Boeing Australia E-Procurement

Boeing Australia Limited – E procurement Executive Summary As Russell Menere, I recommend the management of Boeing Australia Limited to follow the footsteps of Boeing US to adopt and implement cost effective e-Procurement system, which can be interfaced with the legacy information system as we have IT infrastructure in place that is our core strength. Through e-Procurement system we can improve redundancies in the business process and operations, gain in productivity by upgrading procurement processes. Cost savings by reducing processing time, rationalization of a large number of BAL suppliers and maintaining relationship with Key Suppliers.Investing in an e-procurement system BAL would seek short term improvement tool that would simplify the procurement process across different division and support complex interfaces with suppliers. We can broaden our scope to include reverse auctions tool as well. Key Assumptions I would assume that the management has approved a reasonable a mount for the cost of setup, implementation, training, interface and support of e-Procurement system with the BAL legacy system. Assuming that the BAL key suppliers have no problems with the changes to the procurement processes.Statement of issues The main issue is processes. There are redundancies in the business process low productivity and high processing time in procurement processes, a large number of BAL suppliers and relationship with Key Suppliers is not maintained. BAL is having budgetary constraints to invest in an expensive new system and set up complex interfaces within inter organization and with suppliers. Existing legacy system is having large information system across the organization. A list of possible barriers is as listed below Barriers to e-procurement Upper Management Support / Lack of Leadership †¢Other Competing Initiatives †¢Resistance to change †¢Lack of a widely accepted solution †¢Magnitude of Change †¢Complicated procedures and e xtended relationships †¢Lack of technical expertise †¢Security in the process – Data transmission to the wrong person †¢Confidentiality of information – unauthorized viewing †¢Prevention of tampering with documents -changes to documents †¢Different national approaches to e-procurement †¢Proof of intent – electronic signatures †¢Clarity of sender and tendered information †¢Enforceability of electronic contracts Information technology investment costs †¢Cost of assessment of systems to find correct system to fulfill tasks †¢Internal Compatibility †¢External Compatibility †¢Investment in compatible systems †¢Reluctance to ‘buy-into’ one off system The major impediment is the Size of Company as the separate categories of commodities should have a volume enough so that it looks attractive to the suppliers for going in to an e-auction and going in to long term contract. These vendors are to be given a visibility of the order size during the contract period so that they can weigh their options.Criteria The Boeing Company’s vision is interpreted according to the organization of the various divisions who are committed to the corporate vision by keeping customer as center and cost reduction with a good quality. Reverse Auction A reverse auction is an electronic auction where buyers enter requirements, and Suppliers bid to provide the required goods and services. It is conducted in real-time, And bidders see the offers of competitive bidders but no the names of the other Bidders. The bidding prices move downwards as the auction progresses.The consortium of vendors participating in the e-auction process should be prescreened and graded on an index point scale on various attributes like Quality, Delivery timelines, financial standing, Competitors, market standing and other Customer feedback. The steps in a reverse auction: †¢ Define the event. †¢ Prepare supp liers. †¢ Develop item specifications and auction parameters. †¢ Conduct an RFQ period. †¢ Run the auction. Potential Costs and Benefits The major costs involved are mainly under the following heads 1. Software cost. 2. E-procurement platform hiring fee. 3. Training Costs to all relevant employees and vendors. . Vendor classification and grading and appraisal cost. 5. RFQ and RFA clarification with vendors: Time cost. 6. Administrative costs. 7. Time involved in analysis and award of contract. 8. Quality check mechanism cost. Benefits †¢Process cost savings – (Tender / Purchase Process) †¢Service / Material / Product Cost Savings. †¢Reduced Waste †¢Transaction Administration Cost Savings †¢Reduced Administration †¢Increasing Profit Margins †¢Strategic Cost Savings †¢Enhanced Inventory Management †¢Decrease in Costs through reduced staffing levels †¢Shortened Overall Procurement Cycle Times †¢Shortened Commu nication Cycle Times Reduction in time through greater transparency(Less objections) †¢Reduction in Evaluation Time †¢Reduction in Time through improved internal workflow †¢Reduction in purchasing order fulfillment time †¢Reduction in time through increased visibility †¢Increased Quality through increased competition †¢Increased Quality through Benchmarking (Market Intelligence) †¢Increased Quality through increased visibility in the supply chain †¢Increased Quality through increased efficiency. †¢Increased Quality through Improved Communication †¢Gaining Competitive Advantage Recommendations In such competitive scenario E-procurement is apt solution for Boeing Australia.I would recommend making relevant lots of commodities focused under various categories and offered to relevant set of vendors to give them a good business perspective and gain competitive advantage to the company during the contract period. All the bigger $-value lot s to be awarded under e-auction and smaller lots can be awarded through open auctions for low risk items. An Online system should be aligned with vendor systems can be developed to process in time orders and payments. These steps will provide Boeing reduced cycle times, determine market price of goods and in turn reduce overall cost of goods.

Review of New Types of Relation Extraction Methods

This is explained by the fact that patterns do not tend to uniquely identify the given relation. The systems which participated in MUCH and deal with relation extraction also rely on rich rules for identifying relations (Fought et al. 1 998; Gargling et al. 1998; Humphreys et al. 1998). Humphreys et al. 1998) mention that they tried to add only those rules which were (almost) certain never to generate errors in analysis; therefore, they had adopted a low recall and high precision approach. However, in this case, many relations may be missed due to the lack of unambiguous rules to extract them.To conclude, knowledge-based methods are not easily portable to other domains and involve too much manual labor. However, they can be used effectively if the main aim is to get results quickly in well-defined domains and document collections. 5 Supervised Methods Supervised methods rely on a training set where domain-specific examples eave been tagged. Such systems automatically learn extractors for relations by using machine-learning techniques. The main problem of using these methods is that the development of a suitably tagged corpus can take a lot of time and effort.On the other hand, these systems can be easily adapted to a different domain provided there is training data. There are different ways that extractors can be learnt in order to solve the problem of supervised relation extraction: kernel methods (Shoo and Grossman 2005; Bunches and Mooney 2006), logistic regression (Kamala 2004), augmented parsing (Miller et al. 2000), Conditional Random Fields CRY) (Calcutta et al. 2006). In RE in general and supervised RE in particular a lot of research was done for IS-A relations and extraction of taxonomies.Several resources were built based on collaboratively built Wisped (YOGA – (Issuance et al. 2007); Depended – (Rue et al. 2007); Freebase – (Blacker et al. 2008); Wicking (Instates et al. 2010)). In general, Wisped is becoming more and more popula r as a source for RE. E. G. (Opponent and Strobe 2007; Unguent et al. AAA, b, c). Query logs are also considered a valuable source of information for RE and their analysis is even argued to give better results than other suggested methods in the field (Passes 2007, 2009). 5. 19 Weakly-supervised Methods Some supervised systems also use bootstrapping to make construction of the training data easier. These methods are also sometimes referred to as â€Å"huckleberries information extraction†. Bring (1998) describes the DIPPER (Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Expansion) method used for identifying authors of the books. It uses an initial small set of seeds or a set of hand- constructed extraction patterns to begin the training process. After the occurrences of needed information are found, they are further used for recognition of new patterns.Regardless of how promising bootstrapping can seem, error propagation becomes a serious problem: mistakes in extraction at the initial stag es generate more mistakes at later stages and decrease the accuracy of the extraction process. For example, errors that expand to named entity recognition, e. G. Extracting incomplete proper names, result in choosing incorrect seeds for the next step of bootstrapping. Another problem that can occur is that of semantic drift. This happens when senses of the words are not taken into account and therefore each iteration results in a move from the original meaning.Some researchers (Korea and How 2010; Hove et al. 2009; Korea et al. 2008) have suggested ways to avoid this problem and enhance the performance of this method by using doubly- anchored patterns (which include both the class name and a class member) as well as graph structures. Such patterns have two anchor seed positions â€Å"{type} such as {seed} and *† and also one open position for the terms to be learnt, for example, pattern â€Å"Presidents such as Ford and {X}† can be used to learn names of the presidents .Graphs are used for storing information about patterns, found words and links to entities they helped to find. This data is further used for calculating popularity and productivity of the candidate words. This approach helps to enhance the accuracy of bootstrapping and to find high-quality information using only a few seeds. Korea (2012) employs a similar approach for the extraction Of cause-effect relations, where the pattern for bootstrapping has a form of â€Å"X and Y verb Z†, for example, and virus cause Human-based evaluation reports 89 % accuracy on 1500 examples. Self-supervised Systems Self-supervised systems go further in making the process of information extraction unsupervised. The Knolling Web II system (Edition et al. 2005), an example of a self-supervised system, learns â€Å"to label its own training examples using only a small set of domain-independent extraction patterns†. It uses a set of generic patterns to automatically instantiate relation-specif ic extraction rules and then learns domain-specific extraction rules and the whole process is repeated iteratively. The Intelligence in Wisped (IPP) project (Weld et al. 2008) is another example of a self-supervised system.It bootstraps from the Wisped corpus, exploiting the fact that each article corresponds to a primary object and that any articles contain infusions (brief tabular information about the article). This system is able to use Wisped infusions as a starting point for training 20 the classifiers for the page type. IPP trains extractors for the various attributes and they can later be used for extracting information from general Web pages. The disadvantage of IPP is that the amount of relations described in Wisped infusions is limited and so not all relations can be extracted using this method. . 1 Open Information Extraction Edition et al. (2008) introduced the notion of Open Information Extraction, which is opposed to Traditional Relation Extraction. Open information e xtraction is â€Å"a novel extraction paradigm that tackles an unbounded number of relations†. This method does not presuppose a predefined set of relations and is targeted at all relations that can be extracted. The Open Relation extraction approach is relatively a new one, so there is only a small amount of projects using it. Texturing (Bank and Edition 2008; Bank et al. 2007) is an example of such a system.A set of relinquishment's lexicon-syntactic patterns is used to build a relation- independent extraction model. It was found that 95 % Of all relations in English can be described by only 8 general patterns, e. G. â€Å"El Verb E â€Å". The input of such a system is only a corpus and some relation-independent heuristics, relation names are not known in advance. Conditional Random Fields (CRY) are used to identify spans of tokens believed to indicate explicit mentions of relationships between entities and the whole problem of relation extraction is treated as a problem of sequence labeling.The set of linguistic features used in this system is similar to those used by other state of-the-art relation extraction systems and includes e. G. Part-of-speech tags, regular expressions for detection of capitalization and punctuation, context words. At this stage of development this system â€Å"is able to extract instances of the four most frequently observed relation types: Verb, Noun+Prep, Verb+Prep and Infinitive†. It has a number of limitations, which are however common to all RE systems: it extracts only explicitly expressed relations that are primarily word-based; relations should occur between entity names within the same sentence.Bank and Edition (2008) report a precision of 88. 3 % and a recall of 45. 2 Even though the system shows very good results the relations are not pacified and so there are difficulties in using them in some other systems. Output Of the system consists Of tepees stating there is some relation between two entities, but there is no generalization of these relations. Www and Weld (2010) combine the idea of Open Relation Extraction and the use of Wisped infusions and produce systems called Weepers and Weeps . Weepers improves Texturing dramatically but it is 30 times slower than Texturing.However, Weeps does not have this disadvantage and still shows an improved F-measure over Texturing between 1 5 % to 34 % on three corpora. Fader et al. 201 1) identify several flaws in previous works in Open Information Extraction: â€Å"the learned extractors ignore both â€Å"holistic† aspects of the relation phrase (e. G. , is it contiguous? ) as well as lexical aspects (e. G. , how many instances of this relation are there? )†. They target these problems by introducing syntactic constraints (e. G. , they require the relation phrase to match the POS tag 21 pattern) and lexical constraints.Their system Revere achieves an AUK which is 30 % better than WOE (Www and Weld 201 0) and Texturing (Bank and Denton 2008). Unshackles et al. (AAA) approach this problem from another angle. They try to mine for patterns expressing various relations and organism then in hierarchies. They explore binary relations between entities and employ frequent items mining (Augural et al. 1993; Syrians and Augural 1 996) to identify the most frequent patterns. Their work results in a resource called PATTY which contains 350. 69 pattern sunsets and substitution relations and achieves 84. 7 % accuracy. Unlike Revere (Fader et al. 201 1) which constrains patterns to verbs or verb phrases that end with prepositions, PATTY can learn arbitrary patterns. The authors employ so called syntactic- ontological-lexical patterns (SOL patterns). These patterns constitute a sequence of words, POS-tags, wildcats, and ontological types. For example, the pattern â€Å"persons [ads] voice * song† would match the strings my Heinousness soft voice in Rehab and Elvis Presley solid voice in his song All shook up.Their approach is based on collecting dependency paths from the sentences where two named entities are tagged (YACHT (Hoffa et al. 2011) is used as a database of all Ones). Then the textual pattern is extracted by finding the shortest paths connecting two entities. All of these patterns are transformed into SOL (abstraction of a textual pattern). Frequent items quinine is used for this: all textual patterns are decomposed into n-grams (n consecutive words). A SOL pattern contains only the n-grams that appear frequently in the corpus and the remaining word sequences are replaced by wildcats.The support set of the pattern is described as the set of pairs of entities that appear in the place Of the entity placeholders in all strings in the corpus that match the pattern. The patterns are connected in one sunset (so are considered synonymous) if their supporting sets coincide. The overlap of the supporting sets is also employed to identify substitution relations between various sunsets. . 2 Di stant Learning Mint et al. (2009) introduce a new term â€Å"distant supervision†. The authors use a large semantic database Freebase containing 7,300 relations between 9 million named entities.For each pair of entities that appears in Freebase relation, they identify all sentences containing those entities in a large unlabeled corpus. At the next step textual features to train a relation classifier are extracted. Even though the 67,6 % of precision achieved using this method has room for improvement, it has inspired many researchers to further investigate in this direction. Currently there are a number of papers ring to enhance â€Å"distant learning† in several directions. Some researchers target the heuristics that are used to map the relations in the databases to the texts, for example, (Takeouts et al. 01 2) argue that improving matching helps to make data less noisy and therefore enhances the quality of relation extraction in general. Hay et al. (2010) propose us ing an undirected graphical model for relation extraction which employs â€Å"distant learning' but enforces selection preferences. Ridded et al. (2010) reports 31 % error reduction compared to (Mint et al. 2009). 22 Another problem that has been addressed is language ambiguity (Hay et al. 01 1, 2012). Most methods cluster shallow or syntactic patterns of relation mentions, but consider only one possible sense per pattern.However, this assumption is often violated in reality. Hay et al. (201 1) uses generative probabilistic models, where both entity type constraints within a relation and features on the dependency path between entity mentions are exploited. This research is similar to DIRT (Line and Panatela 2001 ) which explores distributional similarity of dependency paths in order to discover different representations of the same semantic relation. However, Hay et al. (2011) employ another approach and apply IDA (Belie et al. 2003) with a slight modification: observations are re lation tepees and not words.So as a result of this modification instead of representing semantically related words, the topic latent variable represents a relation type. The authors combine three models: Reel-LAD, Reel-LDAP and Type-LAD. In the third model the authors split the features of a duple into relation level features and entity level features. Relation level features include the dependency path, trigger, lexical and POS features; entity level features include the entity mention itself and its named entity tag. These models output clustering of observed relation tepees and their associated textual expressions.

Media’s Negative Effect on Women Body Image

I. Images in the media are having a negative impact on female body image and has given society a blurred meaning as to â€Å"beautiful† A. Models 1. Models give an unrealistic view of the ideal woman; they give the idea that you cannot be beautiful unless you are thin. 2. â€Å"The average model is taller and weighs 23 per cent, or almost a quarter, less than the average woman who is 5'4†³ and weighs 148 lbs. † (Canadian Women’s Health) 3. Model’s bodies have been getting thinner by the years, and as the bodys keep slimming down women and girls in society are becoming more unhappy with their selves. B. Economic goals . â€Å"There are no official statistics for spending on diet products, but estimates vary from $40bn to $100bn in the US alone – more than the combined value of the government's budget for health, education and welfare. † (Cummings) 2. By the media presenting an almost impossible ideal to get and maintain, the cosmetic and diet industry becomes profitable. 3. Ads are directed mostly to younger girls purposely. C. Health issues 1. Exposure to images of thin, young, air-brushed female bodies is linked to depression, loss of self-esteem and the development of unhealthy eating habits in women and girls. . The American research group Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders, Inc. says that one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control (bulimia, anorexia, excess exercising, laxatives, skipping meals. ) 3. This has even affected younger girls, as low as 5-6 years old. 4. Nearly half of all preadolescent girls wish to be thinner, and as a result have engaged in a diet or are aware of the concept of dieting. (Tiggeman) 5. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A  real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition. II. Although the damage has been well done, by eliminating the fake women pictures and providing the society with a healthier view of themselves, women’s views about themselves would be a lot healthier and they would feel uch happier. A. Although these campaigns have just started with their healthy ideas, many companies have tried to help with this problem and have received much positive feedback. 1. In 2004, Dove launched the very successful Campaign for Real Beauty which features real women, not models, advertising Dove's firming cream. (Dove) 2. Dove has also recently launched a new campaign, 3. In Septem ber 2006, a news and media furor erupted when Spain banned overly thin models from its fashion runways. 4. Dove produced this video in response to the negative comments of the changes of the company’s models called Evolution which shows the transformation from a regular women to a model and how unrealistic perceptions of beauty are. 5. In 2010, Dove ® set out a bold new vision for the brand with the Dove ® Movement for Self-Esteem. ( Dove) III. Not everyone agrees, however, that this is something wrong. A. The people that prosper from these ideas say 1. Women need to have more self control. a. It’s not like women can just avoid these ads, they are everywhere and have come to dominate our society. Depression and low self-esteem is not something that women want to have. Not everyone is born the same. 2. Obesity is a problem, thinner is healthier. a. Thinner can be healthier because obesity has become a growing issue but the media has taken it to their advantage. b. The thinness shown in magazines and models is not healthy, the models are always underweight which leads to fainting and serious health conditions including malnutrition. Works Cited â€Å"Beauty and Body Image in Media. † Media Awareness Network. N. p. , n. d. Web. 20 Nov 2011. . Cummings, Laura. â€Å"The diet business: Banking on Failure. † BBC news. N. p. , 05/02/2003. Web. 20 Nov 2011. . â€Å"Body Image and the Media. † Canadian's Women's Health Network. N. p. , 2005. Web. 20 Nov 2011. . â€Å"The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. † Dove. Dove, n. d. Web. 20 Nov 2011. .

Computer Science Information System Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Computer Science Information System - Essay Example Solution: This system provides with user inputs to a large variety of questions to analyze their needs and future goals to get them the best they desire. Constant monitoring is a very important activity. Solution: They will be able to understand their system change requirements to cater better services to the members and win satisfaction and performance in the competitive market to give everyone the best service possible. Description: The primary system has the main process called the DSS system for fitness center. The users enquire the systems as for their requirements and get the answers relevant to their plans. The questions and answers are stored in a data store and the DSS system accesses it to retrieve the respective ones. The fitness experts do keep their info and the knowledge of the members with regard to their plans and performance. The databases include the 'general questions and answer', 'user info', 'fitness consultant info' and 'Company services list and eligibility criteria'. The main purpose of the DSS system to the management is to get the regular or periodic feedbacks about the system and also about the member's interests. It helps them in preparing an appropriate marketing strategy to bring in more customers and create a brand in the

Deforestation in Indonesia Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Deforestation in Indonesia - Research Paper Example The 52-second tremor left 5, 700 lives and damaged an estimated amount or US3.1 billion (Leitmann, 2007). These are just some of the examples from the growing list of disasters in Indonesia. At first glance, these disasters can be considered to be brought about by natural calamities, natural catastrophes that could be beyond anybody’s control. Taking a closer look however on Indonesia’s environmental policies, many issues can be clarified and a lot of questions can be answered. This paper delves on the environmental condition including the policies of Indonesia with specific focus on deforestation. Country profile Republic of Indonesia is an archipelagic country in the South East Asian region with the land area of 1.9 million sq km (BBC News, 2011). Indonesia’s terrain is mainly coastal lowlands and its larger islands have interior mountains (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). Indonesia is highly diverse ethnicity with more than 300 local languages (BBC News, 20 11). As of this year, Indonesia has a recorded population of more than 245 million. According to the data of Central Intelligence Agency, it has an urban population of 44 percent as of year 2010 and the rate of urbanization goes at 1.5 percent rate of change for the year 2010-2011. Indonesia is endowed with rich natural resources such as petroleum, gold, silver, coal, natural gas, nickel, and copper among others. Most of its land area is also arable and fertile soil. On the other hand, Indonesia is also home for the most volcanoes in the world, some 76 are historically active (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). In spite of being a highly agricultural country, only 16. 5 percent (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011) of Indonesia’s labor force is in the agricultural sector. The industrial sector dominates the labor force with 46.4 percent (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011) followed by services with 37.1 percent (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). This set-up of the labor force can be traced back during the 1970s when Indonesia started the development of its wood-processing industries maximizing its forests that comprise 84 percent of its total land area. From then on, Indonesia’s production capacity of pulp and paper industries has increased immensely by almost 700 percent, thus, it is now one of the world’s largest pulp and paper producer. Forest-related industry in Indonesia was further expanded in the decades of 1980s and 1990s by the government. However, these expansions went underway without any sustainable forest management system thus resulted to the acceleration of forest loss in the country. Status of deforestation Deforestation from a layman’s point of view is simply an act of cutting down trees in forest and rain forests. Usually, these are through logging or burning of trees. However, the act of systematically cutting down trees to pave the way for industrial plantations that support the pulp and paper industries or clear ing forests to convert them into crop plantation such as palm oil or opening up to mining industries, the simple act elevates to exploitation and deforestation becomes seriously destructive. Conversion to plantations The rate of forest loss is growing fast. In 1980, about 1 million hectare per year was cleared. This accelerated in the first half of the1990s with an average of 1.7 million hectares and by 1996 onwards, the average has grown as high as 2 million hectares (Four Corners,

Reporting Forensic Evidence Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Reporting Forensic Evidence - Research Paper Example Therefore, the report ought to be more formal for clear presentation. For instance, in the report of the investigation that involves a group of criminal enterprise, a comprehensive report is to be produced. Therefore, the forensic investigators can apply the use of a computer to carry out the forensic procedures. Computer forensic is thus the utilization of the computer applications and also analysis for the discovery of any legal evidence involved in the field of forensics. The use of the computer to practice the forensic investigations enables a quick identification and capture of the potential criminal through the use of vital data in the computer (Stauffer & Bonfanti, 2006). During the forensic investigation process, some of the things that were accomplished are the process of gathering the critical details of the potential suspects. This can only be achieved when the forensic investigators are rightly granted a warrant. This warrant allows them to carry out the forensic investig ation procedures without any limits. Therefore, the investigators first must obtain a legal warrant from the authority to enable them access any form of information from individuals. Furthermore, the evidence obtained by the investigator must not be interfered with. For instance, in the computer forensic investigation, the computers must not be touched or even moved once the incidence has occurred. The investigators must further protect the data and the system and its components so as to be used for the prosecution in the court. Moreover, a continued chain of custody is maintained. Eventually, during the retrieval of the data of the suspects, the investigator ought to be extremely careful so as to avoid any distortion of data contained in the computer. Consequently, the evidence collected by the forensic investigator ought to meet some set requirements. These includes that the evidence ought to be produced then also be professionally authenticated and furthermore be of the best evid ence available (Stauffer & Bonfanti, 2006). There are numerous types of systems that are employed during the examination procedures of the forensic investigation. The evidence gathered by the investigator varies widely. Some of these evidences are obtained from the computer includes theft of the intellectual property; there is also theft of the trade secrets. For instance, the investigators can employ the manual form of collecting forensic evidence or they can employ the computer technology method in the collection of the forensic evidences. The computer method used in the collecting evidences of any form of crime is the latest developed procedure. This technique is quick and also among the most effective procedure to be utilized. The forensic investigators utilize the computer forensic to gather any forensic evidences to be utilized in court. For instance, the evidence obtained for criminals, theft, deaths, and all forms of suicides (Anastasi, 2003). Additionally, a variety of tool s are employed by the forensic investigator during the investigation process. Thus for an effective process in the forensic investigation, a smarty decision ought to be made on the best and most valuable tools to be utilized. This is to enable the investigator have an accurate analysis of the evidences obtained. These tools employed by the investigators can also be created by individuals who are experienced. Unfortunately, this idea is not embraced by many because it is hard to

Workforce 2020 project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Workforce 2020 project - Essay Example activities will have to be diverted to improving the ecosystem, and promoting environmental care and safeguards, so that we can avoid, at the very least, environmental catastrophes. These events do not only affect our businesses but our personal lives as citizens of Mother Earth. In the year 2020, or roughly more than a decade from now, we can expect changes in many areas of our lives, from business to personal, and from the countryside to urban life. A challenging but demanding environment awaits Americans in this era of electronic gadgets, computers, climate change and global warming. â€Å"Even now it has become harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. People in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in our country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down a government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and the Atlantic have threatened whole cities.† (Albert Gore’s speech, cited in Cruz, 2008) The existence of climate refugees is a big sign that more migration will happen in the days and years ahead. With more immigrants in our land, we are not assured of job opportunities for own citizens. And there is no assurance that American economy can generate more and more jobs for Americans and immigrants ten years from now. That is, except if we don’t create forecasts based on existing events and trends. We can prepare for eventualities, and initiate programs for the future of our business organization. Business

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Essay Example Dave Holden, Rick’s fellow bounty hunter goes through a dreadful encounter with Nexus-6. He gets injured in the process and Rick heads an operation that is meant to find and retire the remaining Nexus-6’s. This operation succeeds when Rick finds and kills Polokov. Eventually, Rick retires from bounty hunting after witnessing Resch’s killing of Luba Luft, an android impersonating an opera singer. He terms this killing an absence of empathy towards androids. Could Rick engaging in doublespeak? Why does he abandon bounty hunting on the basis of the inhuman killing of Luft after participating in the elimination of Polokov? I believe that this story presents a paradox. The aspect of empathy that develops in Rick contrasts sharply the life he has lived. The main questions arising from the story are, â€Å"How is hypocrisy demonstrated of Dick’s future society?† and â€Å"How does the theme of mind control manifest in the character of Buster Friendly?† The aspect of decay versus regeneration is emphasized when Dick develops a world that is in peril. The dust of nuclear fallout covers the landscape. This decay is metaphysically represented by kipple. Against this backdrop, Dick suggests that the world can survive and regenerate through decay. This is the tragic irony of the

International business management report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

International business management report - Essay Example The involvement of cross functional teams and different stakeholders therefore require project management to be governed in effective manner. This report will also include evidence from the various reports of National Audit Office on the success of implementing Shared Services in UK and will take practical insights from the same. ManCo’s decision to implement a shared service to manage certain business processes will require a systematic approach towards understanding how the overall dynamics of project management work besides how leadership can effectively contribute towards the success of the project. More collaboration needs to be on the development of agile systems which are not overly complex as well as fulfill the requirements of the internal customers of the project. This report will provide analysis and insights into how ManCo can manage the overall project of initiating the required changes in the processes. This report will further discuss about critical issues and p rinciples related with the successful project management. Key Principles of Project Management One of the key principles a project follows is the clear definition of what project is and how much the project manager is actually responsible for. In order to successfully launch the project of managing the shared services across different locations, it is important first to actually define what this project is and what it intends to achieve. Practically, however, project managers fail to clearly define the projects and determine the accountabilities for this. Various reports by National Audit Office (NAO) suggest that failure to clearly identify the purpose of project and who will own it can increase the cost for project managers. Definition of the roles and accountabilities is also another key principle ManCo must first determine. The people involved in the overall project, how cross functional teams will be formed and what will be the role of each member must be defined initially in o rder to avoid conflicts at the later stage. In order to successfully manage all the stakeholders, it is critical therefore that the roles and responsibilities of people to be involved in the overall project.( Brewer,& Strahorn, 2012) Another important and critical principle is the preparation of plan and the discussion of the same with that of the managers. As a project manager, I would therefore focus more on discussing the project and its deliverables and justifying various activities which will be undertaken in order to centralize HR, Finance, Payroll and other activities across different locations. Dissemination of information and properly communicating to all stakeholders is another important principle which needs to be followed. Not informing all the stakeholders involved may create further conflicts of interests and hence the overall governance of the project may become difficult to achieve. National Audit Office in its one of recent reports has suggested that there is a need to have in-house capability along with the business and technical expertise to manage shared services. As such, the project management principles for shared services require that in-house capabilities must be developed rather than outsourcing the shared services. Focus should be on improving the in-house efficiency and to leverage the same with tha

The Continuum From Legitimacy To Fraud Research Paper

The Continuum From Legitimacy To Fraud - Research Paper Example The archival research employs the use of secondary data, making it difficult to determine proxies for managing of earnings. Several models developed for this proxy are unable to distinguish accurately amid opportunistic behavior of managers and true performance. Another archival research limitation is the inability to tap the managers’ incentives into earnings management. This research type has founded its argument on economic theory in an attempt to explain the occurrence of earnings management (Cozby, 2009). It is hard to confirm beyond doubt that firms with the motivating factors such bonuses, debts covenants and political reasons undertake earnings management because of these factors. Behavioral researchers have tried to handle these shortcomings by giving proof of the behavior of earnings management, which has greater construct validity (implying easily to measure and define) than archival perspective. Several methods can detect and measure earnings management empirically . The most discretional method is the discretional accrual, which assumes that managers can depend on their discretional ability concerning some accruals to use as the proxy testing of earnings management (J. W. Creswell & J. D. Creswell, 2009). Another method is single accrual where only one of accrual types, say depreciation estimates, exists. This method is ineffective because of difficulty in establishing the exceptional accrual required to manage earnings. In the distribution method of earnings management testing, loss reporting is avoided (McKee, 2005).... Earnings Management Stimuli Motivation of capital markets The accounting information is useful in the capital markets in influencing the stock price in the interim, and for this reason, managers alter the information to influence their firms’ performance in the stock market. The key incentive for earnings management is to promote investment in a firm through purchase of shares in the capital market. Many firms post unanticipated positive accruals, which enhance prior to initial public offer (IPO) and acquisition financed by stock. These situations increase the use of earnings management to boost incomes, making them more viable than those of other firms (McKee, 2005). Past studies of firms indirectly concur with this argument by stating that ownership of lower institutions represented by interim oriented investments with much stress on stock prices over lasting gains. In opposition, some studies illustrate the inducement of understating earnings before a management buyout. Ron en and Yaari in their study support a hypothesis showing that unanticipated negative accruals depict a decreasing income, making the buyout cheaper and easier. This permits the management of a firm to propose a price that emerges as reasonably beyond the market price but beneath the actual worth of the firm. This market price does not show the real firm’s economics (Ronen & Yaari, 2011). Another motivation reason for capital markets is to show that the earnings of the firm have met the requirements of financial management or analysts. There are firms that hardly meet or surpass the forecast of a financial analyst; hence, the management alters the earnings upwards in order to satisfy the forecast (Trochim & Donnelly, 2008). Besides, firms should avoid loss making and

Evaluate the Range of Alternative International Assignment Forms Essay Example for Free

Evaluate the Range of Alternative International Assignment Forms Essay An international assignment of 3-5 years is usually considered as Long Term Assignment. One of the reasons that it is becoming extremely more expensive for MNE’s is due to the nature of the job scope and the International Assignee’s (IA) personal considerations. Interestingly, according to the 2009 Global Relocation Trends Survey [ (Brookfield Global Relocation Services, 2009) ] report, when multinational companies are relocating their employees for assignments overseas these days regardless of short or long term, they tend to dispatch older and more experienced employees due to the low risk of assignment failure. This is one of the reasons why it has become increasingly and extremely more expensive for MNE’s [ (Harzing, 1995) ]. Following the expatriate demographic provided by the survey, family concerns sit on top of the chart which remain the most overwhelming reason of 92% for assignment refusal and also the top reason for early returns from assignments which recorded at high of 27%. Historically, the top five challenges over the years of the survey have been family adjustment, partner resistance, difficult location, children’s education, and partner’s career [ (Borstorff, 1997) ]; [ (Brett, 1995) ]. These are also the reasons why it is difficult to find the right candidates with the right experience to fill the vacancy for long term assignment [ (Shaffer, 2001) ]. Antidotes for the Poisons Exploiting Other Alternatives Due to the above dilemma faced by most of the MNE’s, they are now looking at other alternatives which can provide them with the best ‘antidotes’ to the ‘poisons’ that are stinging them. The ranges of alternatives of international assignments that the multinational companies can consider apart from the long term assignment include short term, self-initiated, commuter, and virtual assignments. Short term assignments This type of assignments can last from a few weeks to months. According to the PricewaterhouseCooper’s survey 2001, there is a sharp increase of almost 60% in the popularity of companies implementing this approach in their respective organizations. This is due to the nature of these assignments which give the companies an ‘instant’ solution in resolving skills shortages and are in general easier to manage [ (Solomon, 1999) ]. Apart from that, in comparison with the long term assignments, short term assignments imposed lower cost to the companies due to the assignment length and duration. In addition, companies do not need to spend on relocation on their entire employees’ family and it is also a good means to circumvent family-related problems which can be seen in most of the traditional assignments such as family upheavel. Self-initiated assignments Over the years, there is this trend that is growing in numbers where the assignees make their arrangements to find work abroad and are employed on local work contracts. According to [ (Suutari, 2000) ], they have identified a series of distinct characteristics of the self-initiated assignees as compared to traditional expatriation. These characteristics, which may not be that ‘bull’s eye’ accurate, however does speaks most common assignees may have and practice. These include young and single, be more motivated in moving abroad due to interest in internationalism and poor employment situations at home, working for companies at lower hierarchical levels, and receive no repatriation promises and view their relocation as a more permanent move. The benefit of recruiting the self-initiated assignees is that it can offer companies the potential of not having to undertake preparation. In fact, the assignees recruited could have been resident in a particular location for years where they are well blend with the socio-cultural of the place. One of the drawbacks is that the assignees are not familiar with the organizational culture which until a certain extent where such familiarity is important will be driven by the nature of the assignment. Commuter assignments This type of assignment involves employees commuting from their home to an office in another country by means of travelling by land, sea or air. One of the examples would be employees travelling by airplane on a weekly or bi-weekly basis [ (Assignment types explained, 2012) ]. In contrast with short term assignments, the commuter assignments allow company to fill in the skills shortage without disrupting the employee’s spouse’s career or the children’s education or family affair. This gives the assignees the opportunity to work abroad without leaving their home when carrying out their assignments. However, the drawbacks of the assignment are the quality life of the assignees may be affected. This is due to the likelihood of the assignees returning late from work due to the unspeakable distance of commuting and not to mention the fatigue due to the travelling journey. This affects the communication and the quality time between the assignees and their family which further prolong may affect their emotional and indirectly affects their productivity in the company. Virtual assignments The assignees manage the variety of international activities across several countries which do not require the assignees to be physically relocated to a foreign organizational unit. Although relocation is not necessary but extensive travel is inevitable. The advantages of a virtual assignment seem to be overwhelming over the traditional expatriate assignment. Firstly, the assignees are less expensive due to their wages are paid on local basis (without expatriate allowance) but perhaps with travel expenses. With the increasing use of video conferencing and other communication development, it has narrow down the possibility of this approach and making it less necessary in the future. Secondly, there is no need for any special scheme for the assignees such as insurance, foreign social security, and pensions as they can stick back to only local scheme. This gives the company another cost saving solution and as well as cutting on the unnecessary procedure in establishing a new scheme for the assignees. Lastly and most importantly, the assignees work-life balance is not tremendously affected. The assignees do not need to move their family abroad and their children’s education are not affected. The current trend of expatriation 2011 As the global economy continues to improve, more and more companies are increasing their presence in the emerging market where international assignments have become key aspect in the global economic recovery. Following the reliable source from the 2011 Global Relocation Trends Survey published by Brookfield Global Relocation Services [ (Brookfield GRS 2011 Global Relocation Trends Survey Report, 2011) ], China is where they are heading. According to the survey, China ranked the most common new destination followed by Brazil, India and Singapore. In terms of difficulties, China still sits on top of the list followed by India, Russia and Brazil. This gives a good reflection of the assignee volume going into these locations and the competition for housing and schooling will create delays and difficulties to the relocation and at the same time giving negative impact on the relocation experience. Conclusion In order to draw a bottom line on the above discussion, I personally view that self-initiated assignment would be the acceptable form of assignment from my generation. The current trend is leaning more towards modern thinking and not being hold back by the conventional belief and thinking. Take for example, the young adult nowadays do not rush through their marriage at early age and the average marriage age have increased to over 30 years old in contradictory with 18-22 years old during the olden days. This has indirectly give an impact to the working trend where employees remain single till the age of over 30 years old and they tend to be mobile and not restricted to family pressure or spouse’s career. Coming to this modern generation, we are starting to adapt to a very competitive environment where the local market is getting more and more saturated. In order to overcome this matter, we have to go out from our home country to get a well-paid jobs rather than saturating further in the local market. Therefore, this type of assignment is some kind of ‘killing two birds with one stone’ where companies can expect to save cost by hiring these assignees on contract basis and the assignees can expect to earn higher foreign exchange rate wages overseas compared to working in their home country. Considering the mutual benefits from this type of assignments, in the coming future we can expect to see the self-initiated assignment to gain popularity among the companies and also the prospective employees.

Art history formal analysis Renoir luncheon of the boating party Essay Example for Free

Art history formal analysis Renoir luncheon of the boating party Essay The subject matter of the painting consists of a group of people assembled on an outside deck that has a wooden railing and a red and white striped canopy. The deck is surrounded by marsh grass and some trees with a river visible beyond them. Upon the river a few boats can be seen, one of them a sailboat. In the immediate foreground there’s a square table with a white tablecloth on which rests several empty wine glasses with apparent red wine residue. A few plates are also visible with fluted glasses upon them, discarded morsels of food and silverware can also be seen. A centerpiece dish of fruit composed of Grapes and pears is flanked by several bottles of  red wine. A few discarded white cloth napkins have been casually cast among the dishes. Seated to the left of center at the table in the foreground is a young woman wearing straw hat with a red flowered hat band. She wears a fine black dress with white lace edging at the neck and cuffs, a dark red scarf draped over neck and down the front of the dress. She wears a black choker around her neck. She’s holding a small brown furred dog close to her face from under its forelegs the dog sits upright upon the table facing her. Behind her to the left standing and leaning with his backside against the wooden railing of the deck, his right arm gripping the railing stands a large man, his face in profile as he looks to the right and slightly back. He wears a dome shaped straw hat with the brim curved upwards its edge trimmed in blue. He has close cropped reddish brown hair and has a full beard and mustache of the same color. He wears a white tank top shirt and white pants. To his right along the railing several feet behind the foreground table stands a woman bent forward, her left arm and right elbow resting upon the railing as she faces the table. She wears a straw hat with a blue hat band the brim curved down. Her dresses is off white and trimmed in red that the neck and cuffs. Facing her with his back to the table sits a man wearing a brown suit and a brown and bowler hat. Behind the woman at the railing at the far left corner of the deck facing forward stands a man wearing a brown jacket with a light blue shirt wearing a cap. Facing him standing with his back to the viewer facing left is a man wearing a black overcoat and a black top hat with a beard. In the right foreground seated facing the table on a wooden chair that is turned backward is a man who looks left toward the railing of the deck, his face in profile. He faces the woman seated opposite him who holds the dog. He is wearing a straw hat with a flat top and black hatband its brim turned up at the back. He has brown hair and a light brown short mustache. He wears a white tank top shirt and dark colored pants. His arms rest forward on the reversed chair back; in his right hand he holds a cigarette. To his right seated at the table is a woman wearing a white brimless hat with a few blue stripes. Her dress is blue with white ruffles trimmed in red at the neck and white cuffs. Her hair is brown a small round earring can be seen hanging from her right ear as she looks up and to the  right. Standing behind her over her left shoulder is a man wearing a cream colored jacket with wispy blue stripes. He wears a white shirt and a black cravat. His hair falls over his forehead and is reddish brown. He has a small mustache and a goatee beard. He is leaning over the woman’s shoulder with his hand resting on the back of her chair, looking down at her. Behind him in the background over his left shoulder is a woman standing facing left, with black gloved hands raised to the sides of her face. She wears an ornate black hat with feathers and a black dress. Standing next to her with his arm around her is a man with a straw hat with a red hat band, wearing a red and white striped shirt. He faces forward looking at her intently. To his right stands another man facing the woman he has his arm around. This man has a full beard and wears a black hat. Behind him seated at the back table is a woman in a flowered straw hat who is drinking from a glass, she looks directly out of the picture plane past the table in the foreground at the viewer. A man seated to her left is barely visible in profile and past the shoulder of the man in the cream colored jacket. The entire scene is brightly lit with ambient light from the open sides of the porch the majority of which were enters from the front left of the picture plane. The white tablecloth on the table in the foreground glows with reflected light and the glasses and bottles on the table twinkle in the light. Part IV – Examination of the Art Objects Medium/Technique/Process Used: The medium used is this painting by Renoir is oil on canvas. The work was painted en plein air (outside) utilizing the alla prima (wet on wet) technique and also the classical layering technique of oil painting employed by the old masters. In these processes the first step would require the preparation of a surface on which to apply the oil paint. A linen canvas would be stretched around a wooden frame and tacked into place. The surface of the canvas would then be protected from the acidic qualities of the oil paint by applying layers of rabbit skin glue and chalk known as a ground. Next a primer of white lead paint or glue mixed with chalk â€Å"gesso† is added to provide a base layer for the painting. A rough outline of the scene would then be sketched onto the canvas as a guide for painting. Next the creation of a palette from which to paint from would require selecting the proper pigments. (Eastlake pg.234) For the portions of this work that were painted en plein air in the alla prima technique in the Impressionist style such as the tableware in the foreground Renoir would have used portable tubes of pigmented paint. Other portions that were executed in his studio employed classical oil painting techniques of layering colors and then glazing which creates a lustrous glow and provides the three dimensional quality of modeling. This technique is evident in the modeling of the forearm and the hand holding the cigarette of the man seated at the table in the right foreground. Colors would then be applied to their proper regions according to the sketch starting with the darkest and ending with the lightest, a mosaic upon which the details and highlights could then be painted. Finally upon completion the painting would be sealed with a varnish to protect its surface. (Sanders pg.11) Part V Examination of the Art Objects Composition (its Form Organization): 1. Identify and describe a specific incidence of composition from the list found below: A. Line: Renoir uses a sharp clean line to define the arm of the man seated at the table in the right foreground. The precise outline of the arm adds to the contrast of color between the arm and the man’s white shirt, the white tablecloth, and chair adding perceived depth to the shape of the arm. In contrast Renoir’s use of line in creating the marsh grasses outside the balcony is loose and diffused, giving the grass a perceived movement and depth. B. Shape: The semi circular shape of the awnings scalloped edge is distorted into curving points giving the illusion that the awning is swaying in the breeze adding a sense of movement to the air that is picked up by the grasses beyond it. C. Space: The open space left of center, framed by the two men in white tank tops allows for an unobstructed view of the landscape beyond providing perspective and contrasts the densely populated right side of the picture adding to the intimacy of the assembled group. This open space also directs the viewer gaze to the centerpiece of the table which is the symbolic heart of this painting. D. Color: Applications red are spread about the painting accenting the amorous qualities of the subjects depicted. Most evident in the women in varying profusion and intensity, the color red highlights the garments at the cuffs and necks, in the flowers they wear on their hats, and on their lips. Although more subtle, accents of red are present on the men as blushes to their face or on their lips. The most overtly amorous male in the right to the back wears a shirt and hat both striped with red. The most overtly sexual female seated, at the table in the left foreground has red tracing her neck and an explosion of red in the flower on her hat. Finally the red striped awning with its tong like flaps covers the entire flirtatious scene. E. Texture: Renoir employs variations in color, shadowing, and white highlights to render the textural appearance of the straw hat worn by the man seated at the table in the right foreground. F. Pattern: The diffused lines of blue/green create a layered pattern in the marsh grasses outside the porch rendering the effect of overlapping leaves with combined density. G. Time and Motion: The motion in this painting is imparted by the marsh grasses and awning gently swaying in the breeze. The aspect of time slowly passing is expressed through the sailboats gliding along the river and in the leisurely poses of the subjects along the railing. 2. At the end of this set of paragraphs identify any art elements you think is not found or used in the art objects composition.

Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?

Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? There is a general and growing concern about Terrorism and the fear it is spreading all over the world. Fighting it is one of nowadays main priorities and the most effective ways of doing it are being discussed by scholars, governments and people in general. The concept of terrorism has evolved throughout the years and no consensual definition has been reached. There are however certain features that clearly characterizes these unexpected and, many times, devastating events. Yet also the way terrorists are operating and the tools theyre using has been changing, which makes even more difficult to find the better way to stop them. When the huge and powerful democratic country USA became the target of one of the major attacks from all times, then many things were questioned and the sense that no one and no country were safe got easily spread among public opinion. Are Democracies more vulnerable to Terrorism? Is this type of regime the best one to stop the violence? Is Terrorism, or the measures to annihilate it, limiting the rights and liberties that democracy is meant to provide? These are intriguing questions. In this Essay, I will firstly explain what I mean by terrorism and democracy, before analysing the existence of a link between both. Then I will present arguments for and against the idea that democratizing the countries where terrorism comes from might be the solution to this fear spreading phenomenon. I will then show that probably it is not the case and that ending terrorism might involve much deeper measures than a simple change of political system. Finally, and to understand whether or not Terrorism is weakening democracies and its main guarantees, I will show recent examples that might allow us to understand it better. Throughout the paper I will also find in theories and great authors, like Hobbes and Schmitter, the necessary help to better understand these two complex yet challenging and current concepts. Defining democracy and terrorism Democracy can be defined as the political system where political authority belongs to people. The word comes from the Greek, where demos means people and kratos means authority. There are however different types of democracy and in this essay whenever I refer to democracy, I mean liberal democracy. This later concept adds to the general concept of representative democracy (in which people through elections decide their representatives) the fact (among others, but this is probably the most distinguishable) that there is the protection of liberties and rights through a constitution. Among those rights and freedoms there are the freedom of speech and religion, equality before law and others. Confusion between democracy and liberal democracy happens quite often because democracy is the word that resonates in peoples minds and springs from their lips as they struggle for freedom and a better way of life  [1]  . However what they look for in fact is a political system that combines dem ocracy on one hand with freedom, the rule of law, and good governance on the other hand in other words, liberal democracy.  [2]   Although terrorism is a difficult concept to define there are some common features among terrorist attacks that can be stressed: they involve an ideological component, use violence or at least a threat of violence, are generally conducted by an organized group (or at least by a group constituted by a strong leader and faithful followers), and aim, usually, civilians rather than belligerent groups. The main idea is to spread the fear in a generalized way and thats why their targets are common citizens that usually dont even know their purposes but sense fear and the unexpectedness of their acts more profoundly. According to Willem Schinkel  [3]  terrorism works bottom up, that means, that civilians are used as a mean to achieve their real audience (usually states, as symbols of a certain ideology or states themselves in cases of independence fights, like ETA in Spain). Depending on the nationality of those (people and institutions) involved in the attacks, we can differentiate two types of terrorism: transnational terrorism and domestic terrorism. In the former the incident takes place in one country [and] involves perpetrators, victims, institutions, governments, or citizens of another country, in the latter it involves perpetrators, victims, and an audience of the country in which the incident occurs  [4]  . For the purpose of my research I will mainly focus on transnational terrorism. Since within transnational terrorism there are different types, I will mainly focus my analysis on the one played by radical Islamist movements, like Al-Qaeda, for example. As it has already been said, the concept of terrorism has evolved through times. Namely the way fear and terror are being perpetrated is getting more sophisticated. The most common attacks are characterized by bombings, kidnapping and hijacking but the fear of weapons of mass destruction being used turns the finding of solutions even more urgent. Yet, what is frighteningly challenging in this new wave of terrorism is that fear is in the majority of cases unilateral (considering, like it was said before, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda). We can say that in this case fear wont probably be enough to end war, as Hobbes would say. According to this author, the society is composed by selfish beings and so the normal state is a state of war, but the war itself can be prevented because what also characterizes human beings is that they fear things, they fear death for example. However, in the case of terrorism (or in the case of one of the most common forms of it), its actors are not driven by fear, they are trained to face death if necessary and for the sake of what they believe to be a higher purpose.  [5]   Will Democracy be able to stop Terrorism? Mostly after 9/11 attacks in USA, that killed around three thousand people in both New Yorks World Trade Center and Pentagon, the majority of President Bushs speeches regarding the fight against terrorism involved the idea that only through the democratization of the countries generators of terrorism would that fight be successful. In February 2003, for example, in the American Enterprise Institute, Bush stated that The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. There is then a great discussion regarding the capability of liberal democracies to end the grievances that feed terrorists actions. Assuming that the majority of terrorist attacks perpetrators come from the Middle East, where theres an undeniable lack of democratic principles, can then a link be made between these two phenomena? Would the democratization of these countries result in less terrorist events? Natan Sharansky in his book The Case of Democracy: The Power of freedom to overcome tyranny and terror defends that it would. He considers that the lack of democracy in these countries favours the flourishment of angry and frustrated minds and urges violence in order to achieve ones goals. He believes that democracy would bring peace to those nations and goes even further by saying that it is Wests responsibility to help the democratization process. According to Sharansky, and supporting Bushs intentions, the west and democratic world should make efforts towards the implementation of a democratic political system where it was never experienced and this would be the most effective way of ending this terrorism era.  [6]   Like Sharansky also Quan Li  [7]  defends that democracy would diminish frustrations and conflict by expanding political opportunities through elections and according to Rudolph Rummel living in a liberal democratic country would per se reduce conflict between people, because the interaction between people in a context of freedom is favourable to everyone. So, would a higher political participation contribute to the reduction of terrorist incidents? According to Michael Freeman  [8]  the mechanisms that drive transnational terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda are four: military, cultural, economic and political. The organized terrorist attacks are then the result of a sense of threat towards Islamic lands (military), a sense of threat towards Islamic culture and identity (cultural), a sense of frustration towards modernization and globalization, which the western world represent and that in the Middle East failed to improve the economy (economic) and a sense of inability to make themselves heard and to reach their demands (political). Considering these four mechanisms, democracy apparently seems to be able to have positive results but most likely wouldnt be enough to stop terrorism. I agree with Gregory Gause  [9]  when he argues that this political system would provide the possibility of a political participation from these groups but there is no guarantee that they would have enough support for their political agenda. And in that case, the question is whether they would accept peoples choice or would that situation make them even more frustrated and incite them to return to their previous modus operandi and attack their democracy and other nations too in order to get the accomplishment of their goals. Besides this uncertainty regarding terrorists reaction before unsuccessful elections, there is also the ideological component of their aims. And that is something that cannot be ignored. It is not just a question of being heard and achieving political representation, I would even risk saying that it is their mi nor priority. There is a rooted hatred towards what the western culture represents. Religious issues and fundamentalism are definitely on the basis of part of that hatred and that is something that should be smoothen namely by education. Islamism is far from the extremist ideas that these organizations stand for and children and young people should learn within an understanding and tolerant environment. Living in a free country, where rights and liberties are assured might not be enough if the mentality remains attached to the idea that Islamism is being threatened by countries like the USA and that that justifies the so called jihad. A crucial step to be taken is also the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Osama Bin Laden assumed that this conflict was one of the main reasons for attacking the USA in 2001. This is a very sensitive question which generates great part of the sense of threat towards Islamic lands. It is then important to establish a peaceful relationship between Israel and Palestine so that a calmer Middle East can be achieved. Besides everything said before, the theories that see democracy as the solution for terrorism do not consider an undeniable reality: there are democracies that still have terrorist groups IRA in Ireland and ETA in Spain are two of the most resounding examples. Even though these are domestic terrorism organizations, they are examples of how it is possible that terrorist groups (with different purposes but with similar ways of terrorizing people) can emerge within a democratic system. Are Democracies becoming more fragile as a result of Terrorism? There is a strong discussion regarding the vulnerability of democracies before terrorism. The arguments in favour of a higher vulnerability of democracies when compared to other political systems are mainly two. First, some authors for example Paul Wilkinson  [10]  defend that the particular features of a liberal democratic nation such as free press, freedom of political organization and of movement facilitate the organization of terrorist attacks. Also Bianchi and Keller stated that the irony is that their [democracies] distinguishing traits and foundational tenets in many ways constitute fertile ground for international terrorism.  [11]  Namely the free speech right might be able to raise some violent reactions from the outside, when for example, like in Denmark, cartoons with Mohammed wearing a turban with a shape of a bomb (among other cartoons with the prophet) were drawn. This happened in 2005 and for several weeks not only the cartoonist responsible for the drawings wa s target of direct death threats and attempts but also Danish embassies throughout the world (namely the Muslim world) were burned. What started to be the result of a mans creativity and freedom of drawing whatever he wanted to (or the result of any other motivations, which Im not discussing here) turned out to be one of the biggest international crisis for Denmark after II World War, as Danishs Prime Minister at the time stated. The second argument regarding the higher vulnerability of democracies is defended by some authors who consider that it is not the result of democracies particular features (because in that case they would be as vulnerable to domestic terrorism as to transnational terrorism and they defend it is not the case) but the result of how they position themselves in the world, i.e., the result of their foreign policies. Democracies tend to engage themselves in foreign issues and get involved in conflicts, to which they believe they can give a positive contribute. Th is involvement might create certain resentments  [12]  . As B. Savun and B. Phillips stated The more frequently a state engages in conflict with other states, the more likely that it will create resentment and hostility abroad. Although this resentment may be most pronounced among the people who are directly affected by such hostile actions, it is likely that such hostile actions result in a broader resentment and negativity toward the participants of such crises.  [13]   Whether it is because of one type of argument or the other the fact is that many democracies have been throughout the years target of terrorist attacks. And this brings me to another question: At what extent are these attacks and the counterterrorism measures that they induce to be taken, making democracies weaker and making them lose some of their most important features, by obliging governments to restrict certain civil and political rights? This makes us rethink about governments priorities: security versus liberty. Should the state provide security, as being the most important good, like Hobbes would suggest, or should it be more worried with guaranteeing liberty for its citizens, above anything else, like Locke defended? My intention is not to prioritize between these two values but understand if there really is a trade off between both, i.e., if fighting against terrorism is in fact limiting some liberties. Some authors have tested that and reached some conclusions (like for example Weinberg and Eubank  [14]  ). First I would like to say that in this particular study of Eubank and Weinberg, democracy was measured by using Polity IV scales, civil liberties and political rights were measured according to Freedom House and Terrorism (please note that Im always referring to International Terrorism) was measured using the number of attacks occurred per year between 1968 and 2005. They included 24 countries in this test from West European countries to Latin America and South Asia. The results indicated a poor relationship between terrorism and civil liberties and political rights, indicating that probably there is no trade-off after all. These results were then against the authors first perception (that political rights and civil liberties have been suffering a reduction as a result of the spread of terrorism). In my opinion, however, (and even though the regressions might not be statisti cally significant in proving that there is an inverted relationship between terrorism and political and civil rights) a more empirical analysis would suggest that it can really exist and might even embody a trend to getting worse in next years. Statistics may not cover certain modifications and policies, which after a more careful analysis might be considered as reducing certain liberties, for example, in terms of privacy rights. For the sake of a safer country for example in the United States and since 9/11 attacks, several measures have been taken with controversial effects in ones privacy: wiretaps in private telephones, databases of phone calls made in American soil, inspections with warrant in suspicious packages received by Post. More recently, a failed attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines airplane in its flight from Amsterdam to Detroit stressed the major preoccupation regarding the possibility of terrorists hiding explosive engines in their bodies and being able to carry them to the airplane. This incident brought to the discussion a new technology that is being developed, consisting in a full-body scanner. This scanner is able to see through clothes and do the same thing to a human body like the x-ray engine doe s to the luggage. Some say this is a clear invasion of privacy but theres a quite majority (among public opinion and states responsibles) believing that this is a necessary evil, regarding how terrorism is evolving and how, besides all the level of protection, a terrorist was still able to bring explosives to the airplane. Counterterrorism policies will evolve accordingly to terrorism threats. And this is the main reason why I said that not only terrorism is jeopardizing certain liberties and rights but also it will keep doing it even more, as terrorist methodologies keep improving and surprising police authorities. Besides privacy rights issues, terrorism is also contributing to the rise of prejudice demonstrations around the world. One may often understand this everyday, mainly against people coming from Middle East. Since some of the more recent and major terrorist attacks (USA in September 2001, Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005) were perpetrated by Muslims or Muslims descendents, a climate of anti-muslim and anti-arab feelings was installed. These feelings are reflected in some common citizens reactions and attitudes towards Muslims but also in a wider attention from authorities in relation to them. This is a clear restriction to ones right of being equally treated. Conclusion Coincidently or not both terrorism and democracy have become more frequent in the last decades. Terrorism has been assuming new shapes, hitting apparently stronger targets and spreading fear throughout the world, at a growing rhythm. In a similar rhythm have been countries all over the world turning their political systems into democratic ones. My goal in this Essay was to analyse the link between democracy and terrorism from two different perspectives. First, I tried to understand whether the implementation of a democratic regime in the countries where terrorism is mainly generated would stop terrorism. I concluded that it could help but it surely wouldnt be enough. I exposed the four mechanisms that stimulate terrorism and theyre not only related to political reasons of lack of participation and week democratic principles, they have also a deep ideological, cultural and religious component that turn it even more difficult to understand and, as consequence, to contain terrorism. I suggested that higher efforts could be put on education in what concerns to religious and cultural tolerance. Moreover, I consider, as well as different heads of state, that in fact it is important that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is solved, since this conflict is, most probably, the highest responsible for the instability in the Middle East. Second, I analysed if democracies are getting weaker as a result of terrorism or more specifically as a result of counterterrorism policies. Said by other words, what I wanted to understand was whether certain rights and liberties were being limited or not by the terrorism environment that characterizes modern times. I presented one study, whose results do not prove the existence of a trade off between rights and liberties and terrorism. However, even though statistics do not corroborate my argument, and this I believe is a consequence of the fact that indicators do not catch every single law modification, I substantiated it through practical examples, where the reduction of privacy rights, for example, are quite visible. At the end of this essay I realized how difficult it is to define a concept so broad and always in constant evolution like terrorism. Making a link between this difficult concept and the political system that in last decades has been conquering more and more countries throughout the world is very challenging. I am sure that the current era of insecurity that were living nowadays together with the technological development speed will certainly add many chapters to this discussion in a near future.

Film Analysis of Malicks Badlands (1973) Essays -- Cinematography Fi

The reclusive film director Terrence Malick has to date, only directed a small number of films. His twenty year hiatus between directing Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), may provide the explanation for such a sparse back catalogue. Malick’s refusal to talk with the media, has led to hearsay, as to how he occupied his time during the hiatus. Malick’s directing debut Badlands (1973) is a collection of concepts, all carefully moulded together to create one iconic piece of film. This process draws in and also alienates the audience. Malick’s style is positively noted by critics to be influenced by European philosophy. This is clearly due to Malick’s study of philosophy at Harvard and Magdalen College Oxford. There is no given explanation to the mindless violence featured within the film, mainly due to the films resistance to the straight forward approach. The familiar and the unknown are carefully merged together. The only way of gaining an understanding into the hidden meanings within Badlands is by breaking down the film, by looking at the characters, the use of sound, the visual setting and the films genre. The illusionary effect of Malick’s style means that all is not as it seems. The films protagonists Kit Caruthers (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) are loosely based on the real life adolescent criminals Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. Starkweather and Fugate become infamous after their murder spree through Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1950’s, however the story of two young fugitives in love is not one that is unfamiliar with audiences; the most notable is Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The character of Kit also bears a resemblance to Jim Stark, James Dean’s character i... ...ames Dean. Available at: http://panicon4july.blogspot.com/2010/01/doing-his-best-james-dean-terrence.html (Accessed 19/12/2010) Film reference: Badlands. Available at http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Aw-Be/Badlands.html (Accessed 19/12/2010) Films Absence of Malick (2003) Dir. David Gregory [DVD]. USA: Warner Home Video. Badlands (1973) Dir. Terrence Malick [DVD]. California: Warner Home Video. Books Elizabeth Weis, John Belton (1985) Theory and Practice Film Sound, New York: Columbia University Press, pp 346. Hannah Patterson (2007) The cinema of Terrence Malick: poetic visions of America, London: Wallflower Press, pp 6. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (2005) Style and meaning : studies in the detailed analysis of film. Engalnd: Manchester University Press, pp 42-52. Lloyd Michaels (2009) Terrence Malick, New York: University of Illinois Press.

What Knowledge Should be Conveyed in Our Public Schools? :: Teaching Education

What Knowledge Should be Conveyed in Our Public Schools? Education has always been an indispensable part of our lives. Through out the centuries there was a problem in specifying who can attend to school, for example women were not allowed to do it, but luckily this obstacle has already been overcome, and this matter is beyond dispute. However, there is another dilemma, one that has not been solved yet. The question is what knowledge should be conveyed in the process of teaching – should schools communicate only erudite theory, or should they also have other aspirations? Naturally, there are different points of view on this case. The first cause to approve the fact that academies ought to have additional aims in tutoring is that they play an important part in bringing young generations up. It is said that parents are those who are to raise their children, but indisputably school is the place where youth spend most of their time. Hence, it is a good place for passing on the information that will help juvenility live their future lives. Consider the example of having sexual education at school, a dilemma which is at issue nowadays. The subject is not easily brought up and this results in the fact that young people leaving school know more about the reproduction of protozoa than about sexual and psychological aspects of human’s lives. This may cause tremendous problems. But the case of having sexual education at school is not the only matter. The truth is that the strict academic knowledge itself is usually useless in real life, and so it may not be worth paying attention to it. Let us be honest – who needs to know when two trains setting off from two different cities and moving with a different speed will meet? People should be better thought to fill in the gaps on a cheque or thousands of other blanks instead of learning all those worthless things. Nevertheless, there are also reasons for concentrating only on academic facts in schooling. First of all, schools were created exactly for that purpose. The world is spinning faster and faster, and people should concentrate on expanding their wisdom in order to survive in this reality. Our world needs more and more specialists in different domains and, frankly, people have to be the best to achieve anything, and gaining knowledge in maths, physics and other subjects helps young people make a success.

Ghost Story of Split Rock Road :: Urban Legends Ghost Stories

Split Rock Road This tale was told by a twenty-year-old Caucasian male from Boonton, New Jersey, who was very excited to share his paranormal experiences. According to the narrator, Split Rock Road runs through a nice residential neighborhood. However, at one point the pavement stops and turns to gravel. At this point, there are no lights on the road, which is surrounded by woods. As you continue down the road, you come to a bridge on top of a dam and an abandoned guard tower. Legend has it that if you turn off your headlights and stop the car while on the bridge, everyone in the car dies. The narrator attempted this once with his friends late at night. He managed to turn off the headlights and stop the car, but all of his friends started screaming and begging him to go back, so he left very quickly. He said that it was one of the scariest experiences of his life. Additionally, there is rumored to be a ghost that wanders on Split Rock Road, a young girl in a white sundress. However, the narrator ha d never personally seen this ghost. Split Rock Road is a notoriously creepy place in New Jersey, with references on both the â€Å"Weird New Jersey† website and the â€Å"Lost Destinations† website. While neither site directly states that if you turn off your headlights and stop the car that you will die, the â€Å"Lost Destinations† site mentions the urban legend that if you try to drive across the bridge at night, gangs will block the exits on either side and trap you in. Additionally, while there is no specific mention of a girl in a white sundress, there are rumors that the bridge is haunted by drowning victims, mostly teenagers who get sucked into the underwater drain and smash into the concrete â€Å"waterfall† on the other side. Both sites also mention practices of the occult allegedly performed on Split Rock Road; the â€Å"Lost Destinations† site describes piles of bones and structures shaped like furnaces that are supposedly haunted by ghosts late at night. Similar furnaces can be found on Clinton road, another creepy spot in New Jersey. The primary scary feature of the story is the concept that doing something as innocent as stopping a car can cause death. Death is something that most people fear, or wish not to encounter until they feel that they have lived their lives to the fullest.

Abigail in Act One Essay

Act One. Discuss in detail how you would direct either Reverend Parris or Abigail in Act One. Refer to voice, movement, gesture and facial expression in your essay; explore the relationship between your chosen character and the others on stage, commenting on their symbolic representation within the play. Arthur Miller was born in New York in 1915 and brought up in the Brooklin area. He won an award for his first play called ‘the grass still grows. ‘ His first real success was with a play called ‘All my sons’ then went on to write a play called ‘Death of a Salesman, which was also a big success. Miller later wrote ‘The Crucible’ in 1953, which was a mixed success. In 1997, He wrote the screenplay of ‘the crucible,’ which starred Daniel Day Lewis, and Winona Rider. McCarthyism had the power to investigate any person or movement who threatened the safety of America. The activities of this committee were linked in Miller’s mind with witchcraft trials, which had taken place two hundred years before. This inspired him to write ‘the crucible’ The people of Salem believed in witchcraft and the devil and believed that the Bible had told them that witches must be hanged. Betty Parris, the daughter of the minister, started to act like a child possessed. In the seventeenth-century the only explanation was that they were possessed by the devil. Salem is a new and very small community, very close-knit and very protective against anything unusual or strange happenings. For many years, Salem village tried to gain independence from Salem town. Salem village did not have it’s own church and minister until 1674. Salem village selected Reverend Parris as their new minister. Parris was a strict puritan, who set lots of rules, including no dancing. I have chosen to direct Abigail Williams in this scene. When Abigail first enters this scene, the first words spoken to her are ‘Oh? Let her come, let her come. ‘ Which are said by Parris. Abigail would lean out the door in a laid-back manor, then would tell Susanna, a nervous, hurried girl who was sent by doctor Griggs, and is a bit younger than Abigail, to come in. She should say this in quite a loud voice to show that she is confident, and telling Susanna what to do, as Abigail is older then her so will look down on her. She would also have here hand reaching out to Susanna, as another gesture to tell her to ‘come in’ When Susanna turns to go, Abigail eagerly tells her to ‘speak nothin’ of it in the village’ Her face expression would be a slightly worried look because she doesn’t want to be accused for making Betty ill, or having anything to witchcraft or the devil.

Middle Woodland

The communities in the Middle Woodland Period possess creative beginnings, essential factors of which are native people, a history of domination and existing and widened transferring of the population from various places and societies. This has led in one of the most varied and differentiated communities in the globe, with almost a thousand ethnic societies (Applegate, 2005). Every one of these ethnic communities has its own definitive traits and characteristics and as a consequence of history, territorial variances and inner and outer migration of people, including differences associated to essential elements such as status, sex and territorial setting. The concept of settlement and subsistence based on the Middle Woodland Period includes diversity, involving the emergence of a powerful existence of aborigines and profiles. This illustrates meaningful topics for the Middle Woodland Period communities: the implications of being a member of a community; the interaction between local and individual profiles; establishing and employing in both the connecting and dividing elements in a community with various ethnicities; and the type and scenario of an incoming leadership and governance system (Fortier, 2001). Under the Middle Woodland Period, community is connected to human ecology with regard to the organizations, mechanisms for survival, and the way of thinking of the people, motives and quality of life. It tops the complicated box of concepts which portrays daily happenings in life and attitudes–the comprehensions and assumptions which leads the people’s initiatives and communications with other members of the community. The Swift Creek community existed during the periods of 1-400 CE, while the Santa Rosa society in Western Florida existed during the periods from 150-500 CE. The start of the Middle Woodland indicated a change of settlement to the Interior. As the Middle Woodland era went on, domestic and foreign exchange of exotic products tremendously improved to the point where a trade mechanism became existent on the Chesapeake Bay. Amongst the Southern and northern parts of the Chesapeake Bay, burial areas of significant people were very evident and possessed various presents, most of which were not recognizable to the people (Ritzenthaler, 1991). The most evident archaeological site in the place of burial sites during this period was in the Chesapeake Bay, and is now pertained to as the Hopewell culture. Due to the likeness of works and burial gifts, experts predict a traditional norm of religious beliefs and customs and cultural communication that was present throughout the entire territory (also pertained to as a Hopewell Communication Sphere). However, this could also be seen as the consequence of the fair exchange of goods and/or responsibilities between local families that managed particular regions. Access to food or other basic needs external to a family's region would be done through special agreements with other people. Family leaders would then be laid to rest along with presents obtained from their business partners to represent the interactions they had formed. Under this situation, permanent communities would obviously be established, leading to improved agricultural gains and an increase in the density of people as well (Wittry, 1994). Although majority of the Middle Woodland customs and beliefs are pertained to as â€Å"Hopewellian,† and in spite of the shared ceremonial customs and beliefs, independent beliefs and customs have been established during the Middle Woodland era. These involve the Swift Creek and the Copena beliefs and customs. References Applegate, D, 2005. Woodland Period Systematics in the Middle Ohio Valley.   University Alabama Press Fortier, A, 2001. The Dash Reeves Site: A Middle Woodland Village and Lithic Production Center in the American Bottom.   Illinois Transportation Ritzenthaler, R, 1991. The Woodland Indians of the Western Great Lakes. Waveland Press Wittry, W, 1994. The Holdener Site: Late Woodland, Emergent Mississippian, and Mississippian Occupations in the American Bottom Uplands (11-S-685). Illinois Transportation

Cross Language Translation in a Web-based Environment Essay

One of the major problems with cross-language translations involving those that are rarely used together (i. e. Finish Lithuanian) is that there are no dictionaries available or it is extremely difficult to find one. The main problem is that there are not enough people to create a market and no one would invest in creation of such kind of dictionaries. English-based dictionaries, however, is of abundance. This project tackled the above cited problem in Cross Language Translation using English as its base dictionary. Artificial intelligence through Neural Networks was used as it appeared well-suited to problems of this nature. For this reason, artificial intelligence through neural networks was investigated as a potential tool to improve translation accuracy but future implementation was left as a possibility. WordNet ® was also investigated as source of defining English words and possible tool to achieve greater accuracy in cross-language translations. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have contributed in any way, shape or form to the completion of this project report, those at Zodynai. org and the Anglia Ruskin University for their advice and support. Thanks to my friends and family who (once again) tolerated my lack of time and sometimes grumpy demeanour. More thanks to friends at Anglia Ruskin University for their ideas and criticism. Your support (directly and indirectly) is greatly appreciated. T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S ABSTRACT Acknowledgements TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION OBJECTIVES METHODOLOGIES DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION CONCLUSION AND EVALUATION BIBILIOGRAPHY APPENDICES A Project Specification B User/Software Installation Guide A C Software Installation Guide B D Poster and Visual Presentations E Source Code F Abbreviations and Acronyms INTRODUCTION The multilingual world and the barriers it entails. A large number of people across the world converse in English thus it serves as the primary lingua franca for developments in the research world. Most publications and journals are published in such language. This leaves publications in other languages inaccessible and apparently, information in English is withheld from those millions who do not speak English (Diekema 2003) Recent trends promote the construction of a far-reaching complex infrastructure for transporting information across boundaries. Apparently, language shares a vital portion in the hindrances presented by National borders. Whilst the fact is inevitable that English remains the most spoken language in the whole world and though, it is true that the spread of ‘World English’ can promote cooperation and equity, longstanding linguistic competition threatens to be even more divisive in a globalizing world. (Maurais et al n. d. ) A lot is currently going on to overcome these linguistic barriers. The most efficient approach to overcoming such is with cross-language translation and in this literature it will well be mostly in the web-based-online-dictionary aspect of such approach. English has always been the main focus of information retrieval, well, that is by tradition. Many of them retrieval algorithms and heuristics stem from English speaking countries and thus are based on the said language. Over the years, these retrieval methods have been adopted by other language communities, creating a wide selection of language-specific monolingual retrieval systems. However, to ensure complete information exchange, information retrieval systems need to be multilingual or cross-lingual. (Diekema 2003) There are a lot of ways to pin down the hindrance of being in this multi-lingual world, the barrier of being in a world divided by being in English- or Non-English-speaking territories. And, as presented, the most researched approach is through Cross-Language translation. OBJECTIVES Main problem that we are facing when translating with English based dictionary is connecting various language data bases. One of solutions for this program is to create a base dictionary (as seen in Figure 1). Figure 1 Other major problem is that performing translation a lot of noise is created. As seen in Figure 2. Figure 2 We can examine this in greater detail in Figure 3. Word Autobusas is translated from Lithuanian language to Russian based on English language. Two different possible translations occur (bus, omnibus) when translating Lithuanian -> English. First word â€Å"bus† translated from English to Russian has three meanings â€Å"Ð °Ã ²Ã'‚Ð ¾Ã ±Ã'Æ'Ã' Ã¢â‚¬  †Ã ¾Ã ¼Ã ½Ã ¸Ã ±Ã'Æ'Ã' Ã¢â‚¬  †Ã'ˆÐ ¸Ã ½Ã °Ã¢â‚¬  word translated. As first few are synonyms third one has totally different value and meant â€Å"Topology bus†. As you can see on reverse translations †Ã'ˆÐ ¸Ã ½Ã °Ã¢â‚¬  will going to give you four different meanings translated in Lithuanian language. Figure 3 We are going to investigate WordNet and Neural networks approach for possible solution of this problem. METHODOLOGIES Cross-Language Information Retrieval, its promise. Information retrieval entails an individual querying about something of interest to him. Inevitably, since we are life forms known to be ever inquisitive, we do Information Retrieval in every aspect of our living. This event so commonly happens in a lot of situation and may be best displayed in a Library when a student picks his book of choice. Formally, let us define Information Retrieval (IR) as the process in which users with information need query a collection of documents to find those documents that satisfy his need. (Diekema 2003) In the electronic realm, the user queries by typing in related words, the system then processes these keywords to create a representation understandable by the system. In the course of the procedure, the system usually strips off non-bearing fragments of the query keywords such as articles like determiners, prepositions, and pronouns. The document collection undergoes the same process resulting to a list of document representations or a catalogue. To find documents that are similar to the query, the ‘stripped off’ query representation is then matched against the catalogue. When a certain degree of similarity between the catalogue and the ‘stripped off’ query has been established, the documents with the uppermost similarity scores (depending on the settings, say top 10) are shown to the user as results. This occurs typically during browsing through the internet and Google. comTM best displays this example. A development of IR is CLIR – the Cross-Language Information Retrieval, which, as the name implies, is information retrieval in a multi-linguistic environment. Consequently, CLIR techniques simplify searching by multilingual users and allow monolingual searchers to judge relevance based on machine translated results and/or to allocate expensive translation resources to the most promising foreign language documents. (Diekema 2003) Simple IR systems only consist of a Query, an Input Cleanser, a Matcher, the Document database and the Output, in logical order. The addition of Language Translators would make this system a Cross-Language Information Retrieval system. Of course the Document database would now contain multi-lingual entries as well and the output is to be presented in the way the query has been placed in the input. Figure 4 would show the Cross-Language Information Retrieval system in schematics. The method Cross-language Retrieval Systems promises users to state their queries in their native language and retrieve documents in all the languages supported by the system. (Diekema 2003) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) results to simulation of intellectual practice such as comprehension, rationalization and learning symbolic information in context. In AI, the automation or programming of all aspects of human cognition is considered from its foundations in cognitive science through approaches to symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, natural language processing, computer vision, and evolutionary or adaptive systems. (Neumann n. d. ) AI considered being an extremely intricate domain of problems which during preliminary stages in the problem-solving phase of this nature, the problem itself may be viewed poorly. A precise picture of the problem can only be seen upon interactive and incremental refinement of course, after you have taken the initial attempt to solve the mystery. AI always comes hand in hand with machine logistics. How else could mind act appropriately but with the body. In this case, a machine takes the part of the body. In a bit, this literature will be tackling about AI implemented through Neural Network. The author deems it necessary though to tackle Machine learning and thus the succeeding paragraphs. Machine Learning is primarily concerned with designing and developing algorithms and procedures that allow machines to â€Å"learn† – either inductive or deductive, which, in general, is its two types. At this point, we will be referring to machines as computers since in the world nowadays, the latter are the most widely used for control. Hence, we now hone our definition of Machine Learning as the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. (Dietterich n. d. ) Machine learning techniques are grouped into different categories basing on the expected outcome. Common types include Supervised, Unsupervised, Semi-supervised or Reinforcement learning. There is also the Transduction method and the ‘Learning to learn’ scheme. A section of theoretical computer science, Computational Learning Theory is the investigation on the computation of algorithms of Machine Learning including its efficiency. Researches on Machine Learning focuses mainly on the automatic extraction of information data, through computational and statistical methods. It is very much correlated not only to theoretical computer science as well as data mining and statistics. Supervised learning is the simplest learning task. It is an algorithm to which it is ruled by a function that automatically plots inputs to expected outputs. The task of supervised learning is to construct a classifier given a set of classified training examples (Dietterich n. d. ). The main challenge for supervised learning is that of generalization that a machine is expected in approximating the conduct that a function will exhibit which maps out a connection towards a number of classes through comparison of IO samples of the said function. When many plot-vector pairs are interrelated, a decision tree is derived which aids into viewing how the machine behaves with the function it currently holds. One advantage of decision trees is that, if they are not too large, they can be interpreted by humans. This can be useful both for gaining insight into the data and also for validating the reasonableness of the learned tree (Dietterich n. d. ). In unsupervised learning, manual matching of inputs is not utilized. Though, it is most often distinguished as supervised learning and it is one with an unknown output. This makes it very hard to decide what counts as success and suggests that the central problem is to find a suitable objective function that can replace the goal of agreeing with the teacher (Hinton & Sejnowski 1999). Simple classic examples of unsupervised learning include clustering and dimensionality reduction. (Ghahramani 2004) Semi-supervised learning entails learning situations where is an ample number of labelled data as compared to the unlabelled data. These are very natural situations, especially in domains where collecting data can be cheap (i. e. the internet) but labelling can be very expensive/time consuming. Many of the approaches to this problem attempt to infer a manifold, graph structure, or tree-structure from the unlabelled data and use spread in this structure to determine how labels will generalize to new unlabelled points. (Ghahramani 2004) Transduction is comparable to supervised learning in predicting new results with training inputs and outputs, as well as, test inputs – accessible during teaching, as basis, instead of behaving in accordance to some function. All these various types of Machine-Learning techniques can be used to fully implement Artificial Intelligence for a robust Cross-Language translation. One thing though, this literature is yet to discuss the planned process of machine learning this research shall employ, and that is by Neural Networks. There is yet to be a precise definition as to what Artificial Neural Network is, though many researchers would agree that it concerns a network of austere processing elements – otherwise known as the neurons, which presents complex behaviour established by the relationship amongst processing and parametrical elements. The main inspiration that lead to the development of this technique was from the investigation of, no lesser than, our Central Nervous System and the neurons (including their axons, dendrites and synapses) which make up its most important information processing elements. A neural network model would show us that simple nodes are connected forming a network of nodes — thus, its coining as â€Å"neural network. † A Neural Network functions in 2 different manners – learning and testing. The former would literally mean, the system learns the ways it is supposed to behave while the latter is when rigorous repetition of training would eventually result to a stable system, defined by its giving of constant satisfactory outputs. Most â€Å"abstract reasoning† of an Artificial Neural Networks are being implemented through three learning types – supervised, unsupervised and the reinforced learning, as has been introduced in the preceding paragraphs. Supervised learning entails a functional relationship between the input and the output. The system has to learn every possible IO pair that can be thought of. In case, there is a miss, all that has to be done is to input the said pair into the memory of the system hence when it resurfaces, the system knows how the handle it. Hence, basically, the goal is to ‘teach’ the network to identify the given input with the desired output. (Sordo 2002) This is usually best achieved when function f has already been derived to represent the behaviour of the Neural Network system. For unsupervised learning, we feed an input and a function to the system and record what behaviour the system outputs with such input and function. To begin with the learning process, there are no IO-pairs as opposed to supervised learning. Ultimately, the main goal of achieving the stable state will be attained through rigorous repetition of test with different sets of inputs. This type of systems – imploring unsupervised learning as its method of learning, are best displayed in statistical modelling, and the likes. Reinforcement learning stems its roots from the related psychological theory that has been conceived even before AI has been. Dynamically, in this type of learning, the machine interacts with its environment by producing actions a1, a2, †¦ These actions affect the state of the environment, which in turn results in the machine receiving some scalar rewards (or punishments) r1, r2, †¦ The goal of the machine is to learn to act in a way that maximizes the future rewards it receives (or minimises the punishments) over its lifetime. Reinforcement learning is closely related to the fields of decision theory (in statistics and management science), and control theory (in engineering). The fundamental problems studied in these fields are often formally equivalent, and the solutions are the same, although different aspects of problem and solution are usually emphasised. (Ghahramani 2004) Advantages of investing a system through Neural Networks. Neural networks with always have the outstanding characteristic of deriving intelligence from the usually complicated and, oftentimes, fuzzy data stored in the neurons. These systems, oftentimes, offer to be easy utilities to deduce patterns and perceive trends that are difficult to be noticed by either human observation or by our current computer intelligence. A trained neural network is regarded as an â€Å"expert† in the category of information it has been given to analyze. This expert can then be used to provide projections given new situations of interest and answer â€Å"what if† questions. (Chung et al 2007) It is used for adaptive learning on how to handle tasks based on the input provided for training or preliminary experience. It is a self-organizational tool that hones its own picture of the data it receives in as early as learning time. Neural networks another feature is that it is a real-time operation system where all calculation may be performed in parallel. Fault Tolerance via Redundant Information Coding is another aspect of the neural system where partial destruction of a network leads to the corresponding degradation of performance. However, some network capabilities may be retained even with major network damage. The platform to a successful implementation. Several environments can be used in totally implementing a Cross-Language Translator through with the various and fast developments in computer technology since its introduction. In the succeeding paragraphs we will be tackling some of those that has come the author’s A-list. Microsoft . NET Framework. This framework form part of Microsoft Windows operating systems, containing a vast number of pre-coded resolutions to general program requirements, and governing the performance of programs written particularly for the framework. This framework is a vital Microsoft contribution and is projected on being utilized by most applications created and to be created for Windows platform. Pre-coded solutions outlining the framework’s Base Class Library (third layer from Operating System in the . NET Framework) encompass a wide range of software requirements in areas including: cross language translation, user interface, database connectivity, cryptography, data access, web application growth, network communications, and numeric algorithms. This layer contains classes, value types, and interfaces that you will use often in your development process. Most notably within the . NET Framework Base Classes is ADO. NET, which provides access to and management of data. Supervising the software’s runtime requirements, this software is written for the . NET Framework implemented in an environment. This runtime environment, which is also a part of the . NET Framework, is known as the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides the appearance of an application virtual machine, so that programmers need not consider the capabilities of the particular CPU that will implement the program. The CLR also provides other significant services such as security mechanisms, memory management, and exception handling. The class library and the CLR together compose the . NET Framework. The . NET Framework is included with Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, and can be installed on some older versions of Windows. .NET Framework 1. 1 This is the first major . NET Framework upgrade that is accessible on its own as a redistributable package or in a software development kit since its publishing on April 3, 2003. It forms part of the second release of Microsoft Visual Studio . NET – the Visual Studio . NET 2003, and is the first version of the . NET Framework to be included as part of the Windows operating system, shipping with Windows Server 2003. 7 .NET Framework 3. 5 This version was authoritatively released to manufacturing (RTM) on November 19, 2007. As with . NET Framework 3. 0, this version applies the CLR of version 2. 0. It also installs . NET Framework 2. 0 SP1 adding some methods and properties to the BCL classes in version 2. 0 which are vital for version 3. 5 features such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ). These changes, however, do not involve applications written for version 2. 0 and a separately, new . NET Compact Framework 3. 5 was released in hand-in-hand with this revision to give support for additional features on Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded CE devices. The source code of the Base Class Library in this version has been partially released under Microsoft Reference License. 7 .NET Framework 3. 5 builds incrementally on the new features added in . NET Framework 3. 0 – for example, feature sets in Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows CardSpace. This version also consists of a number of new features in several technology areas which have been added as new assemblies to avoid breaking changes. They are: (a) deep integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and data awareness which will let to write code written in LINQ-enabled languages to filter, enumerate, and produce projections of several types of SQL data, collections, XML, and datasets by means of the same syntax; (b) ASP. NET AJAX 3. 5 lets you craft more resourceful, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work transversely with almost all the most popular browsers; (c) The New Web protocol sustain for building WCF services adding AJAX, JSON, REST, POX, RSS, ATOM, and several new WS-* standards; (d) Full tooling support in Visual Studio 2008 for WF, WCF, and WPF, including the new workflow-enabled services technology; and, (e) New classes in . NET Framework 3. 5 base class library (BCL) that address many common customer requests. Visual Studio 2008 and the . NET Framework 3. 5. The Microsoft Visual Studio development system is an appropriate development instrument devised to aid developers to tackle complex problems, thus create inventive resolutions. This system’s role is to improve the development process; hence, achieving breakthroughs would be easier and more satisfying. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio Development system will be very productive for this project since it would continually deliver better ways for cross language translations with less energy and with ease from other software. It has efficient form of code editors, IntelliSense, Wizards, and multiple coding languages in one integrated development environment (IDE) to high-tech applications in life- cycle management. New versions of Visual Studio keep bringing innovative tools to help developers focus on solving problems without wasting time. With this development system, software developers gain from an integrated product experience that spans tools, servers, and services. Visual Studio products work well together with other Microsoft software, such as Microsoft server products and the Microsoft Office system. Visual Studio offers a comprehensive choice of tools for all phases of software development, testing, deployment, integration, and management. Every kind of software developer, from novice to skilled professional, can use the Visual Studio because it is engineered to support the development across all types of devices such as PCs, servers, the Web, and mobile devices. Visual Studio is the most reliable tool that is engineered and tested to be always dependable, secure, interoperable, and compatible. Visual Studio offers an unparalleled combination of security features, scalability, and interoperability. Although Visual Studio always incorporates forward- thinking features, it is designed to ensure backward-compatibility everywhere possible. Being a set of technology capabilities, core products, and best practice guidance, the Microsoft Application Platform (MAP) focuses on aiding IT and development business partners to maximize opportunity. As one of its core products, Visual Studio has always and continues to help spearhead for the right customer links, business efficiencies, and value-added services through provision of a fully integrated and single development environment for all types of advances, including Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Web, and mobile applications.