Thursday, October 31, 2019

Descartes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Descartes - Essay Example The wax has been used for the purposes of making comparisons and discussing the human mind. On the other hand, it is also important to note that the mind is quite complex and it is difficult to describe its nature using simple terms. The paper is therefore an analysis of the human mind in relation to the comparison with the wax as outlined in the article. According to the article, wax has different properties that can be used for different purpose. When wax is not burnt, it takes a different shape and it also has a different smell. However, when it is burnt, it changes colour and it also turns into liquid. The wax is therefore capable of innumerable changes when it is burnt. All the scent is also lost and it takes a complexity new form and shape. However, it is difficult to imagine that was may end up turning this way by just looking at it. According to the article, the mind is prone to a lot of errors and hence the difficulties in terms of describing its nature just like the wax (Ariew & Cress, 17). A false assumption may be made when analyzing the nature of the mind just like the wax. The discussion also indicates that some of the complex issues such as the human mind cannot be described through touch alone. It also requires a lot of understanding. The use of the wax and the many forms that it takes under different condition can be compared to the nature of the human mind. It is important to note that the human mind can also change depending on the condition. However, the changes in the human mind are in terms of its intellectual nature as compared to the physical changes that occurs when the wax is heated. The aspect of common sense has also been highlighted in the article. This is through the example of how it changes when it undergoes heating. According to the article, common sense may be misleading when it comes to the issues of the wax. When one sees the wax in its external form, common

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

No topic Discussion Question Mgt 380 Dissertation

No topic Discussion Question Mgt 380 - Dissertation Example There are times when the wrong decisions are made and the question of accountability comes into the equation. This is when leaders have to explain how and why they were made, and what recourse has to be made to recuperate losses as well as corporate images. Circumstances that pose immediate danger to life, property, sales revenues however, may lead to other leaders arising from lower level in the ranks to take charge. A building on fire or a company vehicle tied up in an accident traffic accidents and workers are indecisive as top what to do, are also typical examples of situations where participants will be require to make quick decisions. However, in the design of a product, choosing the most economical distribution routes, the location of the best manufacturing sites, as well as who to employ to fill certain positions, require considering alternatives, as well as others, and has to be done by trained and experienced executives. Leaders may also from time reject suggestions that do not conform to their expectations, but may suffer from a lack of cooperation when time comes for execution of the strategic decision that was un-democratically made. Decision making according to Drucker, should rest always with executives or leaders who should strive to maximize the inputs of their respective teams as much as possible. During such process they should make it known that the final responsibility for the decision rests with them, but they value the contribution of every participant, and will consider all options before deciding (Drucker 1974). Question Q 2 Power according to Etzioni, can be either coercive, utilitarian or normative (Tichy & Candwell 2002). The first type of leader uses force to get the job done, while the second uses incentives, especially in a working environment to achieve the same objective. Normative Power occurs when values are employed to appeal to the inner constitution of people to generate commitment and a sense of purpose. The kind of power that I can identify is the normative one, where people are treated with respect, and their opinions valued in any business or social operation. By constantly communicating those attributes people who are so treated, will feel a part of my team and will go the extra mile to help achieve the mutually established goals and objectives. In addition, at times I will employ the utilitarian source of power along with the normative to help my teams motivated. This is because although they will feel important, at times rewards will serve to reinforce those values that have been communicated to them. Having these two sources at my disposal will always lead to people become loyal, committed, disciplined and very flexible in a knowledge base economy that is subjected to changing conditions at times. These are the values that I may be able upon in times of crisis, when team support and innovations becomes extremely important to the maintenance of competitive edge. Discussion Q 3 My favorite and l east favorite bosses were on opposite ends of a continuum, due to the leadership traits that they portrayed. The relationship between my most favored boss and me was an excellent one, and it made the work flow easy, even though at time some of the tasks were challenging. The fact that he was approachable, had an open door policy and

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Audience Studies in Media

Audience Studies in Media The study of the audience has been very important in the media studies, since the power of the media in relation to the media audience could form how the society would work, what the public opinion would be and what political ideals would dominate. That is why the relationship of the audience and the media has been studies by scholars and academics since a very long time ago, leading to many theories about the subject to be developed and to a certain debate between the conceptualizations of the media audience. This essays aims to give a brief explanation of what the audience is, why it should be studied and then critically compare two conceptualisations of the media audience, the passive and the active one. The comparing will be done by presenting each theory’s main thesis and comparing them by analysing specific studies and approaches that were conducted to support each theory. Any group of people who are gathered in the same place and act as observers or spectators of something are considered an audience (Media and Communications course, Lecture 6: Media Audiences/lecture slides). Audience has existed since ancient times, particularly in Ancient Greece where people gathered in town centres to discuss about community problems. What we nowadays refer to as a media audience has been developed through the years as a result of industrialization, technological developments and several changes in people’s everyday lives. When people started to massively move from villages to industrialised cities, a mass society began to develop so it also became important that this new form of audience had to be studied in relation to the media of its time. What influence the media had on the audience, how the audience used the media in their everyday lives and how the media industry could attract more audience for their own profit (Williams,2003, McCullagh,2002) The main views on the mass society or mass audience research, that first appeared in the 1920s-1930s (McCullagh, 2002) were that the audience was consisted of a large public of consumers of mainstream media texts who were influenced by the rapid changes in society, the unstable family ties due to urbanization and the anonymity of the crowds (McCullagh, 2002), thus they became a vulnerable mass of ‘isolated and defenceless individuals’ (Williams, 2003). This situation positioned the media in a place where it could easily manipulate the unsuspected audience. That is why the media were used by authoritarian governments, like Hitler’s Nazi Party, for propaganda purposes. They would pass on their ideologies, usually political ones, and the audience would believe them without questioning. People were so passive that they would easily believe anything they would hear on the radio or read in a newspaper. Probably the most famous incident that proves this was the public pa nic that occurred in Los Angeles, when a radio broadcast of a science-fiction book called War of the Worlds was aired in 1938 (McCullagh, 2002). When people heard the broadcast they actually believed that a Martian invasion was happening and some of them tried to escape and save themselves. This incident is a great example of the Hypodermic Needle Theory that existed at the time. This theory parallelises the media as a needle that injects a message straight into the passive audience, which is immediately affected by it (Croteu, Hoynes,1997) and like drug-users lose their control and judgement once they are injected with drugs, so does the audience lose its critical judgement when injected with ideas and beliefs by the media (McCullagh, 2002). As the years passed by though and even more technological developments were invented, like film and television, researchers started to question the traditional effects research of the mass society. New studies and experiments on how the audience interprets media texts resulted to several researchers to conclude that the audience is not passive and vulnerable but instead is an active and differentiated audience consisted of groups or individuals and not masses. This new theory, the Active Audience theory concentrated on how audience interprets and makes meaning of media texts based on several factors, such as gender, age, social background, education, ideals, beliefs or family position (Williams, 2003, McCullagh, 2002). As McCullagh put it ‘media audiences are consisted of different individuals who turn to the media to gratify their needs’ (2002). Gradually new theories were developed that replaced the Hypodermic Needle theory and made it antiquated. Stuart Hall developed the Encoding/Decoding theory in 1973, with which he questioned the traditional effects theory and concentrated more on how ‘the content of media texts is encoded ideologically by the audience’ (Williams, 2003). He suggested that media producers encoded what appeared to be a ‘preferred meaning’ in media messages and then the audience was supposed to understand and decode it (Williams, 2003), thus making the relationship between media and audience more like a collaboration or an interplay. As it was obvious though a media text could not be decoded the same way by everyone, due to people’s differences in several aspects, so he concluded that there were three kinds of decoding a media message: the dominant, the negotiated and the oppositional (Williams, 2003, McCullagh, 2002, Deveraux, 2003). As Williams puts it ‘this model emphasises the interaction between the audience and texts as well as the social context within which such interaction happens ’ (2003). The development of the new theories, not surprisingly, led to debates between the active audience theorists and the traditional effects theorists. The new theory of Uses and Gratifications was an approach to understand how and why people use the media to satisfy certain needs (McCullagh, 2002). In comparison with the Hypodermic Needle theory, the Uses and Gratifications not only does not ignore people’s free will, personality and cultural background (The New Audience Research in Media Studies, http://www.le.ac.uk/oerresources/media/ms7500/mod1unit6/page_02.htm, 05/01/2015), it considers them to be active with the power to choose what media they consume. The audience ‘use programme content for purposes other than what might be predicted from their content’ (McCullagh, 2002), which leads to media producers or industries to compete with each other over who will offer the best way for the users’ needs to be gratified. In that way the audience is definitely not considered a passive one which completely accepts the media’s intended message, as the Hypodermic Needle theory suggested. Nevertheless, the debate between the active audience and the traditional effects theorists still goes on, with some of the researchers arguing that the new active audience approaches are ‘too behaviourist and functionalist’ (McQuail, 2010) and that their conclusions lead to an elimination of media power, which was considered essential for ‘shaping the knowledge, understandings and beliefs of the audience’ (Williams, 2003). Also, Kitzinger(1999) wondered whether the audience’s resistance on media messages, as a form of resistance to the status quo, should be praised, since that way people would also easily reject good messages provided by the media, such as safe sex advertisements or campaigns against violence. Even though audience is not considered a mass of ‘couch potatoes’ (Williams, 2003) anymore, whether we are aware of it or not, we all have some certain beliefs and ideals that have been somehow shaped by different types of media, such as the idea of the perfect body that is being advertised today by several model agencies or women magazines. But that does not mean that people do not have the intelligence to make decisions for themselves about what to believe (Williams, 2003). Despite the on-going criticism by the traditional effects theorists, the new audience researchers developed new methods of studying the audience, which focused more on the qualitative rather than the quantitative approach (Williams, 2003). These methods, referred to as the ethnographic turn in media studies, concentrated more on how people were involved with the media and the research was done mostly with participant observation techniques. Unlike the traditional effects research that used surveys o r questionnaires, researchers spent time with the people they were investigating observing their experiences with the media (Williams, 2003). However, there has been criticism on this approach too. Ruddock (2001), for example noted that ‘ethnography requires participants to make personal feelings public. As a result there is a considerable tendency towards self-censorship’, implying that the conclusions resulting from ethnographic research could not possibly present the real truth from the audiences’ perspective. He also questioned how the research questions could be generated in a way that they would respect the natural world of the audience and be appropriate with the field of study in general (Ruddock, 2001). Even though there are many theories that support each thesis, the debate between the traditional effects studies and the active audience theory has been intense and is still on-going (McCullagh, 2002, Williams, 2003). If we were to think about which conceptualisation would best represent today’s society and people, I would say that the active theories concerning this study, including the Uses and Gratifications and the Encoding/Decoding model, position the audience in an active place, where not only it is not exploited by the media, it can even have power over it. Media producers take people’s preferences into consideration so they can produce what would satisfy their audience more (Williams, 2003, McCullagh, 2002, Deveraux, 2003, McQuail, 2010). And since there are arguments that suppose that media takes over people’s lives thus making them ‘couch potatoes’ in another sense of the term (Williams, 2003) the rebuttal would be that nowadays the audienc e knows what it wants in a way that the different types of media work as e ‘menu’ for them to choose from, in order to satisfy their needs to escape their daily routines, educate themselves or even interact socially (Williams, 2003, McCullagh, 2002). Always based on their individual needs and preferences, which is closer to our modern and liberal society. To sum things up, it is now obvious that the study of the audience has been a big chapter in the book of media studies, with many scholars and academics finding themselves engaging with this study. That explains all the experiments, studies and research that have been conducted on the subject, since it concentrates on two different types of audience, which in relation to the media could easily shape the way our society would work. Whether the media would dominate over the audience or the other way around. Since the debate of the subject is still on-going and the opinions diverge, the answer of which model would be the best cannot be absolute. Maybe a combination of the two could function well in the future, but until then the active audience theory seems to be the one closest to our society’s standards nowadays.

Friday, October 25, 2019

Sophies Heart/By Lori Wick :: essays research papers

Sophie's Heart, by Lori Wick, is the story of Sophie, an educated young woman who moves from her homeland, Czechoslovakia, to America where she becomes a housekeeper for a loneyly young widower and his three children. This book takes place mainly in Wisconsin in the 1990's. Sophie moved from Czechoslovakia to American and became employed as a housekeeper for Alec Riley. She grew to love his three children and gradually her love extended to Alec himself, who returned her love with his own. Near the end of this novel, Sophie and Alec get married. Sophie Velikonja, a twenty-year old young woman, moved to America when her name was called on the request list to leave Czechoslovakia. She had not wanted to leaver her beloved grandmother, but her grandmother insisted upon staying behind. Sophie moved to Chicago where she acquired a job as a waitress in a city restaurannt. A devout Christian, Sophie began attending church as soon as she could and met a friendly woman named Janet Ring. Janet's brother, Alec Riley had recently become a widower when his young wife, Venessa, died in a tragic car accident. She suggested to him that he employ a housekeeper. After having met Sophie, Janet recommended the quiet, hard-working young woman to Alec. Alec, after some hesitation and tought, interviewed Sophie and hired her. Sophie lived in a small apartment over Riley's garage and cooked and cleaned for Alec and his three children, Rita (age 17), Craig (age 13), and Tory ( age10). Sophie and the children ended up becoming very close. At first, the children looked down on her with her accent, but when they eventurally learned that Sophie had mastered five other languages and had worked as a translator in her native land, they changed their opinion. Life was not without hardship for Sophie. She desperately missed her beloved grandmother and she also faced problems with Vanessa's mother, who seemed to resent the fact that someone had come to do the same duties her daughter had done. As she and the Riley children grew closer, Sophie began to notice their handsome father, Alec. At first, she didn't admit to herself that she was interested in him, but when Alec began to show an interest in her, Sophie began to seriously look at him. At first, she was concerned that she would be merely a replacement for Vanessa, but as she and Alec grew closer, he made it very clear to her that he loved her for who she was.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Analysis for Costa Coffee Essay

A well-recognized and wide-accepted brand image is one of the most valuable assets of the company. (Aaker, 1991). Costa Coffee has a welcoming and comforting brand image; however, the promotion of this brand image is at a disadvantage compared with its biggest rival Starbucks. In order to reverse the weakness into its strength, Costa Coffee needs to keep improving its brand image and brand awareness. Costa Coffee founded Costa Foundation, which is a charity aiming to offer long-term support especially in education for the coffee-growing farmers and their communities. Thus, Costa Coffee could strengthen its publicity of its efforts in sustaining the vulnerable group. By continue to maintain its social responsibility which could have  reflected its â€Å"responsible† image to the whole public, it would help Costa Coffee gain more reputation and build a better brand image. Launch new products One of the weaknesses of Costa Coffee is its fixed menu and the blank page of new product webpage. Compared to Starbucks and other cafà © shops, having limited choices on the menu would pose a disadvantage to Costa Coffee. The new products might not always attracted to all customers; however, those new products could draw people’s attention and encourage them to come into store and purchase which could be a way of promoting the brand to the public. Create new products and presenting it regular would help Costa Coffee appeal to more potential customers.In the same time, it would also help to create an image that Costa Coffee are trying their best to satisfy their consumers. Cooperate with universities – Costa campus stores or Bring Costa express into campus Costa Express machines have won the hearts of the purchasers as the self-serve coffee machines. As the success of launching Costa Express, Costa Coffee should grab the chance and continue exploiting this opportunity making it to its advantage. Cooperating with other organizations and co-operations would add its consumer base and in the same time it is a lower-risk approach for its further growing. Building campus-based Costa Coffee shops or introducing Costa express into teaching and living areas is a convenient way for students and teaching staff getting their coffee. Besides, it also could increase the probability for more customers to familiar with the Costa Coffee brand itself. Partner with universities allows Costa Coffee better targeting student customers who have the greatest potential to become Costa’s loyal customers in the long run. Reference Aaker, D.A. (1991, Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name, The Free Press,New York, NY.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Bhakti Yoga

There are four goals in the traditional Hinduism. These four goals cover life viewed as good and life seen as bad. Three of these goals appeal to the positive things in life, such as, Dharma or righteousness, Artha or achievement, and Kama or gratification. The fourth goal which is the Moksha or liberation is aimed at the negative things. The three affirmation goals can all be sought at the same time or one at a time, as each may be appropriate at certain periods in one’s life. Hinduism prescribes four paths towards the Divine destiny.These paths may lead to a good life, oneness with the divine, liberation from life, or the fulfillment of any or all of the four goals. The paths are called Yoga. Yoga is a set of disciplines that must be carried out by followers who wished to take these paths. Yoga is like a yoke or a load around the neck or shoulders which is heavy but necessary to reach the destiny or the realization of goals. The different paths or yoga are, Inana or the way towards the ultimate knowledge, Bhakti or the path to loving or devotion to God, Karma or the way to undo the reaction to deeds in life, and the Raja or the royal path to meditation.The Inana, Bhakti and Karma are contained in Bhagavad-Gita while Raja is in Yoga Sutra. Both the Bhagavad-Gita and the Yoga Sutra are spiritual teachings that help explain the divine world. The Bhakti Yoga is the path to the immaculate devotion to and absolute loving of God. In Sanskrit it means the overpowering, generous and joyful love for God. The follower is focused on God by expressions of love and actions of worship. The devotion is strong and faithful like a lover to the beloved, a parent to his child.The Bhakti-Rasamrita-Sindhu of Rupa Gosvami enumerates the nine forms of the path, which are: chant, praise, reflection, service, prayers, preaching, relationship, and surrender. Keeping them all or even one is enough for a devotee to experience the love of God. The objective of this love and devotio n is to get close to God. Depending on their attitudes, Bhakti is taken differently by its followers. For some, it is the initial step leading to Inana. On the contrary, others believe it to be higher than Inana.Others think all of them are equal. Bhagavad Gita is considered the pillar as well as the foundation of Hindu Bhakti theism particularly in Vaishnavism. It has a long list of religious and philosophical affiliations but is partial to Krishna devotees. According to Krishna love, pure intention and utmost devotion is the most powerful driving force in the spiritual life of a devotee. Most Bhakti movements worship only one God, Vishnu or Shiva. They came after the three Vedanta systems were put in place.These Bhakti movements reinvigorated Hinduism because they filled in the emotional and philosophical void of India. The intensity of expression of Bharatanatyam had the most influence in the great changes in Hindu prayers and rituals since the time of Adi Shankaracharya. There h ad been other noted contributions of Bhakti movements in Indian history. Their schools of Philosophy have changed the beliefs of people. Bhakti taught the people to channel their emotions to the direction of God in the process of self-actualization.The Hindus from the orthodox Brahaminical systems denounced the caste system. Bhakti’s call for tolerance and love were not listened to by those deeply-rooted in the caste structure of society. Bhakti was responsible for the mass production of devotional materials in literature, art, music and dance that has enriched the culture not only of India but also of the entire world. This gave spiritual renewal by giving up insignificant rituals and social demarcation, to India References SanatanSociety. org (2008). Bhakti Yoga. Retrieved June 14, 2008 fromhttp://www. sanatansociety. org/yoga_and_meditation/bhakti_yoga. htm ISKCON Educational Services (2004). The Heart of Hinduism. Introduction to the Four Main Parts. Retrived June 14, 200 8 from http://hinduism. iskcon. com/practice/index. htm Hinduism: Living the Religious Life. Retrieved June 14, 2008 from http://uwacadweb. uwyo. edu/Religionet/er/hinduism/HRLIFE. HTM The Yoga Centre Glasgow (2007). Bhakti Yoga. Yogi Nirmalendu. Kundalini Shakti Page. Retrieved June 14, 2008 from http://www. yoginirmalendu. com/Types_Of_Yoga/Bhakti_Yoga/Bhakti_Yoga. html