Essay on Methods of Overcoming Prejudice in Society

Prejudice can be seen from an individual having biased opinions about a certain group, with very little knowledge. Prejudice can be defined in many ways, such as an attitude of how people think about others or people judging ignorantly. But to Gordon Allport, â€Å"Prejudice is a thinking ill of others without a sufficient warrant.. This is how prejudice is defined to an individual who is still witnessing this crisis. This person discovered that apart from the race, color, national origin or gender, people in today’s world, share an universally existing problem: â€Å"PREJUDICE†. There is alot of evidence that a person’s prejudice is wrong, but still, individuals ignore it. There are several sources that lead to this problem, such as people†¦show more content†¦There are books that are read in school where it portrays examples of prejudice. For instance, a book called â€Å"Inherit the Wind† displays an excellent point of view of prejudice. A t own named Hills Bro believes in only one religion, and nothing else. They only believe in Christianity. Nevertheless, there was an individual named â€Å" Bertrim Cates† who introduces another belief, the Darwin theory. The town despises Cates for believing in a belief that is different from the town. Another book that portrays prejudice is â€Å"The Merchant of Venice†. This play teaches individuals about prejudice and why it is wrong. People would see how everyone was hurt at one time or another by prejudice, whether it was the Christians making fun of Shylock or Shylock showing his prejudice to the Christians. One quote that was said by Shylock who reveals his feelings about the prejudice that was laid upon him. â€Å" Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, affections, passions†¦..as a Christian is?† (Act 3 scene 1 lines 49-61). His feelings revealed of how he thinks that are Jews not the same as the Christians, and are they not b oth human. 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Essay about The ECommerce Environment of Singapore

The ECommerce Environment of Singapore Geography The Republic of Singapore is located in southeast Asia, south of Malaysia and northwest of Indonesia. The island measures a total of 637 square kilometers with a coastline 193 kilometers long. Singapore is generally comprised of lowland areas with a central plateau in the middle of the island. Its elevation ranges from the Bukit Timah, (166 m.), to the Singapore Strait which is at sea level. Its climate is tropical and wet. Precipitation occurs on 40% of all days, (70% of days in April). Singapores two biggest natural recourses are its fishing industry, and its deep water ports. Singapore is also a focal point for most Southeast Asian sea routes. History Singapore†¦show more content†¦The E-commerce environment consists of the physical internet network, components, and internet services. The environment also includes a collection of supports and incentives to assist and promote the on-line community. Internet Awareness and Usage Approximately Ninety-two percent of adults aged 18 to 55 years old are aware of the Internet. About one third (32%) of the total population have used the internet. This gives Singapore roughly 667,000 adult internet users. However, only 13% of internet users have ever made online purchases. When surveyed only 21% of internet users were aware that these services existed. The bulk of the population uses the internet primarily for information searches and electronic mail (38% and 30% respectively) Infrastructure Services In order to develop, E-businesses need an operating environment including network services, payment services, and trust systems. The information technology industry in Singapore has been working with the government to develop online payment systems, security systems, directory services, and other E-commerce services essential to a developing online industry. 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What Broke My Fathers Heart free essay sample

What Broke My Father’s Heart by Katy Butler, published June 14, 2010 in the New York Times One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. â€Å"Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,† she said, using my father’s first name.I nodded, and my heart knocked. Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more. After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic.She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window. I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend.That my father had never given up easily on anything. Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph. D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from â€Å"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam†: â€Å"Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry! † At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting â€Å"Hamlet† : â€Å"May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. â€Å"Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,† he wrote, â€Å"there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death. † A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail. Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some br ief, undefined final illness.Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town. In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well.Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. â€Å"I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,† he once told me. â€Å"It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul. † They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s â€Å"Final Exit† in her bookcase.Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims. Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, â€Å"I don’t know who I am anymore. † His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member. Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the â€Å"oldest old† have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast.Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants. My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. â€Å"She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,† he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. â€Å"And then she would have been all right. It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more. As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker. Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and pre-stroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment. My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual.According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would â€Å"rather die† than live permanently in a nursing home.In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state. When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his tradeoffs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with care-giving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes.One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax. Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery.But my mother never consulted Fales. And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later. It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr.Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way. And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent.Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits. Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death. The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell.At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s â€Å"Full Catastrophe Living,† bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate. In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house. In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. â€Å"The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,† my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. â€Å"My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years. † His pacemaker kept on ticking.When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year. When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house.When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm.If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood. If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s â€Å"Fantasia,† it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin.If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant. On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When the government-sponsored Medicare system approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded.Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness. Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown.In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended or recommended as â€Å"reasonable† for 56 heart conditions and â€Å"not recommended† for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm â€Å"reasonable† category. The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, some researchers warned, because â€Å"expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, consulting fees or research support from industry. Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. â€Å"I take responsibility for whatever,† she wrote in her journal that summer. â€Å"Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine? † Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact.I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, pre-dementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a â€Å"life,† but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice. Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things.We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical. (Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values.In such cases, it continued, doctors â€Å"cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure. † This came, of course, too late for us. ) In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father.This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love. Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call â€Å"the dwindles†: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.Pneumonia was once called â€Å"the old man’s friend† for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine. My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father â€Å"might die immediately. † And so came five days of hard labor.My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in. On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing. After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold.By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone. A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, â€Å"To ask questions. She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost. The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years.If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function. ) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team.She would be revived if she collapsed. â€Å"If I have a stroke,† my mother said, nearly in tears, â€Å"I want you to let me go. † What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side? I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me. The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram.A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. â€Å"No,† she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. â€Å"I will not do it. † She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. â€Å"I’m aching to garden,† she wrote in her journal. But so it goes. Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather.She was continent and lucid to her end. A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.

Sustainable Development free essay sample

This essay argues that sustainable development is the answer to the world’s environmental and economic problems. Its purpose is to outline my understanding of sustainable development and to discuss what the authors Ede (2008), Collier (2007) and Monbiot (2006) have contributed to it. For the purpose of this essay I am referring to ‘development’ in the context of human socio economic growth. Brundtland defines sustainable development as â€Å"development that results in the needs of the present being met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs† (Sutton, 2004). To begin I will analyise each of the authors perspectives and also provide my own based on my experience, and then highlight any similarities, gaps or differences between them. According to Monboit (2006), urgent change needs to take place to reduce our carbon emissions by 90 percent by the year 2030. If we do not then it is a very real possibility that we have missed our opportunity to cool the Earth’s atmosphere from heating which would result in a catastrophic outcome. We will write a custom essay sample on Sustainable Development or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page However, Monbiot believes it is possible to meet the challenge by adopting sustainable development, in particular through the development of environmental science and technologies. He explains that previous environmental campaigns have failed because the majority of environmentalist lack integrity, and that it is virtually impossible for anyone to be wholly sustainable unless there is a paradigm shift in society driven by changes in Government policy. The concept of sustainable development is complex, it encompasses the protection of the environment and people and aims to see an end to poverty (Sutton, 2004 pp 3). The need for change towards sustainable development is critical for the very survival of the human species however it seems they are their own worst enemy. Collier (2007) explains that there is a clear divide between people in developing countries and the poor countries (referred to as the bottom billion) which are stuck in what he calls development traps. One of the biggest problems in these countries is corrupt Governments. Collier refers to the poorest people in the world as the ‘bottom billion’ and explains that they have no option other than to turn to depleting the natural environment of its resources just to survive. People in countries such as Africa, are forced to mine minerals that are then sold on to the developing countries to use in technologies such as mobile phones and computers. Globalisation has only accelerated the problem because technology is essential to globalisation (McMahon, 2001). The result is that people are consuming and producing waste at an ever accelerating rate. It is what drives the economy, and so products are made to break down or they quickly superseded as a new model takes it place with ‘better’ features. Ede, 2008 pp 20) The shiny marketing of the latest and greatest gadgets, that claims to make your life easier and faster than ever before. Ede explains that marketing is not just about selling a product anymore, now it is also about selling an identity or a lifestyle. Ede explains that â€Å"waste is a psychological and social issue, not an engineering problem. † Unfortunately even people who are sustainably conscious fall victim to the evils of capitalism, there seems to be no escaping it however, Monboit (as quoted in Ede, 2008 pp 20) believes that through the power of people who choose to buy eco, a shift towards sustainability will occur. However, this is only a part of the solution because for any real change needs to occur it needs to be driven at Government policy level (Collier, 2007 pp 3). Similarly, the challenge for leaders in the green building movement is to influence the Governments to change or create policies that support sustainable development. My understanding of the concept of sustainable development stems from my five years of working in the sustainable building sector. The built environment is the single largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions (Morell, 2011). The concept of sustainability in the built environment is the same as ‘sustainable development’ in this unit which is to live more sustainably by relying more on solar energy, preserving biodiversity and not disrupting the earth’s natural chemical recycling processes (Miller, 2010 pp6). Another challenge the green building movement is faced with is to convince developers of the long term economic benefits of green building. Technology can provide a path towards sustainable development, for example a six star, green star rated building can reduce its energy consumption by nearly 90% (Bond, 2008). Monbiot shares this view as he too believes that global implementation of science and technology can help achieve sustainable development. Although each of the authors agree about sustainable development is the answer to the worlds most urgent environmental and economic problems, their views on how to gain economic balance differ. Ede considers that by eliminating our waste we are able to regain economic balance and Monbiot’s theory is that the shift towards green technology will bring balance.

Carib Studies Ia Essay Example

Carib Studies Ia Essay Acknowledgement Nobly, the researcher would like to bestow gratitude to all who has helped me in the completion of this Internal Assessment. Gratitude and appreciation to, God most of all, because without him theres is no ability to complete something. He helped to guide the researcher and helped her put away her indolence and complete her study effectively. The youngest sister of the researcher deserves appreciation because she helped the researcher in getting references and gathering the essential for this project. Much love to you, Lisan. To all those such as my peers and respondents to my questionnaire, Merci. Hope to submissively return the favour one day. Introduction Locale: Urban Parish: St. Ann School Code: 06063 Gender: Female School Organization: Whole Day Size: Class III Attendance Rate: 92% Capacity: 1000 Enrolment: 950 Number of Teachers: 41 Pupil/Teacher Ratio: 24:1 Owned by: Anglican Church Socio-Economic Context St. Hilda’s Diocesan High School for girls was established by the Anglican Church in 1906 as a small day school run by the Deaconesses. In 1917, it was named The Diocesan High School for Girls and moved to its present site in 1922. It was given the present name in 1927. St. Hilda’s is located in Browns Town, St. Ann. It is a medium sized boarding school with approximately 950 students, and it has a capacity of 1000. With 41 teachers, the student teacher ratio is 24:1. The school’s average daily attendance is 92 per cent. Students are from mixed socio economic backgrounds drawn from all over the island and include a few who are not Jamaicans. Many parents are unemployed but some are professionals. Some work in the hotel industry, some are farmers. We will write a custom essay sample on Carib Studies Ia specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Carib Studies Ia specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Carib Studies Ia specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer The school motto: Res Severa Verum Gaudium (Hard work brings true joy) is a source of inspiration for staff and students alike and summarizes the school’s general attitude towards its endeavours and accomplishments. St. Hilda’s High school gets valuable support from business and community organizations in the forms of donations and scholarships. Its high academic standard is complemented by a rich cultural heritage which is showcased in its annual Eisteddfod. In 2010, the school was placed fourth in the ‘All Together Sing’ choir competition and came first in Bob Marley’s Song Arrangement Competition. For the latter, the school received a replica of the icon’s guitar. Intervention programmes like ‘Young women of Change’ give support to students with emotional and social needs. Statement of problem What is the extent of racism at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High, Brown’s Town? Aims and objectives Racism is vastly evident at this institution. The completion of this IA will therefore determine: The extent of racism at the institution The influence of racism at the institution The consequences of racism at the institution Literature review Racism is the ideologies of social processes which discriminate against people based solely on the basis of their belonging to different ethnicity. It should be noted that some sociologists such as Parsons, think that people are primarily socialized to be racist. The influencing factors of racism are: parents, siblings, peers, schools, governmental officials, religion, mass media and many others’ (Solomos, 1993, Har alambos and Holborn, 2004). ‘Racial disadvantages are a result of the differences in cultural characteristics that do not coincide with the norms and values of the upper class’ (Smith, N. D adopted from Mustapha, 2009). for integration in the creolization process to take place multi- culturalism and plurality of cultures must be first accepted in order to reduce racial stigmatization (Braithwaite, adopted from Mustapha, 2009). ‘Similarly, functionalists aim for a cultural consensus for a consequential balanced and functional society’ (Kirby,1997 adopted from Haralambas and Holborn, 2004). Marx, however, views racism as a belief system used to legitimize the exploitation of the lower class citizens by the upper class. ‘ Some sociologists even believe that if capitalism had not developed then racial prejudice, in question, would not exist’ (Kirby et. l 1997; Cox, 1970, Haralambos and Holborn, 2004). ‘Interactionists believes that racial con flict was a result of the deficiency in communication about the variation in the self-conceptualization. In society, race and ethnicity are viewed as variable because they are often being discussed’ (Lal, 1998; Kirby, 1997, Haralambos and Holborn, 2004). ‘Racism was used to validate slavery during colonialism’ (Roleff, 1991). ‘In the 19th century, indentured workers were bought to Trinidad to supplant the Africans on the plantations and there was an immediate awareness of the ethnic differences. Hence, social stratification in the plantation society was based on the differences in the race in society. Therefore, race is one of the fundamental factors behind class division in society. ’ (Brereton, 1979 adopted from Reddock and Barrow, 2001). ‘The term race was first used in the 15th century but only grew in importance with the relation to the development of liberalism bought a sense of identity to people, which was intended to bring further improvement of society, along with equality’ (Golberg, Haralambos and Holborn, 2004). Whites in society being superior encouraged racism and racist beliefs in society and the racism led to the limitations in the social life chances of proletariats’ (Golberg, Haralambos and Holborn) ‘Segregation and discrimination in society are also the results of racism’ (Haralambos and Holborn, 20004). ‘Policies can be formulated to enclose equal opportunities and cultural integration such as the Race and Rel ations Acts’ (Haralambos and Holborn, 2004). ‘The Creolization Thesis proposes the governments can promote cultural assimilation and integration in order to have syncretism. A variety of the cultural traits blended together to form a new culture that is satisfactory for all members of society’ (Braithwaite, 1971, Mustapha, 2009). Research Design The term research design may be defined as the scientific data collected. It is from research that theories are derived. Quantitative data was the selected research data since it is general, objective and value free. The statistics of the data gathered can be easily quantified and is used to support the findings of research. Questionnaires were used because they are used for obtaining particular instruments for data collection. The data gathered from the questionnaires would be easily quantified and displayed in various figures and diagrams. The study is based on the degree of the existence of racism at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High. To effectively complete this project, the study was done during the period of November 20th to November 30, 2012. In order to attain data randomly, the sample population was selected by process. Two out of the fifty questionnaires presented were separately distributed to students from each grade level and class with permission from the school principal and form teachers. Sample A sample may be defined as a portion of a large population and it is often used to represent the large population. For this study, random sampling was used. So two out of fifty questionnaires were to distributed 2 students from each class from each grade level, who willingly participated in the study. This would be considered systematic random sampling. It is considered as such because the subject units were chosen in a logical order. The method of sampling is practical because it is time effective when selecting the same from a large population. Data Collection Instrument Questionnaires were used to collect data. The use of questionnaires was both cost effective and time effective. The use of questionnaires assured the maintenance of increased objectivity and the accuracy in the study. The data gathered from the questionnaires can be easily quantified. Questionnaire Gender male female How old are you? To what ethnicity do you belong? African Chinese American Mixed Do you know what racism is? If yes, explain. Do you think racism exists at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High? Please explain the reason for your answer. How prevalent is racism at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High? Great extent not a great extent non-existent Does racism at school affect you? If yes, in what way. Would you consider yourself racist? Would you consider any of your friends as racists? Explain answers for both number 7 and 8. Have you ever been involved in any racist activity? Please account for your answer. Have you ever been a victim of racism? If so, how: Persons provoke you about your ethnicity and religion persons ignore your existence and humanity persons demean your ancestry and heritage other. Please specify. Does anyone at your school instigate racism? If so, who: academic staff peers principal ancillary staff Do you think racism has a negative impact on students? If yes, in what way: causing students to fail academically because of low self-esteem and confidence emotionally scarring students, especially the younger ones, for life If other, specify. What are some of the methods that could be used to eliminate or reduce racism at St. Hilda’s? How do you think the school on a whole can benefit from the reduction or elimination of racism? Presentation of Findings Figure 1: Students affected and not affected by racism Figure 2: Been vs. haven’t been victims of racism. Figure 3: ways students were victims of racism Figure 4: racism is instigated/ not instigated Figure 5: Does racism has or doesn’t have a negative impact on students? Analysis and Discussion of Findings As seen in figure 1, 10% isn’t affected by racism while 90% is. This shows that generally, a large percentage of students are affected by racism at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High. The concept behind this question was to ascertain whether multi- culturalism and plurality of cultures are accepted, in order to reduce racial stigmatization as Braithwaite claimed it must in order for integration and prober flow of communication. Without proper communication students’ learning and interpretation of certain matters will be affected. Figure 2 shows the percentage of students who have been victims of racism at St. Hilda’s Diocesan High. The diagram is based on information received from the related question from the questionnaire. The diagram shows that 80% have been and 20% haven’t. figure 3, displays the percentage and different ways in which students are victimized by racism. Its displays that 10% persons demean their ancestry and heritage, 40%, persons provoke them about their ethnicity and religion and 50%, persons ignore their existence and humanity. Figure 4, 5% said no racism isn’t instigated, while a mighty 95% said it is. When asked how and by who, a large number of students stated that it is instigated by the principal in the way she treats certain students because of either their grades or their light coloured skin. One student notably wrote that she thought about becoming a racist so many times because of the way the principal treated her different from all other students. She notably stated that she is of Chinese ethnicity and is academically well of as she is a prefect at the school. She states that ometimes she thinks she is better than other students academically and when it comes to beauty because of how Mrs Johnson, her principal idolizes her. Also certain things that Mrs Johnson would say instilled some kind of racial feelings inside her. This indeed proves that racism is instigated and goes back to: ‘Racism was used to validate slavery during colonialism’ (Roleff, 1991). ‘In the 19th centu ry, indentured workers were bought to Trinidad to supplant the Africans on the plantations and there was an immediate awareness of the ethnic differences. Hence, social stratification in the plantation society was based on the differences in the race in society. Therefore, race is one of the fundamental factors behind class division in society. ’ (Brereton, 1979 adopted from Reddock and Barrow, 2001). This could cause class division yes because this student might think so highly of herself that she will be-little others as it were in slavery days. Also, racism was instigated by planters to cause division and immediate distinction between owner and slaves. Maybe this is the similar to what Mrs Johnson is doing, separating brighter and prettier students from the rest so the less intelligent or less beautiful one will feel inferior as the slaves did to the whites. All this adds to what is seen in Figure 5. There are 8o% of students who are affected negatively by racism and 20% which aren’t. this incorporates Brerton’s prospective on racial and ethnic discrimination, racism between slaves from other ethnic groups based on stratification. Also with regards to Figure 3, Marx perspective that racism is a belief system used to legitimize the exploitation of the lower class can be applied. Students who say they are affected by racism are those who are may belong to different social classes in social hierarchy or may belong to different ethnic groups than those who are not affected. Certain students who are affected may also be considered less academically accomplished to those who are not. Racism has negative effects on students as shown in Figure 5. This according to Lal, is that interactionists believe that racial conflicts were a result of the deficiency in communication about the variation in self- conceptualization. Conclusion In conclusion, racism impacts negatively on the lives of the young ladies of St. Hilda’s Diocesan High. Racism negatively affects school interaction, and behaviour of these young ladies. However, as Braithwaite indicates, through formulation of policies, the Government can promote cultural assimilation and integration in order to have syncretism. A variety of cultural traits blended together to form a new culture that is satisfactory for all students of the St. Hilda’s Diocesan High School. Bibliography Barrow C and Reddock R, (Eds. ), 2001 Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Recordings. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd. Haralambos, M and Holborn, M (Eds. ) 2004 Sociology: Themes and Perspectives. London: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. Mustapha, N (Eds) 2009. Sociology for Caribbean Students. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd. Kerwin, C and Jackson, I, 1996. Sociology for Caribbean Students, Volume 1. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Ltd. Table of Contents Topic Page Acknowledgement Introduction Statement of problem Literature review Research design Sample Data collection instrument Presentation of findings Analysis and discussion of findings Recommendations Limitations Conclusion Bibliography bRecommendations The researcher would recommend: The government implement some non- racist movement within all schools The government go about implementing ways to encourage students in schools and fire any employee at the school who encourages racism The school’s chairman visit the school more often and see just what is going on there, ask the students their opinions on the matter discussed and go about making changes Students appeal to authorities who might help them on the matter Limitations Within the completion of this project the researcher didn’t have any limitations. All resources were at hand especially at home. The researcher should proudly say that she put these resources to good use. This project was well organized and put together because of this. He researcher hopes all readers and the examiner feels the same.

Get this new symbol and youll pay for it - Emphasis

Get this new symbol and youll pay for it Get this new symbol and youll pay for it If you have an aversion to emoticons and their ilk, you may want to look away now. Introducing an entirely new symbol to express heavy-handedly what your words apparently cant: ladies and gentlemen, the Sarcmark. As you might already have guessed, it can be handily popped at the end of a sentence to signify when youre being sarcastic. Actually, its probably meant to be an indicator of irony, but presumably the Iromark didnt have quite the same commercial appeal. Thats right: youll have to pay to use it. Its makers, Sarcasm Inc, will charge you a mere 1.20 for the privilege. So will we be downloading it? Of course. (Darn, now we need one. The irony!) Ok, sometimes the lack of tone in email can be a problem. But sarcasms a tricky one to pull off at the best of times, particularly in business dealings. Insert one of these and you run the risk of either offending your reader for using sarcasm at all, or by assuming theyre too dim-witted to recognise it if they see it.

Social media Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Social media - Research Paper Example The selection of Facebook as a social media marketing tool is influenced by the fact that the site offers a massive market that could be utilized. The site has been in existence since 2004, making it the oldest significant social media network to date. The number of users has surpassed the 1 billion globally. This provides a massive business opportunity in regards to market reach. In an argument by Ray (2013) the use of Facebook as a marketing tool provides a business with a massive and significant market population. The author further asserts that the market concentration at one place makes marketing simpler (Ray, 2013). These forecasts have been reflected in the family business. On a daily business, our Facebook page is viewed by at least 15 people. This depicts the effectiveness and simplicity of using Facebook as a marketing tool. In addition, out of the 15 views, five people contact us on the availability and description of our products. The trend has significantly increased the size of the target market and consumer population. From the site, we are able to acquire consumer feedback on how we could improve our marketing approaches as well product and service quality. Consumer often feel friendly enough to develop personal interactions. To understand the effectiveness of Facebook in business, one should understand the prevalence of its usage. Firstly, the social network has an estimated 700 million active users) (iMarketing Factory, 2011. From the population, each active user spends an estimated time of 50 minutes daily in the social network site (iMarketing Factory, 2011). Moreover, the active Facebook user has an average of 130 friends. Consequently, their interactions would be visible to more people. From a business point of view, this is a massive opportunity for brand education and development. This exceptional opportunity is not emulated by any other marketing approach (Ray, 2013). To capitalize on the opportunity, my family

Philosophy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 8

Philosophy - Essay Example Aristotle asserts that all human endeavor is directed towards the achievement of the â€Å"chief good† (Aristotle, 32). This good, towards which mans’ knowledge and activity is directed, is difficult to define precisely, as it has different connotations for different people. However, based on the criteria of the chief good being â€Å"that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else† (35), we reach the conclusion that it is only happiness which is â€Å"final and self-sufficient† (35) and is therefore the ultimate objective of man. Aristotle concedes that happiness requires external instruments, such as good birth and prosperity. Man’s function is to perform any activity to the best extent possible and in accordance with virtue. Aristotle defines happiness as â€Å"an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue† (37). Virtue has both moral and intellectual components - the former, such as temperance , is a result of good habits, while the latter, such as wisdom, can be learned. Virtue is the perfect intermediate or mean, which avoids both excess and deficiency. Aristotle equates good with truth: â€Å"The good state is truth in agreement with right desire† (44). Choice is inherent in the practice of virtue. Aristotle affirms that the most self-sufficient and superior kind of life, which will lead to â€Å"the complete happiness of man† (44) and enable man to reach for the divine, is the life devoted to the philosophical contemplation of the truth based on reason. Unlike most other philosophies, which lay down rigid rules (Hobbes), or advocate highly idealistic, intellectual tenets (Kant), Aristotle’s moral principle, which identifies the pursuit of happiness as mans’ objective in life and links this objective to virtue and activity, is particularly pertinent to everyday life.

Fall of Eurozone Consumer Prices Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Fall of Eurozone Consumer Prices - Essay Example The region is just recovering from the economic depression that affected the entire globe. A major concern in the region was that consumers would opt to postpone spending on investment opportunities, as they fear the downward spiral into a full-blown economic depression. So what is the European Central Bank doing to prevent the region’s economy from experiencing the adverse effects of a fall in consumer prices? Mario Draghi, the President mentioned that the bank was set to convene a meeting in Frankfurt, Germany to discuss aggressive strategies aimed at containing the fall in consumer prices before it became unmanageable. In addition, he inferred that the rumoured onset of deflation was unlikely to happen; however, he did not rule it out completely. Among the possible intervention strategies the Bank was likely to take was quantitative easing, which is similar to that undertaken by the US Federal Reserve. Although controversial in the region, this strategy proved helpful in stimulating the American economy. Quantitative easing entails the process by which a country’s Central Bank injects money into the country’s economy with the intention of managing inflation by increasing spending by the private sector. In this case, the Europe an Central Bank would purchase financial assets such as government bonds using money it has creates. It is crucial to note that the money used in this process is not tangible money, as it is generated electronically. Arguments against the use of Quantitative Easing are as follows.

Proportional Representation Electoral System

Proportional Representation Electoral System Critically compare and discuss the major differences and similarities between proportional representation and majoritarian electoral systems. Which criteria are the most important ones with which to judge an electoral system in a new democracy? How does each system perform on these criteria? Resulting from an in-depth investigation into the establishment of new democracies, this essay explores the view that Proportional Representation electoral system (henceforth PR) promotes better stability, as opposed to the Majoritarian electoral system, which occasionally leads to instability. It is how a party interprets votes into parliamentary seats in each electoral system that determines which system to perform better. It is upon this factor that this essay will attest the claim that PR promotes an increase in social representation in parliaments. Although majoritarian systems do stipulate greater stability and accountability in governments, this does not support the belief that PR systems disregard a governments stability or culpability; each system tends to highlight certain factors, where others do not. This essay will commence by explaining the elements that characterise both PR and majoritarian electoral systems, after which it shall be seen how each system performs in the criteria of accountability, social representation and stability in a new democracy. It is in a new democracy where the most support for the government is needed; this is resulting from the often controversial past experienced in these nations before evolving into a democracy. By looking at South Africas first democratic election in 1994, and their utilisation of the PR system, one discovers why in this context a PR system most suited. The majoritarian system, which can be divided into two subsections, namely plurality and the second ballot majority run-off system, is the oldest electoral system having originated in the 12th century (Norris, 1997: 299). In both instances, the nation is separated into territorial single-memberconstituencies. Plurality decrees all citizens vote for a candidate party; while votes are counted, the party with the majority of votes in a specific constituency is granted the parliamentary seats for that region. The party with the most seats in the parliament will ultimately be the governing party (Norris, 1997: 301). For a government to come into power through the second ballot run-off system, the government would need to win the absolute majority of 50% +1; in cases where this does not occur, the two top contenders from the first round of elections run alongside each other in a second round of voting (Norris, 1997: 302).It is the majoritarian system of representation that sees larger part ies winning a higher proportion of seats than the proportion of votes they gain in an election (Heywood, 2007: 256). This increases the chance of a single party gaining a parliamentary majority and being able to govern independently (Heywood, 2007: 256). The PR system, which also divides countries into constituencies, is most often made up of multi-member districts, larger in size, which is geographically defined. Lists are presented by each party of their districts number of parliamentary seats available; lists in some countries are open to voters, allowing them to rank their candidate preferences, whereas some lists are closed and only made visible to the party. Seats, instead of being given to the majority winner, are granted according to a partys percentage of votes received (Norris, 1997: 303). This system guarantees an equal relationship between seats won by a party and the votes gained in an election. In instances were PR is implemented at its purest form, a party gaining 60 per cent of the vote would win exactly 60 per cent of the seats (Heywood, 2007: 256). PR systems, thus, make single-party majority rule unlikely, rather allowing for coalition governments or multi-party systems (Heywood, 2007: 256). Each electoral system majoritarian or PR has its own advantages and disadvantages. It does, however, depend on a new democracys main concerns and its aims, hopefully to be achieved, that would decide which system to implement. New democracies have clearly come from somewhere disagreeable in terms of democratic values, and so because they have experienced a severe shortage of representativeness as was the case with Mexico, Chile, South Africa, and Tunisia they will overwhelmingly want to replace this with representativeness (Pettinger, 2012).In order to achieve an increased representativeness, countries would most likely prefer the use of PR as it allows previously unheard minority groups the chance to voice their concerns. In terms of government accountability, both systems contain different quantities of this within. The majoritarian system, which allows candidates receiving the most votes in a constituency to have a seat, bestows the masses the ability to hold someone responsible, in this instance the victorious party member, in a specific area. The masses have the choice, during each election, to give their support or help vote a certain member out of power. As a result, representatives of the constituency are further stimulated to help voice the concerns of the people in that area. This motivates service production in the most successful style and, simultaneously, fortifies the bond with the constituency (Norris, 1997: 305). PR systems, which are able to produce single-party governments, usually lead to the establishment of coalition governments unless one party wins a majority of votes (Norris, 1997: 308). Following a survey of twenty newly established democracies, only 10 percent of PR systems led to the establishment of single-party governments (Norris, 1997: 308). Consequently, this lowered government accountability (also referred to as government responsiveness) as the populations cannot leave a single party responsible for choices made. Majoritarian systems, alternatively, are more often than not single-party governments. The aforementioned study mentions 60 percent of majoritarian systems lead by single-party governments (Norris, 1997: 308). With this in mind, as well as the fact that the controlling party is the dominant party in parliament in a majoritarian system, the party possesses enough power to carry out unpopular choices; they need not rely on minority parties support (Norris, 1997: 304) . Furthermore, the domineering party would be held wholly accountable for their actions during their time in power, and following the end of their term would their performance be measured. At this time it would be decided whether or not to vote them out of power. In a majoritarian system, responsibility and power are viewed as one. In a majoritarian system, the power that gives the ruling party in government the ability to pass legislation and implement party policies increases the accountability of that party (Norris, 1997: 304). This gives rise to government effectiveness, and stability. Resultantly, fragmentation, which occasionally occurs in the PR system, is prevented. PR thus leads to instability in some cases (Norris, 1997: 305). This instability becomes clearer depending on the lifespan government tends to have; this occurrence is due to the majority of the masses not supporting the government, as apposed to the majoritarian system. It is when one considers social representation that one begins to see that a PR system is not necessarily more effective than the majoritarian system. By determining parliament seat rendering to the percentage of votes each party receives, the presence of smaller parties is ensured (Norris, 1997: 309).It is the fact that parties in a majoritarian system have support spread out in many areas that disadvantages the system despite overall greater support in the foundation (Norris, 1997: 305). This sees minority groupings excluded out of parliament as well as those groups experiencing lesser representation than warranted. After the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, both the African National Congress and the National Party entered into negotiations in order to establish a democratic constitution that would allow for a swift transition; this realisation developed from a mutually hurting stalemate (Zartman, 1995: 147) that left neither side able to seize power by force (Zartman, 1995: 148). Due to South Africas diversity, which can be summarised as 79.4% Africans, 9.2 Whites, 8.8% Coloureds and 2.6% Asian/Indian (Statistics South Africa, 2010:4), social representation presented itself as a key concern during the transition into a stable democracy. Hendrik Verwoerd, who believed white men in Africa to not see peace and stability resulting from a satisfied nationalism (Verwoerd, 1960: 363), proposed no intermingling in the political sphere (Verwoerd, 1960: 364); this was the beginning of the oppression of many social groups, experiencing the domination of a nation ruled by one party. The adoptio n of the PR electoral system, which occurred following the amalgamation of the new democracy (Zartman, 1995: 45), would be to ensure the representation of all previously suppressed groups (Masiko-Kambala, 2008: 2). This system successfully maintained political stability despite having to reach a consensus while including various contradictory views. The PR system assured a diverse parliament, even though the system could not always ensure suitable accountability and stability (Norris, 1997: 305). Enforcing the majoritarian electoral system would have prolonged the aspect of Apartheid where certain groups were oppressed, the only difference is that the majoritarian system would oppress minority groups, whereas Apartheid oppressed South Africas racial majority. This would occur as parties would retain a majority in an area to gain a parliament seat, while the PR system presents any minority group the chance to win a seat (Norris, 1997: 303). Moving forward past a history of great viol ence and dissatisfaction amongst the populace, the PR system allowed an environment where all groupings were able to have their voice heard (Masiko-Kambala, 2008: 2); this would guarantee a great deal of support encouraging the new democratic government. Having discussed both electoral systems advantage and disadvantages with respect to each criteria with which to judge an electoral system in a new democracy, it can be concluded that each system is favourable in different instances. Where the PR system ensures a more diverse parliament, the majoritarian system is seen to generate greater responsibility and stability in government. It is purely a case of what a country views as the most important feature of governance at the time, and for South Africas case it would have been social representation, therefore ending in the implementation of a PR system; finding accountability or stability to be of more importance would have resulted in the establishment of the majoritarian system.

Essay example --

Napoleon Bonaparte was a bewildering man of many achievements. He attended military school at the age of nine, and joined the French military when he was sixteen. His mother was named Letizia, and his father was named Carlos. He had seven siblings, named Joseph, Lucien, Elise, Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jerome. He also supported the revolution, which led to him attending several places during the initial part of the revolutionary wars. He became renowned after shielding the Nation Convention in 1795. One of his more significant feats was that he led effective campaigns against Austria, Sardinia, and Italy. As soon as other people became aware of his accomplishments, he very quickly became known as â€Å"the General.† His earlier military occupation included the Italian Campaigns: from 1796-1797, he dominated most of northern Italy for France, and had established a liking for leading. Another triumph from his early military career was the Egyptian Campaign. In 1798, he was defeated by a British navy, which was under the command of Admiral Horatio Nelson, who devastated the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Discarding his troops in Egypt, Napoleon returned to France and received a champion’s welcome. In 1796, Napoleon got married to Josephine. But by 1799, the dishonesty of the Directory along with the dwindling war effort against the Second Coalition left the government open for assaults. Napoleon was put in control of the military on November 9, 1799. The next day, he and his military took control by overtaking the government, which then decided to end the Directory. The Directory was swapped with three consuls, and Napoleon was elected First Consul. With the government in disorder, Napoleon launched a successful coup d’ et... ... European leaders at the Congress of Vienna tried to reestablish order and reestablish peace. The champions (mainly the alliance of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain) restored the French boundaries of 1792 and the Bourbon dynasty. They made other modifications in the boundaries of Europe, founding Prussia as a "sentinel" against France, and produced a new kingdom out of Belgium and Holland. It was understood that the notion of the stability of power would preserve peace in Europe. But the demands of the conquerors, especially the Prussians and the Russians, for reimbursement threatened the balance. The Russian demands for Poland and the Prussian wish for Saxony led to conflict among the powers. Castlereagh, Metternich, and Talleyrand forced Russia and Prussia into a compromise whereby Russia got part of Poland and Prussia received two-fifths of Saxony.

The Traditional Costing Systems Accounting Essay

Activity-based costing emphasizes the demand to obtain a better apprehension of the behaviour of operating expense costs, and therefore ascertains what causes overhead costs and how they relate to merchandises. ABC recognizes that in long tally, most fabrication costs are non fixed, and it seeks to understand the forces that cause overhead costs to alter over clip. ( Colin Drury, 1995 p. 275 ) The definition of accounting supplied by Zlatkovich, et. Al. ( 1966 ) is the procedure of identifying, measurement, and pass oning economic information to license informed opinions and determinations by users of the information. ABC besides can be defined as a method of bing activities that are necessary for the production of merchandises or services ( i.e. activities being undertaken ) ( Dandago, 2003 ) . Whatever the definition of ABC, this method was originally developed by Cooper and Kaplan in 1988 as a solution to the insufficiency of traditional direction accounting techniques that used volume based methods to apportion operating expenses to merchandises. ABC is a method of apportioning overhead costs. Eventhough, it is similar to the direct method of overhead costs allotment found in traditional method, but there are two important different. In the traditional direct method, overhead costs are identified by service and production sections while in ABC operating expense costs are identified by activities which likely non the same as sections. In the traditional direct method, service section costs are allocated straight to production sections and so overhead allotment rates are prepared from these combined costs. Overhead costs are so assigned from the production section cost pool to the merchandises processed through this section. The different with ABC method this intermediate measure has been eliminated. Overhead costs are collected by activity and so straight allocated straight to the merchandise. In traditional method direct, the cost object is the terminal merchandise or service. And the premier costs and production costs are charged straight to merchandise or service whereas non-production costs will non bear down to merchandise or service. There are five ( 5 ) chief advantages of following ABC methods are:Accurate InformationABC offers more accurate estimations. Businesss typically have to compare an point ‘s monetary value and merchandising record to see if it is deserving bring forthing, and one of the benefits of ABC is better analysis of both profitable and non-profitable merchandises. Overhead costs can be a major job with some merchandises, but this method will place the costs and helps cut down operating expense. Directors frequently can work better under this costing method, because they have more accurate information.Accurate Product-Creation CostAnother benefit of ABC method is a more accurate product-creation cost. By following this bing method, analysts can calculate out the per-product cost and, therefore, more realistic prosodies are used for appraisal.Competitive PlacementABC is helpful in choosing which merchandises are profitable and which 1s should be eliminated. If a merchandise is identified a s non-profitable, the concerns seldom continuously sell a merchandise. This is because the ABC method enables the concerns to find more accurate merchandise pricing and therefore competitory placement of the merchandise in the market place.Better Decision MakingSince ABC provide accurate information on costs, more appropriate capital investing determinations can be made as a consequence of better burdening being determined on assorted facets.Future PlaningABC helps the concerns estimates the cost of all activities or processes that associated to future merchandise planning accurately determined before it is launched. This can so assist with finding pricing, and any associated outgo. By implementing ABC method, the concerns besides could place which production line is inefficiently. This enables the concerns to make up one's mind whether to go on the procedure or activity in-house or outsourcing the procedure or activity to 3rd party. Despite the advantages of implementing ABC, the method besides has disadvantages and restriction. The disadvantages of the method are elaborated in the following paragraph.ComplexityThe most obvious disadvantage of ABC is complexness in nature. It prevents the system to widespread into other companies. This ensuing the ABC methods normally remain hard to grok and dearly-won to run. ABC requires direction to non merely estimate the costs of each activities and identify and step the cost drivers for such activities, but besides update the same on a regular footing. This utilise much of the organisation ‘s resources such as direction clip and cost. slide 3 of 6PremisesABC while it institutes a complex methodological analysis to delegate costs to activities, the method remains far from perfect. The major defects include: Certain overhead costs remain impossible to split and apportion on a per-product usage footing. Not all productive activities will add value to merchandises. Most activity based bing methods assign such ‘business prolonging ‘ costs to merchandises on a proportionate footing or based on premises, and this makes the method far from perfect. slide 4 of 6The Big PictureABC places excessively much attending to detail and command on procedures. This causes a terrible restraint in that it obscures the bigger image by doing the organisation to lose sight of strategic long term aims in a pursuit for short term nest eggs. slide 5 of 6Confirmation to StandardsThis method, while supplying for better direction control over the concern procedure, does non conform to by and large recognized accounting rules ( GAAP ) . This means that for the companies that practising GAAP demand to duplicate their attempts by keeping two cost systems and separate accounting books for internal usage and external studies.Replacing ProcedureFinally, ABC method does non replace an bing occupation order or procedure cost system, but instead supplement the same. Indirectly, this will be seen as excess procedure. Eventhough the method has disadvantages ; it has proven that it still taking method to bring forth the most dependable, accurate bing information particularly for fabricating companies today. Although this method may non be easy to implement, since it utilizing activities to follow costs but it provides more accurate information ensuing in better scheme, better planning, and better prediction. However, the most influential facet of ABC is the ability to salvage cost. If company has a more accurate image of costs, so it is in a place to accomplish higher net incomes which straight maximize the stockholder wealth.Case StudiesThe following paragraph discussed on the execution of the ABC method in four ( 4 ) different states with different civilization and industries. The analysis was based on the research documents conducted in these states. The first research paper by Wen-Hsien Tsai and Jui-Ling Hsu. The survey was carried out to analyse the operational costs of a hot spring hostel in the Yang-Ming-Shan country of Taiwan. The ABC method was used to calculate housing, hot spring usage and repast helping costs per client. Based on the consequence of the research, it was reported that the cost of merchandises was lower than utilizing other methods eventhough during winter season. The research worker besides compares the ABC method with the traditional costing method and concludes that the ABC method is practical and appropriate for such a hot spring state hostel and outputs more accurate information for cost direction and pricing determinations. The following research paper was carried out by Ahmet Agca and Ali Cagri Buran in implementing ABC method in Third Party Logistics ( 3PL ) houses at Turkey. This survey was carried out for selected endeavors that are expertise in logistic activities at Turkey. The successful factors for these houses are the service they provide and accommodating their clients to their procedures in an optimum manner. The 3PL houses can plan their services in a two different manner to run into their clients ‘ outlooks i.e. service-oriented and customer-oriented. By following ABC, it shown that either service-oriented or customer-oriented, both theoretical accounts need to find the optimal cost degree for accurate pricing determinations to enable them to find the profitableness of clients or services. Therefore, the bing method they use need to be qualified adequate to run into the demand for accurate cost informations. The houses have found out that, ABC method has proved the optimum method in both state of affairss. As this method allocates costs by the activities ; so, it is the method supplying the most accurate cost informations both in bing logistic activities and finding the costs of clients and services/products. The 3rd research paper was carried out by Francesca Bartolacci for logistic procedure in Italy. In this instance survey, Francesca defined logistics as portion of the supply concatenation procedure that plans, implements and controls the effectual and efficient flow of goods, services and related information from the point of beginning to the point of ingestion. Nowadays, the market really competitory, the merchandises, monetary value and quality are easy imitated and the velocity of the physical and information flows plays a cardinal function for the accomplishment of the company objectives. Excellence client service can be the cardinal component for the company to be at the competitory border and one of the maps evidently plays a critical function in the success or failure of a company is logistic. Eventhough Francesca Bartolacci has identified some disadvantages and drawback in implementing the ABC method in logistic, nevertheless ABC method has references to work out the jobs refering the usage of traditional cost accounting system based on volume and the betterment of concern profitableness. The method provides directors with utile information about labor and other resources, including ingestion for merchandises, consumers and providing channels, taking to the direction and control of the operating expenses nowadays in the company. The analysis besides managed to place the factors that determine the operating expense consumed. By following this method it is possible to do the logistics activities more efficient by extinguishing redundant or unneeded undertakings, and optimizing resource allotments to activities adding more value to the merchandise or client. Other advantage of the method is, ABC permits the planning of more efficient collaborative relationships among the companies in the supply concatenation. Francesca concludes that â€Å" the designation of costs in return influenced allows for a pick of coactions as a method which is more convenient for the whole partnership. Correct information about the differential costs originating from possible change of the coaction relationships aid companies to do those appropriate strategic determinations with their logistics activities. This in bend helps them gain, with other companies, how best to modify the object of the cooperation in order to do the whole supply concatenation more competitory † . The concluding research paper was analysing the consequences of following of ABC methods in service sectors at United State of America by Ashford C. Chea. It was reported that the acceptance of ABC to efficaciously apportion resources and to find monetary values was the primary aim in the instance of a big regional bank. Previously, the bank had no clear manner to be services or find how resources were being consumed by different activities. In add-on, since some of the clients were related parties, the bank wished to demo that the charges being made to them were effort-and-use-based, i.e. , there was a direct correlativity between the nature of service provided and the charge for this service. ABC method assisted the bank to turn to both i.e. internal pricing and strategic pricing. For planetary insurance company, the determination to follow ABC method simply for revenue enhancement intents. The method was adopted to find its allotment methodological analysis for external transportation pricing intents. This is because the company wanted to guarantee that its charges to its abroad affiliates were accurate and defendable to revenue enhancement governments. By following ABC, the company ensured that the services provided to all abroad affiliates were tracked through the ABC systems, ensuing in charges straight related to the economic benefit received by the receiver. As a consequence, the company was able to take down its effectual revenue enhancement rate.DecisionABC was introduced in the 1920 ‘s and over period of clip the method continually bettering. As shown in four ( 4 ) instance surveies, ABC is non merely allow for usage in a fabrication environment ; it is besides reported to be most appropriate for service organisations such as fiscal establishmen ts, the health care industry, and authorities organisations. In fact, some banking and fiscal establishments have been using the construct for old ages under other names. One of them is unit costing, which is used to cipher the cost of banking services by finding the cost and ingestion of each unit of end product of maps required to present the service.

Blog Image Context How To Choose Relevant Blog Images

Blog Image Context How To Choose Relevant Blog Images It was mid-autumn, and the air was getting colder. I was walking with a friend down the street, heading to that evening’s symphony performance. As we passed by the county jail on the opposite side of the street, I stopped. I could not believe my eyes. â€Å"Look at that!† I said to my friend. I pointed to the south entrance of the jail building. Now I know that it is commonplace to see photographers with their clients out and about, shooting photos in alleys, the middle of the street, parks, and especially our state capitol grounds library which has soaring two-story Ionic columns and is about the only place around here that you can get that kind of architectural background. But I admit I was surprised to see a photographer out shooting a very-pregnant woman in a tube top on the steps of the county jail. â€Å"What are they doing?† my friend asked. â€Å"I imagine she is having some pregnancy photos taken. You know, the ones that show a baby bump.† â€Å"But why in front of the jail?† â€Å"I assume they want the Art Deco architecture in the background,† I said, hoping it wasn’t because the baby’s father was inside the jail or that she was establishing some horrific self-fulfilling prophecy of where her child would end up. â€Å"I’m not sure the subtlety of the Art Deco elements is really worth it if you have to use the jail as the background.† Our discussion continued as we walked to the concert, ranging from how cold it would be to wear a tube top on that chilly evening to the proclivity for Art Deco to pop up in North Dakota architecture. But I’ve thought about that incident a lot since then, weighing the photographer’s decision to go for an interesting background for her photo and choosing to ignore the context that background provided. Not everyone would know the photo was in front of the jail, but many would. Every image carries, and is in need of, context. This is important when it comes to choosing powerful images for your blog posts. Every Image Needs Context Benign images- stock photos at their worst- carry very little context beyond that of you grabbing a photo for your blog post because you know it’s a best practice to have one. The problem is that even that seemingly innocuous context can work against your great blog post, suggesting that the copy that goes along with this plain vanilla image is just as unexciting. Every image needs context and has its own context, and all of this can work for or against your blog post and the likelihood that someone will read it. 1. A picture is worth a 1,000 words. Any words. A picture is worth a thousand words. But which thousand? On its own, a photo assumes the context the viewer is most comfortable with. Rare is the image that can’t be interpreted differently depending on what the viewer brings to it. One viewer sees complexity while standing before a Pollock painting, and another sees the handiwork of a kindergartner gone mad. That same painting evokes different reactions, too, depending on whether it is hanging in an art gallery or on the wall of an elementary school. A few weeks after the jail photo shoot, I met a friend for coffee. Out of curiosity, I asked her what she would assume if she saw the county jail in the background of baby bump-type photo. â€Å"I’d assume the father of the baby was in jail.† â€Å"Really?† Her reaction surprised me, but maybe she was correct. My assumption had been that the Art Deco elements were the goal, but then again, my major was in art and that’s how I see everything. Pollock’s painting will always be hanging in a gallery for me. The context of your  images helps define the content in which they  appear.Consider your audience. Consider your blog. The thousand words that your image contributes to your post might not be the thousand you were aiming for if you don’t consider who is reading and the blog it is being read on. Tip: In this day and age where it seems as if everyone is looking to be offended, always review the images you select for your blog posts. While you can’t please everyone (and you don’t want to, because that leads to bland, flavorless content), get a set of fresh eyes on the imagery and ask them what they think when they see it with your blog post’s headline and after reading the blog. 2. The words you put with an image changes its impact. Moving beyond the thousand words that your image brings with it, you can include words with images to change its impact. This works best with flexible or peripheral images, those that are illustrating an abstract concept or scenario that could be used lots of ways. These are powerful images because they evoke reader curiosity (which we’ll talk about in a bit). However, they also have to be framed into proper context or confusion arises. For example, imagine an image of a child, head down at a school desk. What does that image mean? If your headline or caption reads: â€Å"Almost half of children don’t eat breakfast before school†... ...your interpretation of that image would be different than if that same text read: â€Å"How to blame your dog for eating your homework, and other productivity hacks†. The same image can mean very different things. The words you use with an image puts it into context so that you don’t have to wonder if the baby’s father was in jail or if the mother loved Art Deco architecture. Recommended Reading:  How To Design The Best Blog Graphics With Free Tools And Design Theory Admittedly, when searching for stock images, we only have keywords to go on, and it’s tough to find images outside of the typical realm of our search. A search on â€Å"productivity† will turn up boring images of computers, notepads, office scenes, and so on. You’ll miss out on those peripheral images that can mean different things in different settings unless you get really good at searching on abstract words for big ideas (which we’ll talk about in a bit). Tip: Use captions with images, and consider captions that do more than indicate where you got the image. Pose a question as a caption, one that the image hints at to answer. Or, use highlighted text or pull quotes in the body of your blog post that frame your images properly. People who are skimming content will see images, headings, and pull quotes. If they are all in contextual sync, the better for you. 3. Images pulled out of context take on new context. Several years ago, I was reading a story online about a man who had been arrested for abusing children after quite a manhunt. The story had only one photo, a small headshot of the reporter who wrote the story. It was the newspaper’s practice to include the headshot of the author. The headshot was a few paragraphs down, embedded in the text of the story, on the right. The problem was that there was no other photo for the story. As this story was shared on social media, the bold headline that told of a man who had committed a horrific crime against children was associated with an image of the reporter. By the next day, the headshot was pulled from the article, so this unfortunate realization must have occurred to the newspaper, too, but I’d already seen the article shared on social media with the grinning reporter next to the headline, insinuating he was the criminal. The first rule would be that you should always have a featured image for every blog post so that your headshot or a random ad doesn’t become the image on social media. But there’s more to it than that. A clever or innocuous image that relies on the body copy of a blog post may seem fine, but when it gets shared on social media, all that people may have to go by is the headline and the image. Is the right context still there? More than ever, headline clarity matters. But so does headline-image match. Look at your blog post’s featured image, the one that you (and others) will be seeing when it is shared on social media. Is the context all wrong? Is the message not what you expected? Tip: If need be, incorporate words into your graphic itself (using Canva.com perhaps) so that wherever the image travels, the context does, too. This is especially helpful if your blog post topic is controversial or evokes strong reactions. Choosing Powerful Images That Work It isn’t easy choosing an image to go with a blog post, matching image with message. Most of the time is devoted to the actual blog post, and it’s pretty common to toss an image in as an afterthought just before you publish. The image, however, is doing some serious work (such as helping your blog post get read on already image-saturated social networks), so you should give it serious consideration. Recommended Reading:  How To Make The Best Blog Graphics (For Non-Designers) I came up with a few ways to approach making a decision about images you will use with your blog posts. Whether you use all or some from this list is up to you. 1. Your image must stand out. Getting your image to stand out isn’t easy. Every social network is overrun with images. The methods you’ll use to get your image to stand out are, quite simply: Color Startling image Using humor. Humor is probably the easiest way to go when it comes to creating a startling image that stands out, but when everyone does it...no one does it well after a while. This is particularly the case with memes. I know that a lot of blog posts recommend using memes and other pop-culture images, but I suggest proceeding with caution in how you choose those types of images. We’ve all seen the Boromir â€Å"One does not simply†¦Ã¢â‚¬  meme to death, or the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man In The World meme. Neither are particularly funny at this point, and are almost completely ignorable. In other words, they are no longer a startling image because they became overused. Humor startles when it’s fresh and stinks when it’s stale. Shake up assumptions. Startling images are hard to come by, at this point, and completely subjective. However, you can use an image out of typical context and make a strong point for your blog post that is completely within your context. An example is an image I found for a post Garrett wrote several years ago. Despite the age of the post, that image still comes to mind even now. In his post, he introduced the concept of content marketing to readers, and discussed how it was different from traditional marketing forms. While looking for an image to illustrate the post, I considered the usual suspects: stock photos of computers, people, pens on notebooks, guy holding a loudspeaker- you know the kind of generic images I’m talking about. And then I found this: The color (or the lack thereof) is striking, but the image itself is also startling. And the image, in conjunction with the title (â€Å"What Is Content Marketing?†), is startling, too. It inspires curiosity that could get someone to read your blog post, because what would a post-apocalyptic dystopia have to do with content marketing? When I stumbled across the image in the stock photo gallery, I was immediately drawn to it, and it suddenly occurred to me that it perfectly illustrated the problem that content marketing solved. In the wasteland of marketing, there had to be a better solution. I captioned the image, â€Å"Traditional marketing has desensitized our audience and made them tune out our message. What now?† and used it to tap into the initial problem that filled the introductory paragraphs of the blog post (to which content marketing was the eventual solution, of course). Another example is this post, a blog post about capturing ideas. Avoiding the usual imagery of a lightbulb, post-it notes, or someone with question marks above their head, I went with goldfish in a bowl that had striking orange-blue (complementary/opposite) colors. An example of blog image context with an unusual, interesting visual. Tip: The best image is the one that makes you ask a different question about your blog post. Instead of merely illustrating the blog post’s obvious concepts or generic associations, try finding an image that illustrates an abstract concept in a surprising way. 2. Your image should illustrate the idea. Not every post will have a post-apocalyptic dystopian photo to go with it (nor should it), but you should always try to match your graphics up to the big idea in your post. What I mean is that your post is about something bigger than a computer keyboard or a jar of pens or whatever other generic stock photo image you so often see on blog posts. Boring imagery often illustrates objects that are related to the topic instead of the higher concepts. Sure, a computer is related to content marketing, but who cares? This is tricky, particularly if you are pressed for time and know that you need to have an image with every blog post so that it fares well on social media. It takes serious time to find or create images that perform this level of illustration. One of my favorite illustrations is the one Ashton did  for a blog post I wrote about creating content for fragmented audiences. When Ashton finished the illustration and sent it to me for review, I absolutely loved it. She illustrated the big idea perfectly, showing two forms of fragmentation (generational and device use) in one simple image. The image hit on concrete points in the post as well as showed, at a glance, the challenge a fragmented audience presented to content marketers. The post-apocalyptic dystopia image from #1 fits this criteria, too, by addressing the big idea behind the problem which requires the solution outlined in the blog post. Any image is better than none (mostly), but part of your editorial planning should be about deciphering the big idea in your post and finding or creating imagery that illustrates that instead of peripheral objects or actions that don’t mean anything. Tip: When you finish writing your blog post, sum it up in one sentence for yourself. Find the big idea, and then find an image to illustrate that specific idea instead of finding an image to illustrate your blog post in general. 3. Your image could evoke curiosity. As long as your image isn’t fighting the proper context (i.e. suggesting the opposite of what your blog post is about), it could function successfully even if it is vague (sort of like the examples in #1). Let’s take a look at an old blog post of mine from several years ago. The blog post is about how the people you follow on social media can actually change you and how you view and react to things. When I set about trying to find an image that would go with the post, I wanted to avoid social media logos, stock photo people, or those creepy white stock photo balloon stick figures. But this was a tough topic to find an image for. Should I find something that illustrated the concept of following? Of social media? Of change? These were abstract ideas, which are hard to find images for. I decided to focus on the idea of â€Å"view†, and I ended up using this image: It was visually strong with its graphic circles and bold red element, fulfilling #1. It’s a photo of camera filters, suggesting the idea of how the people we follow on social media filter our understanding and view. Now, in hindsight, I’d have gone back into the post to rework the copy a bit to highlight this concept, freely using the camera/lense/viewfinder/filter analogy so that it would make better sense to the reader. That would have made it work better. Tip: Write your post. And then, if you find a fantastic image that evokes curiosity, go back and edit your post so it fits. Sometimes the image can inspire the copy, and that’s perfectly fine. How Will You Explore Blog Image Context? In a nutshell, this post is about understanding how context can affect a reader’s interpretation of an image, and what you can do to frame that context. And then, it’s about playing around a bit with context, bending those rules as far as you can so that you choose blog post images that really get attention and get readers to read. Recommended Reading: We’ve written a lot of posts to help you with both choosing and creating images for your blog content. Are You Sure You’re Using Copyright Free Images For Your Blog? Should You Use Stock Or Free Images For Blog Posts? Color Psychology In Content Marketing: The Ultimate Color Guide