Hate crimes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Hate crimes - Essay Example tions of their formation are mostly notorious in that, as the term hate implies, these groups expresses extreme aversion or hostility towards their defined focus; as they all possess characteristics of bigotry and being structurally organized. More identified with their activities are violent and exhibition of criminal acts, believed to be consistent with their philosophies and beliefs and with utter disregard for social responsibility. Personally, one believes that society must endeavor to create a check and balance mechanism that would pre-empt and anticipate aggressive behavior and violence planned to be perpetuated by these groups. By eliciting the assistance of authorized government security agencies (the FBI, anti-terrorist agencies, the police), the agenda of hate groups must be monitored and any untoward incident attributed to any of the groups’ members should be sanctioned according to proper legal proceedings. The questions that came to one’s mind while reading the chapter are: (1) how effective are current government agencies’ measures in pre-empting violence and crimes planned by these hate groups? (2) Were there any benefits that have been identified to hate groups’ ideologies to society, aside from seeking to achieve the groups’ interests and goals? (3) Could society ultimately provide a solution to prevent the formation of hate

Final Exam Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Final Exam - Assignment Example oup faces an ethical dilemma on whether to provide a minimal support of food, clothes and water or return to the base camp and provide the Sadhu with a proper care. One individual decides that the journey was more important than the welfare of the stranger while another member tried to help him as much as he could. When the two individuals meet up, one of them asks the other How he feels about contributing to the death of the Sadhu. Nobody was sure whether Sadhu was dead or alive and no one was willing to accept total responsibility of the Sadhu but they did what they could to their convenience. The ethical issues brought in the parable are that of self interest, compassion and the issue of passing a burden to others. The issue of fulfilling self interest is portrayed by one member of the group who states that the journey as more important than helping a needy Sadhu.This show that he does not care of those in need and this is an ethical problem.The ethical issue of compassion which is presented in the virtue approach of ethical thinking is clearly shown by a member of the group who takes the burden of helping the sadhu although in the end of the journey he does not know whether the sadhu survived o died but he can be credited for trying to provide means in which the sadhu can get better. Passing on of burden from one person to the other is also an ethical issue raised within the parable as one member of the group passes the burden of Sadhu to the others. This occurs mostly in the society as people tend to pass stressful issues to other in order to escape the stress accompan ying the issue. Corporate social responsibility is a corporate self regulation that is incorporated into a business model. The built in self regulation by businesses ensures they adhere to the law, international norms and ethical standards. Under corporate social responsibility, businesses have big responsibility for the impact of the activities on the consumers, environment, communities,

Case Study on Ontology Languages Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Case Study on Ontology Languages - Essay Example 20/Jul/2006 J B Conrad Semantic web creation conrad@xyz.com DAML+OIL: http://www.xyz.com J B Conrad conrad@xyz.com Semantic Web Creation May OWL: Comparison of the...While these languages represent the specifications for the Ontology, they do not represent the real programming languages that are employed like CycL, Ontolingua, F-Logic, etc., 1. XML: This uses a standard syntax laid down already by the W3C. The code is crisp and easy to write. The DTD can be defined the way it is required. However, this does not offer the flexibility of defining standard classes and then making use of the similar structure repeatedly. XML is easy to use in a program though of course, creating XML data which will have semantics in them is not possible with the existing structure of XML. 2. XOL on the other hand, offers all those features that are present in XML as well as in OIL. XOL employs modelling primitives that are in line with OKBC standards. This is based on XML and uses Ontologies to extend the features. Therefore, it is found that the language is supporting some of the insufficiencies in XML like standard class definition and other structure definitions. With these, the data gets verified and the mistakes in the data are avoided. In addition to these, this also supports extensive slot hierarchies. But however, it does not allow definition of relationships extensively. This makes it a weak relationship modeller. XOL is comfortable where only data is to be represented without any major relationship criterion which is hard to find in knowledge systems. 3.

Report on Religious Field Research Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Report on Religious Field Research - Assignment Example This religious teaching emanated from India when Siddharta Gautama, son of King Suddhodana and Queen Maya in 566 BB of Kapilavastu, who reflected the four realities of life: sickness, old age, death, and a wandering monk. He followed the life of the monk, abandoned his wealth and wore ragged robes (Instilling Goodness School, 2013). He practiced ascetic lifestyle to gain enlightenment; do a lot of meditation and eat raw foods, fruits and leaves. Sometimes, he fasted. He realized in life that overdoing things cannot provide happiness in life, but moderation and objective balancing of needs is. Gautama became Buddha, the awakened one (Boundlesslight.webs.com, 2013). He emphasized that suffering is caused by peoples’ dissatisfaction and greed and such could only be eliminated if one would live a life of truth, moderation, meditation, and reflective reasoning of life. He believed that life’s moderation will spare one from unnecessary wants and from overreacting to life†™s circumstances (Instilling Goodness School, 2013). ... While it has been recognized that human failures are sourced from misguidance, misperceptions, distortion, stresses and suffering, but for them, this can be remedied by living a balance life and life of reason as the best remedy for all these things (Boundlesslight.webs.com, 2013). Buddha explicated that happiness is fundamentally based on quiet and simple life: to want what you have and not want those you do not have (Instilling Goodness School, 2013). This is to rule over one’s negativities in life to maintain that composure and peace derived from the inevitabilities of life’s roller coaster realities. Self-control is possible when we all have control of our very lives and when we are reasonably able to maintain that life of reflective reason (Instilling Goodness School, 2013). Buddhism has three major teachings: 1. Nothing is lost in the universe- this asserts that all matters are transformed into energies of the universe and vice versa. For instance, all human being s are finite and life will eventually die and be buried back into the earth. From dust we came and life returns into dust (Instilling Goodness School, 2013). Other life forms emerge from the soil which could either be plants that could provide oxygen which will support the existence of life too. Every person is born from parents and the children grow into adults to become parents too of the younger offspring. Human life perpetuated in this cycle and if people tends to be destructive to the environ where one is evolving would mean that we, too, are destroying our lives (Instilling Goodness School, 2013). 2. Everything Changes – this is the fundamental principle of impermanence.

Summary paper on book 1 free choice of the will by Augustine of hippo Essay

Summary paper on book 1 free choice of the will by Augustine of hippo - Essay Example On the other hand, those who do evil and sin but are God’s chosen, are not going to be punished because they still remain saved, regardless of their behavior. Augustine persists that wrongdoing is a substance of free will at its cause, where he sounds sensible and is the least uncertain. He further stresses this by detaching wrongdoing from God’s cause. All what is God-made is good according to Augustine, and for that reason, he says god cannot be the cause of evil. He argues that evil is committed in the act of free will of humanity, and adds that it can also be in free will of angles, but not God. On the other hand, his persistence about Gods actions of good will being by God’s grace seems to disagree with his own affirmation on choice of free will. While God should not be the one to blame for wrong doing, God is given all the praise and glory for good, despite the bad deeds committed by those who have done things according to the good will. Therefore, people should be blamed for the bad things they do and cause, but do not deserve any recognition for whatever good they do. According to Augustine, people’s capability to operate according to their own free will has been seriously weakened by the obsession and desires. They lack the strength to control their needs, so they are controlled and driven by lust. Augustine believes that lust is one of the biggest sin of all and that it troubles very many people, who end up giving in to it readily and gladly. This is proof of the weakness of free will. Where Augustine makes outstanding points on the way flesh desires directly disagreeing with the spirit, the way he argues that we behave in good manner by God’s grace is in direct disagreement with his persistence that evil is a deed of free will. If we are made good by God, then why cannot the devil be the cause to sin, when we act badly? As Augustine insists that we as human beings have free will, it means we are responsible for the bad

Owner-Manager Types Essay Example for Free

Owner-Manager Types Essay Cranfield School of Management has been studying the behaviour of entrepreneurs and their relationship with key staff in some thousands of growing UK companies. Cranfield study has concluded that it is the entrepreneurs themselves who are the most likely to be the biggest stumbling block to the growth and development of their own company. Cranfield grouped entrepreneurs into four dominant types of relationship with their staff, mainly: Heroes, Artisans, Meddlers and Strategists. Past Cranfield studies shows that most small firms do not think very much about their future strategy. In fact, less than a third of small and medium enterprises across Europe set their objectives in terms of profit and margins. This is somewhat surprising as profit and profitability are the key measures of business success. However, as over two-thirds of owner-managed companies with a turnover of i 10 million do not have a plan at all, it should come as no surprise that few entrepreneurs are strategists. Other research has uncovered the shocking fact that 60 per cent of senior staff in small firms leave within two years of their appointment. Some of these early departures can be put down to poor recruitment. The researchers studied two important elements of this relationship. The first element studied was how much time the owner-manager spent on routine management tasks such as marketing, selling, analysing figures, reviewing budgets or arbitrating between managers. The second one examines what level of business skills has been attained by the key staff. Heroes Probably the Heroes undertake one management function such as sales or production. The Heroes time is now spent on managing the business. As the level of business skill throughout their employees is still relatively low, the Heroes will take the lead in starting routine management procedures. They will introduce ideas from the courses they attend to the firm and be the only persons who really understand them. That is the reason why they will be considered as Heroes from the rest of the employees. Unfortunately, this leads to the Heroes taking the Herculean role on their hands. In this case, allocating operations to the employees is relatively simple as the working skills in most businesses are either readily available in the local community or the people can be trained up without too much difficulty. On the other hand, passing out routine management tasks will almost always require that the owner or manager trains up his own management teams. There are few well trained managers available to the small company because of two main reasons. Firstly, the overall pool of such people is small as training in the small business sector until recently has been almost exclusively concentrated on the Entrepreneur. Secondly, well trained managers usually seek jobs in larger firms with more opportunities for advancement and more resources to practice the art of management on. The Heroes have a high capacity for improving the firm performance but still have low growth prospects when compared to their market. They have no time for strategic thinking and no depth of management to handle growth effectively. Artisans In the Cranfield model, the Artisans are characterized by low occupation with routine management tasks. The reason is that most of their time is spent producing a product or delivering a service. The level of business skills in the company is also low as most of the Artisans staff is employed helping in production or performing primary duties, such as book-keeping or selling. Artisans can include professional firms, such as architects and surveyors, manufacturers, sub-contractors or small building firms, owners of small retail chains such as chemists, video stores and proprietors of hotels and restaurants. Little time is available either for routine management tasks such as examining performance or reassessing methods. Every hour that can be sold is sold and little time is left over to either improve the quality or profitability of todays business or to consider strategy for tomorrow. The Artisans have low growth prospects in relation to their market. Their training and development needs are to raise their awareness of the management significance as a business task of equal importance with daily revenue earning. Meddlers The Meddler increases the level of management skills either by training or recruitment but then fails to delegate routine management tasks. At this stage, according to the Cranfield model, the owner-managers probably have no operative responsibilities and have assumed the role of managing directors. Typically, they spend much time anticipating subordinates, introducing more refined, but largely unnecessary management systems. They also go on courses or read books that make them even more well-informed and sometimes better at routine management tasks than their own employees, who anyway are by now doing a perfectly satisfactory job of managing todays business. They get in early and leave late and practice management by walking about. The Meddlers problem is that they cannot delegate routine management tasks because they feel useless. They have been used to a 70-90 hour week with only 10 days holiday each year. Once their management team is in place and trained, they are out of a job. Until they reduce their involvement with routine management tasks, they will limit the growth capacity of this firm for two reasons. Firstly, their management team will not take on more duties if the reward for taking on the last lot of responsibility was being irritated and criticised. Secondly, they are too busy checking on people to develop sound strategies for growth. Strategists The Strategists are the most desirable type of entrepreneurs to develop a growing business. They develop the management skills of their team to the highest appropriate level and in depth. They may introduce a staff duty to help their line managers in such areas as personnel and market research. This will free-up their key managers to think strategically too. They will dedicate roughly a third of their time to management tasks such as monitoring performance, co-ordinating activities, resolving conflict and helping to manage todays business. A third of their time will be spent motivating, counselling, developing management teams and helping them to manage change. This activity is aimed at improving the existing business. The final third of their time will be devoted on developing strategic thinking to form the shape of the future business. Their training needs will be to continuously update their core leadership and motivation skills and to increase their depth of knowledge on strategic issues, acquisition or divestment activity and financing sources. Relationship between the Owner-Manager and His Key Staff in a Growing Firm The natural path of development for the relationship between the owner-manager and his team is to pass from Artisan to Hero to Meddler and for the lucky few to become Strategists. Why Family Businesses Die The family business is deeply rooted in the sense of pride of the owner like most of other forms. Schein (1998) said that this is reinforced by a desire for autonomy which forms part of the five career anchors. This becomes possible with the combination of vision, energy and dedication. Moorman and Halloran (1993) stated that there are more businesses that fail than they succeed in this competitive market place. Twenty-four from one hundred start-ups fail in the U. S. , within the first two years and more than sixty within the first six years. This happens due to lack of planning and preparation which is the most common reason. The second is the lack of creativity which is important to survive. Some businesses offering the same product may succeed because they are doing something better and more innovative than competition. The Copy Cat approach lacks creative skills to turn its product into a unique selling proposition. This can be harmful for family businesses.

Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape

Andy Goldsworthy: Concepts of the Landscape Title: ‘Travel constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape’ (M. Auge, â€Å"Non-Places,† 1995; p86). Does this statement seem to you to express a central insight about landscape and travel in the 20th century? Please discuss in relation to the work of Andy Goldsworthy. The Earthworks art of Andy Goldsworthy challenges, firstly, a classical art-historical conception of the landscape, and can also be implicitly responsive to the ‘supermodern’ sense of landscape and place, theorised by Marc Auge, in which â€Å"Vocabulary†¦ educates the gaze, informs the landscape[1].†. Goldsworthy captures the essence of place through texture, allusion to process and a mutual dependability on nature, as if to transform both the materials of the objects and the meaning of their often banal contexts. It is immediately evident that Goldsworthy’s works, in general, strongly accentuate texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the working process as a tactile expression, implying the involvement of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially through cues signifying touch and vision. â€Å"For me, looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins[2].† This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lost the purpose and functionalism of the commercial product. This tactile gaze, used as the central way of identifying the object, is further evoked through the use of text. For example, in a photograph of a spherical ice ball positioned aside a bleak Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the image not only in terms of its visual impact but also the texture implied by its aural qualities: â€Å"Stacked ice – sound of cracking.[3]† The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks[4] symbolizes its sensual form in a way which still identifies it as relating to a river, but without the non-abstracted seamless visual art representation of a river. Goldsworthy describes this process: â€Å"The snake has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes below and sometimes above, an expression of the space it occupies[5].† Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to designate a river (in its non-place), the use of more tactile cues reclaims the spectator’s newness of vision: in Auge’s words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is â€Å"the first journey of birth†¦the primal experience of differentiation[6].†While Auge asserts that non-places â€Å" exist only through the words that evoke them,[7]† AG’s words work to clarify the gaze rather than condense it to a unified vision. But what constitutes this gaze? When we refer to his earthworks, are we referring only to the symbolic object, or the whole space inside the photo frame? Like a travel writer, a heightened perception or rediscovery of the landscape is the central tenet of Goldsworthy’s working process: â€Å"Some places I return to over and over again, going deeper- a relationship made in layers over a long time.[8]† There is a suggestion by AG that site or context affects and, to an extent, has a significant role in generating the features of his objects: When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it†¦The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within[9] While the train, for Auge, is one of the greatest culprits behind the spectator’s fleeting vision of space, Goldsworthy’s immobilization and transposition of the train track and its practical function to a snaking †¦in the Lambton earthworks?, is a way for AG to recapture the essence of the landscape, to shift its perceptual status from non-place to place: â€Å"Staying in one place makes me more aware of change[10].† However, part of this awareness is awareness that the land itself is fleeting and transforming according to environmental ‘whim,’ and that the photograph merely represents a certain moment in a process. His emphasis on spontaneity and change according to environmental and climactic conditions, as well as his own sense of navigation, is significant because he is able to evoke the history of the object through capturing a synchronic moment in its processes. If we look at several of his works in which piles of material are neatly centred with a hollow hole[11], we sense their impermanence and a foreboding decay from seeing their present formal cohesion. A Cambridge earthwork with leaves is accompanied by this awareness in text, where a materialistic description of the object is transformed into a narrative of it: â€Å"Torn Hole/horse chestnut leaves stitched with stalks around the rim/moving in the wind[12].† Perhaps more than these smaller-scale earthworks, the earthworks in County Durham most forcefully use the concept of environmental process to allude to the movement of travel, not only through their obvious association with trains, but through the movement implied by the object, as â€Å" ripples from a thrown stone[13]†. Freezing these processes is a way of reawakening the senses, by both seeing the object statically without moving too fast and by being aware of its continuing narrative, rather than being driven by the â€Å"perpetual series of presents[14]† of those unrecognised non-places, exaggerated in Thomas Gursky’s digital photos . According to Auge, the language of signposts etc. does not heighten the spectator’s perception of a place, but merely substitutes their relationship to it as a mere passing acknowledgement.[15] Goldsworthy’s works seem to reclaim that historicity of the natural object that is lost in the immediacy of the commercial product[16], including the signs that describe and name features and punctuations in the land, trying to give it a sense of place. Challenging the prescriptions of discourse on our subjectivity, however, has always been a preoccupation in landscape art. Constable’s landscape paintings, for example, could represent a different challenge to the supermodern construction of landscape into a fleeting ‘non-place,’ through his holistic, static, formalist and panoramic vision of the land. While Goldsworthy reconfigures the landscape’s gaze beyond the static to an awareness of its morphology, materiality, unpredictability and precariousness, Constable and the landscape painters of the 18th century synchronized these natural irregularities, painting the clouds and sun simultaneously and consciously at different periods and freezing the movement of the Hay wain into a stance.[17] In Goldsworthy’s work, therefore, landscape is no longer a site, implying static, but a process, implying diachronic, in which the object and its place are interdependent. Throughout the earthworks photographs and their accompanying text, two main interconnected subjectivities emerge, both of which seem threatened by the dislocation through the â€Å"non-place:† organic nature and Goldsworthy, who is simultaneously a conscious manipulator of nature’s autonomous processes as well as driven by the manipulations of nature itself. The larger scope of his County Durham Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, encourages a more structural and slightly cartographic gaze. A disused railway track becomes the site for a snaking sand track photographed aerially alongside rows of monotonous houses. Their juxtaposition, their mutual encroachment on one another and the snaking imprint’s echo of movement, in one sense seem to re-establish the inter-dependency of urban structures and nature, and the similarities in the way we perceive them despite serving different functions. In this sense, it allows greater insight to its organic qualities by its association. In a technical sense, it could be argued that there is a tension between Goldsworthy’s organic creations and their technological control by the intrinsic features of the photograph. However, any hint of the artist’s exploitation, evoked in works such as â€Å"Snowball in trees†[18] or in references to the name of the excavator driver in the Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, is balanced out, in exchange, by their precarious existence in nature, where a rock could be precariously balanced on a boulder.[19] This relationship between nature and its manipulations is significant because it represents a reappropriation of our relationship with those places, designated by the artist’s symbols rather than the symbols of industry with which â€Å"individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but ‘moral entities’ or institutions[20]†. Goldsworthy navigates and finds his non-prescribed place, by being led by climactic and environmental factors rather than such ‘moral entities.[21] Auge defines non-place in detail against the anthropological concept of place, where the traveller occupies a non-communicative, solitary space with the language of ticket machines and train timetables.[22] Accordingly, these public facilities and structures give the spectator an image of their individuality, or a ‘distanced’ simulated familiarity,[23] by discursively framing and displacing the ‘gaze’ and the individual ‘essence’ towards a simultaneous collective individuality, through the â€Å"individualization of references[24].† In contrast, by allowing the serendipitous influence of nature to produce a unique result on each object, each of the processes in the Earthworks produces individual objects, which, not over-prescribed by images and signs, evolve in partial autonomy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Auge, Marc, Non-Places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995. Baudrillard, Jean, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia, 1988 Goldsworthy, Andy, Andy Goldsworthy, London: Penguin Group, 1990. Hand to Earth, Ed. Andy Goldsworthy. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Rosenthal, Michael, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987 Rosenthal, Michael, â€Å"The Victorians and Beyond,† British Landscape Painting, Oxford: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1982 Footnotes [1]Marc Auge, Non-Places:introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, 1995: Verso, London , p108 [2]Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Goldsworthy, 1990:Penguin Group, London , p1 [3]Andy Goldsworthy, â€Å"Stacked ice sound of cracking,† Hampstead Heath, 28 December 1985 [4] Andy Goldsworthy, â€Å"Leadgate and Lambton earthworks,† County Durham, Winter-Spring 1988-9 [5] Goldsworthy, p3 [6] Auge, p84 [7] opcit, p95 [8] Goldsworthy, p1 [9] ibid [10] ibid [11] For example, â€Å"Bracken,† Borrowdale, Cumbria, 13 February 1988; â€Å"Slate,† Stonewood, Dumfriesshire, Summer 1987, â€Å"Plane Leaves,† Castres, France, 19 October 1988. [12] Cambridge, 24 July 19886 [13] AG, p4 [14] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. [15] Auges, p97 [16] Jean Baudrillard, The ecstasy of communication, trans. Bernard Caroline Schutze, ed. Slyvere Lotringer, Brooklyn, N.Y. : Autonomedia, 1988 [17]Michael Rosenthal, Constable, London Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987 [18] [19] Rock on boulder work [20] Auge, p96 [21] AG, p1 [22] Auge, p107-8 [23] Auge, p106 [24] Auge, p109