Article review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 6

Article review - Essay Example 1). A Mouse Resource Browser (MSR) was presented, â€Å"a database of mouse databases that indexes 217 publicly available mouse resources under 22 categories and uses a standardised database description framework (the CASIMIR DDF) to provide information on their controlled vocabularies (ontologies and minimum information standards), and technical information on programmatic access and data availability† (Zouberakis, et.al., 2010, par. 1). The discourse briefly introduced the need to achieve the authors’ identified objective and progressed by proffering the design, implementation and accessibility of the proposed database. The MRB which was the focus of the article was described as â€Å"the front-end of a relational, fully normalized PostgreSQL database, and is a typical Java EE application that follows the MVC architectural pattern, generating three transparent layers: the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) layer, the intermediate Session layer and the interface/web layer† (Zouberakis, et.al., 2010, par. 5). The general content of the article was explained in greater detail in terms of management, delivery and structure. Likewise, an online questionnaire was designed for curatorial purposes. Several illustrations and graphical representations were provided to diagram the MRB architecture and to depict the online responses, curatorial information, ontologies, and accessibility, among others. Finally, a discussion of the proposed MRB’s beneficial contributions to scientists and professionals in the fields of genetics and biomedical sciences was clearly expounded; and the source of funding was appropriately acknowledged. The authors were effective in attaining their objective to â€Å"provide useful information to both bench scientists, who can easily navigate and find all mouse related resources in one place, and bioinformaticians, who will be provided with interoperable resources containing data which can be mined and integrated† (Zouberakis,

Essentials of business in 2012 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Essentials of business in 2012 - Essay Example Our reputation for quality products, unique baked products, eclectic atmosphere, and excellent, friendly service will be the basis for continued growth. Long-term vision (beyond next year): Building on a foundation of community presence, referral business, quality and excellence, we will continue to expand our market and become the preferred choice in the Salthill area for consumers seeking a quiet place to visit while enjoying a hot beverage and freshly baked cakes. While we will offer high quality and a variety of coffee blends, along with other hot and cold beverages, our unique selling point will be our fresh baked cakes and other baked goods. We will offer a large variety and unique flavors to highlight local taste favorites and respond to customer demand. Since we are not a chain, we will have the freedom to experiment with flavors and adjust to accommodate customer needs quickly and efficiently. Our success will rely on our flexibility to changing customer needs, our service excellence, and our fantastic products. These elements, packaged in an inviting environment, with careful attention to costs and profit, will create a sustainable business model. To market the shop we will periodically place advertisements in The Galway City Tribune, create a website, and launch a Facebook page. The costs incurred will be predominately with the newspaper articles, though depending on the service selected, there may be a minimal on-going web hosting fee that we will need to maintain to keep the website live. We will rely on samples, hand-bills, and word-of-mouth for a portion of our marketing strategy. These options offer a low-cost option that will help us create a presence in the community and quickly install The Caked Bean as an everyday destination for the local clientele. While the shop will offer cake slices and single serving baked goods, we will also take orders for whole cakes for special occasions to supplement the normal

Advanced Financial Reporting - Prevalence of Creative Accounting Essay

Advanced Financial Reporting - Prevalence of Creative Accounting - Essay Example This report will be evaluating the reasons that give rise to creative accounting by organizations; the grounds for the nativity of this practice will also be discussed. The evaluation of the efforts made by existing standards and accounting practices in controlling and reducing aggressive accounting will be catered in the report. The levels of success achieved by regulatory bodies will also be discoursed. Increasing the complexity of accounting treatments in such a creative and aggressive way, actually results in deviation from the actual spirit of the suggested treatment. Transactions are treated with a high level of quibble and in a complex manner so as to obtain desired misrepresentation of items present in financial statements, such as assets, liabilities, expenses, revenue, and stock options. It is generally successfully applied over the transactions of inherently complex items of financial statements, for example Derivatives, Hedge accounting, leases, insurance contracts, const ruction contracts, financial instruments, impairment of assets, revenue recognition and manipulation can easily be made. Reasons for using Creative Accounting Creative accounting aims to manipulate ultimate shareholder’s wealth, showing high paper profits, and hiding right earning figures from stakeholders (Farlex 2011). Those who are involved in creative accounting are usually personnel having excess to accounting documents, or can influence the accounting treatments. The records and accounts are falsified and wangled as to divert the route of organization’s money to individual intended pockets. There are some obvious motivations, which lead to the commencement of creative accounting by managers or directors. The business corporate and other borrowers search for capital beyond their home land; this gives rise to an increase in the foreign investment. The investors must be supported with high level investor protection measure and market integrity because there is a sig nificant gap between the investor and the borrower that increases the chances of and may lead to dishonesty (Security and Exchange Commission 2000). Creative accounting provides assistance to businesses to appear profitable and attract customers, resources, and investors. It proves to be more costly when deceptive accounting leads to drastic consequences. Methods of Creative Accounting In an organization where salaries and incentives are paid on the basis of performance (performance related pay), directors can manipulate the annual sales account by showing high sales value or reduction in the figures of liabilities as to pay themselves high remunerations and incentives. Directors can also create high provisions for remote liabilities and include under the head of assets account remote or possible future assets, this treatment of assets and liabilities will be against the bench marks described by standards but if the liability and asset heads are intensely populated then, it will be difficult to locate this non compliance. Other minor non-compliances in the financial statements can result in a material non-compliance in the aggregated form. Directors can also change the policies relating to share options and take advantages like bed and breakfasting shares. Job security concerns can also cause highly designated individuals to falsify accounts in the periods of unfavorable results. To cover up previous frauds, original accounts become compulsory to be replaced by fake accounts using creative accounti

Telecom - Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and At&T Case Study

Telecom - Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and At&T - Case Study Example The main objective of purchasing is to preserve the excellence and worth of a company’s goods, to reduce cash tied-ups in register, to sustain the flow of outputs and support the organization’s aggressive position. Purchasing involves development and evaluation of the products’ specifications, reception and processing of requisitions, promotion and evaluation of bids, examination of goods, suitable storage place and release. Thus, it can be said that purchasing is one of the important decisions which needs prior assessment of various factors. The purchasing or buying cycle consists of five major steps1. Purchasing Cycle Source: 1 The buying cycle model according to Weele talks about five factors namely awareness of needs, assessment of alternatives, alleviation of risk, decision and last but not the least achievement of results. With the increasing effects of globalisation and changing business scenario, cellular services have become part and parcel of human life . Increasing need for cellular services has brought quite a few companies into the market. Verizon Wireless, Sprint Wireless and AT&T are three of the popular companies of United States that have successfully catered the need of the customers for certain years. The success of these companies lies on the fact that they could impressively hit the requirement of the prospective customers. The companies came up with foray of alternatives which had been the second stage of the buying cycle model. Verizon wireless provides wireless voice and data products along with services of broadband data. Video services and network accesses are also available to the customers of the company2. Sprint Wireless also provides data and voices services in wireless segment to its customers. Moreover, it provides wireless network with both CDMA and iDEN networks for the customers of United States3. AT&T also provides certain other benefits like WI-FI services, the facility of U-verse which is primarily requi red to send SMS along with high speed broadband and video services. Moreover, the wireless 4G facility and high speed downlink packet access are also provided by AT&T4. The next stage of the buying cycle is the alleviation of risk. While considering the risks, the existing and the prospective customers of any cellular service basically considers the factor of network connectivity. In this context, it can be said that AT&T and Verizon Wireless have higher market penetration in terms of network connectivity in comparison with Sprint. Verizon is also way ahead when compared to two other companies with respect to other add-on services like Bluetooth. The next step of the buying cycle i.e. decision is the most important. The trend of the market depicts that Verizon having better services, also leads in the market share which ultimately depicts that customers have decided to be with the services of the company. In order to ensure long term sustainability, Verizon Wireless needs to ensure that the customers (both existing and the prospective) achieve their desired objectives. The other two companies, on the other hand, need to ensure that they provide services in such a way that they can attain greater market share in due process. Positioning Positioning is an effort to influence the customer perception for a brand or product in relation to its competitive brands. Positioning is one of significant tools of marketing to highlight a brand

The essay should be presented as a Journal opinion article. The

The should be presented as a Journal opinion article. The article should be timely and address an economic issue of curren - Essay Example The short and long term implications of immigration laws are imperative for determining employment rates and productivity of the US workforce. In the short run, immigration is said to slightly decrease the employment rates or in other words, increase unemployment rates however the long run implications are positive. The matter has been the center of debate and has affected the US immigration policy greatly. While many try to make a case against reform in US immigration laws, credible sources in the available literature have established that long term impacts of immigration on the US workforce is positive as it enhances labor productivity. In their opinion article titled More Immigration Means More Jobs for Americans, John Dearie and Courtney Geduldig have given useful statistics that suggest that immigration improves employment as it creates jobs for the common people (n.pag.). It mentions how immigrants make up on a small percent of the total American population yet contribute a sig nificant percent to the economy by means of small businesses. Because most immigrants are self-employed and own several small scale sole-proprietorships and partnership businesses, they create jobs for the people thereby helping to reducing the unemployment rates. ... ed by Dearie and Geduldig is consistent with current findings which Giovanni Peri has described in his article The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion. Peri’s article mentions the long run positive effects of immigration on the US economy as it increases productivity (4). Immigrants bring in new ideas and creativity along with them leading diverse distribution of organizational workforces. Although it may seem like immigrations negatively impact the US labor market as they saturate jobs and cause unemployment in the short run, the long run implications are promising. However, it seems to long before the long run positive impacts become observable. Even though short run effects of immigration may reduce employment, it increases average income in the long run (Peri, 4). So, the long effects of immigration are positive on employment, productivity, and income. However, it is also important to note that the immigration must adapt to economic changes in order fo r it to improve variables such as employment, productivity, and average income. The current US immigration laws do not allow the immigrants to adjust to economic changes because it makes them unresponsive to the economic conditions. In order for legal immigration to improve organizational productivity, average income, and employment rates, immigration must adjust to economic cycles thereby leading to improvements in the US economy. These adjustments are the hardest to carry during prolonged periods of economic downturns and therefore amendments in the US immigration policy is required to allow the inflows to be responsive to economic changes thereby helping to boost economic activity and hence result in greater jobs for the people. Thus, a reform in the current US immigration laws may provide a

Cold War Essay Example for Free

Cold War Essay In the European theater of operations for WWII, the Allied victory and the Axis loss resulted in unprecedented destruction of the economy of the region. The Americans felt that the United States had a purpose to work for the revival of the European economy along the lines of political and social factors that could allow free countries to emerge (qtd. in May par. 2). The sweep of such a purpose on into a solid commitment was not perceived or hoped for at the outset. In the United States the Executive branch (including the State Department) and the US Congress were often at odds about what to do about the European economic situation. But there was agreement that the aftermath of WWII must not come to have a result in any fashion like the economic conditions that prevailed after WWI (Marshall Plan Par. 7). It was initially felt that the United States involvement in European recovery would not be costly or time consuming. It was thought that Europe and especially the United Kingdom and France with their colonies, could pull themselves back up in short order (Marshall Plan par. 4). The cold winters after the war did not help the situation. The worst winter in a century was experienced in Europe in 1946-47 (Kunz par. 5). There was high unemployment, food shortages, and strikes. In particular, the food shortages sparked humanitarian and relief efforts among various organizations. The new United Nations sponsored much of this effort and it was almost all funded by the United States (Marshall Plan par. 11). Not enough of this was organized well enough or in great enough amounts to do more than to briefly alleviate the problem. American troops in Europe also lent a hand in repair and refugee work. For the long term, the food shortages could be seen to keep on occurring since the traditional source for supplies for Western European had come from Eastern Europe (Judd â€Å"East-West Trade† par. 2). After these winters of food shortage, it was becoming apparent that a divided Europe was becoming the norm. The awareness of such a division was not generally acknowledged prior to these harsh winters. President Truman entered the United States into some bilateral agreements intending to militarily aid Greece and Turkey. These countries could be seen as being in East Europe. They were facing subversive efforts by communists to take over those countries. For Western Europe, some thought the Morgenthau Plan could be used (Marshall Plan par. 13). This plan supposed massive war reparations could be extracted from Germany to restore the countries other than Germany. There was also the Monnet Plan (Marshall Plan par. 13) which proposed more punishment of Germany since France would control the Ruhr and Saar coal regions for French purposes. On a purely monetary front the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 established the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for loans to European nations (Kunz par. 7). The funds made available for these loans were proving to not be of the necessary magnitude. It had been assumed that the international economic system was sound and that an initial infusion of monetary aid would do the trick. But even more was needed. The American agricultural production was unimpaired, the level of manufacturing output was unprecedented, and the American gold reserves were safe. An outlet was needed to sustain and use the economic prowess of the American transition from wartime to domestic and foreign consumption. The economic plan for a reconstruction of Western Europe, if needed, could borrow from the New Deal experience as the American response to the Great Depression had been accomplished. Early in 1947, evidence of a recession brewing in the United States turned some economist’s attention to a need to assure European purchases of American goods. The Americans did not want to see continued European wartime controls and plans which had placed the idea of a continuance of control and regulation by European governments as conclusive. Many in Europe were looking to the Soviet Unions central planning controlled by the state. The Soviets were reporting very high growth rates with the prospect of prosperity just around the corner (DeLong and Eichengreen 11). The Americans had not successfully concluded a war in Europe to end fascist tyranny and oppression only to then see a different brand of tyranny and oppression in its place. This threat was perceived to be the communists, Soviet or otherwise. The Soviet influence was directly felt on Eastern Europe. The American administration felt that, for Western Europe, an economic union would be needed. These nations would have to be on the same page if they were not to go communists or be controlled by communists. Accordingly, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State Marshall spoke of the need to promote free institutions in Europe through their restoration with American aid (Marshall Plan, par. 15).

Illusions Realities Ibsen Essay Example for Free

Illusions Realities Ibsen Essay Introduction In Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, illusions and reality are set into a conflict within the story of a son’s personal desire to confront idealism. Throughout much of the play, the son, Greger, argues the value of truth with the reluctant Dr. Relling. Relling insists on the importance of illusions, but fails to discourage Greger’s intentions and a play that begins as a comedy quickly turns into a tragedy because of these conflicts. At the heart of the illusions in this play are the ways that people assume many roles in a family, impersonating multiple ideals as ways for managing their relationships. This theme of impersonation is also developed in Ibsen’s Ghosts, where family relations are slowly undone as the illusions and deceptions are stripped away. In both plays, deceptions are strategic and designed to protect the children from the pains and struggles of their families’ histories. Ultimately, in these plays, families are held together by illusions, yet torn apart by truths that have been concealed to protect the children. Illusions and Realism In The Wild Duck, as Relling continues to discourage Greger from revealing damaging truths about family secrets, Relling insists, If you take away make-believe from the average man, you take away happiness as well (Ibsen, 294). Relling is referring to the ways the Ekdal family is structured on particular deceptions; however, these are designed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. Hedvig, the fourteen year old daughter, represents one of the innocents, and Greger’s father, Old Werle, represents a part of the guilty side. The key to these dualisms of false and truth, innocent and guilty, illusion and reality, lies in Ibsen’s art of realism, which was a staging of the complicated threads that hold ordinary lives together. Within the ordinary lives of the families in Ghosts and The Wild Duck are tales of infidelity, corruption, greed, lust, disease, and other afflictions that characterize family secrets. For example, in Ghosts, the mother, Mrs. Alving, reveals the ways she has protected her son Oswald from the truths of her unhappy marriage. She tells her friend and priest, Manders, â€Å"†¦Yes, I was always swayed by duty and consideration for others; that was why I lied to my son, year in and year out. Oh, what a coward I have been† (315). Manders responds, â€Å"You have built up a happy illusion in your son’s mind, Mrs. Alving – and that is a thing you certainly ought not to undervalue,† (315) echoing Dr. Relling’s belief that illusions are sometimes more than a question of reality. In both plays, the deeper questions are about whose reality matters, and who may determine another person’s reality. Relling accuses Greger of having a plague of â€Å"†¦integrity-fever; and then whats worse you are always in a delirium of hero-worship; you must always have something to adore, outside yourself,† which Greger agrees to, without considering the consequences of this claim (297). In fact, Greger’s certainty about the dangers of illusions provokes the young Hedvig into an emotional despair, and she kills herself. The issues presented in this play are not about what is true, or false, but about the ways people build their lives on the past. Hedvig’s father, Hialmar, protects his daughter from truths that concern the actions of others, with consequences that have indirectly affected her life. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving is protecting her son from truths that, in the end, have consequences on Oswald’s life, as he has inherited syphilis from his philandering father. The climaxes of these two stories result in the deaths of Hedvig, and Oswald and both deaths come about as a result of their learning the truths of their pasts. In each of these plays, the reality is what destroys the characters. Once the life illusions are taken away, there is nothing for the individuals to hold onto. As the illusions are shattered, reality becomes impossible to endure. Ultimately, by using realism to portray the value of illusions, Ibsen produces complicated questions about what is real and what is sometimes a necessary illusion. Conclusion Both The Wild Duck, and Ghosts are tragedies that involve what might be understood as â€Å"the sins of the fathers;† however, Ibsen seems to suggest that some truths are better maintained as illusions. In both plays, the truth destroys the lives of those who have been protected from the past and in both cases the past involves relationships that have indirect consequences on the children’s understandings of their lives. In the end, whether it is right or wrong to maintain the illusions is not as significant as the question of who has the right to determine what is real, and what is true for others. Works Cited Henrik Ibsen, â€Å"The Wild Duck,† Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen, NY: Bantam Books. Henrik Ibsen, â€Å"Ghosts,† Playreader’s Repertory, M. R. White and F. Whiting, Eds. , London: Foresom and Company.