing 16.23% of the total fish production with a value of RM1, 393 million  [2]  . However, aquaculture showed an increase in production by 26.64% and in value by 7.87% as compared to the year 2006. For the year of 2007, fisheries sector provided 120,904 work forces, where 21,287 of the work forces are fish culturists were involved in various aquaculture systems. Most of the freshwater aquaculture production was contributed from pond culture system, about 70% of total freshwater aquaculture products; while on-bottom culture system was main contributor for brackish water aquaculture, about 25% of total brackish water aquaculture production. Other freshwater culture systems are ex-mining pools system, cage culture system, cement tank system, pen culture system, and canvas; while other brackish water culture systems are including pond, cage, on-bottom, rank, and tank culture system. Furthermore, the top producer by using pond culture method is Perak state compared with other states with 11,427 tones worth RM131.41 million; the total pond culture area increased from 5,623.69 hectares in 2006 to 7,627.11 hectares in 2007 (or 35.62% of growth rate), but this culture system production decreased 1.6 % in 2007. In addition, Perak state produced the most aquaculture product in year 2007 with grand total 70.05 tonnes compared to second largest producer, Selangor, with 24.9 tones  [3]  . In the year 2007, production from the national aquaculture sub-sector was 268,514.21 tones worth at RM1, 393.35 million, contributed mainly by the production from brackish water aquaculture (73.91%) and the remained was contributed by freshwater aquaculture. Work force, however, was majority involved in freshwater sub-sector, which are 75.48% of the total fish culturists. Brackish water aquaculture provided only about 25% of work force over the total fish culturists; however, this culture system contributed 73.91% of the total aquaculture production with the growth rate of production was 31.97% and the value rose from RM 999.41 million in 2006 to RM1, 044 million in 2007 (or 4.45% of growth rate). Why brackish water aquaculture production can produce largest share of total aquaculture production with lesser labor input? Penaus Merguiensis (banana shrimp) and Monodon (tiger shrimp) is widely and solely produced by using brackish water pond culture method with 23,737 and 11,435 tones, respectively. The major banana shrimp producer is Perak state, and then follows with Selangor and Johore state.

British Imperialism in India :: Colonialism Imperialism

British Imperialism in India "All the leadership had spent their early years in England. They were influenced by British thought, British ideas, that is why our leaders were always telling the British "How can you do these things? They're against your own basic values.". We had no hatred, in fact it was the other way round - it was their values that made us revolt." -Aruna Asaf Ali, a leader of the Indian National Congress. (Masani, quoted in Wood, 32, 1989) There is no doubt that British imperialism had a large impact on India. India, having previously been an group of independent and semi-independent princedoms and territories, underwent great change under British administration. Originally intended to consolidate their hold on India by establishing a population that spoke the same language as their rulers, the British decision in the 1830s to educate Indians in a Western fashion, with English as the language of instruction, was the beginning of a chain of events, including a rise in Indian nationalism, that led to Indian resentment of British imperialism and ultimately to the loss of British control over India. One of the most important factors in the British loss of control over India was the establishment of English as a unifying language. Prior to British colonisation, India was fragmented and multi-lingual, with 15 major languages and around 720 dialects. English served as a common ground for Indians, and allowed separate cultural and ethnic groups to identify with each other, something which had rarely if ever occurred before on a grand scale. Although it was mainly educated Indians of a privileged caste who spoke English, these were the most influential people in terms of acting as facilitators for nationalist ideas to be communicated throughout the populace. The publication of magazines and journals in English was also a great influence on the rise of Indian nationalism. Although most Indians received nationalist ideas orally, these journals allowed Indians who were literate in English to come into contact with the ideas of social and political reformers. Political and social reform in India was achieved as a result of the European political principles brought to India by the British. Indians were Anglicised, and the British ideal for an Indian was to be "Indians in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions and intellect", as put by one British legislator (Rich, 214, 1979). This Western education inevitably led to well-read Indians encountering European principles such as human rights, freedoms of speech, travel and association, and liberalism.

Computer Class

You are writing a research paper for your history class and have found a photo on the Web that you would like to use. You are cautious about using photos on the Web because of copyright Issues and photos that have been altered digitally. How might you verify the validity of a photo on the Web? When using a source for a research paper It Is always very Important to verify the book, website, photo, etc.In order to verify the validity of a photo on the Web, people need to check the source as to wear It came from, If the website Is not a website with absentia validation, then the photo Is not a resource that they should use In their paper. Also there Is now a Google â€Å"Search by Images† page. This allows people to copy and paste the picture Into the search engine and see where It came from. If the sources that come up do not have accurate validation of the photo then It Is not an appropriate resource that person should be using for his or her paper. Work Password Management: Yo u must remember multiple user names and passwords to access various computer resources within your company. Each time your company introduces a new system, you must remember a new user name and password, some of which you are unable to customize. What steps will you take to manage your passwords? When managing passwords and user names that you were given by your company always make sure to write it down on a certain piece of paper and put it in a safe place.Nowadays there are so many things that you need to have a user name and password for. Work is one of the main things. When introducing a new system, and receiving a new user name and password create a paper that ash the rest of your swords and user names on there with a brief description of what the website is about. This will allow you to remember the website, but also have your user name and password handy.One more thing is that when creating this paper you must find a safe place to put it so that no one can use the paper to lo gin to your account. Make sure you know where the paper is and do not tell anyone because if they find out where the paper is, other workers can have the potential to mess up or change your career. Computer Class By ambassadors using photos on the Web because of copyright issues and photos that have been When using a source for a research paper it is always very important to verify the book, website, photo, etc. N order to verify the validity of a photo on the Web, people need to check the source as to wear it came from, if the website is not a website with substantial validation, then the photo is not a resource that they should use in their paper. Also there is now a Google â€Å"Search by Images† page.

Motivation is the incentive to work Essay

Motivation is the incentive to work; hence having a motivated workforce is vital for most businesses, since a highly motivated workforce can lead to higher rates of productivity, better quality output, and low rates of absenteeism and labour turnover. The main factors which, affect the motivation of workers are pay levels, job security, promotional prospects, responsibility, working conditions, fringe benefits, participation in decision-making and working in a team There are two basic theories of motivation, content theories and process theories. Content theories deal with what actually motivates people, what needs to be satisfied in order for workers to be motivated. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is an example of a content theory. Process theories on the other hand deal with the though processes which affect the workforces behaviour. An example of this is staff at a company working on commission, e.g. their pay is directly affected by production or their sales. I hope to improve my understanding of the different theories and how these theories are applied in real world companies. Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation was published in 1943. He based his theory upon his belief that actualisation was the driving force of human personality. His theory is a five-tiered hierarchy of needs, and is as such; 1.) Physiological needs – These are the basic needs to survive, food, shelter and warmth. 2.) Security needs – These are the needs for job security, security from emotional and physical harm. 3.) Affiliation needs – These are the needs for affection, belonging, acceptance and friendship. 4.) Esteem needs – The need for self-respect and to gain the respect of others 5.) Self-actualisation – The need of a person to reach there full potential. Maslow believed that each level had to be fulfilled before the next level could be achieved, but once a level had been achieved that level no longer motivated, for example, hungry man may be desperate for food, but once he eats a good meal, the promise of food no longer motivates him. I believe since, this theory was written in the 1950’s it is no longer as relevant, compared to when it was written, due to everybody’s physiological needs are met, either by the government or by their job. Security needs are met in today’s world, due to the fact that people cannot be unfairly dismissed, hence so long as they do there work correctly they are secure in their job. So these two factors are no longer motivational. Other than two levels becoming obsolete, I believe Maslow’s theory to be relevant to many companies in the business world, which in turn means that I believe Hertzberg’s theory to be relevant to most companies in the business world. An example of a company to which Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is indeed relevant, is Asda. Physiological needs are provided by Asda, but as they are no longer a motivating factor, they are considered irrelevant, since if a person were to not have a job their physiological needs would be provided for by the government. At Asda job security is provided in that, personnel, if Asda deems them, to be inadequate workers, are given an informal warning, then three official warnings, then a weeks notice would be given if there’s no improvement. The affiliation needs of people are fulfilled by each Asda employee being given a ‘buddy’, which whom, problems, qualms, etc can be privately and confidentially discussed. The esteem needs of people are met by Asda having events such as an achievers lunch, at which, that month’s best worker from each department is invited to a lunch together. There are also other things like an award for giving the best customer service each month, departmental competitions and employee’s, if they have an idea to improve Asda, can ‘tell Tony’, this is a scheme which, allows all Asda employees to participate in the running of the company. The prospect of self-actualisation is achieved by offering employees the opportunity for training, promotion, which will allow them to work their way up the job ladder, to their maximum potential. Douglas McGregor’s theory of the x and y managers was published in a book called ‘The Human Side Of Enterprise’, in 1960. His theory stereotypes all managers into two groups, type x and type y. Type x manager’s work on the assumption that all human beings have an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if they can. Due to this they work on the principle of reward and punishment, or stick and carrot. McGregor believed that type x managers are lazy, obtuse, dislike responsibility and need to use control factors to motivate employees, such as pay. Theory x managers contradict, since it relies on employees needing only financial gain to motivate them. Theory x managers give only context factors, which, in Hertzberg’s opinion do not motivate. Theory y managers are creative and aim to develop potential. They work under the assumption that control and punishment are not the only way to get people to work. People will be more productive if they are committed to the aims of the organisation, and they will be committed if they have job satisfaction Asda attempt to use type y managers since, employees are encouraged to be creative, with ideas such as the ‘tell Tony’ scheme mentioned above. But there is one outlying principle used by Asda, which, shows that management cannot be stereotyped, in that employees are financially punished, if they receive an official warning, in that they lose their bonus. Hertzberg theory is that there are context or hygiene factors and motivators or content factors. Context or hygiene factors do not motivate, but without them there would be dissatisfaction. These factors involve the work environment rather than what people actually do on the job. Context factors are, salary, supervision, security, working conditions and status. Motivators or content factors are factors, which, motive employees and involves what people actually do on the job. These are achievement, recognition, advancement and responsibility. As with Maslow the context factors, which are the same as the physiological needs and the security needs, have to be fulfilled before the content factors can be fulfilled, which are similar to the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, but it is separated into two tiers, rather than five. I believe Hertzberg’s theory to be a modification of Maslow’s theory that is more applicable to the modern world, since modern or basic needs, no longer include only food, shelter and warmth, most people will consider a TV, car, etc, basic needs. These modern basic needs can be covered by Hertzberg’s context factors. Asda use Hertzberg’s theory, since it is a modern extension of Maslow’s theory, as I explained above. Taylor theory was not about motivation; rather it was about specialisation, which had the same final result as motivation, increased productivity and efficiency. Taylor formed the basis for all the theorists with his introduction of the scientific approach to decision making. Taylor’s theory is still applicable to all professions, since he created specialisation, which is the basis of all modern businesses. Previous to Taylor creating specialisation workers had changed jobs erratically, so people never learnt how to do a job efficiently, but when Taylor introduced specialisation people only did one type of job, weaving for example, so they became skilled in doing that specific thing, so the production line was more efficient. During this assignment I have developed a more though understanding of what motivates people and the theories developed to motivate people. Prior to completing this assignment I had failed to realise the importance of motivation.

Comparing the depiction of Men throughout Charles Dickens Essay

â€Å"Great Expectations† is a pre twentieth century book with â€Å"Cider with Rosie† is a twentieth century book. â€Å"Great Expectations† is about a boy â€Å"Pip† which the book revolves around his life from a young child in the marshy land of Kent to a grown man where he meets Estella the love of his life, which he has not seen for years. This book has a storyline which has leaves you in suspense at the end of chapters. An example of this is at the end of chapter 0ne on page 5, â€Å"I looked round for the horrible young man, and I could see no signs of him. But, now I was frightened again, and I ran home without stopping.† This leaves suspense and you want to read on. Where as â€Å"Cider with Rosie† follows all the happenings of a young boy, Laurie Lee. Really it is a autobiography of Laurie Lee till he is about 14, 15 years of age. Cider with Rosie is a very descriptive book, which will describe things in great detail and in big long lists of running commentary. An example of this great description is on page 11 chapter one â€Å"I crawled about among the ornaments on the unfamiliar floor-the glass fishes, china dogs, shepherdesses, bronze horsemen, stopped clocks, barometers, and photographs of bearded men.† In â€Å"Great Expectations† the main Men I am going to look at are Mr Joe, Mr Wemmick, Herbit Pocket and Magwitch the convict. Magwitch is an escaped convict from the local prison near where pip lives. The first man described in this book is on page 2 of chapter 1, it is Magwitch the convict. Pip meats him in the church yard looking at his mothers tomb stone this is the first encounter of Magwitch for Pip it would be terrifying for the young boy. Magwitch is described in this scene as â€Å"A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, broken shoes and with an old rag tied round his head†. This shows the first description of a male in â€Å"Great Expectations†. It gives the reader a very clear image of what this convict would have looked like and been like to meet in person. The next description is one of Joe Gargery on page 6 chapter 2 of â€Å"Great Expectations†. Joe is married to Pips sister so he is Pips Brother-in-law but Pips looks up to him as his father as he does not have one. They are very good friends and spend a lot of time together. This is the description of him, â€Å"Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have some how got mixed with their whites.† This is from Pips point of view and shows you what Pip thought and sees of his brother-in-law. Joe is Pips father figure, a kind of replacement for Pips Dad, which Pip looks up too. The next male I am going to describe is Mr Wemmick. He is Mr Jaggers clerk and lives and works in the London area. He is a poor man but is happy as he have his small castle to get away from the world and his old Dad who is dependent of him. In â€Å"Great Expectations† Mr Wemmick is frequently is involved in helping Pip in London. A description of Mr Wemmick is on page 165 chapter 21. † Casting my eyes on Mr Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints.† This shows what Pip thinks of Mr Wemmick when he first sees him in Mr Jaggers office in London. It is a very depictive description of Mr Wemmick and you can vividly imagine what Mr Wemmick would look like to meet in person. Mr Wemmick is closely involved in what Pip does in London and helps him financially and none-financially. The last male I am going to look at in â€Å"Great Expectations† is Herbert Pocket. Pip first encounter with Herbert Pocket in â€Å"Great Expectations is when they meet at Mrs Havishams after Pip has been round Mrs Havishams playing. When Pip leaves her house he runs into Herbert Pocket in which they have a play fight. This is in chapter 11 page 87, after playing at Mrs Havishams. When Pip see’s Herbert Pocket he is described as a â€Å"pale young gentleman†. Which is what he is described as for a while longer. After the fight Herbert is described as â€Å"not very healthy-having pimples on his face and breaking out of his mouth, these dreadful preparation appalled me†. The next time pip meats Herbert is in London when they a older and about to share a flat together in London. Herbert is now described as â€Å"still a pale young gentleman. He had not a handsome face, but it was better than handsome: but extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure was a little ungainly†. This description of Herbert is more descriptive and is described in a grown-up way instead of the way he was described earlier in the book. This is on page 172 chapter 22. In â€Å"Cider with Rosie† there are not many men in the book as it is a female dominated book and there are very few males in the book as his father deserted him and the rest of his family at an early age of so he dose not have many males in his life. The only males he really sees in his life at an early age is at school, his brothers and men around the village he lives in. described main men that I am going to look at that are involved someway with Laurie Lee’s life are mostly in the chapter â€Å"The Uncles†.

Wind Turbine Design and Construction Lab Report

Wind Turbine Design and Construction - Lab Report Example In its very basic nature, the wind turbine consists of the rotating blades, a component that points the turbine to the wind, a system to convert the mechanical rotation of the blades into other forms of energy, the control system, as well as the start and stop mechanisms. There are two main wind turbine designs, the horizontal axis and the vertical axis designs (Spera, 2009). Specifications of the Wind Device For this project, the horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) is considered. The horizontal axis machine is preferred due to the fact that less cost is incurred in the foundation (as a fraction of the total cost) of the structure compared to its vertical axis counterpart (Veritas, 2001). This essentially makes HAWT cheaper in cost. The design is also preferred since it does not need to be pointed at the wind direction especially where the wind direction varies almost constantly. The wind turbine is expected to operate at room temperatures (between -200C to 400C). Operating beyond these temperatures may cause the wind turbine generator to work inefficiently or cause structural damage. Furthermore, at extremely low temperatures, the generator may need external power to internal heating. The wind turbine should be ale to work efficiently at different wind speeds and directions. Very high wind speeds (beyond the survival speed) often lead to wind turbine damages according to Veritas (2001). In order to reduce the speed of rotation, a mechanical (disc) braking system will be used. The design will take into consideration the three modes of operation of the turbine; beyond rated speed, around rated speed and below rated speed operations. In order to ensure that the wind turbine operates efficiently at different wind directions, a wind vane will be fitted at the rear of the devices. The vane which also forms the tail of the wind turbine is made of a thin steel plate welded to a slender metal strip. Steel is suitable for its strength and low cost. According to past studies, the mass of a wind turbine for the survivable wind speed is best proportional to the blade length cubed (Stiesdal, 1998). The square of the blade length is also proportional to the power of the wind tha t is intercepted by the turbine (Stiesdal, 1998). The Rotor Unit As a matter of fact, the most visible and most vital part of the wind turbine is the bladed rotor. The rotor is the part that transforms wind energy into mechanical energy. This energy in turn causes the rotation of the turbine’s main shaft. The turbine blade is designed in such a way as to allow the streamlined flow of wind, the material at best remaining inflexible. Considering this need, the blades will be made of steel sheets. The thickness, twist and width of the blade is a compromise between the need for strength and for the streamline flow of wind (Stiesdal, 1998). Considering that the more the number of blades the greater the aerodynamic efficiency but with reducing return, the turbine to be constructed will have three blades. The transmission system The transmission system of the wind turbines acts as the link between the rotor system and the generator. The transmission system of the wind turbine is bas ically presented in the following figure. Fig. Transmission system The hub is made of cast iron. The complicated shape of the hub makes casting the most appropriate method for its production according to Stiesdal (1998). The material for the hub is cast iron, the material’s desirable property being its high resistance to fatigue. For such a small turbine, normal cast iron, although the material is fragile and may fracture if exposed to extreme blasts. Fig: The Wind turbine hub The main shaft of the wind turbine is commonly made of hardened steel that is tempered. For this project, hardened steel will

12-1 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

12-1 - Assignment Example The bidding assists us on quality equipment, supplies and services. This will help limit cases of fraud and abuses of office by those who are mandated with ensuring supplies are made to the company. In this particular scenario, one can tell that the contractor and the health facility are the major players in the process of coming up with ways of ensuring transparency in the process. However, patients are the main beneficiaries of supplies since they require the facilities to keep fit. Medicare is the way in which patients will pay for the services they get. The coverage is very important to all because it makes it easier for them to get treatment. Equipment supplied to the facility have to be included in the Medicare program but have to be accounted for before one can look at the probability of benefitting from these services (Michael, 2004). The most fundamental thing that one has to contend with is the fact that the terms and conditions that are set apart by the companies which par ticipate in the agreement, have to adhere to the terms they state in the documents. The parties involved in this agreement are mainly the suppliers and the facility. Many contracts have been cited as being done in fraudulent ways making many institutions to lose a great deal of their financial resources. This is where the competitive bidding comes in to ensure that the best is chosen to conduct the supplies and involve the public in making decisions for effective services. In the long run, patients end up paying for the amount of money spent in handling these processes given that they are charged for services offered. They must be involved in the process and included in making it a routine to use the Medicare program to educate them on ways of identifying the best services and how they can control what goes on in the facility (Michael, 2004). The patient has to make private arrangements between them and the suppliers

Discussion Topics for Management Course - United States Essay

Discussion Topics for Management Course - United States - Essay Example In this case, employees feel motivated and increase their dedication business practices, something that enhances its chances of success and quality outcomes. It is important for business executives to understand that risk and uncertainty are not actually similar. Uncertainty often concerns possible results and outcomes, which are not known to the business managers. On the other hand, risks can be described as certain kinds of uncertainties that involve actual probabilities of loss for various outcomes (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2005). In this case, it is evident that situations involving risks can be accounted for easily as compared to those involving uncertainties. The process of making decisions based on risky conditions has to seek, where possible to provide a definite identification of risks, quantifying and absorbing them. In this case, business executives have to understand that the quantity of a risk is often equivalent to the total of all the probabilities relating to the particular risky outcome, alongside the expected loss from the outcome. From the foregone discussion it is evident that business managers are better placed to account for the management outcomes that are made under risky situations that those involving certainties. One of the most important aspects of a business’ management decision-making process is accounting for the outcomes. Accountability, in this case is needed in the process of making assessments and evaluations, which are important in the growth and development stages of the business (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2005). Business managers are expected to avoid uncertainty situations in the business, this is because, they often lead to many losses in the management process. Risky situations can often bring positive outcomes depending on the effectiveness of the decisions made in the business. This is the reason why business managers that make effective decisions over

Annotated Bibliography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Annotated Bibliography - Essay Example However, eating disorders are caused by many factors, both social and cultural factors. With the increases of eating disorders among students the awareness campaign has been extended to schools. This paper will look at the possible causes of eating disorders. It will also look at the treatments of these disorders. Stewart, G. (2000). Teens with eating disorders. San Diego: Lucent books. Eating disorders among teenagers are mainly caused by psychological issues. Teenagers are easily disappointed or depressed with occurrences in their lives. In most cases they tend to eat a lot to drown their sorrows (Stewart, 2000). This scenario is rampant to male students. At young age depression could be cause a lot of harm in teenagers. With eating a lot many affected individuals feel more occupied thus they have less time to think about their problems. At first it is not of concern since the feeding is under the control of the student’s mind (Stewart, 2000). However, with time the student loses control and it slowly turns into an eating disorder. Swain, P. (2006). New developments in eating disorder research. New York: Nova publishers. Swain (2006) says that there is not a single cause for eating disorder. She suggests that most cases of eating disorder are caused by concern over weight and body shape. In female students, the issue of weight brings a lot of concern to them. Some of them may turn to dieting as a way of watching their weight. In many scenarios these individuals acquire the eating disorder whereby they cannot feed. They get a king of psychological disgust every time they think of feeding (Swain, 2006). The author relates the same occurrences regarding the issue of acquiring a certain body shape. Herrin, M. & Matsumoto, N. (2006). The parent’s guide to eating disorders. California: Gurze books. The two authors bring up the factor of genetic background. For example, if one identical twin has anorexia the probability of the other twin to have the di sorder is at about 80% (Herrin & Matsumoto, 2006). This is because they have in them the genes of the eating disorder. In other scenarios some individuals inherit the eating disorders. LeGrange, D. & Lock, J. (2011). Eating disorders in children and adolescents: A clinical handbook. London: Guilford Press. Another genetic factor is the hormonal influence. Some brain chemicals create a possibility of having an eating disorder. According to LeGrange & Lock (2011) individuals suffering from anorexia nervosa have high levels of vasopressin and cortistol hormones. The hormones are released after any occurrence of emotional or physical stress. The hormones are found to cause eating disorders in a number of people. Goodman, L. & Villapiano, M. (2001).eating disorders: A journey to recovery Handbook. New York: Psychology Press. Sociological factors also have a great role to play in the cause of eating disorders. We live in a society which perceive being fat as a disability. In every street corner, on radio, on television and on the internet there is always that negative perception of being fat. To adolescent this causes a lot of worry to them. In order to be fit in these societies they tend do anything possible not to become fat (Goodman & Villapiano, 2001). It is at this point that eating disorders like bulimia occur. According to the authors peer pressure also plays its negative role to cause these disorders. Teenager especially students tend to try and fit in the social

Management Case Study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Management Case Study - Essay Example he sports facilities managers to be effective, they need to handle issues and all aspects of management in a creative manner, including programming that would maintain high quality of the facilities and are based on standards and legislation (Leberman, Collins and Trenberth, 375). Designing the facility, managing the assets of the facility, management of contracts and leases, management of risks, and monitoring are some of the roles that sports facilities managers have to consider (Leberman, Collins and Trenberth, 375). Management of sports facilities generally involve several parts such as direct management which is done by the owners of the facilities, contract management where the management is contracted to an individual manager or any management groups, lease management, and joint management. Depending on the form of management, the control over the facilities and the responsibilities vary. However, in order to achieve any of the above mentioned management styles, suitable management plan are highly essential. With a good plan of management, the efficiency and effectiveness of the facility is achieved and maintained (Managing facilities). The present study focuses on choosing a sport facility and learning about its management processes. The aim of the study is to choose a sport facility and have an understanding of the management processes followed in the facility. The facility that has been considered for the case study is the Emirates stadium. In order to achieve this aim, the following objectives have been set: The Emirates stadium is in London built on an area that was formerly a brown field industrial estate. With the new stadium built in the area, it not only allowed football clubs like Arsenal to make their places in the stadium, but also enabled regeneration of the total area. The architecture and design of the stadium was under the charge of Populous who are leaders in the field of architectures. Buro Happold are the engineers who were consulted

Understand the role of the Social Care Worker Essay Example for Free

Understand the role of the Social Care Worker Essay Ai: Three differences between a working relationship and a personal relationship are: A working relationship is a relationship that remains professional within the workplace where as a personal relationship you may spend time with someone out of work hours. A personal relationship is a relationship in which information sharing is unlimited yet a working relationship information sharing is on a need to know basis with colleagues, residents and other professionals. A personal relationship is one of choice with someone you like and share common interests where as a working relationship may be with someone you may not usually be friends with but have to form a team with that person and work under certain rules. Aii: One example of a working relationship in an adult social care setting is the relationship between carer and resident. This relationship is important as you need to maintain a professional duty of care. Another example would be between the senior in charge and the G.P. When a G.P comes to see a resident that is poorly they are relying on the carers and the senior in charge to inform them of any changes in that resident so they need to be professional at all times. Aiii: It is important that social care workers work in partnership with individuals using the service and their families because we all have a common interest in doing whats best for the individual and keeping them from harm. The service user is there because they may not have someone that can look after them the way they need therefore involving families and help to improve the way you care for them. For example, you might think that â€Å"Doris† may like going to bed at 10pm every night but is always very tired during the day after getting up at 7am. The family can tell you that in fact â€Å"Doris† used to go to bed at 9pm and likes getting up at 8am when she was at home. It is  essential to establish and maintain a good working relationship with family as they can also help to overcome any communication issues you may have with that service user and also find out their preferences for food choices. It’s all about person centered care. The resident is less open to abuse as there are clear boundaries and expectations of the social care workers relationship. Aiv: Three ways of working that can help improve partnership working are: Involve the resident in all decision making regarding their care plans for example what time they like to go bed, whether they prefer a bath or shower and if they like to go out on planned outings Give them a choice at meal times and what they would like to wear that day Try to promote their independence by giving them as much do to by themselves as possible for them without allowing them to struggle and that someone is there if they need a hand. Av: When people with different views, skills and expertise work together there may be disagreements about the best way forward. Here is five different skills or approaches that may help resolve conflict. 1.By listening to each side may help you and others see that your way may or not be the best way 2.By compromising you can figure out the best outcome by thinking about all possible solutions 3.Stay calm. If you start to lose your temper than the problem isnt going to get resolved 4.Communication is key. By talking it through you all may come up with a suitable solution as a team 5.By using a person centered approach everyone has the residents best interests at heart. Avi: Two ways in which you could obtain support and advice about working in partnership and resolving conflicts are by talking to colleagues and senior members of staff. They may have more experience and knowledge when dealing with conflicts or partnership working. The manager can help you by offering a professional solution to conflicts and follow the complaints procedure. If necessary the manager will enable you to access conflict management training or any other training that may be relevant. Task B Bi: Agreed ways of working means: That you should keep up to date with legislation Follow policies and procedures Work within your job description Work within your code of conduct Work in line with care standards Bii: Its important to have up to date details regarding the agreed ways of working because if a piece of legislation changes, as they do quite regularly, you need to know what is expected of you. When I was pregnant in order to keep myself, my colleagues and the residents safe my job description changed slightly and my new agreed ways of working were updated regularly. These changed back when I returned to work after having the baby. Biii: Where I am not trained in giving medication if I was to carry out this task I would be liable if something was to go wrong. I do not carry out tasks that are not within my job description and that i have not been trained in as these are not within my agreed ways of working. Its important to follow these guidelines so that I do not cause harm to myself, my colleagues or the residents.

Constructing Social Knowledge Graph from Twitter Data

Constructing Social Knowledge Graph from Twitter Data   Yue Han Loke 1.1 Introduction The current era of technology allows its users to post and share their thoughts, images, and content via networks through different forms of applications and websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. With the emerging of social media in our daily lives and it is becoming a norm for the current generation to share data, researchers are starting to perform studies on the data that could be collected from social media [1] [2].The context of this research will be solely dedicated to Twitter data due to its publicly available wealth of data and its public Stream API. Twitters tweets can be used to discover new knowledge, such as recommendations, and relationships for data analysis. Tweets in general are short microblogs consisting of maximum 140 characters that can consists of normal sentences to hashtags and tags with @, other short abbreviation of words (gtg, 2night), and different form of a word (yup, nope). Observing how tweets are posted shows the noisy and short lexical natu re of these texts. This presents a challenge to the flexibility of Twitter data analysis. On the other hand, the availability of existing research conducted on entity extraction and entity linking has decreased the gap between entities extracted and the relationships that could be discovered. Since 2014, the introduction of the Named Entity rEcognition and Linking (NEEL) Challenge [3] has proved the significance of automated entity extraction, entity linking and classification appearing in different event streams of English tweets in the research and commercial communities to design and develop systems that could solve the challenging nature in tweets and to mine semantics from them. 1.2 Project Aim The focus of this research aims to construct a social knowledge graph (Knowledge Base) from Twitter data. A knowledge graph is a technique to analyse social media networks using the method of mapping and measurement for both relationships and information flows among group, organizations, and other connected entities in social networks [4]. A few tasks are required to successfully create a knowledge graph based on Twitter data A method to aid in the construction of knowledge graph is by extracting named entitiessuch as persons, organizations, locations, or brands from the tweets [5]. In the domain of this research, the named entity to be referenced in the tweet is defined as a proper noun or acronym if it is found in the NEEL Taxonomy in the Appendix A of [3], and is linked to an English DBpedia [6] referent and a NIL referent. The second component in creating a social knowledge graph is to utilize those extracted entities and link them to their respective entities in a knowledge base. For example, Tweet: The ITEE department is organizing a pizza gettogether at UQ. #awesome ITEE refers to an organization and UQ refers to an organization as well. The annotation for this is [ITEE, organization, NIL1], where NIL1 refers to the unique NIL referent describing the real-world entity ITEE that does not have the equivalent entry in DBpedia and [UQ, Organization, dbp:University_of_Queensland] which represents the RDF triple (subject, predicate, object). 1.3 Project Goals Firstly, getting the Twitter tweets. This can be achieved by crawling Twitter data using Public Stream API[1] available in the Twitter developer website. The Public Stream API allows extraction of Twitter data in real time. Next, entity extraction and typing with the aid of a specifically chosen information extraction pipeline called TwitIE[2] open-source and specific to social media and has been tested most extensively on microblog sentences. This pipeline receives the tweets as input and recognises the entities in the same tweet. The third task is to link those entities mined from tweets to the entities in the available knowledge base. The knowledge base that has been selected for the context of this project is DBpedia. If there is a referent in DBpedia, the entity extracted will be linked to that referent. Thus, the entity type is retrieved based on the category received from the knowledge base. In the event of the unavailability of a referent, a NIL identifier is given as shown in section 1.2. The selection of an entity linking system with the appropriate entity disambiguation and candidate entity generation that receives the extracted entities from the same Tweet and produce a list with all the candidate entities in the knowledge base. The task is to accurately link the correct entity extracted to one of the candidates. The social knowledge graph is an entity-entity graph combining two extracted sources of entities. The first is the analysis of the co-occurrence of those entities in same tweet or same sentence. Besides that, the existing relationships or categories extracted from DBpedia. Thus, the project aims to combine the extraction of co-occurrence of extracted entities and the extracted relationships to create a social knowledge graph to unlock new knowledge from the fusion of the two data sources. Named Entity Recognition (NER), Information Extraction (IE) are generally well researched in the domain of longer text such as newswire. However, overall, microblogs are possibly the hardest kind of content to process. For Twitter, some methods have been proposed by the research community such as [7] that uses a pipeline approach to perform the first tokenisation and POS tagging and topic models were used to find named entities. [8] propose a gradient-descent graph-based method for doing joint text normalisation and recognition, reaching 83.6% F1 measure. Besides that, entity linking in knowledge graphs have been studied in [9] using graph-based method by collectively gather the referent entities of all named entities in the same document and by modelling and exploiting the global interdependence between Entity Linking decisions. However, the combination of NER, and Entity Linking in Twitter tweets is still a new area of research since the NEEL challenge was first established in 2013 . Based on the evaluation conducted in [10] on the NEEL challenge, lexical similarity mention detection strategy that exploit the popularity of the entities and apply a distance similarity functions to rank entities efficiently, and n-gram [11] features are used. Besides that, Conditional Random Forest (CRF) [12] is another mentioned entity extraction strategy. In the entity detection context, graph distances and various ranking features were used. 2.1. Twitter crawling [13] defined the public Twitter Streaming API provides the ability of collecting a sample of user tweets. Using the statuses/filter API provides a constant stream of public Tweets. Multiple optional parameters may be specified such as language and locations. Applying the method CreateStreamingConnection,a POST request to the API has the capability of returning the public statuses as a stream. The rate limit of the Streaming API allows each application to submit up to 5,000 Twitter. [13] Based on the documentation, Twitter currently allows the public to retrieve at most a 1% sample of their data posted on Twitter at a specific time. Twitter will begin to return the sample data to the user when the number of tweets reaches 1% of all tweets on Twitter. According to [14] research comparing Twitter Streaming API and Twitter Firehouse, the final results of the Streaming API depends strongly on the coverage and the type of analysis that the researcher wishes to perform. For example, the researchers found that if given a set of parameters and the number of tweets matching them increases, the coverage of the Streaming API is reduced. Thus, if the research is concerning a filtered content, the Twitter Firehose would be a better choice with regards to its drawback of restrictive cost. However, since our project requires random sampling of Twitter data without filters except for English language, Twitter Streaming API would be an appropriate choice since it is freely available. 2.2. Entity Extraction [15] suggested an open-source pipeline, called TwitIE which is solely dedicated for social media components in GATE [16]. TwitIE consists for 7 parts: tweet import, language identification, tokenisation, gazetteer, sentence splitter, normalisation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recogniser. Twitter data is delivered from the Twitter Streaming API in JSON format. TwitIE included a new Format_Twitter plugin in the most recent GATE codebase which converts the tweets in JSON format automatically into GATE documents. This converter is automatically associated with documents names that end in .json, if not text/x-json-twitter should be specified. The TwitIE system uses TextCat a language processing and identification algorithm for its language identification. It has the capability to provide reliable tweet language identification for tweets written in English using the English POS tagger and named entity recogniser. Tokenisation oversees different characters, class sequence and rules. Since the TwitIE system is dealing with microblogs, it treats abbreviations and URLs as one token each by following the Ritters tokenisation scheme. Hashtags and user mentions are considered as two tokens and is covered by a separate annotation hashtags. Normalisation in TwitIE system is divided into two task: the identification of orthographic errors and correction of the errors found. The TwitIE Normaliser is designed specific to social media. TwitIE reuses the ANNIE gazetteer lists which contain lists such as cities, organisations, days of the week, etc. TwiTie uses the adapted version of the Stanford Part-of speech tagger which is tweets tagged with Penn TreeBank(PTB) tagset trained. The results of using the combination of normalisation, gazetteer name lookup, and POS tagger, the performance was increased to 86.93%. It was further increased to 90.54% token accuracy when the PTB tagset was used. Named entity recognition in TwitIE has a +30% absolute precision and +20% abso lute performance increase as compare to ANNIE, mainly respect to date, Organizations and Person. [7] proposed an innovative approach to distant supervision using topic models that pulls large amount of entities gathered from Freebase, and large amount of unlabelled data. Using those entities gathered, the approach combines information about an entitys context across its mentions. T-NER POS Tagging system called T-POS has added new tags for Twitter specific phenomenal retweets such as usernames, urls and hashtags. The system uses clustering to group together distributionally similar words for lexical variations and OOV words. T-POS utilizes the Brown Clusters and Conditional Random Fields. The combination of both features results in the ability to model strong dependencies between adjacent POS tags and make use of highly correlated features. The results of the T-POS are shown on a 4-fold cross validation over 800 tweets. It is proved that T-POS outperforms the Standford tagger, obtaining a 26% reduction in error. Besides that, when trained on 102K tokens, there is an error reduct ion of 41%. The system includes shallow parsing which can identify non-recursive phrases such as noun, verb and prepositional phrases in text. T-NERs shallow parsing component called T-CHUNK, obtained a better performance at shallow parsing of tweets as compared against the off the shelf OpenNLP chunker. As reported, a 22% reduction in error. Another component of the T-NER is the capitalization classifier, T-CAP, which analyse a tweet to predict capitalization. Named entity recognition in T-NER is divided into two components: Named Entity Segmentation using T-SEG, and classifying named entities by applying LabeledLDA. T-SEG uses IOB encoding on sequence-labelling task to represent segmentations. Furthermore, Conditional Random Fields is used for learning and inference. Contextual, dictionary and orthographic features: a set of type lists is included in the in-house dictionaries gathered from Freebase. Additionally, outputs of T-POS, T-CHUNK and T-CAP, and the Brown clusters are used to generate features. The outcome of the T-SEG as stated in the research paper, Compared with the state-of-the-art news-trained Stanford Named Entity Recognizer. T-SEG obtains a 52% increase in F1 score. To address the issues of lack of context in tweets to identify the types of entities they contain and excessive distinctive named entity types present in tweets, the research paper presented and assessed a distantly supervised approach based on LabeledLD. This approach utilizes modelling of every entity as a combination of types. This allows information about an entitys distribution over types to be shared across mentions, naturally handling ambiguous entity strings whose mentions could refer to different types. Based on the empirical experiments conducted, there is a 25% increase in F1 score over the co-training approach to Named Entity Classification suggested by Collins and Singer (1999) when applie d to Twitter. [17] proposed a Twitter adapted version of Kanopy called Kanopy4Tweets that uses the approach of interlinking text documents with a knowledge base by using the relations between concepts and their neighbouring graph structure. The system consists of four parts: Name Entity Recogniser (NER), Named Entity Linking (NEL), Named Entity Disambiguation(NED) and Nil Resources Clustering(NRC). The NER of Kanopy4Tweets uses a TwitIE a Twitter information extraction pipeline mentioned above. For the Named Entity Linking. For NEL, a DBpedia index is build using a selection of datasets to search for suitable DBpedia resource candidates for each extracted entity. The datasets are store in a single binary file using HDT RDF format. This format has compact structures due to its binary representation of RDF data. It allows for faster search functionality without the need of decompression. The datasets can be quickly browse and scan through for a specific object, subject or predicate at glance. For e ach named entity found by NER component, a list of resource candidates retrieved from DBpedia can be obtain using the top-down strategy. One of the challenges found is the large volume of found resource candidates impacts negatively on the processing time for disambiguation process. However, this problem can be resolved by reducing the number of candidates using a ranking method. The proposed ranking method ranks the candidates according to the document score assigned by the indexing engine and selects the top-x elements. The NED takes an input of a list of named entities which are candidate DBpedia resources after the previous NEL process. The best candidate resource for each named entity is selected as output. A relatedness score is calculated based on the number of paths between the resources weighted by the exclusivity of the edges of these paths which is applied to candidates with respect to the candidate resources of all other entities. The input named entities are jointly dis ambiguated and linked to the candidate resources with the highest combined relatedness. NRC is a stage whereby if there are no resource in the knowledge base that can be linked to a named entity extracted. Using the Monge-Elkan similarity measure, the first NIL element is assign into a new cluster, then the next element is used to differentiate from the previous ones. An element is added to a cluster when the similarity between an element and the present clusters is above a fixed threshold, the element is added to that particular cluster, whereas a new cluster is formed if there are no current cluster with a similarity above the threshold is found. 2.3. Entity Extraction and Entity Linking [18]proposed a lexicon-based joint Entity Extraction and Entity Linking approach, where n-grams from tweets are mapped to DBpedia entities. A pre-processing stage cleans and classifies the part-of-speech tags, and normalises the initial tweets converting alphabetic, numeric, and symbolic Unicode characters to ASCII equivalents. Tokenisation is performed on non-characters except special characters joining compound words. The resulting list of tokens is fed into a shingle filter to construct token n-grams from the token stream. In the candidate mapping component, a gazetteer is used to map each token that is compiled from DBpedia redirect labels, disambiguation labels and entities labels that is linked to their own DBpedia entities. All labels are lowercase indexed and linked by exact matches only to the list of candidate entities in the form of tokens. The researcher used a method of prioritizing longer tokens than shorter ones to remove possible overlaps of tokens. For each entity ca ndidate, it considers both local and context-related features via a pipeline of analysis scorers. Examples of local features included are string distance between the candidate labels and the n-gram, the origin of the label, its DBpedia type, the candidates link graph popularity, the level of uncertainty of the token, and the surface form that matches best. On the other hand, the relation between a candidate entity and other candidates with a given context is accessed by the context-related features. Examples of mentioned context-related features are direct links to other context candidates in the DBpedia link graph, co-occurrence of other tokens surface forms in the corresponding Wikipedia article of the candidate under consideration, co-references in Wikipedia article, and further graph based feature of the link graph induced by all candidates of the context graph which includes graph distance measurements, connected component analysis, or centrality and density observations. Besid es that, the candidates are sorted per their confidence score based on how an entity describes a mention. If the confidence score is lower than the threshold chosen, a NIL referent is annotated. [19] proposed a lexical based and n-grams features to look up resources in DBpedia. The role of the entity type was assigned by a Conditional Random Forest (CRF) classifier, that is specifically trained using DBpedia related feature (local features), word embedding (contextual features), temporal popularity knowledge of an entity extracted from Wikipedia page view data, string similarity measures to measure the similarity between the title of the entity and the mention (string distance), and linguistic features, with additional pruning stage to increase the precision of Entity Linking. The whole process of the system is split into five stages: pre-processing, mention candidate generation, mention detection and disambiguation (candidate selection), NIL detection and entity mention typing prediction. In the pre-processing stage, tweet tokenisation and part-of-speech tags were used based on ARK Twitter Part-of-Speech Tagger, together with the tweet timestamps extracted from tweet ID. Th e researchers used an in-house mention-entity dictionary of acronyms. This dictionary computes the n-grams (n [20] research paper proposed an entity linking technique to link named entity mentions appearing in Web text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. The solution mentioned is by employing a knowledge base. Due to the vast knowledge shared among communities and the development of information extraction techniques, the existence of automated large scale knowledge bases has been ensured. Thus, this rich information about the worlds entities, their relationships, and their semantic classes which are all possibly populated into a knowledge base, the method of relation extraction techniques is vital to obtain those web data that promotes discovery of useful relationships between entities extracted from text and their extracted relation. Once possible way is to map those entities extracted and associated them to a knowledge base before it could be populated into a knowledge base. The goal of entity linking is to map ever textual entity mention m à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã‹â€  M to its corres ponding entry e à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã‹â€  E in the knowledge base. In some cases, when the entity mentioned in text does not have its corresponding entity record in the given knowledge base, a NIL referent is given to indicate a special label of un-linkable. It is mentioned in the paper that named entity recognition and entity linking o be jointly perform for both processes to strengthen one another. A method proposed in this paper is candidate entity generation. The objective of the entity linking system is to filter out irrelevant entities in the knowledge base that for each entity extracted. A list of candidates which might be the possible entities that the extracted entity is referring to is retrieved. The paper suggested three techniques to handle this goal such as name based dictionary techniques entity pages, redirect pages, disambiguation pages, bold phrases from the first paragraphs, and hyperlinks in Wikipedia articles. Another method proposed is the surface form expansion from the local document that consists of heuristics based methods and supervised learning methods, and methods based on search engine. In the context of candidate entity ranking method, five categories of methods are advised. The supervised ranking methods, unsupervised ranking methods, independent ranking methods, collective ranking methods and collaborative ranking methods. Lastly, the research paper mentioned ways to evaluate entity linking systems using precision, recall, F1-measure and accuracy. Despite all these methods used in the three main approaches is proposed to handle entity linking system, the paper clarified that it is still unclear which are the best techniques and systems. This is since different entity linking system react or perform differently according to datasets and domains. [21] proposed a new versatile algorithm based on multiple addictive regression trees called S-MART (Structured Multiple Additive Regression Trees) which emphasized on non-linear tree-based models and structured learning. The framework is a generalized Multiple Addictive Regression Trees (MART) but is adapted for structured learning. This proposed algorithm was tested on entity linking primarily focused on tweet entity linking. The evaluation of the algorithm is based on both IE and IR situations. It is shown that non-linear performs better than linear during IE. However, for the IR setting, the results are similar except for LambdaRank, a neural network based model. The adoption of polynomial kernel further improves the performance of entity linking by non-LINEAR SSVM. The paper proved that entity linking of tweets perform better using tree-based non-linear models rather than the alternative linear and non-linear methods in IE and IR driven evaluations. Based on the experiments condu cted, the S-MART framework outperforms the current up-to-date entity linking systems. 2.4. Entity Linking and Knowledge Base Based on [22], an approach to free text relation extraction was proposed. The system was trained to extract the entities from the text from existing large scale knowledge base in a cooperatively manner. Furthermore, it utilizes the learning of low-dimensional embedding of words, entities and relationships from a knowledge base with regards to score functions. Built upon the norm of employing weakly labelled text mention data but with a modified version which extract triples from the existing knowledge bases. Thus, by generalizing from knowledge base, it can learn the plausibility of new triples (h, r, t); h is the left-hand side entity (or head), the right-hand side entity (or tail) and r the relationship linking them, even though this specific triple does not exist. By using all knowledge base triples rather than training only on (mention, relationship), the precision on relation extraction was proved to be significantly improved. [1] presented a novel system for named entity linking over microblog posts by leveraging the linked nature of DBpedia as knowledge base and using graph centrality scoring as disambiguation methods to overcome polysemy and synonymy problems. The motivation for the authors to create this method is because linked entities tend to appear in the same tweets because tweets are topic specific and together with the assumption since tweets are topic specific, related entities tend to appear in the same tweet. Since the system is tackling noisy tweets acronyms handling and Hashtags in the process of entity linking were integrated. The system was compared with TAGME, a state-of-the-art system for named entity linking designed for short text. The results shown that it outperformed TAGME in Precision, Recall and F1 metrics with 68.3%, 70.8% and 69.5%. [23] presented an automated method to populate a Web-scale probabilistic knowledge base called Knowledge Vault (KV) that uses the combination of extractions from the Web such as text documents (TXT), HTML trees (DOM), Html tables (TBL), and Human Annotated pages (ANO). By using RDF triples (subject, predicate, object) with association to a confidence score that represents the probability that KV believes the triple is correct. In addition, all 4 extractors are merged together to form one system called FUSED-EX by constructing a feature vector for each extracted triple. Next, a binary classifier is applied to compute the formula. The advantages of using this fusion extractor is that it can learn the relative reliabilities of each system as well as creating a model of the reliabilities. The benefits of combining multiple extractors include 7% higher confidence triples and a high AUC score (the higher probability that a classifier will choose a randomly chosen positive instance to be ra nked) of 0.927. To overcome the unreliability of facts extracted from the Web, prior knowledge is used. In the domain of this paper, Freebase is used to fit the existing models. Two ways were proposed in the paper which are Path ranking algorithm with AUC scores of 0.884 and the Neural network model with a AUC score of 0.882. A fusion of both methods stated was conducted to increase performance with an increased AUC score of 0.911. With the evidence of the benefits of fusion quantitatively, the authors of the paper proposed another fusion of the prior methods and the extractors to gain additional performance boost. The result of the fusion is a generation of 271M high confidence facts with 33% new facts that are unavailable in Freebase. [24]proposed TremenRank, a graph based model to tackle the target entity disambiguation challenge, task of identifying target entities of the same domain. The motivation of this system is due to the challenges and unreliability of current methods that relies on knowledge resources, the shortness of the context which a target word occurs, and the large scale of the document collected. To overcome these challenges, first TremenRank was built upon the notion of collectively identity target entities in short texts. This reduces memory storage because the graph is constructed locally and is continuously scale-up linearly as per the number of target entities. This graph was created locally via inverted index technology. There are two types of indexes used: the document-to-word index and the word-to-document index. Next, the collection of documents (the shorts texts) are modelled as a multi-layer directed graph that holds various trust scores via propagation. This trust score provided an in dication of the possibility of a true mention in a short text. A series of experiments was conducted on TremenRank and the model is more superior than the current advanced methods with a difference of 24.8% increase in accuracy and 15.2% increase in F1. [25]introduced a probabilistic fusion system called SIGMAKB that integrates strong, high precision knowledge base and weaker, and nosier knowledge bases into a single monolithic knowledge base. The system uses the Consensus Maximization Fusion algorithm to validate, aggregate, and ensemble knowledge extracted from web-scale knowledge bases such as YAGO and NELL and 69 Knowledge Base Population. The algorithm combines multiple supervised classifiers (high-quality and clean KBs), motivated by distant supervision and unsupervised classifiers (noisy KBs) Using this algorithm, a probabilistic interpretation of the results from complementary and conflicting data values can be shown in a singular response to its user. Thus, using a consensus maximization component, the supervised and unsupervised data collected from the method stated above produces a final combined probability for each triple. The standardization of string named entities and alignment of different ontologies is done in the pre-processing stage. Project plan Semester 1 Task Start End Duration(days) Milestone Research: 23/03/2017 Twitter Call 27/02/2017 02/03/2017 4 Entity Recognition 27/02/2017 02/03/2017 4 Entity Extraction 02/03/2017 02/03/2017 7 Entity Linking 09/03/2017 16/03/2017 7 Knowledge Base Fusion 16/03/2017 23/03/2017 7 Proposal 27/02/2017 30/03/2017 30 30/03/2017 Crawling Twitter data using Public Stream API 31/03/2017 15/04/2017 15 15/04/2017 Collect Twitter data for training purp