Wednesday, October 30, 2019

E-business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 2

E-business - Essay Example For purchasing groceries in an online mode, one of the most crucial aspects are that the buyers of groceries should be computer savvy. According to a research conducted by Chu et. al. (2010), the shopping behaviour of the households, especially those purchasing groceries side by side from online and offline sources is dependent upon their brand loyalty, price sensitivity and size loyalty. These offline-online differences are more prominent in the purchase behaviours towards food products which include the grocery category. According to the research, there is more brand loyalty, size loyalty but less price sensitivity in online shopping behaviour of consumers than in the offline shopping behaviour. The online environment for grocery shopping mostly consists of elements like purchasing carts, grocery categories mentioned with prices, the online navigation facilities to know the products’ features, online communication with the seller on specifications of the grocery. The product details and the prices of the product are the main information that is reviewed by the customer. The categories of groceries are present which could be viewed and grocery from these categories could be added to the purchase cart and ordered online after online payment. The online shopping environment also includes in-store displays which mainly attract the customers to buy the particular groceries. Also online displays help the customers search for grocery they need to buy easily. The search option present on the website is a convenient option that allows users to review their preferred products just with one or two clicks. According to a research conducted by Breugelmans and Campo (2010), online in-store displays (ISD) help increase brand sales and make grocery shopping easier and ISD that anticipates competition through first-order or isolated position outperforms the ISD that aims to make the items stand out in the online

Monday, October 28, 2019

Comparison of The Crucible and After Liverpool Essay Example for Free

Comparison of The Crucible and After Liverpool Essay For this assignment I am going to be comparing two plays both of which I have studied and preformed. The first play, which I studied, was the crucible by Arthur Miller and After Liverpool by James Saunders. Each of the two plays are naturalistic but are set in two very different times. The Crucible is set in Salem Massachusetts in 1642 and After Liverpool is set in the 70s. The two are quite contrary in how they were set out first of all After Liverpool was made up of 23 small scenes some only having a few lines some having quite a few but most of them were short. The main things used in the setting for each scene are very basic. The scene was made up of a coffee table, a few chairs and a sofa. It os so basic as everyone has these things and this type of thing could happen to anyone of us at any time. This produces the effect that relationships are similar and that in this performance the only thing that maters is the relationship between the actors whereas on the other hand The Crucible is quite different. This is made up of four long acts. This uses lots of sophisticated props for example detailed furniture and crockery. This is all needed to set the time in which the crucible is set. Whereas in After Liverpool the setting is not irrelevant but is not as important. After Liverpool was made up of two characters of not much significance and a series of duologues bar one. After Liverpool is about the lack of communication that can develop over time. The short scenes in this piece are somewhat symbolic to the nature of relationships today. The speed and the fact that long term relationships are not as common. Also most of them are based on sexual attraction, which is now an important thing when looking for a partner. The crucible has many different characters and each of the characters are described and are of quite significance. Compared to After Liverpool where there is no description of the characters. There is no description of characters as it is irrelevant of who you are in this piece as all people are involved or could be involved in a relationship. The crucible is based on a true story and some of the characters were real people. The crucible is an allegory and was written as Arthur Miller wanted to express his views but couldnt so he uses The Crucible as an allegory to do so. Miller wanted to express his views about the McCarthy communist hunts in America. What he was saying was that if America is so great and believes in freedom why is it that you were killed or exiled for believing in a contrary government to Americas own. Also The Crucibles main theme was mass hysteria and the community being ruled by the church and religion. After Liverpool also uses symbolism in the apples by this is mean is that the apple is representing the forbidden apple from the story of Adam and Eve. Both of theses plays are similar as both are about gaining power in a relationship in the crucible Abigail gains power over John Proctor leading to his death. After Liverpool this is about relationships and communication between couples. It is preformed entirely in chronological order with no flash backs unlike The Crucible tells you about past events. In After Liverpool each scene is wholly about the couples relationship and the communication or lack of the couples lack any past and never refer to the future. The Crucible is very detailed in its explanation of characters, which gives you an idea when performing of how to play each character. In After Liverpool there is no indication and it is entirely down to the person performing the piece. So it is an indication of how the performer sees the scene happening and maybe an indication on how they view relationships. The fact After Liverpool is written like this is also symbolic in that everyone can be in a relationship that is why the characters are labelled M and W. The reason they are labelled M and W is that it can represent anyone, which is rue as anyone can be in a relationship. The scenes did not have to be in any order this is also symbolic that the relationships in the play do not get anywhere they always end up asking the same questions. They had no specific chronological order as everything was happening in the present. Having looked at both plays it has given me an insight of two very effective ways of portraying relationships both of them very different from each other. I preferred performing After Liverpool as I could use my own drama skills to play each character, which I think is a lot better, and I enjoyed it more. Also I found it easier to understand, as it used more modern language, which was easier to learn.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Act 2, Scene 2 of William Shakespeares Henry :: Papers

Act 2, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare's Henry How does Shakespeare present Henry (and, by extension, England) in this scene? Refer in your answer to Shakespeare's language, stagecraft and sense of audience, as well as the two-filmed versions you have seen. Shakespeare presents Henry using a variety of language and stagecraft, in Act two, scene two, Shakespeare shows how Henry has a bad temper, and can go off into towering rages. First comes to the unmasking of the conspirators Cambridge, Scroop and Gray. Shakespeare uses a lot of exquisite dramatic art and a sense of the effect of irony. He makes Henry only seem to be concerned for the good of his kingdom. One of the personalities that Henry has is his liking for games. He plays with Scroop and the other traitors, handing them letters that they think are promotions when in reality they are letters to inform them that Henry knows their secret. Shakespeare's use of language was complex as he referred to biblical references and historical references through out the play. When he gets to Scroop, Henry stops using the 'we' pronoun. Shakespeare uses many linguistic devices, for example rhetorical questions. "Wouldst thou have practiced on me for my use?" This makes a difference in the tone of voice, and also in its structure, otherwise, all Henry would be doing is making statements. He also uses a pun during the first part of the speech, when addressing Cambridge. "This man, for a few light crowns hath lightly conspiredà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦". Shakespeare used a pun for a slight contrast in the atmosphere, otherwise everything in his speech would be is very serious. Henry also uses personification: "Treason and murder ever kept together, as two yoke-devils sworn to each other's purposeà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦" This technique is used as Henry can only imagine Scroop had been possessed, and not that he did this by his own choice. With this metaphor of a demon, he refers to him as betraying a good friend and because of this, sending him to death is what a king has to do.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Of Mice And Men :: Free Essay Writer

Of Mice And Men The novel ‘Of mice and men’ is set in 1930’s America. The characters suffer from this because of the Great Depression in 1929. This led to many things, for example people losing their jobs. Because of this factor the characters Lennie and George have to travel from place to place looking for a job and a place to live. Also Woman and Black rights did not exist as they were 2nd class citizens, Crook says to Lennie â€Å"Why aint you wanted† †Cause I’m black†, unlike contemporary America. Also in the 1930’s people were discriminated against because they were put before any other person wanting the job. I think the differences between 1930’s America and today’s America shows drastically in this novel by affecting the characters jobs and social lives. Lennie is a very interesting and important character in the novel; he affects all the character but mostly George. He is very forgetful, George says to Lennie â€Å"So you forgot that already did you!!!† Steinbeck uses Lennies ‘forgetfulness’ as a way to kill Curley’s wife without Lennie knowing. Also Lennie cannot take care of himself, unlike today society cannot provide help for him and if left alone him would slowly die. Also if he was left alone he would not be able to get a job because he would be discriminated against, but with the help of George he has a chance to work if he follows Georges rules, â€Å"If he sees ya work before he sees ya talk, were set†. In this quote George is telling Lennie what to do around the boss, Stienbeck makes it clear in this quote how much discrimination there is in the 1930’s. George, I think, is the main character in the novel, mainly because he controls the book by helping and telling the characters what to do. He teaches Lennie how to behave to other people, I think if Lennie weren’t there, George would be depressed and lonely, although George sometimes get annoyed with him, he thinks a lot of him and this is why he was king enough to kindly kill him. Candy is also an important character in this novel and I think she is also very clever. â€Å"Everybody wants a bit of land, not much† she understands what its like to live in a mans world. Curley’s Wife is a very depressed character because she is a 2nd class citizen and once had hopes of becoming famous, â€Å"he was gonna put me in the movies†, her dream disappeared and is now the wife of Curley’s wife and has no role and no job in the novel, she also wants children

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

International Movie Revenues: Determinants and Impact of the Financial Crisis

Institute of Economic Studies Faculty of Social Sciences Charles University in Prague Empirical Project Assignment — Econometrics II Due on Friday, 13 January 2012, 11. 00 International movie revenues: determinants and impact of the financial crisis Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Table of Contents Abstract Keywords Introduction Literature survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data analysis variables used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Results model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion References primary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . secondary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . data sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix Descriptive statistics for the dependent variables model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Residuals versus ? tted values plot . . . . . Breusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity . model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Residuals versus ? tted values plot . . . . . . Breusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity . The correlation matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 2 2 3 3 4 4 4 4 6 6 6 7 8 8 8 8 9 9 10 11 11 12 13 13 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 1 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Abstract This empirical project examines the determinants of international box o? ce revenues for movies produced in United States during 2006 – 2010. Our sample consists of 424 ? lms released in this period. We also test the hypothesis if the world ? nancial crisis had any signi? can t impact on the international box o? ce revenues. Keywords the ? ancial crisis, movie international box o? ce revenue, movies produced in the United States, budget, rating, Academy Awards, Introduction When choosing a topic of our empirical paper we were considering di? erent suggestions. As we both are pretty much interested in movies we ? nally decided to exit a viewer seat for a while and perform an empirical study on the movie industry. While being newcommers in sophisticated movie data analysis, we needed ? rst to get acquainted with important theoretical concepts and empirical papers concerning this topic. Literature survey When going down the history, [Litman, 1983] was the ? st who has attempted to predict the ? nancial success of ? lms. He has performed a multiple regression and found a clear evidence that various independent variables have a signi? cant and serious in? uence on the ? nal success of a movie. Litemans work has been gradually getting developed, [Faber & Oâ₠¬â„¢Guinn, 1984] tested the in? uence of ? lm advertising. They proved, that movie critics and word-of-mouth are less important then movie previews and excerpts when explaininng movie succes after going on public. [Eliashberg & Shugan, 1997] explored the impact of restricted-rating labeled movies on their box o? e performance. [Terry, Butler & De’Armond, 2004] analysed the determinants of movie video rental revenue, ? nding Academy Award nominations as the dominant factor. [King, 2007] followed their research and used U. S. movie data to ? nd the connection between the criticism and box o? ce earnings†¦ Many other authors has extended the initial work of [Litman, 1983], but none of them has focused on the key factors of the international box o? ce revenues as we planned to. So we ? nally decided to use [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] as our primary source. Their object of interest is very much similar to our resarch.Therefore we studied their metodology the most and we u se their results in the analytical part as a primary resource of comparison. Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 2 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Data We got quickly stucked realising that the strong majority of movie data on the internet are not free available. It was quite a surprise because there are many movie-oriented sites with seemingly endless data access. But when there is a need of more profound, well structured and complete set of random data everything gets little bit tricky.After hours of searching, we luckily got to a 30 days free access to this kind of databases [opusdata. com] and got the core data for our analysis. Then we wanted to add some interesting or usefull variables just as the movie rating or the number of AcademyAwards to complete our dataset. It has been done using well known and free accessed databases [imdb. com], [numbers. com] and [boxo? cemojo. com]. Thanks to our literature survey we discovered a model which we have thought would be interesting to test on di? erent or new data. The most interesting would be to test it on our domestic data but these are quite di? ult to obtain (as explained before). Anyway, it would be possible to get data for the highest grossing ? lms but that would violate the assumption of random sample. Therefore we decided to use data from U. S. and Canada which we considered the most likely to obtain. We also wanted to test whether the ? nancial crisis have had an impact on movie box o? ce revenues and whether the world ? nancial crisis made people less likely to go to the cinema. Model We considered several models and in the end we used two models. The ? rst one is just the same as the one used in paper [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010], but it is slightly modi? d by using di? erent data plus setting the crisis variable. We considered it as a dummy variable, which was 1 if the movie was released during crisis (2008-2009), otherwise it is equal to zer o. As it was proposed before, this model has been used as a comparison to the original model [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] wihle we wanted to test whether their inference holds up with slightly di? erent and newer data. In the second model we tried to use a slightly di? erent approach. We used a time series model with year dummies and we also used all the variables which we obtained and were statistically signi? ant. Our ? rst model is basic linear regression with cross-sectional data. Our data are a random sample thanks to [opusdata. com] query which was capable of selecting a random sample of movies. We have tested all the variables for multicollinearity with the correlation matrix and there is no proof for multicollinearity in our used variables. The only high collinearity is between domestic and budget variables, which is about 0. 75. After running the regressions we have used the Breusch-Pagan test for heteroscedasticity and the chi squared was really high therefore showing s igns of strong heteroscedasticity.Even after looking at the graph of residuals against ? tted values it was clear that the heteroscedasticity is present. Therefore we had to run the regressions with the heteroscedasticity robust errors. We therefore tested in both models for presence of these: †¢ the variables which have an impact on movie international box revenues †¢ any signi? cant impact of ? nancial crisis on these revenues Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 3 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Data analysis Here we list all the used variables in both models and their a description. ariables used academy awards . . . . . . . . . number of Academy Awards a ? lm earned action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in action genre animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in animation production method budget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the estimated pr oduction and promotion cost of a movie comedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in comedy genre crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dummy variable for movies released during crisis domestic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . omestic box o? ce earnings horror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in horror genre international . . . . . . . . . . . . international box o? ce earnings kids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies for children rating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . average user rating from the [imdb. com] source ratingR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . is a categorical variable for movies with a restricted rating romantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in romantic genre sequel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies derived from a previously released ? lm y06 ? y10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dummy vari able for movies released in a year The list of variables is followed by both model equations and reggression table comparism, while model 1 and model 2 mean the original [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] model and our new model respectivelly. model 1 international = ? 0 + ? 1 domestic + ? 2 action + ? 3 kids + ? 4 ratingR+ + ? 5 sequel + ? 6 rating + ? 7 academy awards + ? 8 budget + ? 9 crisis model 2 international = + + ? 0 + ? 1 academy awards + ? 2 budget + ? 3 domestic + ? 4 sequel + ? horror + ? 6 romantic + ? 7 comedy + ? 8 action + ? 9 ratingR + ? 10 animation + ? 11 y06 + ? 12 y07 + ? 13 y08 + ? 14 y09 Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 4 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Table 1: Model comparison model 1 domestic action kids rating R sequel rating academy awards budget crisis horror romantic comedy animation y 06 y 07 y 08 y 09 Constant Observations t statistics in parentheses ? model 2 1. 025 (13. 31) -18. 56? (-2. 29) 1 . 028 (12. 70) -13. 43 (-1. 79) 48. 33? (2. 10) 5. 922 (1. 52) 26. 91? (2. 06) 0. 309 (1. 42) 6. 978? (2. 33) 0. 68 (5. 48) -5. 320 (-1. 01) 9. 259? (2. 36) 28. 74? (2. 16) 7. 097 (2. 59) 0. 508 (4. 73) -9. 867? (-2. 23) 13. 41 (1. 79) -17. 77 (-3. 31) 52. 02 (2. 87) -7. 962 (-1. 24) 1. 182 (0. 17) -6. 748 (-1. 01) -11. 79 (-1. 30) -43. 25 (-3. 05) 424 -15. 11? (-2. 41) 424 p < 0. 05, p < 0. 01, p < 0. 001 Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 5 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Results model 1 After running the ? rst regression we get quite similar results as [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010], so their inference holds up even under our data.The similar results we get are that one dollar in revenues in US makes $1. 02 in international revenues, therefore succesful movie in US is likely to be similarly succesful in international theatres, if movie is a sequel it adds to revenues about $26 mil. , every academy award adds about $7 mil. and every additional dollar spent on budget adds about $0. 57 so there is about 57% return on budget. We also have similarly insigni? cant variables which are whether is movie rated as restricted and how great or poorly is movie rated by critics or other people.That means that international audience is not in? uenced by age restrictions and critical movie ratings. When we look at our and theirs results regarding the genres then we get quite di? erent results. They say that when a movie is of an action genre then it adds about $26 mil. whereas we obtained results that revenues for an action movie should be lower about $13 mil. and our result for children movies is two times larger and it says that a children movie should make about $48 mil. more. It could be explained that movie genre preferences shifted in the last two years.But more likely explanation is the di? erence in our data in labeling the movies. In our data we have had more detailed labeling and movies which they had labe led as action movies, we had labeled adventure movies etc. Therefore the strictly action movie genre is not so probable to make money as it would seem. Action movies are usually of low quality and many of them could be labeled as B-movies which usually are not very likely to have high revenues. The children movies could be getting more popular and taking children to the movies could be getting more usual thing.Our last and new variable is the crisis dummy which is not signi? cant and therefore we have no proof that the ? nancial crisis had any e? ect on movie revenues. Our model has quite high R2 which is about 0. 83, that is even higher then [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] have. But the main reason behind this high R2 is that most of the variation in data is explained by US revenues. If we regress international revenues on domestic alone we still get high R2 which is about 0. 59. model 2 In our time series model we get quite similar results as in the ? rst one. We have there ? e ne w variables which are genres comedy, romantic and horror, animation dummy, which tells us whether the movie is animated or not and year dummies. Our model implies that when a movie is a comedy it will make about $17 mil. less in revenues, when horror about $10 mil. less, when romantic about $13 mil. more and when animated it will add about $52 mil to its revenues. The restricted rating is now also statistically signi? cant and it should add to the revenues about $9 mil. which is quite unexpected. Y ear dummies are statistically non-signi? cant and even when we test them for joint signi? ance they are jointly non-signi? cant. Therefore even in this model there appears no reason to believe that the ? nancial crisis or even year makes di? erence in the movie revenues. Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 6 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Conclusion The inferences from our models are quite like we expected. We expected that people ar e more likely to go to cinema to see movies that had won academy awards, that were succesful in U. S. theatres and that are some kind of sequel to previous succesful movies. The resulting e? cts of di? erent movie genres could be quite puzzling but these e? ects depend highly on quality of the movies released these years and on the mood and taste of current society. If we had had larger sample with data from many years then it is possible that we would have seen trends in the di? erent movie genres. The insigni? cance of the ? nancial crisis on movie revenues was also likely because the severity of the crisis and impact on regular citizen has not been so large that it would in? uence his attendence of movie theatres. Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 7 of 14International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Reference primary [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] Terry, Neil, John W. Cooley, & Miles Zachary (2010). The Determinants of Foreign Box O? ce Reven ue for English Language Movies. Journal of International Business and Cultural Studies, 2 (1), 117-127. secondary [Eliashberg & Shugan, 1997] Eliashberg, Jehoshua & Steven M. Shugan (1997). Film Critics: In? uencers or Predictors? Journal of Marketing, 61, 68-78. [Faber & O’Guinn, 1984] Faber, Ronald & Thomas O’Guinn (1984). E? ect of Media Advertising and Other Sources on Movie Selection.Journalism Quarterly, 61 (summer), 371-377. [King, 2007] King, Timothy (2007). Does ? lm criticism a? ect box o? ce earnings? Evidence from movies released in the U. S. in 2003. Journal of Cultural Economics, 31, 171-186. [Litman, 1983] Litman, Barry R. (1983). Predicting Success of Theatrical Movies: An Empirical Study. Journal of Popular Culture, 16 (spring), 159-175. [Ravid, 1999] Ravid, S. Abraham (1999). Information, Blockbusters, and Stars: A Study of the Film Industry. Journal of Business, 72 (4), 463-492. [Terry, Butler & De’Armond, 2004] Terry, Neil, Michael Butler & D e’Arno De’Armond (2004).The Economic Impact of Movie Critics on Box O? ce Performance. Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, 8 (1), page 61-73. data sources [opusdata. com] Opus data – movie data through a query interface. 30-days free trial. http://www. opusdata. com/ [imdb. com] The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The biggest, best, most award-winning movie site on the planet. http://www. imdb. com [numbers. com] The numbers. Box o? ce data, movies stars, idle speculation. http://www. the-numbers. com [boxo? cemojo. com] Box o? ce mojo. Movie web site with the most comprehensive box o? ce database on the Internet. ttp://www. boxofficemojo. com Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 8 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Appendix Descriptive statistics for the dependent variables Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 9 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis model 1 Regr ession of the original model published in [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 10 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Residuals versus ? tted values plotBreusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 11 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis model 2 Regression of our model Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 12 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Residuals versus ? tted values plot Breusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 13 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis The correlation matrix Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 14 of 14 International Movie Revenues: Determinants and Impact of the Financial Crisis Institute of Economic Studies Faculty of Social Sciences Charles University in Prague Empirical Project Assignment — Econometrics II Due on Friday, 13 January 2012, 11. 00 International movie revenues: determinants and impact of the financial crisis Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Table of Contents Abstract Keywords Introduction Literature survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data analysis variables used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Results model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion References primary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . secondary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . data sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix Descriptive statistics for the dependent variables model 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Residuals versus ? tted values plot . . . . . Breusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity . model 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Residuals versus ? tted values plot . . . . . . Breusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity . The correlation matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 2 2 3 3 4 4 4 4 6 6 6 7 8 8 8 8 9 9 10 11 11 12 13 13 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 1 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Abstract This empirical project examines the determinants of international box o? ce revenues for movies produced in United States during 2006 – 2010. Our sample consists of 424 ? lms released in this period. We also test the hypothesis if the world ? nancial crisis had any signi? can t impact on the international box o? ce revenues. Keywords the ? ancial crisis, movie international box o? ce revenue, movies produced in the United States, budget, rating, Academy Awards, Introduction When choosing a topic of our empirical paper we were considering di? erent suggestions. As we both are pretty much interested in movies we ? nally decided to exit a viewer seat for a while and perform an empirical study on the movie industry. While being newcommers in sophisticated movie data analysis, we needed ? rst to get acquainted with important theoretical concepts and empirical papers concerning this topic. Literature survey When going down the history, [Litman, 1983] was the ? st who has attempted to predict the ? nancial success of ? lms. He has performed a multiple regression and found a clear evidence that various independent variables have a signi? cant and serious in? uence on the ? nal success of a movie. Litemans work has been gradually getting developed, [Faber & Oâ₠¬â„¢Guinn, 1984] tested the in? uence of ? lm advertising. They proved, that movie critics and word-of-mouth are less important then movie previews and excerpts when explaininng movie succes after going on public. [Eliashberg & Shugan, 1997] explored the impact of restricted-rating labeled movies on their box o? e performance. [Terry, Butler & De’Armond, 2004] analysed the determinants of movie video rental revenue, ? nding Academy Award nominations as the dominant factor. [King, 2007] followed their research and used U. S. movie data to ? nd the connection between the criticism and box o? ce earnings†¦ Many other authors has extended the initial work of [Litman, 1983], but none of them has focused on the key factors of the international box o? ce revenues as we planned to. So we ? nally decided to use [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] as our primary source. Their object of interest is very much similar to our resarch.Therefore we studied their metodology the most and we u se their results in the analytical part as a primary resource of comparison. Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 2 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Data We got quickly stucked realising that the strong majority of movie data on the internet are not free available. It was quite a surprise because there are many movie-oriented sites with seemingly endless data access. But when there is a need of more profound, well structured and complete set of random data everything gets little bit tricky.After hours of searching, we luckily got to a 30 days free access to this kind of databases [opusdata. com] and got the core data for our analysis. Then we wanted to add some interesting or usefull variables just as the movie rating or the number of AcademyAwards to complete our dataset. It has been done using well known and free accessed databases [imdb. com], [numbers. com] and [boxo? cemojo. com]. Thanks to our literature survey we discovered a model which we have thought would be interesting to test on di? erent or new data. The most interesting would be to test it on our domestic data but these are quite di? ult to obtain (as explained before). Anyway, it would be possible to get data for the highest grossing ? lms but that would violate the assumption of random sample. Therefore we decided to use data from U. S. and Canada which we considered the most likely to obtain. We also wanted to test whether the ? nancial crisis have had an impact on movie box o? ce revenues and whether the world ? nancial crisis made people less likely to go to the cinema. Model We considered several models and in the end we used two models. The ? rst one is just the same as the one used in paper [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010], but it is slightly modi? d by using di? erent data plus setting the crisis variable. We considered it as a dummy variable, which was 1 if the movie was released during crisis (2008-2009), otherwise it is equal to zer o. As it was proposed before, this model has been used as a comparison to the original model [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] wihle we wanted to test whether their inference holds up with slightly di? erent and newer data. In the second model we tried to use a slightly di? erent approach. We used a time series model with year dummies and we also used all the variables which we obtained and were statistically signi? ant. Our ? rst model is basic linear regression with cross-sectional data. Our data are a random sample thanks to [opusdata. com] query which was capable of selecting a random sample of movies. We have tested all the variables for multicollinearity with the correlation matrix and there is no proof for multicollinearity in our used variables. The only high collinearity is between domestic and budget variables, which is about 0. 75. After running the regressions we have used the Breusch-Pagan test for heteroscedasticity and the chi squared was really high therefore showing s igns of strong heteroscedasticity.Even after looking at the graph of residuals against ? tted values it was clear that the heteroscedasticity is present. Therefore we had to run the regressions with the heteroscedasticity robust errors. We therefore tested in both models for presence of these: †¢ the variables which have an impact on movie international box revenues †¢ any signi? cant impact of ? nancial crisis on these revenues Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 3 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Data analysis Here we list all the used variables in both models and their a description. ariables used academy awards . . . . . . . . . number of Academy Awards a ? lm earned action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in action genre animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in animation production method budget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the estimated pr oduction and promotion cost of a movie comedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in comedy genre crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dummy variable for movies released during crisis domestic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . omestic box o? ce earnings horror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in horror genre international . . . . . . . . . . . . international box o? ce earnings kids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies for children rating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . average user rating from the [imdb. com] source ratingR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . is a categorical variable for movies with a restricted rating romantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies in romantic genre sequel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . categorical variable for movies derived from a previously released ? lm y06 ? y10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . dummy vari able for movies released in a year The list of variables is followed by both model equations and reggression table comparism, while model 1 and model 2 mean the original [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] model and our new model respectivelly. model 1 international = ? 0 + ? 1 domestic + ? 2 action + ? 3 kids + ? 4 ratingR+ + ? 5 sequel + ? 6 rating + ? 7 academy awards + ? 8 budget + ? 9 crisis model 2 international = + + ? 0 + ? 1 academy awards + ? 2 budget + ? 3 domestic + ? 4 sequel + ? horror + ? 6 romantic + ? 7 comedy + ? 8 action + ? 9 ratingR + ? 10 animation + ? 11 y06 + ? 12 y07 + ? 13 y08 + ? 14 y09 Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 4 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Table 1: Model comparison model 1 domestic action kids rating R sequel rating academy awards budget crisis horror romantic comedy animation y 06 y 07 y 08 y 09 Constant Observations t statistics in parentheses ? model 2 1. 025 (13. 31) -18. 56? (-2. 29) 1 . 028 (12. 70) -13. 43 (-1. 79) 48. 33? (2. 10) 5. 922 (1. 52) 26. 91? (2. 06) 0. 309 (1. 42) 6. 978? (2. 33) 0. 68 (5. 48) -5. 320 (-1. 01) 9. 259? (2. 36) 28. 74? (2. 16) 7. 097 (2. 59) 0. 508 (4. 73) -9. 867? (-2. 23) 13. 41 (1. 79) -17. 77 (-3. 31) 52. 02 (2. 87) -7. 962 (-1. 24) 1. 182 (0. 17) -6. 748 (-1. 01) -11. 79 (-1. 30) -43. 25 (-3. 05) 424 -15. 11? (-2. 41) 424 p < 0. 05, p < 0. 01, p < 0. 001 Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 5 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Results model 1 After running the ? rst regression we get quite similar results as [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010], so their inference holds up even under our data.The similar results we get are that one dollar in revenues in US makes $1. 02 in international revenues, therefore succesful movie in US is likely to be similarly succesful in international theatres, if movie is a sequel it adds to revenues about $26 mil. , every academy award adds about $7 mil. and every additional dollar spent on budget adds about $0. 57 so there is about 57% return on budget. We also have similarly insigni? cant variables which are whether is movie rated as restricted and how great or poorly is movie rated by critics or other people.That means that international audience is not in? uenced by age restrictions and critical movie ratings. When we look at our and theirs results regarding the genres then we get quite di? erent results. They say that when a movie is of an action genre then it adds about $26 mil. whereas we obtained results that revenues for an action movie should be lower about $13 mil. and our result for children movies is two times larger and it says that a children movie should make about $48 mil. more. It could be explained that movie genre preferences shifted in the last two years.But more likely explanation is the di? erence in our data in labeling the movies. In our data we have had more detailed labeling and movies which they had labe led as action movies, we had labeled adventure movies etc. Therefore the strictly action movie genre is not so probable to make money as it would seem. Action movies are usually of low quality and many of them could be labeled as B-movies which usually are not very likely to have high revenues. The children movies could be getting more popular and taking children to the movies could be getting more usual thing.Our last and new variable is the crisis dummy which is not signi? cant and therefore we have no proof that the ? nancial crisis had any e? ect on movie revenues. Our model has quite high R2 which is about 0. 83, that is even higher then [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] have. But the main reason behind this high R2 is that most of the variation in data is explained by US revenues. If we regress international revenues on domestic alone we still get high R2 which is about 0. 59. model 2 In our time series model we get quite similar results as in the ? rst one. We have there ? e ne w variables which are genres comedy, romantic and horror, animation dummy, which tells us whether the movie is animated or not and year dummies. Our model implies that when a movie is a comedy it will make about $17 mil. less in revenues, when horror about $10 mil. less, when romantic about $13 mil. more and when animated it will add about $52 mil to its revenues. The restricted rating is now also statistically signi? cant and it should add to the revenues about $9 mil. which is quite unexpected. Y ear dummies are statistically non-signi? cant and even when we test them for joint signi? ance they are jointly non-signi? cant. Therefore even in this model there appears no reason to believe that the ? nancial crisis or even year makes di? erence in the movie revenues. Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 6 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Conclusion The inferences from our models are quite like we expected. We expected that people ar e more likely to go to cinema to see movies that had won academy awards, that were succesful in U. S. theatres and that are some kind of sequel to previous succesful movies. The resulting e? cts of di? erent movie genres could be quite puzzling but these e? ects depend highly on quality of the movies released these years and on the mood and taste of current society. If we had had larger sample with data from many years then it is possible that we would have seen trends in the di? erent movie genres. The insigni? cance of the ? nancial crisis on movie revenues was also likely because the severity of the crisis and impact on regular citizen has not been so large that it would in? uence his attendence of movie theatres. Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 7 of 14International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Reference primary [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] Terry, Neil, John W. Cooley, & Miles Zachary (2010). The Determinants of Foreign Box O? ce Reven ue for English Language Movies. Journal of International Business and Cultural Studies, 2 (1), 117-127. secondary [Eliashberg & Shugan, 1997] Eliashberg, Jehoshua & Steven M. Shugan (1997). Film Critics: In? uencers or Predictors? Journal of Marketing, 61, 68-78. [Faber & O’Guinn, 1984] Faber, Ronald & Thomas O’Guinn (1984). E? ect of Media Advertising and Other Sources on Movie Selection.Journalism Quarterly, 61 (summer), 371-377. [King, 2007] King, Timothy (2007). Does ? lm criticism a? ect box o? ce earnings? Evidence from movies released in the U. S. in 2003. Journal of Cultural Economics, 31, 171-186. [Litman, 1983] Litman, Barry R. (1983). Predicting Success of Theatrical Movies: An Empirical Study. Journal of Popular Culture, 16 (spring), 159-175. [Ravid, 1999] Ravid, S. Abraham (1999). Information, Blockbusters, and Stars: A Study of the Film Industry. Journal of Business, 72 (4), 463-492. [Terry, Butler & De’Armond, 2004] Terry, Neil, Michael Butler & D e’Arno De’Armond (2004).The Economic Impact of Movie Critics on Box O? ce Performance. Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, 8 (1), page 61-73. data sources [opusdata. com] Opus data – movie data through a query interface. 30-days free trial. http://www. opusdata. com/ [imdb. com] The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The biggest, best, most award-winning movie site on the planet. http://www. imdb. com [numbers. com] The numbers. Box o? ce data, movies stars, idle speculation. http://www. the-numbers. com [boxo? cemojo. com] Box o? ce mojo. Movie web site with the most comprehensive box o? ce database on the Internet. ttp://www. boxofficemojo. com Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 8 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Appendix Descriptive statistics for the dependent variables Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 9 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis model 1 Regr ession of the original model published in [Terry, Cooley & Zachary, 2010] Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 10 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Residuals versus ? tted values plotBreusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 11 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis model 2 Regression of our model Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 12 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis Residuals versus ? tted values plot Breusch-Pagan test for heteroskedasticity Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 13 of 14 International movie revenues : Determinants and impact of the ? nancial crisis The correlation matrix Marek Kre? mer, Jan Mati? ka c c Page 14 of 14

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

A Guide to Buying Firewood at Reasonable Prices

A Guide to Buying Firewood at Reasonable Prices When it comes to fueling your fireplace or wood-burning stove, you can either purchase a rack or two of wood a time, cut it yourself, or buy it by the truckload. The problem with buying it a rack at a time is that its not cost-effective. The other option, cutting it yourself, is less expensive, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Which is why so many people who use fireplaces and wood-burning stoves as their primary source of heat choose to buy pre-cut wood in a large volume. By learning just a little bit about how to make the right purchase, you can save yourself money, time, and muscle pain- and stay cozy all winter. What the Law States Many states have enacted firewood transaction laws to ensure that consumers are getting the correct amount of wood for their money. Its important to understand how a seller might measure wood compared to the state standards of measurement before trying to evaluate how much the wood should cost per unit of measurement. Cords and fractions of a cord are the only two legal units of measurement accepted in most states. Any other unit term- pile, rick, rank, pickup load, etc.- is more of a regional or local preference and therefore can be prone to price-gouging. Understanding Measurements of Wood On average, a cord of wood as defined by most states is equal to the amount of cut and tightly stacked roundwood that can fit inside a container that measures four feet by four feet by eight feet or 128 cubic feet. Be aware that wood received in different lengths can mean you get a different amount of wood. For instance, a cord of wood split and tightly stacked in 16-foot lengths contains considerably more energy (less air space) than a cord of wood stacked and racked in eight-foot lengths. If the firewood is cut to fit a stove or fireplace and is split and tightly stacked, there is less room for air and more room for wood. If the wood is haphazardly piled, on the other hand, the air-to-wood volume ratio is increased and you have less energy per cord. You should, of course, insist on neat and tight stacking, but remember that every processing step adds to the cost of the wood. Also know that a truckload, while not a legal definition, is often the one most used by sellers. In these instances, a truckload can mean anything from a loaded light-weight short-bed pickup (which usually holds about a fifth of a cord) to a large pulpwood truck (which usually holds four cords). Tips for Getting Firewood at the Right Price There are a number of ways to mitigate price gouging and ensure that youre paying the right amount of money for the right amount of energy per unit of wood: Try to avoid buying firewood that is not sold in cords or fractions of a cord, since, again, these other measurements arent standardized and make it almost impossible to compare prices to the market value.In order to avoid wasted space, insist that the  wood is cut to burning length, split, and uniformly stacked in a pile. Although this may increase the cost of the wood for handling, it will ensure a better volume of energy estimation and will make stacking for storage that much easier.Because truckload measurements can vary so greatly, always determine the hauling capacity in cubic feet of any truck used to hold the wood youve ordered and ensure that the stacking is relatively tight and orderly. You can, and should, measure your or the sellers transport bed to determine its volume, which will then determine the cord or fraction-of-a-cord price you can expect to pay.You can determine this price by multiplying the bed length by the bed width by the bed height. Then divide that gross cubic feet volume by 128. Take that number, which will probably be a fraction, and then multiply it by the price per cord to get your woods value. For instance, say you plan to go to a wood lot and stack and haul your own truckload. Your truck bed measures two by four by eight feet. Multiply those numbers together and you get 64. Divide by 128 and you get .5, or the capacity to hold half a cord of wood. If the seller advertises $200 per cord, you should expect to pay $100 to stack and haul your truckload yourself. What Youll Pay Firewood costs are driven by location and availability, so prices for a cord of mixed hardwood can range from $50 to more than $100 a cord, depending on location. If you want to have the seller stack and deliver, know that the cost of transporting that wood to your front door will add more money to that price. Again, depending on the region, you can pay anywhere from $100 to $150 more for processing, transport, and handling.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Segunda parte de la Tutoria Essays - Compaa Minera Milpo

Segunda parte de la Tutoria Essays - Compaa Minera Milpo Segunda parte de la Tutora Realizar esta 2da parte a modo ensayo. 1.La misin y visin son coherentes con la postura de responsabilidad social que maneja la empresa? 2.La empresa cuenta con un cdigo de tica que deba ser seguido desde la punta hasta los niveles ms bsicos del organigrama? Explique y argumente. 3.Consulte a cuatro colaboradores (indicando sus nombres, cargo y reas de trabajo) de reas distintas de la organizacin. -Por qu es importante tener un cdigo de conducta en la organizacin? -Quin realiz la socializacin tanto del cdigo de tica como del cdigo de conducta? -Conoce alguna medida de represalias impuesta en el cdigo de conducta ante un acto de corrupcin? 4.Existe un comit de responsabilidad social integrado por los representantes de las principales reas de la empresa? 5.Existe algn plan de manejo de crisis en caso de que se presentara una a nivel laboral, social y/o medioambiental? 6.Existe una figura que defienda los derechos e intereses de los Stakeholders ante la compaa? 7.Se conoce con cifras exactas cul es el consumo de papel de la compaa y si ste viene de bosques certificados o si es reciclado? 8.La empresa cuenta con planes de accesibilidad de personal y/o clientes con discapacidad? 9. La organizacin cuenta con polticas de transparencia y anticorrupcin? 10.Existen prcticas responsables en el rea de Talento Humano como pagos justos y sin el uso ventajoso de outsorcing? 11.La organizacin cuenta con un plan de comunicacin interna y externa de todo el tema de responsabilidad corporativa?

Sunday, October 20, 2019

The Problem of Media Bias essays

The Problem of Media Bias essays Media plays an important and powerful part in America. Millions of American citizens consult their television sets for the news. They form opinions on certain issues based on what they've seen, heard, and read in the media. The medias role in political affairs is especially important: They have the power to make or break a candidate. They can vilify a candidate or make him/her likeable. News media networks affect the publics interest in politics by showing the people what they want them to see. Even if there are many issues in a campaign, the media will focus on the one they consider to be the most important, and other issues can be completely ignored. Given that general public cannot make clued-up decisions on public policy issues if the news on which they rely is deformed, it is obviously essential that TV news broadcasts and other media be just and impartial. However, there has always been much discussion about the so-called media bias. Is the media biased? Of course, but towards whom? The media can be biased towards both liberals and conservatives. Some conservatives argue that liberal journalists tend to attach their own liberal beliefs in the news they report, while liberal journalists insist that they stay neutral and report news without any bias. Others will argue that conservative reporters take minor things, embellish it, or blow it to mythical proportions. According to Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken, right-wing journalists used this tactic to cripple Clintons presidency, discredit Gore, and put Bush into office. The media should present their news in an unbiased way to allow viewers to form their own views. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The media often shows its bias. Their widespread exposure enables them to communicate their ideas to the public, regardless of the publics responsiveness. The media affects American interest towards politics by only s...

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Relationship of the Sexes in Greys Anatomy Essay

Relationship of the Sexes in Greys Anatomy - Essay Example The argument shall be based on an individualized character description of the characters from the show and then segue into a discussion of Season 6, episode 15 a.k.a Timewarp. This episode is the one that set the tone for the mother of Meredith Grey to become one of the most admired surgeons at Seattle Grace. The discussion shall conclude with a look at how sexism still exists in the modern medical workplace as evidenced by scenes from the show. There have been many instances on the show when women were portrayed in a sexist manner. Take for example the episode in the first season when Dr. Isobel Stevens (played by Katherine Heigl) was treated as a sex object and disrespected by the other male interns on the floor because she used to do sexy modeling assignments in order to help pay off her medical school expenses. She did not take the disrespect sitting down at the time. Instead, she chose to force the men to respect her by giving them more than they expected to see herself in the l ocker room. Thus shaming them into thinking about how they were treating her and in the end, getting an apology from those who disrespected her the most. Then we have Cristina Yang (played by Sandra Oh), the overachieving cardio-thoracic surgeon who tends to get on everyone's nerves because of her by-the-book attitude. Since she always held herself in a manner higher than the other interns, and then residents in Seattle Grace, she was able to gain their respect and then the respect of her superiors such as Derek Shepherd who saw and treated her as an equal both in and out of the operating room. Dr. Yang gained their respect and high regard by proving herself where it mattered the most, in action in the operating room. Dr. Bailey, also known as The Nazi lead the team of then medical misfits as their resident advisers. Her job was to whip them into shape in order to make them respectable and noteworthy additions to the field of medicine that they may have chosen to specialize in. She was not exactly respected by her peers in the sense of the word. In fact, the respect for her person and position was born mostly out of fear for these people because she has a tendency to be tactless and straightforward in order to get her way. That is perhaps, the only way she knows to gain the respect of her colleagues in a profession that is mostly dominated by men. Of all of the interns and now medical doctors on the show, however, none of them carried the same kind of responsibility and unfair expectations of her peers than Dr. Meredith Grey whose mother, Ellis Grey, was considered to be one of the foremost surgeons at Seattle Grace during her tenure at the hospital. Meredith chose to follow in her mother's footsteps because of the influence that her strong-willed mother had on her existence as a child. But that is perhaps also the reason why Meredith found herself lost during the first few seasons of the show. She was the most uncertain and self-doubting doctor in the hospita l because she felt that they all expected too much from her.  

Friday, October 18, 2019

( HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT) ;Managing people and organizations in Essay

( HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT) ;Managing people and organizations in changing contexts; - Essay Example According to Sparrow (2009) employees in a company are the most valuable assets and their interests should therefore be in the forefront while devising policies and in their implementation. This paper will at discussing human resource management and management of organisations in changing contexts. The paper will elaborate this by discussing issues related to HR management and in Tata Consultancy Services. This discussion will aim at uncovering specific challenges in HRM faced by the company as it spreads its operations globally and the underlying issues of compensation policies. Tata CS is one of the leading companies offering consulting services and a wide range of software related services in the world. The company boasts of being the market leader in these services and more so in IT and outsourcing services in Asia. The company opened its doors in 1968 as a consultancy firm from the outset (TCS 2010). It actually started as a computer centre for the Tata Group. As time went by the management saw it to be prudent to extend the portfolio in offering solutions as well. The company expanded operations quickly and by 1970 it was the first one of its kind and in the area of operation to expand to the American market. This was after conquering the Indian market that had various challenges like the one of License Raj being an unfavourable government regulation. The 1990s saw the company grow tremendously with the rise in the spread of IT, the time of Y2K bug and the emergence of the Euro currency (TCS 2010). The same decade saw the company expand to outsourcing by developing an E-business section which within half a decade later was already giving more than five hundred million dollars to TSC. The company has many subsidiaries it owns the world over some partly while others fully. Its operations span over 40 countries with recorded revenue of about 6 billion US dollars (TCS 2010). The

Interview with entrepreneur Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Interview with entrepreneur - Essay Example The reason why these individuals will propose to be their own bosses is because of the various merits that are associated with entrepreneurship. Some of the benefits are becoming their own bosses as well as the ability to enjoy freedom on the areas of businesses (Erik, 2011). The creativity and innovative nature of an individual molds the entrepreneurship skills in them. Since the 1700s many creative and innovative young professionals have become entrepreneurs and the driving force behind their entry into entrepreneurship world are the various benefits that are associated with entrepreneurship (Erik, 2011). Good practice of entrepreneurship requires application of qualities like dedication, flexibility, determination, and creativity. CHAPTER ONE Introduction The process of entrepreneurship starts with introduction of new things in areas where those introduced things are missing. Once the new things have been discovered these things are combined with the already existing resources (Er ik, 2011). The process of combination of these things with the already existing resources entails creativity. ... The generation of their energy takes place internally because of their focused minds and the urge to achieve success in all that they do. Possession of naivety and smartness at the same time These people tend to have high level of intelligence as well naivety in venturing into new areas (Brown, 1989). The naivety originates from divergent thinking since this thinking is associated with separation of good ideas from bad ones. Ability to combine both discipline and playfulness Creative people are always capable of combining both irresponsibility and responsibility quality and they are able to work late at night unlike uncreative individuals (Brown, 1989). Ability to navigate between imagination and fantasy Creative people always have a sense of reality and this reality emerges from imagination that these people obtain from art and science. Possessions of introversion and extraversion These possessions are able to differentiate the personality traits in individuals and measurement of th ese differences is possible. Studies have shown that these qualities can be both found in creative people. Stephen Murtagh seems to have much of the above qualities and this is because through his efforts AW Bell Machinery manufacturing firm was able to emerge as a medium company for the year (Casey, 2013). The company was not able to export its products in previous years and through his effort they were able to reverse this culture and the company could now export most of its products as well as to come up with innovative and creative products. CHAPTER TWO-Literature review According to Teresa Amabile (1988), some of the factors that enhance individual creativity are self motivation, cognitive

Thursday, October 17, 2019

Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 23

Marketing - Essay Example In the past, the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) of marketing strategy were highly relevant mainly because of the three main reasons. They were lack of variety within the products, people were exposed to limited means of publicity and lastly promotional activities were more localised. The strategy therefore, was viable in the given restrained parameters and yielded results that satisfied both the customers and the retailers of the time (Shultz, 2001). Unilever had realized early that technological advancements have brought forth an explosion of information that is easily accessible to public through the internet and other media like television, radio, mobile phones etc. The internet has made it easy for the customers to become aware of the product details including its availability at competitive prices which has precipitated the need to develop a whole new perspective for a new marketing technique. One needs to be more open when Shultz say that it is the end-users who now control the markets rather than the marketers. Unilever understood the compulsions of the contemporary times and has adopted innovative and mix market strategy for its Axe products to meet the challenges from its rival companies in the global market. It is true that increased awareness among the customers has put more pressure on the marketers. Even though the customer base is increasing, it is becoming difficult not only to attract more customers but also to retain them. So, one need to add something ‘more’ on the existing products to make it more attractive without compromising much on the price. In fact, the more innovative the product and fancier the promotional techniques, the higher are its chances of capturing market space. Thereby, asserting that brands, advertising, and promotional techniques are very important tools of marketing. The Axe products have incorporated this marketing mantra in their strategy and maintained an edge over their

Final assignment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Final assignment - Essay Example The amount of arable farmland in China continues to decline sharply even as the region faces yet another problem, which is water shortage (Imura 93). This paper will examine some of the ways China is trying to curb the recent trends, and what it might mean to the future of the region if these techniques do not work. In order to be an economic powerhouse, the country has to have its affairs in order so as to be able to control most of what it imports into the region. The fact that arable farmland is diminishing and water shortages are becoming rife, the region may soon be faced with problems its citizens or government may not be fully equipped to handle. A recent report by the Minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhang Ping, indicates that the severe shortages of the reserve farmlands and water resources present the biggest challenges to ensuring food security for the region. Urbanization that is considered to be rather rapid and natural disasters are said to be among the top reasons why the region is losing cultivatable or arable land, thus; making it a herculean task to save the remaining percentage of land that is still cultivatable (Imura 97). China’s National Bureau of Statistics indicates that China is responsible for 20pc of the globe’s population. However, only 7pc of this has been recorded as cultivatable land. It goes on to claim that; of the over 130 million hectares of arable land that was present in China in 1996, there was only a little over 120 million hectares left by the year 2008. Bank of America has, unfortunately, claimed that China has already bypassed the 120 million hectare mark, meaning that only 115 million will be available by the year 2015. China, at the moment, can only boast of having less than 5 million hectares of land as reserve farmland (Imura 101). Further statistics by an agricultural consultancy firm indicate that there is need to maintain or preserve the remaining 120 million

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 23

Marketing - Essay Example In the past, the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) of marketing strategy were highly relevant mainly because of the three main reasons. They were lack of variety within the products, people were exposed to limited means of publicity and lastly promotional activities were more localised. The strategy therefore, was viable in the given restrained parameters and yielded results that satisfied both the customers and the retailers of the time (Shultz, 2001). Unilever had realized early that technological advancements have brought forth an explosion of information that is easily accessible to public through the internet and other media like television, radio, mobile phones etc. The internet has made it easy for the customers to become aware of the product details including its availability at competitive prices which has precipitated the need to develop a whole new perspective for a new marketing technique. One needs to be more open when Shultz say that it is the end-users who now control the markets rather than the marketers. Unilever understood the compulsions of the contemporary times and has adopted innovative and mix market strategy for its Axe products to meet the challenges from its rival companies in the global market. It is true that increased awareness among the customers has put more pressure on the marketers. Even though the customer base is increasing, it is becoming difficult not only to attract more customers but also to retain them. So, one need to add something ‘more’ on the existing products to make it more attractive without compromising much on the price. In fact, the more innovative the product and fancier the promotional techniques, the higher are its chances of capturing market space. Thereby, asserting that brands, advertising, and promotional techniques are very important tools of marketing. The Axe products have incorporated this marketing mantra in their strategy and maintained an edge over their

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Personal and Professional Development for Business Essay

Personal and Professional Development for Business - Essay Example The greater job insecurity and weakened right of workers have increased the level of poverty in the developing countries (Goldberg & Pavcnik, 2006). For the purpose of giving the farmers and workers in the developing countries a living wage for their work, which can sustain them and create opportunities for social and economic development, the alternative system of trade which counteracts international free trade, corporate control and global policies was established. Such system is a Fairtrade initiative, which aims are to improve the living conditions of producers in developing countries with their attempts to achieve higher prices, greater availability of financing and longer-term and sustainable buyer-seller relationships. Along with that, an organized social movement was also called to improve social goods and community development and to use the environmental friendly production through a certification process for producers and suppliers. The initiative is simple about the bett er prices, decent working conditions and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the countries that are developing. The following report will examine precisely the question of Fair Trade, will analyze who are the main consumers and who and why people buy Fair Trade products. Further the report will investigate what retailers of selling Fair Trade products can do to increase sales. A Fairtrade Foundation tends to relieve world from poverty, suffering, and distress. That is why it promotes research and education concerning the causes and effects of poverty, in particular, the relation of trade and to the conditions of employment of poor people living in the developing countries. I

Mcbride Financial Services Marketing Plan Essay Example for Free

Mcbride Financial Services Marketing Plan Essay The firm will specialize in conventional, FHA, and VA loans for home purchasing and refinancing. The company intends to expand its operations into Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota. † (McBride Financial Services website, 2003) According to their intranet site, McBride’s target market is: 1. Professionals purchasing either a primary or secondary residence. 2. Retirees purchasing a primary or secondary residence. 3. Families and/or individuals purchasing recreational properties. This document will review McBride Financial Services’ existing marketing approach and offer suggestions for focusing market research and what types of media to use. Additionally a review will be made of McBride’s target market and how the existing strategy relates to the marketing principles of the 4Ps and SIVA. Target Market McBride’s target market is professionals and retirees purchasing a primary of secondary residence as well as individuals or families looking to purchase recreational properties. They service the following states: Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota. In addition, McBride is focusing on using state of the art technology in order to be able to offer their low cost mortgage services which means that the target market must also be willing and able to conduct are large portion of the mortgage application transaction using electronic means, i. e. Internet and email. Media types McBride’s current marketing plan, as listed on their intranet site, includes the use of the following media types: localized TV ads, newspapers, radio and realtors in addition to informational handouts available at airports and major tourist attractions. McBride’s annual advertising budget is $80,000. Given that McBride utilizes technology to reduce the cost of the mortgage application process, it is surprising that the existing marketing plan does not include an online advertising strategy. 4Ps The 4Ps are product, price, promotion and place. McBride’s product is low cost conventional, FHA and VA mortgages. The price for a credit report, the mortgage application, an inspection and appraisal is fixed at $1,500. Promotions are created through the above mentioned media types of TV, radio, newspapers and realtors and through informational handouts at the airports and at tourist attractions. The placement for the application process is via McBride’s website. Marketing Strategy The SIVA marketing methodology is defined as solution, information, value and access. According to Dev and Schultz (2005) this approach to marketing starts with understanding the market and the customers based on true and deep customer insights and then identify and clarify what customer’s value. Market research needs to be focused on identifying customer’s core wants and needs from a mortgage lender so that targeted value propositions can be created. McBride needs to adjust or change their services to align with the marketing research results. Additionally, McBride needs to focus on gaining insight from existing customers as to how to improve their services as well as potentially tapping that customer base for referral, perhaps by creating an incentive for existing customer’s to bring in new clients. Put another way, the market research should investigate McBride’s target market of professionals, retirees, individuals and families to create a solution (S) based on what those customer’s value. That solution can in turn be used to create multiple targeted value propositions (I) highlighting how McBride’s services address the needs and wants of their customers. McBride then delivers on the value proposition as determined by customer needs and wants gained in the research (V). The value is measured through both market research on potential customers and through feedback loops from existing customer’s so that solutions can continually evolve to better meet the needs of the target markets.

Monday, October 14, 2019

Human Rights in the Workplace

Human Rights in the Workplace Konark Nanda The legal environment is critical to Canadian labour relations. Employment standards legislation mandates the minimum terms of employment such as minimum vacations, holidays and wages. These provide a floor for the negotiation of collective agreements. Any contract terms relating to issues covered by employment standards legislation must provide at least the minimum rights provided in the legislation. Human rights legislation prohibits discrimination and harassment and imposes a duty to accommodate. All jurisdictions have their own human rights legislation. This legislation and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are the basis for the law relating to discrimination in each jurisdiction. Human rights legislation in each jurisdiction in Canada sets out prohibited grounds of discrimination. There are several prohibited grounds that apply to all jurisdictions in Canada, certain protections are not assured in every part of Canada. Discrimination based on age, marital status, physical or mental disability, and sexual orientation are found in federal and human rights laws throughout Canada; demographic factors such as family status, pardoned convictions, and gender identity do not fall within protected ground in several federal or provincial human rights code. Human rights are important in the relationships that exist between individuals and the government that has power over them. The government exercises power over its people. However, human rights mean that this power is limited. Provinces must look after the basic needs of the people and protect some of their freedoms. Ontarios Human Rights Code, the first in Canada, was enacted in 1962. The Code states that every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to employment without discrimination or harassment because of race, ancestry, place of origin, color, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, record of offences, marital status, family status or disability (Rights Commission, 2016). Discrimination happens in several ways. It can be direct, indirect, or systemic. Discrimination can also be things like reprisal, a poisoned environment, harassment, or racial profiling. Direct discrimination means discriminating against someone because you think they are different from you. It includes practices or behaviors that have a negative effect of a person or a group of people who belong to a ground listed under the Code. It doesnt matter that you didnt intend to treat them differently. What matters is whether your actions or what you said results in discrimination. Constructive discrimination refers to a neutral rule that has an adverse impact on an individual because of prohibited grounds of discrimination; it may be unintentional. Systemic discrimination may be part of a system, like how decisions are made, and the practices and policies, or the culture of the organization. For example, the head of the company likes golf, and only wants to promote managers who play golf. In human rights legislation, there is a duty to accommodate that requires measure to be adopted preventing people from being adversely affected by workplace requirements based on a prohibited ground of discrimination. Government Objectives in Labour Relations Government plays an important role in the regulation of labour relations process. Government has made bodies to oversee key processes such as union organizing, contract negotiations and the administration of the collective agreement. Government regulates the labour relations outcomes by overlooking agreements, strikes, and lockout. Government has to intervene in labour relations as they could affect the economy by causing inflationary pressure. To protect public interest and limit disruption of the public, governments can seek to avoid strikes and lockouts through labour legislation that places restriction on strikes and lockouts, assistance during negotiating in the form of conciliation and mediation and back to work legislation. Government regulates economy, control inflation and unemployment through monetary and fiscal policies. Government regulates market practices and results with minimum terms of employment and human rights legislations. Role of Unions in Labour Relations Unions are key actors in the labour relations system. The main objectives of unions are to improve the terms and conditions of work, protect arbitrary management action, providing conflict resolution and employee input and pursuing social and economic change. Unions try to achieve these objectives by organizing employees, contract negotiations, strikes and boycotts, grievances and arbitration, court / legal actions, political activities, union management collaborations and other unilateral actions. Role of Management In the private sector management has two main core objectives: the maximization of profit and maintaining control over the business. In the public and nonprofit sectors, employers seek to balance operating budgets, comply with government policy initiatives and meet the demands for the public services at reasonable costs. The management must achieve its objectives while taking care of its employees and not discriminating against them. The management has a duty to accommodate its employees till the time it does not cause them undue hardship. Possible measure to accommodate are allowing a period of absence from work, reduced hours, transfer to an alternate job, training to facilitate a move to another job. Certification Process in Ontario When the union applies to the board, the union must establish that it is a trade union as defined in the labour relations legislation, the application is timely, the group of employees specified in the application is an appropriate bargaining unit and the union has adequate support of employees in the proposed unit. In the beginning of the certification process Ontario government makes the union send out a notification of application to both the employer and any current union(s). Certification package is send out by union that is described in Ontario Labour Relations boards (OLRB) and this information is also available to other parties to prepare their responses to the application. Then the union makes its application to the ORLB, along with membership evidence gather in the organizing campaign that it considers appropriate for a collective bargaining unit. All the parties are then contacted by OLRB to ensure that the notification has occurred, the employer post a notice to the employees in the work place informing them that a vote will be held. All the unions and the employers representing the effected employees give feedback to the OLRB within two days of the application being filed. The information normally includes the actual number of employees in the bargaining unit proposed by the union and any alternating bargaining unit proposed, while listing this information employers must decide if its challenging the union application under section 8.1 of Ontario labor relation act 1995. Based on the information provided by the union, OLRB decides to sanction it if it appears the union has the support of at least 40% of the employees in the bargaining unit which is being proposed and if thats the case then a secret ballot vote is held in the work place within five days of filling the application, board has the power to change the time line if necessary. The voters whose eligibility to vote is in doubt and then they later become eligible, then their names are written on the envelope and dropped in ballot box. The OLRB holds a secret ballot vote. Anyone who is in the bargaining unit in the union that has applied for the certification can vote. If the majority (50% + 1) of workers who caste vote to unionize, the union is certified. On the off chance that the assentation cant be achieved, a hearing before the OLRB will be planned for four weeks after the vote. Its possible that the vote wont be numbered until after the board issues its choice. On the off chance that more than 50 percent of the votes are supportive of the union, the OLRB will grant certification. References Publishing, P. Why are Human Rights Important? Retrieved from http://www.pearsonpublishing.co.uk/education/samples/S_497198.pdf Rights Commission, O. H. (2016). Employment. Retrieved from http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/social_areas/employment Suffield, L., Gannon, G. L. (n.d.). Labour relations

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Standardized Testing Essay -- Standardized Testing Essays

Standardized Testing Scholar Bill Ayers believes standardized testing in schools does not accurately measure what is necessary to be successful in life. Ayers insists that Standardized tests such as the American College Test (ACT) and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) measure specific facts and function which are among the least interesting and slightest important information that children should know. In an article titled â€Å"Testing the Right Way for Talent†, written by Hugh Price, argues the fact that standardized tests fail to capture the qualities that are necessary to be successful in the business world. Another article labeled â€Å"Implementing NCLB Assessment and Accountability Requirements in an Imperfect World† composed by Stuart Kahl, is in agreement with both Price and Ayers. According to Bill Ayers, Hugh Price and Stuart Kahl, standardized tests are uncalled excuse for a traumatic and stressful time in a child’s life. Hugh Price and Stuart Kahl are among the large majority of people who do not believe one test is able to accurately measure what a child knows. Price states, â€Å"High-stakes standardized tests, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT, fail to capture the qualities most essential for success in the corporate world, such as creativity, drive and leadership† (Price). Price claims that although these tests are able to rate children in topics such as Math, English and History, what really makes one who they are is more than book smarts, but their personality and leadership skills are also necessary. In addition to Price believing this fact, Kahl also articulates against standardized testing. In his article that analyzes The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Kahl is aware of the fact that ... ...ort and a motivation behind the tests may as well perform better than those who are not. Whatever the reason may be, many people, including Price, Kahl, and Ayers do not support standardized testing. These authors all have one opinion in common; they are all against testing for the sake of the children, because of the pressures kids already endure without the pressures of testing. They all claim that tests may be an unfair way to rank children in the world today due to: teachers not teaching children the right material in preparation for the test, family upbringing, and even worrying the children would affect the test results. As Ayers indicates, one single test could not determine where a child stands in the business world, due to the fact that the test analyzes specific topics on school and nothing about their personality or more personal traits.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Essay --

Part A: Describe protein structure, the level of structure and geometry. Include in a description of the significance of structure and how it affects to analysis. Protein Structure Levels There are four levels of protein structure which are separated from one another by the degree of complication in the polypeptide chain. A protein molecule can consist of one or more of the protein structure types. 1- ) Primary Structure is the sequence of a chain of amino acids. Proteins are formed from 20 different amino acids. Amino acid are composed of a carbon (ÃŽ ± carbon) that bond to the hydrogen atom (H), a carboxyl group (-COOH), an amino group (-NH2) and a variable group, or R group. The primary structure is determined during translation. There are two tools uses to determine the primary structure; Edman degradation and mass spectrometry. Primary structure controls the secondary, tertiary and quaternary structures. It is also used to determine the molecular mass and isoelectric point. 2- )Secondary Structure describes the coiling or folding of a protein due to exclusive hydrogen bonding between its backbone amide and carbonyl groups. These secondary structures are held together by hydrogen bonds. There are three types of secondary structures in proteins. a-) Alpha helix (ÃŽ ±-helix) is a spiral arrangement around polypeptide backbone. The inner part of the coil is formed by the backbone of the peptide while the side chains extend outward from the coil. Hydrogen bonds between N-H of one amino acid and the C=O on the 4th amino acid stabilize the helix. b-) Beta pleated the beta sheet involves H bonding between the backbone residues in adjacent chains. The orientation of a beta pleated sheet can occur in two types. The strands may be paralle... ...Da) than grw175 (28 kDa) proving that the above observation is true. b-) Molecular mass of the XÃ ¸D2788 gene product = 56 kDa 1.) Loaded the image of the gel into ImageJ 2.) Labeled the MW ladder lane then other lanes of interest (lane 2 grw175, lane 3 grw19) 3.) A graph representation was then generated 4.) I selected the peaks of MW lane to be used in the molwt.macros program 5.) Based on the calculations that were generated using the molwt macros program I was then able to select the peaks of interest and compute a numerical value for them 6.) ImageJ indicated a peak of 56kda for grw19 positive and a 28kda value in grw175 positive. 7.) Using the numerical values I was able to subtract the grw175 estimated size of 28kda from the size of what is believed to be the fusion protein grw19 56kda 8.) Grw175 = 28kda – fusion protein 56kda to give you a value of = 28kda

Friday, October 11, 2019

Ethical Lens Essay

Ethical Lens Inventory Results for DESIREE Your preferred lens is: Rights and Responsibility Lens You use your reasoning skills (rationality) to determine your duties as well as the universal rules that each person should follow (autonomy). Your Core Values: Autonomy and Rationality You prioritize the value of autonomy over equality. Your primary concern is protecting individual rights. You believe this is the best way to assure that everyone in the community is treated fairly. You prioritize the value of rationality over sensibility. You believe universal rules exist that apply equally to everyone and that the best results are achieved through consistent application of the universal rules. Your Classical Values: Temperance You value individual balance and restraint in the desire for pleasure as you seek to satisfy your duties. You also know who you are, so you can act with integrity in the exercise of all the virtues. Your Key Phrase: â€Å"I am responsible.† Because you value autonomy and rationality, you tend to assume that your own definitions of what a responsible person should do apply to everyone. Your Definition of ethical behavior: Fulfilling duties You define an ethical person as one who fulfills their duties and does the right thing as an autonomous, fully-responsible adult. For you, this is the fullest expression of fairness and justice. Your Tools for analyzing problems: Reason Using your critical thinking skills is your preferred method for learning and problem-solving. You tend to think through a problem carefully and research options to find the one that will allow you to fulfill your duties. You focus on gathering and analyzing all the available data so you can make a fully informed decision. Your Gift: Self-knowledge Because you are concerned with figuring out your duties, when you are at your best you know yourself – you know both what you are doing and why. Because of this, when you say that you will do something or care for someone, you follow through. You are also able to live in the present, to determine what you need to do at any given moment to fulfill your responsibilities. Your Blind spot: Belief that motive justifies method Because you are so clear about your reasons for acting, you tend to believe that the motive justifies the method. You may unintentionally cause people upset and pain because you are so focused on your good motive. You tend to believe that ethics is a set of universal rules that everyone must follow, just as you do. You follow the rules – everyone should. Your Risk: Being autocratic (bossy) Without self-knowledge, you run the risk of becoming autocratic. You require everyone to do things your way in order to measure up ethically. You tend not to consider other interpretations of the facts or listen to other approaches once you have made up your mind. Your Temptation: Excuses If you are not paying attention, you can be tempted to excuse yourself from following the rules. You insist that you really are being true to your core values, even when you are not. You’ll convince yourself that the rules were meant for other people or that the action you want to take really does meet your responsibilities – even though your â€Å"Responsible Self† tells you otherwise. Your Vice: Becoming judgmental and legalistic Without self-knowledge, you can become overly rigid in your expectations, leading to legalism as you obsess over minute details. You will also become judgmental and when others do not fulfill (what you believe are) their duties, you will be quick to label them as unethical. Your Crisis: Becoming exhausted Unless you develop the practice of mindfulness and reflection, at some point you will become exhausted. No one can meet all of the obligations that your â€Å"Responsible Self† has on your to-do list. If you have few friends, it could be because you are so judgmental that you drive everyone away. Your Seeing Clearly: Listen to your heart To see more clearly, check to see whether your intuition, your heart, agrees with your head. To find balance, explore the gifts of the other lenses – flexibility and a concern for the whole community. As you consider what your duty is, remember that others may see the situation differently or need different supports to fulfill their duties. Also remember to think about the impact of a decision on the whole community. Sometimes an individual actually benefits by restraining autonomy for the good of the community. As you learn to consider the perspectives of others in your decision making process, you will live out the best of your ideals with compassion and care for others.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Freudian Analysis of Melancholia Essay

The film Melancholia by Lars von Trier gradually develops into the character’s depression through their actions and choices that can relate directly to Lars von Trier’s own depression and unfortunate childhood circumstances. The main protagonist of the movie, Justine, is depressed and this affects everyone around her. Lars von Trier, the writer and director, is depressed was depressed when creating this film and this depression is reflected in Melancholia. Freudian theories relate to Melancholia through Justine’s life as well as her love life. She is constantly unsatisfied and immediately has an extramarital sexual encounter when she is vulnerable. Freudian theories are demonstrated through the depression from the characters in the movie to the writer. Some of Freudian theories that will be discussed are looking at how some of the character experiences are similar to Lars von Triers past and the Oedipus complex. Lars von Trier’s past greatly influenced how and what he wrote for Melancholia. Freud said that â€Å"the notion that human beings are motivated, even driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware† (Tyson, 14-15) indicates Lars von Trier is motivated by his past experiences. The viewer learns quickly that Justine has an unhappiness that constantly affects her daily routine, and she pretends to be someone else when she’s around others. Depression is a common mental disorder that presents with depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration. These problems can become chronic or recurrent and lead to substantial impairments in one’s ability to take care of their everyday responsibilities. Justine shows signs of depression throughout the film for example, when refusing to take a bath or go riding which she usually she enjoys doing. People with depression tend to be exhausted on a regular basis similar to when Justine left her own wedding party to have a nap. Lars von Trier may have experienced the same symptoms of depression in his personal experiences, as well his childhood might have influenced why he became epressed in his later life which could have possibly enhanced his work for Melancholia. Although Lars was diagnosed with depression in 2007, he had a difficult childhood. He did not know who his biological father was until his mother told him on her death bed. Freud believed that â€Å"our unconscious was influenced by childhood events†. Lars von Trier stated during an interview that â€Å"I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not to do what I like. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or get drunk on white wine. After a childhood like that, you search for restrictions in your own life. † Lars’ childhood relates greatly to the character of Justine. Justine’s parents did not seem to care for her. During Justine’s wedding, her parent’s self-absorption is reflected in their speeches about their marriage problems. As well, her parents did not care or take time for her when Justine specifically asked a few times to talk privately to her father and he could not find the time. In the bedroom, Justine was upset and asked her mother for help but her mother was no help at all. Her mom did not seem to care and her father left the wedding leaving only a note saying that he was leaving with another woman and to â€Å"forgive an old fool†. Lars’ and Justine’s parents have similar responses to their children of not caring. Claire was distraught and acted out of character, she could no longer organize her thoughts and be as calm around Justine as she was before, alike to Lars’ thoughts he quoted â€Å"Everything is going to Hell, but we should smile all the way. † (Lars personal quotes on IMDB) Once Justine realized Melancholia was going to hit the earth she became collected and composed. At the end of the movie Justine, Claire and Leo site together, close their eyes and hold hands as Justine had instructed. This is one of the only scenes where Justine actually genuinely smiles. She appears to be at peace and content even though she knows that the end of the world is approaching. This scene relates to Lars’ quote. Even though Justine knows everything is going to Hell, she is smiling even at the end. Lars’ mentions the restrictions he puts on his life like Justine not allowing herself to have a happy marriage and accept her husband’s love and happiness. Justine becomes very depressed during her wedding and cheats on her newly wedded husband. She will not have a real relationship with her husband but moments later will have a quick sexual encounter with a complete stranger. This relates to Freud’s beliefs in the Oedipus complex, a girl’s desire for her father and anger and jealousy towards her mother. Justine’s father flirts openly with other women in front of his wife and children at the wedding. Justine has a sexual encounter with a stranger trying to mimic a relationship alike to her fathers. This may have influenced Justine’s decision to behave dishonestly with her husband even though her husband loved her very much. Justine’s mother makes a speech during the wedding dinner and expresses her animosity against marriage, while Justine and her sister Claire look at their mother with anger and embarrassment. Justine and Claire disrespect their mother by getting married, knowing to expect her disapproving comments, yet criticize her for it. â€Å"The result is a murderous rage against the Mother†¦ and a desire to possess the Father† (1016) Melancholia is about the world ending and in Justine’s small world she is depressed, Citing Freudians Oedipus Complex one can parallel Lars’ state of depression which is shown throughout the movie. The character’s actions mirror Lars von Trier’s beliefs and experiences through his life and through his depression, which is a huge factor in Melancholia. As well the relationships Justine has reflects the Oedipus Complex through her behaviour and decisions. Therefore Freudian theories relate directly to Melancholia.