Role of the Public Relations Professional Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Role of the Public Relations Professional - Essay Example public relations department help increase the customer base of a company and it helps build a better corporate image which indirectly helps the marketing department. This paper discusses public relations and its impact in the corporate world. Public relations activities can either be perform in-house or by an external public relations agency. There are many successful businesses out there in the global economy. These companies may be good at their expertise, but most of them do not have the functional business knowledge to perform an adequate job with specific business functions such as public relations. Due to this business reality public relation agency such as 5W Public Relations exist. 5W is one of the 25 largest public relations agencies in the United States whose goal is to successful deliver their client’s messages to the target audiences (5wpr, 2009). Some of the corporate clients that enjoy the services of 5W are rapper Ice Cube, Barnes & Noble, Harrahs, Nice, Phillips Van Hausen Corporation, and McDonalds. Many of these corporate clients choose to outsource their public relations activities to public relations a public relation agency such as 5W because it more cost effective to contract them than to perform these types of activities themselves. For example in order to be successful with media relation you have good contacts with news and media channels to get media players to participate in your media initiatives. It is much easier for public relation agency to deal with the networking, than for a sole corporation or specific client to do it themselves. Public relations can have a high level of importance for corporation when they get into trouble due to bad corporate action that hurt the brand image of a firm. An example of a company that needed major help from its public relations activities after mishandling its international activities was Nike Corporation. In the late 1990’s Nike got involved in manufacturing activities in developing nation

The Impact of Digital TV on audiences and TV companies Essay Example for Free

The Impact of Digital TV on audiences and TV companies Essay Fifty years ago, TV was the new thing that would enhance our lives. Even up to this day, we still captivate ourselves to this evolving culture which has had such an impact to us. Just imagine if one of the worlds greatest events would not have been shown in TV (imagine people across America not watching the twin towers fall-what impact would it have on other people?). But these recent times, the advent of Digital Television is another step towards the progression of television itself. It opens a whole window of possibilities- more channels, more choices, better interactivity. Even the television companies itself will be given a new challenge by introducing this new technology to its current and future customers. It is up to them however to find the gap in the market to gain full advantage of Digital TV. When there is progression, so will be regression. Digital TV will not just catch on and be the next best thing instantly. There will be some people who will oppose to the idea and the companies will try and fight over viewing rights of channels. A recent Ofcom report said more than 60% of UK households now receive digital TV. With a digital switchover planned to take place from 2008-2012, should the government say yay or nay? Let us imagine ourselves when the digital switchover has taken place. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? First off, let us discuss the advantages of digital TV. It has a great appeal to the majority of people. Even though the cost of gaining access to one is still expensive experts say that the price of present digital subscriptions and hardware will drop dramatically after a few years. However, the cheapest free view set-top-box presently is as low as à ¯Ã‚ ¿Ã‚ ½25.00. Another advantage is that digital TV could allow the audience to pause record their programmes without the use of tapes. It is also said to be quicker and simpler process than the old VCR. In line with digital TV, the actual television set is changing. There are now ones that are called HDTV (high definition TV). This technology coupled with digital TV provides us with high quality video and sound that is dramatically noticeable. In more simple terms, pictures and sound will have more consistency and less interference. Digital TV has also embraced the convergence of interactivity. Extra information and interactive features now accompany most programmes. Compared to analogue TVs teletext, digital TVs interactivity takes it to a new level. It is more user-friendly and makes the viewer more involved. There is even an electronic programme guide which gives you far more information about programmes content. This hands-on approach is what makes digital TV unique. Of course, these advantages over the audiences equate to the benefits that companies and the government get. At the moment, there are 3 main ways to go digital: Satellite (SKY, Canal +, RAI, etc.), Cable (NTL and Telewest) and Freeview. At the moment, Satellite access is ahead in terms of market share with 7.1 million subscribers (Sky subscribers), followed by 3.9 million homes supplied by freeview and 2.5 million subscribers get their digital TV through cable. These statistics suggest that competition is fierce at the moment. It said up to 1.5 million boxes had been sold in the lead-up to Christmas, with 190,000 sold in each of the two weeks before the holidays. There might be fierce competition, but this is deemed to be a healthy competition. There will be a time when existing sales are starting to tail off. The introduction of the switch off will be a seizing opportunity for them to increase their sales. These opportunities are enhanced services-which adds value to a subscription (or in the case of freeviews, a sharp increase in set-top boxes and HDTVs-which is already happening). Recently, Sky has recently offered a new free satellite service called Sky FreeSat. It allows access to 140 non-subscription channels for a one-off fee. Even the likes of BBC and ITV are to launch a free-to-view satellite TV service to cater for viewers unable to receive Freeview digital coverage-and to rival the monopoly that Sky has. Also, in line with the HDTV technology, the BBC aims to produce 100% HD programmes by 2010. The government will also have some advantages over the switch off. When all the analogue signals have been switched off, those signals could be sold to telephone, communications or aerospace companies to make use of the cleaned up space. The countrys image is also on the line. It essentially propels the country into the digital age in order to gain a more competitive advantage. Furthermore, there are more opportunities for a better efficiency of the operation of government services reducing costs and keeping down taxes. I have used the word majority because there are people who are not in full favour of digital TV. There are also drawbacks for the companies and the government. Digital is an all or nothing technology. The pictures are either crystal clear or absent. In heavy rain or snow an analogue signal might give a grainy but watchable picture. Digital signals are more robust and will tolerate a high level of interference but, when conditions become too bad, both the picture and the sound will vanish. In addition, because all the work is done by an internal computer, it sometimes makes mistakes and the picture can disappear in a maze of coloured squares or simply freeze on the screen. However, this trade off between pictures which might always be grainy and crystal-clear pictures which occasionally disappear will be preferable to most people. Digital provides just one channel from the set top box at a time (the same as existing satellite TV receivers). You cant watch one digital channel and record another unless you: 1. Have more than one set top box 2. Keep your existing analogue satellite receiver 3. Continue to use analogue terrestrial TV (as long as the transmissions last about 5 10 years is anticipated) In a survey, when asked to identify the disadvantages of digital television, a third (32%) state that it is too expensive, 9% that you have to pay for a subscription, and 8% that there are too many channels and choice. Also, the 40% who do not have digital television yet will discover that the present cost of service is not attainable in their opinion. Of course, without the funding that the BBC get from the TV license lowered, they would obviously look to increase the cost threefold. The increase in the number of channels isnt without disadvantages. For viewers, the absence of original programming can lead to a feeling of nothing being on across hundreds of channels. Event programmes are also under threat; virtually gone are the days when 30 million people tuned into the same programme. For channel owners selling advertising time is increasingly difficult. Niche broadcasters may be advantageous in terms of reaching a specific target audience but many have official audience shares of 0%. There was even a study made by Dr Jeremy Klein claiming that Millions of people are not using digital TV because they find it too confusing. He says that Elderly and short-sighted people find it laborious and demanding changing channels. It is said that two million people are affected by this problem. As a result, the elderly and people with low-income will be put off with this news. They feel that it will be better to stick with the old and what they are used to. Companies are also having trouble with the changes.

How John Keats used Symbolism in his Ode to a Grecian Urn Essay

How John Keats used Symbolism in his â€Å"Ode to a Grecian Urn†   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  John Keats was born in 1795 in Moorfields, England. He was the son of a stableman who married the owner’s daughter and eventually inherited the stable for himself. He was fourteen when his mother died of tuberculosis. Having been apprenticed to an apothecary at the age of fifteen, John felt the need to leave medical field to focus primarily poetry. Keats’s imagery ranges from all of our physical sensations: sight, touch, sound, taste, and sexuality. Keats is one of the most famous for his Odes. Traditionally, the ode is lengthy, serious in subject, elevated in its diction and style, and often elaborate in its stanza structure. â€Å"Symbolism seems the obvious term for the dominant style which followed nineteenth-century realism† (Wellek 251). According to an article found in Jstor journal, written by Vyacgeslav Ivanov, titled, Symbolism, â€Å"symbols are far from being an invention and convention of mankind, constitute in the universe, all pulsating with life, a primordial imprint in the very substance of things and, and it were, an occult language by means of which is achieved a preordained communion of innumerable kindred spirits, no matter how these spirits may differ in their individual modes of existence or whether they belong to different orders of creation† (Ivanov 29). Keats uses symbolism in â€Å"Ode to a Grecian Urn† to illustrate his love for ancient Greece.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Ode to a Grecian Urn’ was written by John Keats at some unknown date. â€Å"The Urn, as Keats described it, was a classical vase, decorated with a frieze of engraved figures in scenes from pastoral life. In reality it was more than any particular vase which he had seen on his museum excursions with Haydon or Severn. The Grecian Urn represented poetic vision, the timeless, enchanted world into which the artist’s imagination alone can enter,† as stated in Robert Gittings and Jo Manton’s book titled The Story of John Keats (Gittings and Manton, pg. 148). In this poem Keats wants to create a world of pure joy, but the world is of make believed of people living in a moment in time. In an article titled, â€Å"Thought is sacrificed to sensation in the poetry of John Keats,† author Iain Morrison states that â€Å"Existing in a frozen or suspended time, they cannot move or cha... ... to know.† The beauty lies in the urn. â€Å"What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth,† as stated by Catherine Owens Peare, author of a book titled John Keats a Portrait in Words. â€Å"John Keats’s â€Å"Ode on a Grecian Urn† was both inevitable and incredible. It was inevitable that he should by now have struggled free of the sonnet with its fourteen-line prejudice to create this ten-line stanza and its two pairs of lines and two sets of triple rhymes, inevitable that in developing his own style he should have resolved his philosophic search at this his period of most superb creativity† (Peare, pg. 174). Douglas Wilson’s article in Jstor titled â€Å"Reading the Urn: Death in Keats’s Arcadia,† â€Å"Like Blake’s â€Å"Mental Traveler† and so many other Romantic poems, â€Å"Ode on a Grecian Urn† invites the reader into a landscape of consciousness. As S.T. Coleridge puts it, the primary function of the poetic work, like the visual language of painting, is â€Å"to instill energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to complete the picture. The ode’s speaker responding to an imaginary urn conjures up, as part of a mental dram, the underside of a vanished culture that created such urns† (Wilson 823).

An unsuccessful learning experience

My unsuccessful learning experience was when I was 16 and starting my Maths A level. We had 2 teachers who split the course material between them, one taking pure maths and the other applied maths. The teacher in charge of the pure maths, which had enjoyed up to A level and received an A for (in the days before A* existed, so top marks in other words), was a young man who had just qualified from his PGCE and came to teach us A level maths.The main problem wasn't the teacher's age, I'm sure plenty of young teachers are very capable, the issue was more that he didn't have the self confidence to stand up to the more lively characters in the class. He didn't know how to respond when a pupil would try and disrupt the class by talking about something irrelevant, like last nights television, therefore that pupil would carry on talking and valuable lesson time would be wasted. Even when he did ask people to be quiet a fair amount of disruption had already been made.The other issue was that h e didn't know his subject, in this case pure maths, well enough. I remember clearly one day the entire class followed him working out a complicated equation, writing down his calculations as we went along. After using up two blackboards worth of calculations he came to his answer, only for one of the pupils to check the answers in the back of out text book and announce it was the wrong answer. By then he had erased half of his calculation and he couldn't go back to see where he had made a mistake.It wasn't the only time his calculations were wrong or he was unsure of his subject, which made the pupils very nervous. The short term result was that my class was time-tabled extra maths lessons to try to cover for this teacher's lack of covering his subject, with the other maths teacher working longer lesson hours to try to get us through the exam. The longer term result was that the Pure maths results for that year were far lower than expected and the teacher was moved down to teaching 11-12 year olds maths.

Fraud Case

THE NATION’S NEWSPAPER BS2003-01b Collegiate Case Study Adelphia founder, 2 sons, 2 others arrested in fraud By David Lieberman and Greg Farrell www. usatodaycollege. com Accounting fraud Part II: The results â€Å"Creative accounting† is not a new technique, but it can certainly be a costly one. Businesses feel the pressure to appear profitable in order to attract investors and resources, but deceptive or fraudulent accounting practices often lead to drastic consequences. Are these so-called creative practices always illegal or can they ever be justified? This case study will present examples of companies who have used inappropriate accounting practices, the results of their deceptions and the government's plan to avoid future incidents. WorldCom scandal brings subpoenas, condmnation By Andrew Backover and Thor Vladmanis Andersen’s partners chart firm’s future today By Greg Farrell Client-starved Arthur Andersen cuts 7,000 jobs By Greg Farrell Dominoes hit WorldCom partners, clients By Michelle Kessler Adelphia plans to file Chapter 11 Cable firm expected to seek bankruptcy protection today NEW YORK — The waiting should be over today. Adelphia Communications plans to file for bankruptcy protection, nearly three months after the onceproud No. 6 cable operator first disclosed dealings with the family of founder John Rigas that turned it into a symbol of corporate scandal. The company is expected to announce that it has raised as much as $1. 5 billion from banks led by J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup to keep operating while a bankruptcy judge decides how creditors will be paid. A Chapter 11 filing — the biggest in cable history — could help efforts to find a buyer for some, or all, of Adelphia's systems, which serve 5. 7 million subscribers. The court can protect an acquirer from unexpected liabilities, including those stemming from several shareholder lawsuits and investigations into Adelphia's finances by two grand juries and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company could pay off its estimated $19 billion in debt if it can sell systems for $3,500 per subscriber, roughly the industr y norm. But stockholders could lose their entire investments. Adelphia shares closed Friday at 15 cents in over-the-counter trading. Case Study Expert: John D. Martin, Ph. D. Professor of Finance, Baylor University USA TODAY Snapshots ® Politicians role in monitoring business Opinion leaders1 say government should be more involved in oversight and regulation of private enterprise2: 52% 45% Agree Disagree Source: Edelman Public Relations Worldwide/ StrategyOne Research survey of 400 respondents. 1 – College educated 35- to 64-year-olds with household incomes of more than $100,000 2 – Does not add up to 100% due to rounding By Darryl Haralson Marcy E. E. Mullins, USA TODAY By Darryl Haralson andand Marcy Mullins, USA TODAY Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2002 And a sale may devastate Coudersport, Pa. , where Adelphia is headquartered. It's by far the largest employer in the rural, mountain town of 3,000. Meanwhile, Adelphia will tr y to reassure its subscribers. â€Å"Adelphia is committed to reversing its admittedly difficult present financial situation,† it wrote last week to 3,500 franchise officials. â€Å"Most importantly, there should be no change in service to Adelphia customers as a result of these developments. † Adelphia's downfall began on March 27, when it disclosed that a Rigas family partnership had borrowed $2. billion using company assets as collateral. The amount has since been raised to $3. 1 billion. That stunned analysts, who believed that the operator was already too deeply in debt. Barraged with questions, Adelphia put off release of its 2001 annual report. More questions were raised when it was confirmed that the SEC was investigating. As the stock plummeted, Nasdaq weighed delisting Adelphia shares. T hat took effect on June 3. After acknowledging that it would have to restate its earnings, Adelphia put several cable systems on the block. The company defaulted on bank loans and failed to make interest payments on bonds. And Rigas and sons Timothy, Michael and James were forced to relinquish their jobs and board seats. Then new interim CEO Erland Kailbourne stunned company watchers by disclosing a series of cases where the Rigas family allegedly used Adelphia for private gain. Among other things, the company paid for their apartments in New York, built a golf course on Rigas-owned land, helped the purchase of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, created a Rigas-run investment firm and subsidized a documentary film. Cover story Adelphia founder, 2 sons, 2 others arrested in fraud Investigators say company was ‘personal piggy bank' By David Lieberman and Greg Farrell USA TODAY NEW YORK — For 50 years, John Rigas lived the American Dream. Half a century ago, the son of Greek immigrants left a job making TV picture tubes at Sylvania. The World War II veteran bought a small movie house and a newfangled business — a cable TV company — in the remote town of Coudersport, Pa. , and was on his way to making a fortune. But his oversized ambitions led him this week into an American Nightmare. Wednesday, Manhattan U. S. Attorney James Comey accused 77-year-old Rigas and two sons — Timothy and Michael — with â€Å"one of the largest and most egregious frauds ever perpetrated on investors and creditors. † Rigas attorneys were unavailable for comment. With TV cameras capturing the humiliating moment, the founder of Adelphia Communications, the No. 6 U. S. cable company, was led away in handcuffs here. He became the first CEO arrested in the latest wave of corporate accounting scandals and the most vivid symbol of whitecollar crime since Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky in the 1980s. Two other former Adelphia executives, James Brown and Michael Mulcahey, were picked up in Coudersport. Later in the day, Adelphia itself — which filed for bankruptcy-court protection last month — charged Rigas and his family with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, in a filing in Federal Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 2 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, THURSDAY, JULY 25, 2002 Bankruptcy Court in New York. The Rigases could be forced to pay three times any damages the court finds. The lawsuit alleges about $1 billion in damages. Behind their â€Å"small-town facade,† the Adelphia lawsuit says, the Rigases â€Å"used their domination and control of Adelphia, and their isolation from the scrutiny of the outside world, to engage in one of the largest schemes of selfdealing and financial wrongdoing in American corporate history. † The Justice Department and the U. S. Postal Inspection Service charged the five executives with securities, wire and bank fraud, saying they â€Å"looted Adelphia on a massive scale† and used it as a â€Å"personal piggy bank. Rigas private funds sloshed with Adelphia's in the same cashmanagement system. A U. S. judge set bail for the Rigases at $10 million apiece, secured by cash and property. Allegations against the Rigases range from big schemes to hide financial problems at the cable company to relatively small-scale thievery. For example, Timothy was accused of using a company jet for an African safari vacation in 2000. Adelphia's lawsuit adds that John's daughter, Ellen, used company planes to bring guests to her wedding to Peter Venetis, who became an Adelphia board member. The couple's cozy position enabled them to save $150,000 since 1998: They lived rent-free in two Adelphia-owned apartments on Manhattan's swank Upper East Side, the lawsuit says. In less than four years, the Rigases â€Å"stole hundreds of millions of dollars, and through their fraud (and) caused losses to investors of more than $60 billion,† Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson says. The defendants could face jail time in the criminal case. By filing a complaint instead of a full-fledged indictment, the grand juries weighing evidence in the case can remain empaneled to approve charges against others. They have 10 days to indict those arrested, and 20 days to charge others. Also Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit in U. S. District Court that's similar to the criminal complaint, and includes a third Rigas son, James. The SEC would bar the defendants from serving any publicly owned company. It also wants them and Adelphia to pay restitution and fines. Adelphia said in a statement that the claim against it would â€Å"only have the effect of further penalizing the company's stakeholders who were the victims of the Rigas' improper conduct. The Adelphia cases are low-hanging fruit for prosecutors eager to show that they're getting tough on white-collar criminals. â€Å"This is an old fashioned hand-in-the-till case that's easier to prosecute than an esoteric fraud like Enron,† says Jack Coffee, who teaches securities law at Columbia University. â€Å"To prosecute Enron, you're going to have to teach the jury an intermediate college course i n accounting. † Jacob Frenkel of Smith Gambrell and Russell agrees. â€Å"This could be sexiest of all the cases,† he says. â€Å"Here, you're talking about corporate looting. Every guilty disposition arising out of this indictment should become a show-andtell in all business schools as the antithesis of public company management and stewardship. † Talking tough, getting tough The arrests came as House and Senate negotiators agreed on tough measures, including jail time, for executives convicted of fraud. And Wall Street was impressed after weeks of growing fearfulness about a possible tsunami of corporate scandals. The Dow Jones industrial average soared 489 points Wednesday. That's the second biggest one-day point gain ever. That contrasts with the 179-point drop on July 9, when President Bush called for a new era of corporate responsibility. The arrests aren't â€Å"about Democrats and Republicans,† says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the SEC under President Clinton. â€Å"This is about investors, and they like what they're seeing now. † Even people who aren't obsessed with stocks seem to like the idea of big shots getting a comeuppance. â€Å"We are angry, and we have every right to be angry,† says futurist and consumer expert Marian Salzman of Euro RSCG Worldwide. There's a feeling that we need to kick out the evil-doers in the industry. † But some might recoil at the image of a dignified old man being led before the cameras in handcuffs. â€Å"They're actually going to look sympathetic,† says Robin Cohn, author of The PR Crisis Bible. â€Å"Why would you Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 3 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, THURSDAY, JU LY 25, 2002 handcuff an old man? He's not a murderer and a rapist. That's not to say they aren't crooks. But I think the public would rather see somebody they know in handcuffs — like (former Enron CEO) Ken Lay. And the incident could make the government look somewhat silly, she says. â€Å"I can't imagine Saturday Night Live not doing anything with this. † Corporate crime is in the spotlight these days. Last month, federal prosecutors arrested former ImClone CEO Sam Waksal on charges of illegal trading on inside information and obstruction of justice. Their investigation has expanded to include friends and family of Waksal, who also might have illegally traded on inside information about ImClone last December. Investigators are trying to determine whether any inside information was passed to Waksal's friend Martha Stewart, who sold her ImClone stock just before a Food and Drug Administration announcement, denying an application to market a cancer-fighting drug, drove the stock price down. In coming months, the Justice Department is expected to charge top executives of Enron and WorldCom with fraud. The department's Enron Task Force won one court battle last month when a Houston jury found auditor Arthur Andersen criminally guilty of obstruction of justice. It appears, though, that officials wanted to start off with a bang as they arrested the Rigases. â€Å"What's unusual here is the level of detail included in the criminal complaint, and the number of defendants arrested simultaneously,† says former prosecutor Robert Mintz, now at McCarter & English. â€Å"Usually, the government builds a case slowly, with eventual defections among defendants. Here, it has leveled a wide range of allegations against upper management. That suggests that the government believes it has strong case and that they expect a rush to the prosecutor's door by defendants who will vie to strike deals. The cases build on information that began to come out in late March. Adelphia disclosed then that the Rigases had used assets of the already debt-heavy company to secure loans to private, family-run partnerships. That borrowing is now put at $3. 1 billion. Independent directors forced the Rigases out of their executive positions and board seats, installing f ormer banker Erland Kailbourne as interim CEO. When they investigated the company's condition, they found and disclosed case after case in which the Rigases made no distinction between their personal funds and businesses and Adelphia's. Bad news gets worse But Adelphia was already in a tailspin. Investors lost confidence. Auditors refused to certify the company's financial reports. And lenders cut it off, leading the company to miss interest and dividend payments. Among the charges leading to the Rigases' arrest: u That the family began using Adelphia as collateral for private loans in 1996, even though the company â€Å"was one of the largest junk bond issuers in the United States. † Investors weren't told. u That the Rigases secretly inflated Adelphia's cable TV subscription numbers to make investors think it was still growing at a healthy pace. In 2000 they began to count subscribers from systems in Brazil and Venezuela, where Adelphia owns a minority stake. In 2001, Adelphia began adding customers who just ordered high-speed Internet services from the Rigases' non-Adelphia systems. And earlier this year, they folded in people who ordered home security services from Adelphia. u That they used accounting legerdemain to disguise Adelphia's actual expenses for digital decoder boxes. In 2001 the company claimed that it sold 525,000 boxes for $101 million to an unaudited Rigas-owned company that has no cable systems. That, starting in 2000, Adelphia spent $13 million to build a golf club on land mostly owned by John Rigas. u That in 1999, they told analysts that Adelphia could provide two-way communications to 50% of its customers. The real number was 35%. u And that the Rigases took more than $252 million from Adelphia to pay for margin calls on their purchases as the company's stock price fell. Contributing: Michael McCarthy R eprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 4 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY NEWS SECTION, FRIDAY, JUNE 28, 2002 WorldCom scandal brings subpoenas, condemnation Accounting rumors rattle Wall Street By Andrew Backover and Thor Valdmanis USA TODAY The accounting scandal that enveloped WorldCom reverberated through Wall Street and Washington on Thursday. u Congress subpoenaed top WorldCom executives. u President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill separately railed at corporate wrongdoers. u Unfounded rumors of accounting problems hit stocks of other companies. WorldCom on Tuesday revealed what could be one of the biggest accounting frauds ever. Company officials said $3. billion in expenses had been hidden in financial statements, inflating profits in 2001 and the first quarter of 2002. The Securities and Exchange Commission has since charged WorldCom with fraud. Bush, at an economic summit in Canada, said he is concerned about the economic impact from â€Å"some corporate leaders who have not upheld their responsibility. † O'Neill, a former chief executive of Alcoa, said in an interv iew on ABC's Good Morning America that the people responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. WorldCom has raised fears and rumors about more business accounting scandals. Trading was halted for General Motors stock Thursday afternoon because of rumors of accounting irregularities. GM said they were untrue. Broadcast giant Clear Channel Communications denied it is under an SEC investigation, yet its stock fell almost 13%. The House Financial Services Committee set a July 8 hearing into the WorldCom case. Subpoenas went to: u Current WorldCom CEO John Sidgmore. u Former chief financial officer Scott Sullivan, who was fired this week. * Former WorldCom chief executive Bernie Ebbers, who was ousted in April and who owes WorldCom $408 million for personal loans. Salomon Smith Barney telecom analyst Jack Grubman. Once one of WorldCom's most bullish supporters on Wall Street, he has been criticized for possible conflicts of interest. His firm collected millions of dollars in fees as a WorldCom financial adviser. WorldCom spokesman Brad Burns declined comment on whether Sidgmore would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify. Ebbers and Sullivan couldn 't be reached. Salomon says Grubman â€Å"will fully cooperate. † And there could be more investigations. The House Energy and Commerce Committee told WorldCom to turn over financial records by July 11. WorldCom, strained by $30 billion in debt, will cut 17,000 jobs, or 21% of its workers, starting today. Workers will get severance pay, Burns says. Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 5 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2002 Andersen's partners chart firm's future today By Greg Farrell USA TODAY NEW YORK — Arthur Andersen's U. S. partners will huddle in a nationwide teleconference today to determine the firm's immediate future. At issue: who should lead the firm's U. S. operations on an interim basis, and what steps Andersen should take to remain in business. According to senior partners briefed on the meeting's agenda, Andersen's 1,700 U. S. par tners will decide whether to ask Paul Volcker to assume control of Andersen's domestic operations. In February, Andersen CEO Joseph Berardino asked the former Federal Reserve chairman to head an oversight board dedicated to fixing the firm. A month later, a federal grand jur y indicted Andersen on a charge of obstruction of justice for its role in shredding Enron documents last October. Friday, in a last-ditch effort to stanch client depar tures and restore confidence in Andersen, Volcker offered to lead Andersen if its top par tners asked him. On Tuesday, Berardino resigned. Managing partner C. E. Andrews will meet with Volcker today to discuss his takeover plan. While many obser vers think Volcker's arrival could persuade the J ustice Depar tment to drop the indictment, some Andersen partners are wary of being the subject of an idealistic experiment in transforming the accounting industry. The partners will also discuss, and probably adopt, a â€Å"Renaissance† program aimed at returning Andersen to its roots as a highly regarded auditing firm. This proposal, supported by Andrews, has gained support among older partners who want to stay and rebuild the firm. In other developments: u At federal cour t in Houston, Contributing: Thor Valdmanis J ustice Depar tment lawyers will respond to Andersen's motion to halt further grand jury testimony prior to a May 6 trial. If Judge Melinda Harmon sides with Andersen, it will make the government's obstruction of justice case against Andersen more difficult to win. u Andersen's top global partners will meet Tuesday in London to pick an interim CEO. Andersen's global operations continue to fragment. Its Japanese affiliate, Asahi & Co. , announced plans to merge this fall with rival KPMG. Andersen has also discussed selling affiliates to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Wednesday night, Deloitte spokesman Matthew Batters suggested the firm was only interested in hiring individual Andersen partners and picking up clients leaving the firm. Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 6 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2002 Client-starved Arthur Andersen cuts 7,000 jobs Long expected, layoffs offer first tangible sign of firm's distress By Greg Farrell USA TODAY WorldCom has engaged in what could be one of the bArthur Andersen fired one partner in January for his role in shredding Enron documents. On Monday, the auditing firm announced it will lay off 7,000 of its 26,000 U. S. employees because of the consequences of that shredding. The job cuts at Andersen have been expected for weeks, ever since the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against the firm for its role in destroying its paperwork just as a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into Enron was about to begin. Since the indictment, unsealed on March 14, scores of clients have deserted Andersen. As Andersen partners leave the firm for opportunities at other Big Five rivals, more clients are expected to migrate. So far, Andersen has weathered the crisis without filing for bankruptcy protection. But the layoffs, announced Monday, are the first tangible sign of financial distress at the firm. Of the 7,000 employees being let go, the vast majority are auditing staffers and managers, as well as administrative personnel. A small number of Andersen's 1,700 U. S. partners are also being let go. According to managing partner Grover Wray, most partners are still needed to serve Andersen's remaining clients. Rather than hand out severance checks to laid-off employees, Wray says Andersen is implementing a program called â€Å"salary continuation. † nder this plan, laid-off workers will continue to be paid for a certain number of weeks, depending on how long they've been with the firm. During that period, these employees will keep their benefits and be free to use their office space to search for new jobs. We are trying to treat our people with a level of dignity,† Wray says. In addition to client defections, Andersen also faces major liabilities for the role it played in Enron's collapse into bankruptcy last fall. Plaintiffs lawyer Bill Lerach filed an expanded complaint Monday against Andersen and former Enron managers in federal court in Houston. But the expanded lawsuit, on behalf of a major Enron shareholder — the Unive rsity of California system — adds nine Wall Street investment banks and two law firms to the list of defendants. Representatives from the banks — JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, CS First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Lehman Bros. — either declined comment on Monday or denied the complaint's allegations of complicity in Enron's collapse. Notably, Lerach's complaint leaves out two key players in Enron's demise — Michael Kopper, who headed some of the special purpose entities that kept Enron liabilities off the company's balance sheet, and Ben Glisan, the former Enron treasurer accused of facilitating some of Enron's dubious accounting practices. Glisan is now believed to be cooperating with the Justice Department probe of Enron's activities. Lerach would not comment on whether the pair supplied his investigators with information. But Larry Finder, a former U. S. Attorney now in private practice in Houston, doubts either is helping Lerach. Finder says that if either of them is providing information, it would be to the Justice Department first, where they face criminal liability. And the Justice Department wouldn't necessarily welcome a decision by a witness to cooperate in civil litigation. Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 7 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2002 Dominoes hit WorldCom partners, clients Unpleasant ripple effect also spreads to vendors, charities, sponsored events By Michelle Kessler USA TODAY The WB television network, PGA Tour and Texas Parks and Wildlife service aren't in telecom, but they've already been hurt by the WorldCom scandal. That's because they all did business with WorldCom, as did thousands of other companies. Now they're all trying to figure out where they stand with the struggling giant — and coming up with backup plans. This is not going to be pleasant for a lot of companies,† says Kerry Adler, CEO of WorldCom customer Webhelp. Among those affected: u V e n d o r s . WorldCom repor ted that its capital expenditures dropped 42% to about $1. 3 billion in the first quarter from a year ago, yet it remained a big customer for many telecom equipment makers. While it's unclear how accurate WorldCom's numbers are becaus e of the accounting scandal, what is clear is that its spending has slowed. The hardest hit is Juniper Networks, says Banc of America Securities analyst Christopher Crespi. WorldCom provided about 10% of Juniper's annual revenue, including â€Å"less than $7 million† this quarter, Juniper says. If WorldCom stops buying, that could dampen Juniper's forecast for the year. â€Å"It could easily subtract $50 million or $60 million off their top line,† says Soundview Technology analyst Ryan Molloy. Customers Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and Redback Networks could also get stung, but WorldCom accounts for just a small percentage of total sales, says U. S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray analyst Edward Jackson. All telecom equipment makers could be affected in coming months, even if they didn't do business directly with WorldCom, analysts say. WorldCom was known for buying the latest, most high-tech equipment, forcing competitors to do the same if they wanted to keep up. With WorldCom out of the picture, spending could lag. u Contractors. In 1999, when consulting firm EDS signed an 11-year, $6. 4 billion contract to provide technology services to WorldCom, telecom was a growing industry. EDS is stuck with the deal and a related pledge to buy $6 billion worth of telecom services during that period. Now, EDS says it no longer wants to spend that much with WorldCom. It's in talks to work out a deal. RMH Teleservices has a five-year contract to provide customer service for WorldCom's MCI division. That accounted for 19. 5% of RMH's revenue from October to March. â€Å"While we cannot predict the future . . . we expect to continue to provide these services for MCI,† RMH leader John Fellows said in a statement. u Business partners. Last year, WorldCom pledged to buy millions of dollars in advertising from AOL Time Warner over several years. The exact terms were not disclosed. Now, that deal could be off, meaning fewer ads for Time magazine, cable's TBS and the WB television network. WorldCom also provides service to the company's AOL Internet division. AOL says it has backup providers in case WorldCom service is disrupted. Satellite cable provider DirecTV is holding meetings to determine how to handle its 4-month-old partnership with WorldCom. WorldCom was to provide the underlying network for part of DirecTV's high-speed Internet access service. Similar questions are being asked at Internet Security Systems, a software company that agreed in May to provide security services to WorldCom customers. The value of the two deals was not disclosed. * Sponsored events. Last week's Fourth of July fireworks Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 8 AS SEEN IN USA TODAY MONEY SECTION, TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2002 celebration on the Mall in Washington was supposed to be paid for by WorldCom, which has sponsored part of the festivities for five years. But the company pulled out. The National Parks Foundation scrambled to find new funding from AT. Also in Washington, the MCI Center arena might soon be looking for a new sponsor and name. The WorldCom Classic, an annual PGA Tour stop in Hilton Head, S. C. , is in the same situation. u Charities. Each month, about 10,000 teachers receive free training in math, science and the arts from the MarcoPolo project, which is sponsored by WorldCom's charity arm. Now, program administrators and partners — including the National Geographic Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science and The Kennedy Center — are tr ying to make the proj ect independent of the struggling company. Last week, they pulled WorldCom's logos from the MarcoPolo Web site. They're applying to make it a â€Å"public charity,† says Caleb Schutz, president of WorldCom Foundation. There's a lot to lose if the company . . . pulled the plug. † For now, WorldCom still funds MarcoPolo. u Customers. The Texas Parks and Wildlife department spent last week printing temporary fishing and hunting licenses as a quick contingency plan. The department relies on a WorldCom computer network to transmit license information to 2,500 vendors. †Å"We certainly have to consider what might happen to our contract,† says Suzy Whittenton, a wildlife director. Webhelp, which outsources customer service for companies such as Microsoft, uses WorldCom to connect its overseas technology specialists with help-seekers in the USA. Because of a contract, Webhelp can't switch providers but was forced to get a backup provider in case WorldCom fails. That means twice the bills. â€Å"It's expensive, and at the end of the day, our clients pay for that,† says CEO Adler. Reprinted with permission. All rights reser ved. Page 9 Behind the Story: A Reporter’s Notebook The collapse of Enron and WorldCom, precipitated by revelations that both companies had misrepresented how profitable they were, threatens the health of the the nation’s stock markets. If investors can’t believe earnings numbers issued by the biggest companies in the USA, they won’t put their money into the market. And when investors take their money out of the market, as they’ve been doing for more than two years, businesses suffer. They can’t invest, they can’t grow as quickly and they can’t afford to hire more people. Greg Farrell Money reporter USA TODAY As the Enron and WorldCom examples demonstrate, there’s no room in a public marketplace for â€Å"creative accounting. † Once a few cheaters are revealed, the integrity of the entire marketplace is open to question. Greg Farrell is a reporter in USA TODAY’s Money section. He writes about fraud and white collar crime. In the past year, he has been reporting on Enron, Arthur Andersen, Martha Stewart and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Page 10 For discussion ADELPHIA PLANS TO FILE CHAPTER 11; ADELPHIA FOUNDER, 2 SONS, 2 OTHERS ARRESTED IN FRAUD (LIEBERMAN AND FARRELL) 1. Adelphia Corporation was the sixth largest cable company at the time of its collapse. The company was accused of a number of fraudulent activities including the manipulation of its financial reports. Specifically, the firm was accused of misreporting its cable subscription numbers in order to give the impression that the firm was growing faster than it was. For example, they counted subscribers from systems in Brazil and Venezuela where the company owns a minority stake in the company’s total subscribers. They also counted customers who ordered high-speed Internet services from companies owned by the Rigas family and clients that ordered home security services from Adelphia. Why would Adelphia’s management engage in what appears to be blatant misrepresentation of their number of subscribers? 2. When CEO John Regas of Adelphia was led away in handcuffs on racketeering charges, some complained that the justice department was making too public a display of its tough stance on white-collar crime. This type of treatment is normally associated with murderers and rapists. How do you feel about the importance of making a public spectacle of white-collar criminals? 3. The Adelphia lawsuit stated that the Rigases â€Å"used their domination and control of Adelphia, and their isolation from the scrutiny of the outside world, to engage in one of the largest schemes of self-dealing and financial wrong doing in American corporate history. Financial economists refer to this type of behavior as an agency cost since corporate executives are the agents of the firm’s owners or principals. How can stockholders protect themselves from the potential for self-dealing by corporate executives? ANDERSEN’S PARTNERS CHART FIRM’S FUTURE TODAY (FARRELL) 1. Arthur Andersen was once the premier public accounting firm but a string of high profile financial reporting disasters that culminated with the failure of Enron caused the demise of the once proud firm. Andersen’s failure highlights the fact that the principal asset of a public accounting firm is the firm’s reputation. Once the firm’s â€Å"credibility† is challenged its clients are no longer willing to pay for its auditing services. What is it that a public accounting firm does that requires it to have a sterling reputation for honesty? 2. Anderson’s initial lay off was 7,000 of its 26,000 employees before the firm completely collapsed and all employees lost their jobs. However, all of Andersen’s clients still needed auditing services so in many instances the employees continued to audit the same firms they had audited for Andersen, just for another auditing firm. If the employees just moved from one firm to another, was there really a layoff? Did Andersen employees really suffer from the demise of Arthur Andersen? Isn’t this also true of the Adelphia, Enron, and WorldCom employees? For more information, log on to http://www. usatodaycollege. com Page 11 Future implications WORLDCOM SCANDAL BRINGS SUBPOENAS, CONDEMNATION (BACKOVER AND VALDMANIS); DOMINOS HIT WORLDCOM PARTNERS, CLIENTS (KESSLER) The financial press coverage of the failures of Adelphia, Enron, and WorldCom have focused principally on stockholders who have lost everything they invested and creditors who stand to lose a portion of what they have loaned the company. However, other important consequences of these high profile failures are often overlooked including: (1) the financial and emotional losses suffered by employees who lose their jobs and face the prospect of a lengthy period of unemployment and possibly the dislocation costs of moving to another community to find work, (2) the local community public services and school systems who lose valuable tax revenues, and (3) the budget crises created for local charities and the arts that depend on corporate contributions for their continued survival. Bankruptcy courts focus on the contractual obligations of the firm to creditors and suppliers. It has been argued that the corporation is a â€Å"guest† of the society and as such has obligations to the entire web of stakeholders that have a financial stake in the firm’s survival. Should the claims of these â€Å"silent stakeholders† also be considered when a firm fails? About The Expert John D. Martin,Ph. D. Professor of Finance Carr P. Collins Chair Hankamer School of Business Baylor University From 1980 until 1998 John Martin taught at the University of Texas at Austin where he was the Margaret and Eugene McDermott Centennial Professor of Finance. Currently holding the Carr P. Collins Chair in Finance at Baylor University in Waco, Dr. Martin teaches corporate finance and financial modeling. His research interests are in corporate governance, the evaluation of firm performance, and the design of incentive compensation programs. Dr. Martin publishes widely in both academic and professional journals. Included among his academic publications are papers in the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Financial Management, and Management Science. Professional publications include papers in Directors and Boards, Financial Analysts' Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and Bank of America Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. u Dr. Martin co-authors several books including the following: u Financial Management, 9th edition (Prentice Hall Publishing Company) u Foundations of Finance, 4th Edition (Prentice Hall Publishing Company) u Financial Analysis (McGraw Hill Publishing Company) u The Theory of Finance (Dryden Press) Dr. Martin consults with a number of firms including Citgo, Hewlett Packard, Shell Chemical, Shell E, Texas Instruments and The Associates. Additional resources Working Paper Series — Financial Engineering, Corporate Governance, and the Collapse of Enron http://www. be. udel. edu/ccg/research_files/CCGWP2002-1. pdf For more information, log on to http://www. usatodaycollege. com Page 12

Self Handicapping Essays

Self Handicapping Essays Self Handicapping Essay Self Handicapping Essay Self Handicapping Self-Handicapping Nate is often late wherever he goes. He overslept this morning, but blamed his alarm for not being loud enough. He was also too tired from the night before because his daughter was up sick most of the night. He forgoes exercise, saying he?ll take the stairs in his office building. Driving to work, he speeds 10+ miles over the speed limit, inevitably being pulled over. He tells the police officer that he was just ?keeping up with the flow of traffic.? After receiving his ticket, Nate drives away rationalizing that ?the cop was a jerk.? Nate has begun his morning with many instances of self-handicapping, or making excuses for his behavior. All of the excuses Nate made are examples of self-handicapping. One reason for this ?trick of the mind,? as psychologists call it, is that it ?sets up a win ? win situation by allowing a person to save face when he or she does fail. However, by taking the crippling handicap in the first place, the person is actually more likely to fail at their endeavor. In this paper, we will share about a survey we conducted, yr, self-handicapping, men, [emailprotected], excuses, female, women, making, achievers, nate, work, survey, often, life, being, situation, realizes, questions, question, point, people, over, mistake, failure, fail, excuse, difference, daughter, answered, age

Theories About Female Sexuality and Race from the Past essays

Theories About Female Sexuality and Race from the Past essays The past of the medical profession has some albatrosses scattered throughout its revered history. This report focuses on two of those not so bright beginnings. The report attempts to provide an insight into how the nineteenth century's medical and scientific communities used scientific discrimination techniques such as the theories about female sexuality and race. Although the report is not a full review of the two assigned journal articles, they were the source for answer the assigned questions concerning nineteenth century medical philosophies. Each article presented historical accounts of the opinions of professionals at the time. The opinions were degrading to both the female gender and to men and women of different races such as the Irish and Blacks of England. The first article presented historical accounts about female nymphomania and male Satyriasis. The definition of nymphomania in the nineteenth century was very different from what we know as nymphomania today. "In the nineteenth century, however, nymphomania was believed to be a specific organic disease, classifiable, with an assumed set of symptoms, causes, and treatments. Like alcoholism, kleptomania, and pyromania - diseases that were identified in the mid-nineteenth century - a diagnosis of nymphomania was based on exhibited behavior. "Excessive" female sexual desire is, however, a much more ambiguous concept than habitual drunkenness, shoplifting, or setting fires. Consider the following cases of nymphomania diagnosed in the second half of the nineteenth century." Over the course of the nineteenth century, nymphomania was diagnosed in different ways. Nymphomania was considered as a woman having or desiring too much coitus or masturbating too much. But by today's standards, the women diagnosed were probably quite normal and or healthy. Nymphomania was actually seen as a symptom or a cause of disease. ...

Professional Ethics Essay Sample

Professional Ethics Essay Sample Essay on Pofessional Ethics Providing a professional ethics application towards other party is a simple way of delivering a respectable process of valuing the rights of other individuals as well as groups. When we say professional ethics, this is the professional way of valuing the dignity and existence of other individuals or groups. This is an important structure because valuing the ethical principles and values make a person responsible and disciplined on a regular basis. In this case, the significance of essay has been efficient on delivering a high amount of trust and value towards others in a professional way. In this case, the relationship between individuals, groups, and organizations become stronger as they all value the importance of respecting their rights to promote their dignity on a regular basis. Application of professional ethics is usually observed at work because we all work for the betterment of the company or organization that we apply our skills and knowledge to the company or other people. Valuing the rights and the vision of the company makes us responsible because it is a way to respect the existence of the company or a group that we work with. As a professional, we value our interests and goals in life as we apply our skills and contribution to improve the performance of the company we work with. Respecting the rules and regulations are examples to prevent any ethical and legal consequences that might impact our professional and personal values. This is the reason companies have a very firm reason to apply all corners of regulations to employees, investors, and consumers so that the value of trust becomes efficient with their core values and interests. The importance of utilizing professional ethics is to consistently apply the significance of policies that impact our behaviors and relationship towards others. This is done when we are dealing with business partnerships that are essential to prevent conflicting interests of any activities that we apply or consider. When engaging a contract, respecting the statement of agreement paper aims to establish a common interest between two individuals or groups so that the flow of the activity is followed correctly. A contract of agreement or a statement of agreement is a professional way of adhering to the standards of the company by the involved individuals or parties. It shows how a certain business, service, or talent is being applied in the most professional way as possible through a written contract. Application of professional ethics is important because it applies the essentials of the law and respecting the policies of every involved party at all times. Being formal to every involvement to a business or a company implies that the person is fulfilling their responsibility as mandated by the involved party or the society as a whole. Valuing ethical responsibilities is an example on how a certain role is respected by an involved party so that any misconduct is prevented by employers or anyone who already made agreements with a certain party. One should realize that any conflicting interests such as violating the agreements that have already been signed will consider their professional contracts breached. This is because there are agreed terms that were not followed or having failed to accomplish tasks that are relevant to the scope of responsibilities that should have been applied by the involved party (Wager Williams, 2011). Reference Wager, Elizabeth Williams, Peter (2011). Why and how do journals retract articles? An analysis of Medline retractions 1988- 2008.  Journal of Medical Ethics.  37  (9): 567–570.

Field Experience Observation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5000 words

Field Experience Observation - Essay Example Following the contextualisation of the topic and the introduction of Kendale Elementary School, the author's observations will be analytically presented, with the final section articulating the field's study's findings. The challenge of attempting to comply with special education regulations established at the local, state, and federal level has grown in recent years. Strict legal requirements affect the way students with disabilities receive their education. A movement to include more students with special needs within general education classes has caused some educators to question their ability to effectively serve students with various disabilities. Some critics argue that placing students with disabilities in a general education classroom consumes too much time from the workday of an already overworked teacher and reduces the actual time on task for all the students. Another argument against the inclusion movement is the belief that curriculum standards must be lowered to accommodate students with learning disabilities. One of the most consistent beliefs relating to American educational practices of the past century is that all students are entitled to an equal educational opportunity. Parents, educators, and advocacy groups have contended that the educational services provided to students with disabilities are frequently less effective than the educational experiences that are offered to students without disabilities. Not all students respond positively to traditional educational programs of instruction. Some have social or emotional needs that require different educational environments or strategies. As an immediate result of the aforementioned, school districts around the country have been restructuring their educational programs to accommodate special learners with increasingly complex needs. The response of educational policy makers was to create a separate system of special education to serve these students. As may be deduced from the foregoing, therefore, the delivery of effective ESE is a c hallenging undertaking. The question of how educators and the school system meet these challenges will be analytically reviewed in relation to a Florida Elementary School. 1.2 Kendale

The American War on Terror in Afghanistan Essay

The American War on Terror in Afghanistan - Essay Example Moreover, many others believe that America should reassess its strategy from a realistic point of view to extricate itself from the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq to concentrate on the wider aspects of the war on terrorism. Â  Now the question is how a country can attack another country without convincing reasons? Moreover, why the rest of the world keeping silence even when two sovereign states attacked by a superpower? How can the idealism of spreading democracy with the help of war be justified? Is it necessary for America to take a more pragmatic approach in fighting against terrorism? This paper tries to find answers to above question with the help of analysis of the war on terror both in Iraq and Afghanistan in a realistic point of view. Â  America’s war on terror strategies lacks consistency and a proper shape. While it engages in an all-out attack in Iraq, it uses targeted attacks in specific areas in Afghanistan. The reasons cited for attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan are entirely different. In Iraq, America accused that the president Saddam itself is leading the terrorist networks whereas in Afghanistan they had no such worries. In Afghanistan, America is getting support from the administration in their efforts to eliminate the Taliban led terrorist groups. Â  Mearsheimer (2005) has argued that Hans Joachim Morgenthau, one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century and one of the great realist thinkers of all time has opposed the Vietnam War and he would have opposed the current war on terror also on same grounds. Mearsheimer has also mentioned that the dispute about whether to go to war in Iraq was between two competing theories of international politics: realism and the neo-conservatism that underpins the Bush doctrine (Mearsheimer). Many people now suspect that President Bush has certainly hidden agendas in conducting the war on terror.

MEDICATION ERRORS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

MEDICATION ERRORS - Essay Example The aim of medication is to alleviate a patient from his/her illness and improve his quality of life. Many risks are associated with providing drug therapy as mistakes can result in the lose life or adverse effects on the patient’s health. Hospitals should organize their systems for producing, dispensing and administering medications to reduce the probability of medication errors. Errors can occur at different stages of the system, either in the pharmaceutical company, the hospital, the practitioner, the nurse or even the patient. The hospital can implement formulary systems, whereby the doctors, nurses, patients and pharmacists form societies that evaluate previous medication errors and formulate principles to annihilate the reoccurrence of such mistakes. Charting systems can be used to reduce the amount of medication errors. These systems can be combined with a decision support feature which will helps detect any inconsistencies in the diagnosis. These systems should also be in the form of real time entry; this allows the next nurse to be up to date with the treatment. Independent double checks can also be carried out before a drug is administered to the patient. This process involves two nurses verifying the drug diagnosed to a patient by ensuring it coincides with his medical condition (Whitehead, 2012). This method detects and helps avoid errors at the point of care. However, when the nurses are under stressful working conditions, the double check method has a failure rate of 20% and some errors are undetected. Drugs which have serious adverse effects when administered incorrectly should be placed on high alert. More caution should be taken when prescribing these drugs and they should be double checked with higher caution. Information technology can also be used to try and prevent the number of medication errors. Bar medication administration has also been introduced to reduce the amount of medication errors

The Margaret Mead and derek Freeman debate vs Lets' Abolish high Essay

The Margaret Mead and derek Freeman debate vs Lets' Abolish high School by robert Epstein - Essay Example A second article titled The Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman Debate, written by Ann M. Bender, Trevor Humphries, and Trevor Michael illustrates the ongoing contention brought on by the nature versus nurture debate. We are a product of both biology and culture and both Margaret Mead's book Coming of Age in Samoa, as well as Epstein's article, reinforce this understanding of the debate about how much of our teenage years are a product of biology and how much comes from society. Epstein's article, which calls for a rethinking of adolescence, traces a logical path that concludes that our concept of teenager is a product of our culture. Indeed, Epstein's book, which served as a basis for this article, has been the subject of a considerable number of positive reviews. Authors, professional psychiatrists, and other academic professionals have stated their acceptance and praise. Epstein does make several salient points about our view of the teenage years, how we got this way, and the potential problems that it causes. Yet, Epstein seems to contradict his own view of nature. He seemingly supports the nature argument by stating, "technically speaking we're not really children anymore, and presumably through most of human history we bore our young when we were quite young ourselves". However, in the same writing he argues about the impact of society when he laments the teenage years as a time when he "couldn't own property or do any interesting or fulfilling work, and he had no choice but to attend high school for several more years before getting on with his 'real' life". While biology propels the body into adulthood, society meters its progress and deliberates the impact of socialization. Unfortunately, Mead's book, which also found that teenagers are a product of their culture, was heavily criticized and its results were questioned. In fact, both books highlight the need for teaching children how to learn, and the vital skill of being able to think and write critically. These are traits of nurture that nature could never provide. Margaret Mead made several of the same points as Epstein in her book, yet was heavily criticized by Derek Freeman. Though Freeman's criticism largely rested on the quality of the process and not the results, his criticism does attempt to neutralize the view that adolescence is the product of culture. Clearly, both Epstein and Mead were correct in their assessment that adolescence is molded from cultural expectations. We see this when a young man steps up to be the breadwinner when a father has suddenly disappeared from the family scene. It is apparent when a young girl becomes the homemaker when the family faces life without their mother. Freeman, though maybe technically correct, did sociology and anthropology a disservice by diminishing the importance of Mead's work and her revolutionary insights. Epstein's view that we should teach our children how to learn and send them off as teenagers to discover knowledge makes more sense in a globalized community with few borders or obstacles to information. In conclusion, the ages old argument about nature versus nurture is not an either or and exclusive argument. Teenagers are molded by human nature as well as the society in which they are

Professional Communication Phase 5 DB Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Professional Communication Phase 5 DB - Essay Example vice based model, company executives have decided to use a slightly different business model for the release of SmartFit 2.0 which is tailored toward the general membership of the partner fitness club. SmartFit 2.0 also delivered via a wireless device, will bring a suite of entertainment features to the user in addition to the performance tracking. Users of SmartFit 2.0 will be able to listen to streaming music from the Universal Music catalog, audio books, and pre-recorded fitness routines created by the leading Personal Trainers in North America. At the release of the client version, the beta testers (a focus group of selected clients at a partner facility) suggested to offer a three-month free promotion for all new signed up members to any partner facility as a part of our marketing strategy. New members would thereby benefit of the promotion for ninety days followed by an increase in membership fees to reflect the inclusion of SmartFit 2.0 in the monthly membership fee. For current members willing to upgrade to this new level of membership, we would offer one month free and a 10 percent discount on the new membership fee for a period of twelve months. Our company executives believe that in offering this promotion, we are positioning SmartFit 2.0 to be as much of a success as the Personal training version. The pricing strategy has been studied carefully during the development of the platform, and extensively compared with similar client applications in the local and national market. For answering to the diverse demographics that exits at fitness facilities, our managers decided on using a service pricing model, as well as a per-use model. The service fee model described earlier is designed for the first adopters of the technology and those who can benefit from it by becoming a new member at a partner facility. The per-use service model is made to allow people who may decide to use the wireless features of SmartFit 2.0 in a less regular fashion. The

Sir Robert Peels position on policing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Sir Robert Peels position on policing - Essay Example Although he designed this guiding principle during the early 1900s, its applicability is still being enforced. In the discourse by Wilson & Kelling (1982), on their famous â€Å"Broken Windows Concept†, the basic mission for the existence of law enforcers is manifested in the presence of the police as a figure to restore peace and order is a necessary requirement using the broken windows theory - but not the ultimate factor for crime deterrence. The success of its application was assisted by the participative collaboration of community members combined with the determination and power vested in the public police. Through patrolling, the mere presence of the police figure in communities was deemed effective to prevent crime and to restore peace and order in the community. The success of any endeavor is determined by the amount of commitment and participation of constituents in the area. The successful implementation of patrolling under the Broken Windows Concepts was primarily due to the conformity of community members to the presence of police forces patrolling in their area. Their support and approval of the police actions paved the way for ensuring maintenance of peace through orderly submission to law. Consistent with the previous principle, the relevant factors in this concern is public approval and cooperation. As averred by Larrabee (2007, 2), â€Å"public approval of the police will increase the effectiveness of law enforcement†. The police cannot compel society into enforcing laws which are deemed useless and ineffective. Only those that are viewed by the community as helpful to restoring peace and safety would be supported. Older generation who seek assistance of the police through reporting unruly teenagers and misdemeanors assist in terms of relaying public approval, cooperation and support to the police’s mission of maintaining order and preventing

Professional Communication Phase 5 DB Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Professional Communication Phase 5 DB - Essay Example vice based model, company executives have decided to use a slightly different business model for the release of SmartFit 2.0 which is tailored toward the general membership of the partner fitness club. SmartFit 2.0 also delivered via a wireless device, will bring a suite of entertainment features to the user in addition to the performance tracking. Users of SmartFit 2.0 will be able to listen to streaming music from the Universal Music catalog, audio books, and pre-recorded fitness routines created by the leading Personal Trainers in North America. At the release of the client version, the beta testers (a focus group of selected clients at a partner facility) suggested to offer a three-month free promotion for all new signed up members to any partner facility as a part of our marketing strategy. New members would thereby benefit of the promotion for ninety days followed by an increase in membership fees to reflect the inclusion of SmartFit 2.0 in the monthly membership fee. For current members willing to upgrade to this new level of membership, we would offer one month free and a 10 percent discount on the new membership fee for a period of twelve months. Our company executives believe that in offering this promotion, we are positioning SmartFit 2.0 to be as much of a success as the Personal training version. The pricing strategy has been studied carefully during the development of the platform, and extensively compared with similar client applications in the local and national market. For answering to the diverse demographics that exits at fitness facilities, our managers decided on using a service pricing model, as well as a per-use model. The service fee model described earlier is designed for the first adopters of the technology and those who can benefit from it by becoming a new member at a partner facility. The per-use service model is made to allow people who may decide to use the wireless features of SmartFit 2.0 in a less regular fashion. The

Communication Strategies Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Communication Strategies - Coursework Example These differences in a workplace may cause many problems as attitudes and perceptions shape they way even formal communication takes place. A male boss may be very blunt and direct in his speech which may at a certain point offend a female subordinate than it would a male in the same place. Males also tend to be more interruptive and biases like these may lead for them to pay more attention to the point being made by a male subordinate as opposed to a female. Also the level of trust and intimacy in terms of work relation would be stronger with a male than with a female. On the other hand if a female were to be the boss a male subordinate would most likely question her superiority by throwing questions at her to test her skills. A female boss that is more aggressive in speech is almost always thought to be displaying an otherwise male characteristic and hence given names by subordinates and used as code language among the peers to refer to the boss. A male boss being aggressive and ev en cursing subordinates on the other hand would be thought of as normal. Females may also not be taken as seriously as their male counterparts and thought to be emotional and weak in certain cases. In such cases it becomes difficult for a task to be completed as the authority of a female boss might be questioned. Similarly in an interview situation or a group meeting male to female communication can display similar conflicts due to gender perceptions. An idea by a male might be given more importance than a female. These differences can not just lead to problems in being more expressive among males and females in a work place but may also cause serious delays in work or miscommunication of messages. 2) I agree that language has an effect on gender perceptions and hence elimination of sexist language may have a slow but positive effect on the attitudes and behaviors of people. The terms we use in everyday language has an effect on how we perceive the roles attached to us. These change s are slowly but steadily being incorporated into everyday language because it plays a key role in shaping people’s thoughts and ideas. Gender neutral terms in language are essential to overcome the bias that exists in society’s perception of males and females. I find racism and sexism to be similar biases. Hence, if the elimination of racism is emphasized on in all societies, it is fair to propagate the elimination of sexist terms from language that automatically deems inferior the status of one gender or excludes one from its representation. As an example, we can look at a manual for a workplace that keeps referring to the reader as a man or using â€Å"his† instead of using â€Å"them† for reference to the workforce. This automatically excludes a female worker and hence suggests that there are no women in the organization, whereas in reality, half the workforce might comprise of women and the manual maybe referring to them as much as it is referring to the male worker. Thus, replacing sexist terminology is important to get rid of gender biases in society and can have a positive effect on the attitudes of people who come across it. It will not just lead for women to be represented equally and give them confidence and credit but will also not automatically assign characteristics to one gender that can be

Linguistic Research Essay Example for Free

Linguistic Research Essay When does language begin? In the middle 1960s, under the influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child language researchers assumed that language begins when words (or morphemes) are combined. (The reading by Halliday has some illustrative citations concerning this narrow focus on â€Å"structure. †) So our story begins with what is colloquially known as the â€Å"two-word stage. † The transition to 2-word utterances has been called â€Å"perhaps, the single most disputed issue in the study of language development† (Bloom, 1998). A few descriptive points: Typically children start to combine words when they are between 18 and 24 months of age. Around 30 months their utterances become more complex, as they add additional words and also affixes and other grammatical morphemes. These first word-combinations show a number of characteristics. First, they are systematically simpler than adult speech. For instance, function words are generally not used. Notice that the omission of inflections, such as -s, -ing, -ed, shows that the child is being systematic rather than copying. If they were simply imitating what they heard, there is no particular reason why these grammatical elements would be omitted. Conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and prepositions (with) are omitted too. But is this because they require extra processing, which the child is not yet capable of? Or do they as yet convey nothing to the child—can she find no use for them? Second, as utterances become more complex and inflections are added, we find the famous â€Å"over-regularization†Ã¢â‚¬â€which again shows, of course, that children are systematic, not simply copying what they here. Chomsky’s Influence Research on child language was behavioristic in the years that preceded Chomsky’s critique of Skinner, and his publication of Syntactic Structures: â€Å"though there had been precedents for setting problems in the study of child language acquisition at a more abstract, cognitive level by continental scholarsmost notably, Roman Jacobson (e. g. , 1941/1968)much of the research on child language acquisition at midcentury was influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the highly concrete, behaviorist orientation of B. F. Skinner and others. Two events were of major important in the change from behaviorist to cognitive thinking in research on child language. The first was Chomsky’s classic review (1959) of Verbal Behavior, Skinner’s major book-length work on the learning and use of language; the second Handout for Psy 598-02, summer 2001 Packer Two-Word Utterances 2 was the detailed longitudinal study of the acquisition of English by three young children conducted over a 17-month period by Roger Brown and others in the early 1960s (Brown, 1973). † Ritchie, W. C. , Bhatia, T. K. (1999). Child language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W. C. Ritchie T. K. Bhatia (Eds. ), Handbook of child language acquisition, (pp. 3-30). San Diego: Academic Press, p. 3-4 note 2. â€Å"A child who has learned a language has developed an internal representation of a system of rules† (Chomsky, 1965, p. 25). The psychologist’s task, it follows, is to determine what the child’s rules are. â€Å"The linguist constructing a grammar for a language is in effect proposing a hypothesis concerning the internalized system† (Chomsky, 1968, p.23). Up to the 1950s, people simply counted characteristics such as sentence complexity, proportion of grammatical utterances, etc. After Chomsky, the search was on for child grammars, assumed to be universal. Roger Brown’s Research In 1956 Roger Brown heard Chomsky for the first time, speaking at Yale. In 1962 he began a five-year research project on children’s language at Harvard University. The historical significance of Brown’s laboratory at Harvard can hardly be exaggerated. The names of students and colleagues who worked with Brown pop up all the time, to this day, in psycholinguistic research: the list includes Jean Berko Gleason, Ursula Bellugi, David McNeill, Dan Slobin, Courtney Cazden, Richard Cromer, Jill de Villiers, Michael Maratsos, Melissa Bowerman, Eleanor Rosche, Sue Ervin (now Ervin-Tripp), Steven Pinker. Brown set out to write grammars for each of the stages of language development, by looking at the distribution of forms and construction patterns in spontaneous speech. In most cases the data allow for more than one  grammatical description. â€Å"The description to be preferred, of course, is the one that corresponds to the way the speaker’s linguistic knowledge is structured, the one that determines the kinds of novel utterance he can produce or understand, how he constructs their meanings, and what his intuitions are about grammatical well-formedness† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28) â€Å"Every child processes the speech to which he is exposed so as to induce from it a latent structure. This latent rule structure is so general that a child can spin out its implications all his life long. The discovery of latent structure is the greatest of the processes involved in language acquisition, and the most difficult to understand† (Brown Bellugi, 1964, p. 314) Brown collected samples of spontaneous speech from three children, given the pseudonyms Adam, Eve, and Sarah. The corpus of collected data can be found in the Packer Two-Word Utterances 3 CHILDES archive. Eve was visited from age 18m to 26m, Adam from 27m to 42m, Sarah from 27m to 48m. Dan Slobin described the project: â€Å"We paid close attention to the auxiliary system and to word-order patterns, because these had played a central role in Syntactic Structures. We kept track of sentence types—affirmative, negative, and questions—in which use of auxiliaries and word order would vary. Linguistic growth was assessed in terms of things to be added to childish sentences to make them adult-like: the additions of omitted functors (inflections, prepositions, articles, and the like) and transformational operations. We did not categorize utterances in terms of communicative intent—that is, in terms of semantics or speech acts or extended discourse skills—and so we did not look for growth in terms of additions or enrichment of such abilities. Our central concern was with syntax and morphology, with some later interest in prosody. We worried about such questions as whether child grammar was finite state or transformational, and whether syntactic ‘kernels’ were the first sentence forms to appear in child speech† (Slobin, 1988, p. 11). Mean Length of Utterance This simple measure of syntactic complexity was introduced by Roger Brown. Table 7. Rules for calculating mean length of utterance and upper bound (Brown, 1973, p. 54) 1. Start with the second page of the transcription unless that page involves a recitation of some kind. In this latter case start with the first recitation-free stretch. Count the first100 utterances satisfying the following rules. 2. Only fully transcribed utterances are used; none with blanks. Portions of utterances, entered in parentheses to indicate doubtful transcription, are used. 3. Include all exact utterance repetitions (marked with a plus sign in records). Stuttering is marked as repeated efforts at a single word; count the word once in the most complete form produced. In the few cases where a word is produced for emphasis or the like (no, no, no) count each occurrence. 4. Do not count such fillers as mm or oh, but do count no, yeah, and hi. 5. All compound words (two or more free morphemes), proper names, and ritualized reduplications count as single words. Examples: birthday, rackety-boom, choo-choo, quack-quack, night-night, pocketbook, see saw. Justification is that no evidence that the constituent morphemes function as such for these children. 6. Count as one morpheme all irregular pasts of the verb (got, did, went, saw). Justification is that there is no evidence that the child relates these to present forms. 7.  Count as one morpheme all diminutives (doggie, mommie) because these children at least do not seem to use the suffix productively. Diminutives are the standard forms used by the child. 8. Count as separate morphemes all auxiliaries (is, have, will, can, must, would). Also all catenatives: gonna, wanna, hafta. These latter counted as single morphemes rather than as going to or want to because evidence is that they function so for the children. Count as separate morphemes all inflections, for example, possessive {s}, plural {s}, third person singular {s}, regular past {d}, progressive {ing}. 9. The range count follows the above rules but is always calculated for the total Packer Two-Word Utterances 4 transcription rather than for 100 utterances. The title of Brown’s 1973 book, summarizing of a decade of research (his own and other people’s), was A First Language: The Early Stages. A follow-up was planned, describing the â€Å"later† stages, but never written. What is this book about? â€Å"It is about knowledge; knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. The book primarily presents evidence that knowledge of the kind described develops in an approximately invariant form in all children, through at different rates. There is also evidence that the primary determinants of the order are the relative semantical and grammatical complexity† (58) Here is an early attempt to write a â€Å"syntactic† grammar of two-word speech, first describing only 89 observed utterances (Table 4), then going â€Å"beyond the obtained sentences to the syntactic classes they suggest (Table 5) (Brown Fraser, 1964, pp. 59, 61): Packer Two-Word Utterances 5 Brown’s Two Main Findings Two main findings are described in A First Language. 1. The â€Å"Semantic Look† of Stage I Speech First, that the organization of early word-combinations cannot be described in purely syntactic terms. Brown and his coworkers quickly had to change direction. Syntactic descriptions didn’t suffice. That’s to say, Stage I constructions couldn’t be satisfactorily explained either as â€Å"telegraphic† speech, or in terms of â€Å"pivot-open† grammar. Telegraphic Speech One of the first ways of characterizing 2-word utterances was to say that they omitted â€Å"function words,† such as articles, auxiliary verbs, inflexions, prepositions, and the copula (is). The words that are spoken tend to be nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and their order tends to resemble the order in what one presumes the adult sentence would be. These characteristics make early utterances sound like telegrams. But inflections are omitted too, and these are free in telegrams. And a few functors such as more, no, you and off are found. More important problems are that this description uses adult categories. And it doesn’t explain the productive character of children’s two-word utterances. Pivot-Open grammars Martin Braine suggested that children have simple rules they use to generate two-word utterances. Each pair of words selects one from a small set of words—called â€Å"pivots†Ã¢â‚¬â€that occur in many utterances, and always in a fixed position (either the first word, or the second). For example, â€Å"Allgone† is a first-position pivot: allgone egg, allgone shoe, but not shoe allgone. A second-position pivot â€Å"off†: shirt off, water off, etc. The choice of the second word is more â€Å"open. † Packer Two-Word Utterances 6 But â€Å"the rules simply do not fit the evidence; pivot words do occur in isolation, pivots occur in combination with one another, sentences longer than two-words are fairly common in I, and there is distributional evidence which indicates that more than two word-classes exist† (Brown, 1973, p. 110). Brown and his colleagues noted that adults â€Å"expand† children’s utterances. These expansions don’t seem effective in teaching the child anything new (Cazden, 1965). But they do provide important clues to the researcher. If one assumes that adult expansions are generally accurate interpretations of the child’s utterance, then pivot-open grammars are inadequate because they underestimate the child’s knowledge. (Both would simply be described as O + O. ) For example, Lois Bloom showed that when one attended to context the utterance mommy sock was used by her child in two different ways. The first could be glossed as â€Å"It’s mommy’s sock,† while the second could be glossed â€Å"Mommy is putting on your sock. † A pivot-open grammar would not be able to distinguish these two. From Non-Semantic (Lean) Grammars to Semantic (Rich) Grammars So Brown and his co-workers started instead to describe two-word utterances in semantic terms. They employed a process that Lois Bloom called â€Å"rich interpretation†: using all the contextual information available to infer what the child meant by an utterance. As Lois Bloom said, â€Å"evaluation of the children’s language began with the basic assumption that it was possible to reach the semantics of children’s sentences by considering nonlinguistic information from context and behavior in relation to linguistic performance. This is not to say that the inherent ‘meaning’ or the child’s actual semantic intent was obtainable for any given utterance. The semantic interpretation inherent in an utterance is part of the intuition of the child and cannot be ‘known’ with authority. The only claim that could be made was the evaluation of an utterance in relation to the context in which it occurred provided more information for analyzing intrinsic structure than would a simple distributional analysis of the recorded corpus† (Bloom, 1970, p. 10). The result was the identification of a small set of basic semantic relations that the children’s utterances seems to be expressing. The eight most common of these are summarized in the following table (cf. Brown, p.193-197): â€Å"Major Meanings at Stage I† Two-Word Utterance mommy come; daddy sit drive car; eat grape mommy sock; baby book go park; sit chair cup table; toy floor my teddy; mommy dress Semantic relation expressed agent + action action + object agent + object action + location entity + location possessor + possession Packer Two-Word Utterances 7 box shiny; crayon big dat money; dis telephone entity + attribute demonstrative + entity It seems that children when they first combine words talk about objects: pointing them out, naming them, indicating their location, what they are  like, who owns them, and who is doing things to them. They also talk about actions performed by people, and the objects and locations of these actions. Brown suggested that these are the concepts the child has just finished differentiating in the sensorimotor stage. This kind of semantic characterization of children’s speech continues in current research. For example, the following table is redrawn from Golinkoff Hirsh-Pasek, (1999, p. 151. ) The terminology differs a little, and Recurrence and Disappearance have been added (or at least were not in Brown’s â€Å"top eight†), but other than this the picture is the same. Two-Word Utterance Mommy sock Probable meaning expressed Possessor-possessed or Agent (acting on) an object Recurrence Disappearance or Nonexistence Action on object Agent doing an action Object at location Object and property Naming Possible gloss â€Å"That’s Mommy’s sock† or â€Å"Mommy, put on my sock† â€Å"I want more juice† â€Å"The outside is allgone† (said after front door is closed) â€Å"(Dad) is throwing the toy chicken† â€Å"The car is going† â€Å"The sweater is on the chair† â€Å"The dog is little† â€Å"That is Susan† or â€Å"Her name is Susan†. More juice! Allgone outside Throw chicken Car go Sweater chair Little dog That Susan What Grammar to Write? How to represent the knowledge that underlies children’s utterances viewed in these semantic terms? What kind of grammar can one write? Brown (1973) reviewed several possibilities are concluded that â€Å"No fully explicit grammar proves to be possible† (p. 244). Bloom wrote essentially syntactic grammars, which however included information necessary to give an appropriate semantic interpretation. Schlesinger (assigned reading) wrote a semantic grammar. Antinucci Paresi (optional reading) wrote a grammar that included some pragmatic information too. The following is a grammar for one of the three children Bloom studied: it â€Å"consists of (1) the phrase structure, (2) lexico feature rules, and (3) transformations (Bloom, 1970, pp. 67-68): Packer Two-Word Utterances 8 Packer Two-Word Utterances 9 Criticism of Interpretive Analysis An interesting criticism of these semantic analyses was made by Howe in 1976. Howe noticed a lack of consistency across semantic categorization of two-word utterances by Bloom, Slobin, Schlesinger and Brown, and suggested that the identification of semantic relations actually tells us more about adult interpretation of children’s speech that is does about what the child has in mind. â€Å"Overall, the existence of contradictions between the categories presented in Table 1, the fact that some of the categories are not always mutually exclusive and the fact that it is hard to demonstrate that some of the so-called ‘semantic’ distinctions are more than syntactic alternatives for expressing the same meaning, make it unlikely that Bloom, Brown, Schlesinger and Slobin have produced an adequate categorization of the meanings common to the speech of children at the beginnings of word combination or indeed of adults. [A]ll four writers tacitly assumed that the two-word utterances of young children always express a meaning adults might express using these words and hence their aim was to specify which of the meanings adults might express occur in the first word combinations† (Howe, 1976, p. 34). Howe asserted that (as she later put it) â€Å"there was no evidence that children at the beginning of word combination recognize a world containing agents, locations, and so on† (Howe, 1981, p. 443). It is interesting to read the next rounds of this debate: Bloom, Capatides, Tackeff (1981), Golinkoff (1981), and Howe’s reply (1981). Bloom is witheringly derisive (and seems to miss the point of Howe’s article), Golinkoff is more constructive. Howe accepts Golinkoff’s suggestion that non-linguistic data will show us how a child understands their situation, and she concludes that so far the research shows â€Å"that children do not discover that language encodes roles [played in actions and states of affairs, as distinct from entities involved in actions and states of affairs], until some time after their first word combinations† (451). But I  think there’s a larger point here that I’ll explore in class. Brown’s conclusions about Stage I Brown drew the following conclusions about Stage I: â€Å"The Stage I child operates as if all major sentence constituents were optional, and this does not seem to be because of some absolute ceiling on sentence complexity. In Stage II and after we shall see that he operates, often for long periods, as if grammatical morphemes were optional. Furthermore, the child’s omissions are by no means limited to the relatively lawful omissions which also occur in adult speech. He often leaves out what is linguistically obligatory. This suggests to me that the child expects always to be understood if he produces any appropriate words at all. And in fact we find that he would usually be right in this expectation as long as he speaks at home, in familiar surroundings, and to family members who know his history and inclinations. Stage I speech may then be said to be well adapted to its communicative purpose, well adapted but narrowly adapted. In new surroundings and with less familiar addresses it would  Packer Two-Word Utterances 10 often fail. This suggests that a major dimension of linguistic development is learning to express always and automatically certain things (agent, action, number, tense, and so on) even though these meanings may be in many particular contexts quite redundant. The child who is going to move out into the world, as children do, must learn to make his speech broadly and flexible adaptive† (Brown, 1973, p. 244-245). 2. The Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes in Stage II  The second major finding that Brown reported in A First Language was that â€Å"a set of little words and inflections begins to appear: a few prepositions, especially in and on, an occasional article, an occasional copula am, is, or are, the plural and possessive inflections on the noun, the progressive, past, and third person present indicative inflections on the verb. All these, like an intricate sort of ivy, begin to grow up between and upon the major construction blocks, the nouns and the verbs, to which Stage I is largely limited† (Brown, 1973, p.  249). Brown found that the 14 of these grammatical morphemes of English that he selected for detailed study were acquired in a fixed and universal order. These are the grammatical morphemes we discussed in an earlier class: affixes like –s, -ed, {PAST}, and small function words like on, in, the. We’ve already noted that these morphemes are omitted from the first word-combinations. Brown studied the way they are gradually added to a child’s speech. This takes place in what he called Stage II. The child begins to explicitly mark notions such as number, specificity, tense, aspect, mood, using the inflections or unbound morphemes. Of course, Brown was studying only three children, but the finding of invariant order has stood up when larger numbers of children have been studied. For example, de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) replicated his finding with a sample of twenty-one children. Brown offered evidence that the order of their acquisition was determined by their linguistic complexity. (That’s to say, the number of features each of them encoded.) (Though he noted too that children differ greatly in their rate of acquisition of these morphemes. ) Order 1. 2/3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Morpheme present progressive prepositions plural irregular past tense possessive copula uncontractible articles regular past tense third-person present tense regular Example singing; playing in the cup; on the floor books; dolls broke; went Mommy’s chair; Susie’s teddy This is my book The teddy; A table walked; played he climbs; Mommy cooks Packer Two-Word Utterances 11 11. 12. 13. 14.  third-person present tense irregular auxiliary uncontractible copula contractible auxiliary contractible John has three cookies She was going to school; Do you like me? I’m happy; you are special Mommy’s going shopping Brown examined each utterance is see whether it required any of these morphemes to make it fully grammatical by adult standards, attending to both linguistic and nonlinguistic context. E. g. , when the child points to a book and says that book, Brown inferred that there should have been a copula (‘s or is) and an article (a). Then he checked how many of these obligatory positions for each morpheme were actually filled with the appropriate morphemes at each age. Acquisition—defined as the age at which a morpheme is supplied in 90 percent of its obligatory positions—was remarkably constant across Brown’s three subjects. Why did Brown study these morphemes? Presumably because they are at first omitted. But more importantly, he was trying to test the hypothesis that children are taught grammar by adults. And Brown found that frequency of exposure (in adult speech) was not a predictor. For example, adults used articles more frequently than prepositions, but children acquired these in the opposite order. Brown suggested that linguistic complexity does predict acquisition. The morphemes differ in both semantic complexity (the number of semantic features encoded) and syntactic complexity (the number of rules each requires). For example, the copula verb encodes both number and temporality. These two types of complexity are highly correlated, so they cannot be teased apart, but in either case they predict order of acquisition. The other important change that occurs in Stage II is that, as utterances grow in complexity, the child begins to combine two or more of the basic semantic relations from Stage I: Adam hit ball = agent + action + object = agent + action, plus action + object The Other Stages of Language Acquisition Each of the five stages that Brown distinguished is named for the linguistic process that is the major new development occurring in that stage (â€Å"or for an exceptionally elaborate development of a process at that stage† p. 59). Thus we have: Packer Two-Word Utterances 12. Stage I. Semantic Roles Syntactic Relations. MLU: 1. 0 – 2. 0 agent, patient, instrument, locative etc. expressed (in simple sentences) by linear order, syntactic relations, prepositions or postpositions. Stage II. Grammatical Morphemes the Modulation of Meaning. MLU: 2. 0 – 2. 5 Stage III. Modalities of the Simple Sentence. MLU: 2. 5 Next the child forms transformations of simple declarative sentences: yes-no interrogatives, question request, negation, imperative. During the earlier stages children use intonation to mark different sentence modalities. Now they begin to use morphosemantic devices to mark negatives, questions, and imperatives. Stage IV. Embedding of Sentences One simple sentence will now become used as a grammatical constituent or in a semantic role within another sentence. Stage V. Coordination of Simple Sentences Propositional Relations Sentences are linked together with connector words. Individual Differences Brown also noted some individual differences among Adam, Eve, and Sarah. Two of the children combined V with N, and also used N for possession: eat meat, throw ball, mommy sock. But the child third combined V (or objects of possession) with pronouns: eat it, do this one, my teddy. These two strategies were found by other researchers too. Catherine Nelson called them pronominal nominal strategies (they have also been called â€Å"holistic analytic†; â€Å"expressive referential†), and noted that they could be seen in one-word utterances also: some children tend to produce single-word utterances that are nouns, other children tend to use social or personal words such as hi, bye, and please. Subsequent research has explored the connections between these strategies and later development, cognitive style, and input differences (cf. Shore, 1995. Individual differences in language development, Sage). However, these strategies converge over time. By MLU=2. 5, sentence subjects (agents) are typically pronominal, and predicate objects (patients) are typically nominal. Packer Two-Word Utterances 13 Directions After Brown By the mid-1970s grammar-writing was dying out. Incorrect predictions had discouraged researchers, as had the problem of indeterminacy: the fact that more than one grammar could be written. Interest was growing in other considerations: in the role of semantics; in cognitive precursors to syntax, and to language in general; in mother-child interaction; and in the pragmatic uses to which early speech is put. In the view of some people, linguistic structures and operations became neglected. 1. How Does the Child go from Semantics to Syntax? We’ve seen that Brown’s research found that the grammar of children’s early word combinations was better described in semantic than in syntactic terms. If this is so, how does a child make the transition from a semantic grammar to the adult grammar? Researchers continue to argue about this. Steven Pinker (1984, 1987) suggests that children use semantics to enter the syntactic system of their language. In simple â€Å"basic sentences† the correspondence between things and names maps onto the syntactic category of nouns. Words for physical attributes and changes of state map onto verbs. Semantic agents are almost always the grammatical subjects of sentences. This semantic-syntactic correspondence in early utterances provides a key to abstract syntactic categories of grammar. Paul Bloom has argued that children actually are using syntactic categories from the start, and he cites as evidence for this the fact that children will they place adjectives before nouns but not pronouns: big dog but not: * small she Some linguists have offered a syntactic description of Stage I utterances. They argue that at this stage children merely have a lexicon and a limited set of phrase structure rules in deep-structure. They lack functional categories such as INFL (inflectionals) and COMP (complementizers). No transformations exist at this stage: instead, elements of the deep structure are assigned thematic (i. e. semantic) roles to yield the surfacestructure. And they have proposed that the lack of grammatical subjects in Stage I utterances reflects the default setting of a â€Å"null-subject parameter. † (Since in languages like Italian and Spanish a subject is optional. ) Lois Bloom (1990b) has suggested that children simply have a more limited processing capacity at this age. Sentence subjects are often provided by context, and so can be safely omitted. Dan Slobin has proposed that â€Å"children create grammars in which clearly identifiable surface forms map onto basic semantic categories† (1988, p. 15). Packer Two-Word Utterances 14 For example, locative prepositions—in, on, under—are omitted in early child speech. They are used earlier in languages when they are encoded more saliently—as noun suffixes or as postpositions following nouns. At the same time, there is a common order of emergence across languages: simple topological notions of proximity, containment and support (in, on, under, next to), with locative relations embodying notions of perspective (back, front) always later. Slobin infers that â€Å"conceptual development provides the content for linguistic expression, while linguistic discovery procedures are necessary for working out the mapping of content according to conventions of particular languages† (p. 15). Slobin has looked carefully at the English grammatical morphemes—and their equivalents in other languages—to see how they are used before they are completely acquired (by Brown’s 90% criterion). He finds that children generally use the morphemes systematically, though their use is still â€Å"incomplete† by adult standards. For example, a Russian child applied the accusative inflection only to nouns that â€Å"were objects of direct, physical manipulation, such as ‘give,’ ‘carry,’ ‘put,’ and ‘throw,’ omitting the accusative for less manipulative verbs such as ‘read’ and ‘see. ’† Children will â€Å"organize systems of pronouns and case inflections; but, to begin with, children will organize these various forms to express particular, child-oriented speech functions† (p. 18). They are using the resources of the adult language to mark distinctions that are salient to them. Slobin has also proposed some â€Å"universal language-learning principles. † These are an attempt to explain observed cross-language regularities in order of acquisition. â€Å"According to Slobin, the child has certain concepts, based on cognitive growth, that are expressed through the language system. Using certain principles of acquisition, the child scans the language code to discover the means of comprehension and production† (Owens, 2001, p. 214-215). 1. Pay attention to the ends of words 2. Phonological forms of words can be systematically modified 3. Pay attention to the order of words and morphemes 4. Avoid interruption and rearrangement of linguistic units 5. Underlying semantic relations should be marked overtly and clearly 6. Avoid exceptions 7. The use of grammatical markers should make semantic sense Knowledge of Verb syntax Lois Bloom asserts that learning the argument structure of verbs, and the syntactic differences for different thematic relations is the foundation for acquiring a grammar. Verbs play a central role in further multiword utterances. Opinions differ, however, on how knowledge of verb syntax is acquired. Bloom suggests that the first verbs are those that name actions (do, make, push, eat). Nouns and pronouns take thematic roles (agent, object) in relation to these actions. Bloom says that this implies that children’s â€Å"theories† of objects, space, and causation are important here. Packer Two-Word Utterances 15 A few all-purpose verbs—â€Å"pro-verbs†Ã¢â‚¬â€are used for most early sentences. E. g. , do, go. With these, verb argument structures, verb inflections, and Wh-questions are learned. Subsequently, the child adds the syntax for negation, noun- and verb-inflection, and questions. And then moves on to embedded verb phrases (â€Å"drink [Mommy juice]†) 2. From Semantics to Semantics Language involves a great deal of categorization. â€Å"The forms of language are themselves categories, and these forms are linked to a vast network of categorical distinctions in meaning and discourse function† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28-29).