EMPLOYERS DO NOT ADOPT HR POLICIES IN AN INTEGRATED AND PLANNED WAY, Essay

EMPLOYERS DO NOT ADOPT HR POLICIES IN AN INTEGRATED AND PLANNED WAY, AND THEREFORE LOSE OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE BUSINESS PERFORMANCE - Essay Example There has been a change of approach in the way that labour is reviews in the organisation and the modern perception emphasize on viewing labour as an investment and not as a commodity or resources. In this regard, labours has stared to be seen as a made of creative and innovative social being who are able to give the organisation a competitive edge. (Michael 2006, p. 42) The term human resource has been changing to broader management and the concept of human capital has been applied more often in place of human resource. Therefore the modern perception of human labour has been changing the way organisation have been handling their human capital to a more liberalized way. It has been realised that having a competitive workforce can be an important way which can ensure that an organization creates a competitive edge that other organisation may find difficult to replicate. Therefore the focus of modern human resource management has been looking at the ways in which the workforce can be motivated in order to have a more competent and motivated workforce. This has been shown to translate to a more productive workforce who increases the productivity of the organisation. This is because intellectual capital has been shown to be more important that financial capital that an organisation invests in its operation. The modern focus of human resource management

Use of omputer in academic development of children during their Essay

Use of omputer in academic development of children during their primary years - Essay Example Computers have become a standard feature in preschool, kindergarten and primary grades as a teaching aide. In the competitive age that we live in with strong emphasis on achievement, many educators see computer use as a way to accelerate progress in education.At home too, most parents feel compelled to follow this trend and purchase personal computers for their children in order to make them better prepared for their technology exposure at school and outside. Market researchers tracking software trends have identified that the largest software growth recently has been in new titles and companies serving the early childhood educational market. Even as early as 1996, SPA consumer market report found that of the people who own home computers and have young children, 70% had purchased educational software for their children to use .An estimated $50 million was spent on software programs for young children in 2001. The percentage today could only have increased judging by the omnipresence of computers in schools and homes. Parents and educators seem to be so eager to incorporate technology in education that many of them are introducing computers to children at younger ages to not only motivate them to get a head start on academics but also for their careers in later life. For example, lapware, a software program intended for children under 18 months of age was first introduced in the late 1990s ,to stimulate the brains of children as young as 6 months while they sit on the lap of their parent. Understandably, not all psychologists and educators are thrilled at the idea of using computers as an introduction to academic concepts and have raised questions about its effectiveness and also emotional and physical side effects. Abstract: The literature review that is done in this paper attempts to address several issues related to the academic use of computers with young children. We will study existing articles and research already done on the subject to achieve a better understanding and evaluate the different aspects related to the topic. They are: (1) the integration of technology into the typical learning environment and the potential benefits of appropriate use of technology in early childhood programs (2) the essential role of adults in evaluating appropriate uses of technology; (3) Appropriate Computer activities (4) The concerns of different organizations and educators who are opposed to the academic incorporation of computers. . Literature Review: Learning through computers and evidence of their benefits: The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), an organization that sets standards of excellence for programs for children from birth through age eight, recommends the use of computers with children ages three and older. In fact, the association claims that computers can have important benefits for even very young children, including language development, literacy development, social development, and the development of important problem-solving skills. Computers are intrinsically compelling for young children. The sounds and graphics gain children's attention. Increasingly, young children observe adults and older children working on computers, and they want to do it, too. Children get interested because they can make things happen with computers. Developmentally appropriate software engages children in creative play, mastery learning, problem solving, and conversation. The children control the pacing and the action. They can repeat a process or activity as oft en as they like and experiment with variations. They can collaborate in making decisions and share their discoveries and creations (Haugland & Shade 1990). When used appropriately, technology can support and extend traditional materials in valuable ways. Research points to the positive effects of technology in children's learning and development, both cognitive

Obesity: Causes, Effects and Treatments

Obesity: Causes, Effects and Treatments Obesity , is one of the common and serious disease over the world. There must be cases of obesity no matter in urban or rural area, as it is a widespread and escalating concern. It does not just happen in adults as children also may have the possibility because they are less concern about their health nowadays. Obesity is actually a condition whereby abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health and also the genetic and environmental factors that are difficult to control when dieting. For the rate of obesity has been increasing in both adults and children. Obesity has twice increment around the world since 1980 and more than 1.4 billion adults, 20 and older were overweight. From these overweight adults, it has over 200 million men and approximately 300 million women were obese. According to a hefty new analysis from the Global Burden Of Disease Study 2013, it is stated that the number of overweight and obese people rising from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 201 3. However, the rate change greatly throughout the world . More than half of the world’s 671 million obese individuals living in only ten countries, which is 15% combined at China and India, more than 13% at USA, Egypt, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico, Russia, Germany and Indonesia. USA, one of the high-salary countries, has the highest increases in adult obesity, where approximately one third of the adult population are obese. In Australia, it is estimated around 28% of men and 30% of women are obese, and in UK is about a quarter of the population are obese. [ Refrence 1,2 ] There are mainly many risk factors of obesity. Obesity is mainly due to the overindulging unhealthy diet and eating habits. Many people just eat whatever they like without concern about the value of nutritious. Nowadays, many fast food outlets are opened and it is getting more and more all around the corner of the world. Those fast foods are a diet which is high in calories and the trans fats contained may raise the LDL cholesterol, or known as bad cholesterol and leads to heart attack or any other cardiovascular diseases. Examples of such food high in trans fats include French fries and cheese. Eating canned food and drinking too much sugary drinks or alcohol will also cause obesity, as the food and drinks contain high value in fat and sugar. Eating in a large portion and habits of comfort eating are also not good, since forcing yourself to eat much will cause an incomplete digestion. In order to reduce this risk, a healthy and balanced diet must be well-planned daily. A healthy and balanced diet should be consist of 7 main classes of food and the most important thing is to eat more vegetables and fruits. Reduce the intake on foods that are high in sugar and fat and you can also try replace kilojoule heavy desserts with fruits. Eat in a proper portion too to maintain a healthy body and weight. Other than that, lack of physical activity is also the vital factor leads to obesity. Nowadays, many people have jobs that involve sitting at a desk for most a day and also hectic lifestyle. They also rely on transportation such as bus or car rather than walking or cycling. Sometimes, even when the peoples have stress, the ways they choose to relax is by watching TV, playing computer games, and also surfing the internet. This kind of lifestyle can be known as sedentary lifestyle and so did not burn the calories in their body. Besides, if the energy provided by food is not used, the extra energy intake will be stored as fat in the body. Hence, regular exercise must be don e because it helps in burning away the calories in human’s body. To maintain a good health, moderate intensity exercise should be done for at least 1 hour most days of the week. During the day, simple exercise such as take the stairs and also get up often from your chair or sofa may helps too. [ Refrence 3,4,5] Obesity normally occurs when adipose cells, which adipose cells are cells that provide storage for extra energy, are increasing absurdly in size and also the number (hyperplasia). An increase in the size of adipose cell is called hypertrophic, while an increase in number of fat cell is known as hyperplastic. Thus, an increase in hypertrophic or hyperplastic resulting in obesity. Besides, adipose cells also follow a normal pattern of growth and development. For infance, adipose cells more developed and each cell grows greatly, which resulting in hypertrophic or hyperplastic obesity. While for adulthood, a person usually has a normal number of adipose cells, but there is large amount of fat in each cell. In certain extreme cases, adult-onset obesity can be both hypertrophic or hyperplastic. Then, the fat cells do not disappear in adult state once it developed. Furthermore, obesity also develops regularly as weight is gained over a period of time. When amount of energy which also means calories consumed in food and drinks exceed the energy used for exercise and metabolic processes in body, weight gain will occur. This is also known as positive energy balance. The excess energy will be stored as fat. Each kilogram of fat stores around 9000 kcal. When body needs more energy than available from food, the fat can be lost or reduced from the energy stores. This is well known as negative energy balance. So, a lack of energy balance may eventually cause obesity. [ Refrence 6,7 ] Obesity has significant effects for health and it is linked to a wide range of diseases. One of the disease that is normally caused by obesity is coronary heart disease. Coronary heart disease is usually caused by a build-up of fatty deposits on the walls of the arteries around the heart. This layer of build-up acid is normally accumulated from the food that we eat daily. Foods contain high fat value will eventually build up the fatty deposit called atheroma. It is also made up of cholesterol and other waste substances. Once the atheroma build-up on the walls of the coronary arteries, this will make the arteries become narrower and reduce the blood flow to the heart muscle. This process is called atherosclerosis. If more severe, obesity can lead to heart failure which your heart cannot pump enough blood to meet your body requirement. In addition, type 2 diabetes is also one of the health problem caused by obesity. Those who are obese are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes disease . Being overweights will add more pressure on body’s ability to control blood sugar using insulin and so makes it much more likely to develop diabetes. In type 2 diabetes, body produces insulin but its insulin cannot be used properly. The body overproduce insulin at first to keep the blood sugar normal. But overtime, this cause the body to lose ability to produce enough insulin to keep blood sugar level at a normal rate, and will eventually lead to kidney failure and heart disease. Furthermore, obesity may also lead to high blood pressure, which is known as silent killer.The blood wessels need to circulate more blood to the fat tissue, as the extra fat tissue in the body needs nutrient and oxygen to survive. Due to this, the workload of the heart will be increasing because more blood is needed to pump through the additional blood vessels. The more the circulating blood, then there is more pressure on the wall of the artery. Consequently, the higher pressure on the artery wall will increase the blood pressure. [ Refrences 8,9,10] There are actually several ways to treat obesity. Obesity can be cured either by drug therapy or bariatric surgery, as it is a more effective treatment. For drug therapy treatment, there are two types of drug which are recommended as it can be used for long-term, which is orlistat and sibutramine. Orlistat is a gastrointestinal lipase inhibitor which helps to reduce patient’s weight around 3 kg on average and also decrease patients to be high risk in diabetes. It will be effective if low-calorie diet is alongside the treatment. In orlistat way of treatment, the fat is absorbed and digested into body. It then works on small intestine and stomach to avoid the action of two enzymes found in digestive juices. The enzyme is normally to break down the fat which consumed in meal. So, orlistat block the fat from being digested as it will passed out as faeces instead of being absorbed into body. Another drug, sibutramine which is known as a monoamine-reuptake inhibitor, can help to red uce weight and the mean of weight losses is around 4-5 kg, but is related to increase of pulse rate and blood pressure. Sibutramine is called as appetite suppressants in medication class and it works to decrease appetite by acting on appetite control centers in the brain. Furthermore, bariatric surgery , also known as gastrointestinal surgery helps to reduce weight in a rapid way, by altering the digestive process. The operation can be divided into two that is malabsorptive and restrictive. Malabsorptive weight loss surgery exclude almost all of the nutrients of small intestine from digestive tract to decrease amount of nutrients and calories absorbed. For restrictive weight loss surgery, it creates a narrow passage from the upper part stomach to larger lower part to reduce the intake of food and also slowing the passage of food to stomach. [ Refrence 11,12,13 ] In conclusion, obesity disease should be more concerned and awared by everyone in the society as this disease increasingly on the rise nowadays. So, everyone must have well-planned for a health-enhancing lifestyle. Bad habit must be quited as fast as possible to save own life for a good health. There is a saying that healthy food is not tasty but however this is the golden phrase which leads everyone to a long-life span. References Obesity and overweight http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/ [ Accessed 1 October 2014 ] Obesity rates climbing worldwide, most comprehensive global study to date shows. ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 May 2014. Available at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140528204215.htm [ Accessed 1 October 2014 ] Causes of obesity. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/basics/causes/con-20014834 [ Accessed 2 October 2014 ] Mahshia Dehgan, Noori Akthar-Danesh, Anwar T Merchant. 2005. Childhood obesity, prevalence and prevention. Available from http://www.nutritionj.com/content/4/1/24 [ Accessed 2 October 2014 ] Causes of obesity. http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Obesity/Pages/Causes.aspx [ Accessed 2 October 2014 ] David Jone. Development Of Obesity. Available from http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Development_Of_Obesity.html [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Obesity. How Obesity Develop. http://www.acumedic.com/onestophealth/obesity.htm#article [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Health Risk Of Overweight And Obesity. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/obe/risks.html [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Coronary Heart Disease. http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Coronary-heart-disease/Pages/Causes.aspx [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Health Effects Of Obesity. http://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/healthy-living/obesity/symptoms.html [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Paul E O’Brien, Wendy A Brown and John B Dixon.2005. Obesity, weight loss and bariatric surgery. Available from https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2005/183/6/obesity-weight-loss-and-bariatric-surgery [ Accessed 7 October 2014 ] Orlistat. http://www.patient.co.uk/medicine/Orlistat.htm [ Accessed 7 October 2014 ] Weight loss surgery. http://www.obesityhelp.com/content/wlsurgery.html [ Accessed 8 October 2014 ]

Person Essay On Charles :: essays research papers

Person Essay on Charles As a handsome 5' 10" male with dark hair spiked in the front, and the most engaging smile approached my desk , I knew I would be laughing shortly. Charles walked up to my desk in Human Biology while we were dissecting eyeballs and commented on my eyeball. "You seem to have a better eyeball than I do." Many people wouldn't have taken this situation so lightly but because of Charles's sense of humor being around him was guaranteed to be fun. With his feigned itching disease, his crazy antics, or his practical jokes my friend Charles's sense of humor has taught me not to take life so seriously and have fun anywhere and everywhere. I first met Charles at Dans, a mutual friends, party, where he told me he had an I itching disease. He was drinking beer and I had cranberry juice with vodka, and since we drove we had to spend the night. So around 3:30am we got tired and went to lie down. As soon as we laid down Charles asked if he could take his shirt off and if I would scratch his back. I told him sure. So he did and that's when he told me he had an itching disease and I wouldn't be able to stop scratching his back until it stopped itching him. Well, with a little alcohol in me I believed him. I laid there for 2 Â ½ hours before I realized he had fallen asleep and went to sleep myself. On Monday on school I saw Charles and asked him how his itching disease was. He just looked at me grinned and chuckled. That's when I realized he had pulled a fast one on me. It didn't take me long to realize that Charles had some crazy antics up his sleeve. At another party Charles, Lisa , Dan and I sat in a room talking. Lisa and Dan were drinking and were drunk. Charles and I were not. Dan started flipping out by yelling and screaming that the radio, which was on 2 at the most, was to loud. Charles knew that Dan was drunk and decided to play with his head. So Charles whispered into my ear that I should tell him I turned it down. So I did and Dan was ok with it. Charles and I were laughing hysterically because it was so much fun playing with these drunk friends. Charles didn't care what other people thought about him as long as he made people laugh. At a chorus concert one night our friend Lisa brought in her

Pregnancy and Mother Hood Essay

For my narrative/descriptive essay I chose to write about becoming a mother. There are positives and negatives about being a teenage mother but I choose to always look at the good. My son wasn’t planned but he isn’t a mistake either. I only have one child for the moment but from this experience I’m still debating on having more. This had been one long and challenging journey but it was all worth it in the end. Childbirth is a Powerful & Exciting experience all at the same time. The way I found out that I was expecting was a challenge alone. Once I noticed I was loosing an extensive amout of weight, confused and clueless I went to the doctor to get answers. While in the doctors office I had blood work done as well as a pregnancy test. The test came back negative as I expected being that I was on birth control. Ring Ring. About thirty minutes later, I received a phone call from the doctors office asking me to come back because my pregnancy test changed to positive. Once I get back to the doctors office, the nurse took a blood sample. Fifteen to thirty minutes passed and then my life changed. It was confirmed that I was two months pregnant. Young and scared, I’m now about to be a teenage mother. I just graduated and was trying to go off to college and within fifteen to thirty minutes that dream was taken away. The next seven months were challenging and educational. Over the next seven months, I was going to doctor appointments and gaining more and more weight. The time has now come to meet my beautiful baby boy. I was admitted to the Baptist Memorial Hospital at 5:00 a.m. on Febuary 14,2011. While at the hospital there is so much going on around you the you sometimes get side tracked on what’s really going on and go into a zone of your own. While laying there waiting to see what happens next there is the sound of the nurses feet constantly coming in and out your room along with visitors. Once the contractions start to come then the journey to motherhood begins. After dialating to about 7-8 centimeters I then have a choice of getting an epidural. (a drug used to numb your body from waist down). I had signed up for one but didn’t plan on using it. Once the epidural Is given then most or sometimes all the pain is gone. After I was at about five centimeters my labor stood still. I had the choice of an c-section or getting an epidual to speed the process up the process. I chose the epidural to keep from being left with a permanent scar. Now is time to start pushing and once I started the beeping of machines, sounds of voices, phones ringing, and all other activity around your is tuned out. All that matters to me now is delivering my healthy baby boy. Three long, entensive push and Bray’lon lamar jones enters the world. He arrived Febuary 25,2011 @ 7:44 weighting 6lbs and 6 ozs. During the whole journey through all ups and downs in the end it was all worth it because of my son.

Efficient Pricing of Geomarketing Internet Services Essay

Abstract Geomarketing information is information which enables the user to take better and faster decisions about marketing and sales activities. The main source of information are geographic, demographic, and statistic data. These data are usually collected and maintained by several institutions and come in a variety of forms and formats. The final integrators acquire datasets, sort, filter and organize them, and offer in advance defined analyses. In this paper we focus on geomarketing services offered on the Internet where usually no physical good is exchanged. The subject of trade is geomarketing information the user is able to extract from the datasets. The main issue is how to set a Pareto efficient price for geomarketing information. The situation is Pareto efficient when the sum of user’s and service provider’s surplus is maximized. We investigate nonlinear pricing strategies and their efficiency to serve mass markets and attract users with different willingness to pay. Nonlinear pricing is used in a broader sense to include the practice of selling the same information product on various vertical markets at prices that are not in proportion to the differences in marginal cost. The market research for the GISMO project (Krek et al. 2000) showed that the US market differs substantially from the European. It has characteristics of a commodity market, where providers offer very similar or equal products at similar prices. This is feasible only if the prices for raw datasets, which represent the main barrier to enter the market, are low or zero. Competition among service providers drives prices down and enables them to successfully serve a mass market. The European approach is mostly determined by the high prices of datasets and restrictions on the copyright forced by the National Mapping Agencies. This prevents further production and creation of information products and serves only a narrow group of users with high willingness to pay. We list the most i mportant conditions for Pareto efficient nonlinear pricing of geoinformation services. 1 Introduction Price is a very important element of trade. It can only be discussed in relation to what is offered, how much value the potential user attaches to the product and how much he is willing to pay for it. A geomarketing service in this paper serves as an example for a geoinformation service in general where a Geoinformation product is traded. A Geoinformation product is defined as a specific piece of geoinformation which provides an answer to a particular user’s question. The provider of a geoinformation service has to select the medium of delivery and the price for the service. We concentrate on geomarketing services provided online through the Internet. The service is mostly done automatically, and not by a human. Usually no physical good is exchanged. Gathering information about the product, placing the order, and payment is done over electronic network. In the sections 5 and 6 we analyze different pricing strategies for geographic information and their Pareto efficiency. The s ituation is called to be Pareto efficient when the user’s and service provider’s surplus is maximized. We review marginal cost and nonlinear pricing and explain in which cases they conform to the Pareto efficiency. Setting a price equal to marginal cost is not economically viable since such a price does not cover fixed cost. Some examples of nonlinear pricing, such as quantity discounts, term-volume commitments, and list of price options satisfy the Pareto efficiency requirement if certain conditions are satisfied. We conclude with the list of the most important conditions for the Pareto efficient pricing of geomarketing service. They can be applied to geoinformation services in general. 2 Geomarketing Services A geomarketing service is a service of providing geomarketing information to the user. Geomarketing information is information which enables the user to take better and faster decisions about marketing and sales activities. This information can be delivered to the user in a different form, format and through different media. Geomarketing information is gathered from internal company’s data, which are combined with external demographic, statistic and geographic data. A geoinformation that satisfies a particular information need in a specific decision making situation is called a Geoinformation product. 2.1 Geomarketing Data Geomarketing data consists of internal company’s data and external data. Internal data (the rate of sale, current customers profiles, etc.) is collected and maintained by the company itself. External data comes in a variety of formats and forms, as a collection of numbers, reports, maps, etc., and is gathered by different institutions. Demographic and statistic data is collected and maintained by Statistical Offices and aggregated to a certain extent. Geographic data is provided in Europe mostly by National Mapping Agencies, in USA by the US Geological Survey (USGS). Because of this broad variety of data, their structure, content and formats, they cannot be easily integrated and are not straightforward usable by a non-technical user. 2.2. Geomarketing Information: a Product The source of geomarketing information is geomarketing data. Specialized companies collect the data from different sources, combine them, sort and filter them. For example, the statistical and demographic data have spatial dimension, which is usually given by the street name and house number. This data has to be geocoded in order to link the attributes (purchasing power, age, educational structure, etc.) with geographic data. The providers identify dimensions of data that are valuable for a certain group of users, package them and offer them as a Geoinformation product. A Geoinformation product is a specific piece of geoinformation which provides an answer to a particular user’s question. The answer to the question can come in many different forms; as a selected dataset, combination of datasets, a report, a map, etc. To make the geomarketing service feasible, some in advance designed steps and analyses are offered to the user. The most common are customer profile, site selection, and market penetration. 3 Internet as a Medium of Delivery The Internet changes the way transactions are done. User and seller can enter an electronic relationship without personal contact. The buyer can place an order any time (from the seat at home, late in the evening) and can take as much time as he wants or needs to take the decision about the purchase. Searching for the right product over e-network, he can get comparable information about similar products from other companies, their characteristics and prices. Cooperation with potential and current users of geoinformation services is important. In the Internet world, the gap between service-consumers and services-providers blurs. â€Å"Consumers become involved in the actual production process, their ideas, knowledge, information become part of the product specification process† (Tapscott 1996). In a geomarketing service, usually no physical good is exchanged. The user gets o the result of nly the analysis, the answer to his question. Even more advanced geomarketing services offer the possibility of uploading the data of the user on the provider’s server and combining these data with the collection of the data on the server. A service offered via Internet involves less administration, paper work, and less human resources, which reduces transaction costs. Direct connection to the computer accounting system can provide systematic and efficient registration of the transactions. Security and protection mechanisms enable the service provider to follow and control transactions. Selecting a proper pricing policy in order to attract widespread use of the service is of great importance. In the next sections, we review marginal cost and nonlinear pricing, and analyze their Pareto efficiency. 4 Pareto Efficiency The situation is Pareto efficient if there is no way to make both the user and the service provider better off. The sum of the user’s and provider’s surplus is maximized. It can be a understood lso as maximizing the difference between economic benefits and costs which appear on the user’s as well as on the provider’s side. The economic benefits are the benefits of using the product on the product has to him with his willingness to pay for the marginal unit of the product. If he expects high benefits, he will be willing to pay a high price for the product. Cost incurred on the provider side is mostly high fixed cost of designing and creating the Geoinformation product and enabling the service, and low marginal cost of providing an incremental unit of the product. The user’s cost is the price he pays for the product, the transaction cost and the cost associated with acquiring the information about the product. 5 Marginal Cost Pricing and Pareto Efficiency Marginal cost pricing is pricing where the price equals the marginal cost. The cost of an economic good is an important determinant of how much the producer will be willing to produce. The concept of â€Å"marginal† or â€Å"extra† cost is crucial for the situation on the market of economic goods. It has an important role in appraising how efficient or inefficient any particular price and production pattern is (Samuelson 1967). This observation is valuable for the standard economic good where the total cost of producing the product depends on the quantity produced. The cost structure a Geoinformation product substantially differs from the cost structure of the standard economic good. The total cost of producing the product is mostly a high fixed cost of collecting the data and designing the product, and is not recoverable if the production is halted (sunk cost). The marginal cost of producing t e second and each additional copy of the product is h very low or zero, mostly the cost of disseminating the product. The share of the marginal cost in the total cost of production is negligible. Marginal cost pricing of a Geoinformation product would according to the marginal cost pricing scheme imply very low or zero price. â€Å"Pricing at marginal cost may or may not be efficient: it depends on how the consumers’ total willingness to pay relates to the total cost of providing the good† (Varian 1999). At the first stage of the production, the datasets have low value to most users and they have low willingness to pay for them. The high cost of producing the datasets cannot be recovered. M arginal cost pricing does not imply efficiency because it does not cover the total costs of producing a Geoinformation product. 6 Nonlinear Pricing and Pareto Efficiency Pricing is nonlinear when it is not strictly proportional to the quantity purchas ed. Different prices are charged to different groups of buyers or the same product. Nonlinear pricing is also used in a f broader sense to include the practice of selling the same product on different markets at prices that are not in proportion to the differences in marginal cost. Good examples are phone rates, frequent flyer programs, and electricity (Wilson 1993). The first notion about charging different users differently for the same product was called price discrimination (Pigou 1920) and distinguished among three different forms of discrimination. 6.1 Price Discrimination Pigou (Pigou 1920) first used the term price discrimination and he described the following forms of nonlinear pricing: †¢ First-degree price discrimination The first-degree price discrimination is sometimes known as perfect price discrimination. The producer sells different units of output at different prices and these prices may differ from buyer to buyer. The buyer pays the maximum price that he is willing to pay, irrespective of the cost of production and supply. Usually it is difficult to determine what is the maximum price someone is willing to pay for the product. †¢ Second-degree price discrimination The producer sells different units of output at different prices, but every individual who buys t e h same amount of the good pays the same price. Second-degree price discrimination is much more common in practice. Good examples of this discrimination are volume discounts and coupons. †¢ Third-degree price discrimination The producer sells the output to different people at different prices, but every unit of output sold to a given person sells at the same price. Customers are divided into more groups, which have different demand curves and different price elasticity. The highest price is charged to the groups with the lowest elasticity. Examples of this discrimination are student discounts. 6.2 Two-part Tariff Two-part tariff is an example of a nonlinear pricing and consists of two parts. The first part of the tariff usually comes in the form of a membership, an annual or monthly license and is supposed to cover fixed cost. The second part of the tariff is related to the usage (number of reports transferred, number of bits, layers, etc.) and covers the incremental cost. This pricing scheme is often used in telecommunication. Users are charged for the connection to the network and additionally for the usage. Two-part tariff pricing scheme can be very naturally applied to a geomarketing service. The first part of the tariff represents a membership fee, an annual or monthly licence for access to the data, reports and maps; the second part is a n additional fee usually based on the volume transferred. Price P for a geoinformation service is then P = p0 + p v.q where p0 pv q fixed fee (annual, monthly, membership, etc.) price set for a volume transferred quantity transferred. The revenue collected from the first part of the tariff (p0 ) is supposed to cover the fixed cost of producing the first copy of the Geoinformation product. The price of u sage (pv ) should cover the incremental cost and the cost of transaction. The combination of the membership and usage constructed for the predicted demand is set so that the company’s total cost is recovered. How high the fixed fee and the price of usage s hould be is an important question. Availability of the raw data at low price will change the nature of the market. The price for both parts of the tariff (p0 and pv ) will form according to the equilibrium rules of supply and demand. 6.3 Pareto Efficiency of the Two-part Tariff Two-part tariff can disadvantage a certain segment of the users. Imagine a geomarketing service company offering geographic data over the Internet. For the simplicity of reasoning, imagine there exist two segments of users; those who use data on a regular basis and have a high willingness to pay (governmental institutions, ministries, utilities, etc.), and those who seldom need data (students, individuals, small and medium companies, etc.) and have low willingness to pay. In this case, a high fixed fee excludes the users with low willingness to pay, occasional users who need only a small volume of the data and are not willing to pay an annual membership fee or a license. The necessary condition for Pareto efficiency is not satisfied. 6.4 Quantity Discounts Quantity discounts are a form of a nonlinear price where the provider charges a lower price for a higher volume purchased. The opportunity of selling high volumes at a low price is often neglected in geoinformation business. Increased revenue from the higher volume at lower price enables the provider to improve the service and reduce prices for all users. The quantity discounts are usually designed in order to stimulate sales, but can complicate the billing and accounting system. Pareto efficiency of quantity discounts depends on the volume-price categories offered by the service provider. This pricing strategy might disadvantage users with low willingness to pay, not being able to pay nor interested in purchasing higher volumes. 6.5 Term-Volume Commitments According to this strategy the user agrees with the service provider to pay a certain amount of money for the service in advance. The payment is set according to the predicted demand for the service. This kind of agreement usually involves some discounts, because the whole payment is done at once and at the beginning of the period. Short-term contracts involve lower reduction in price than longer contracts. This strategy reduces billing and accounting cost and is often used by Internet providers. For example, â€Å"a one-year-term commitment to spend $2000/month obtains a discount of 18%â€Å" (Gong and Srinagesh 1998), for the 5 -year contracts the Internet providers use up to 60% discount. Term-volume commitments satisfy the Pareto efficiency requirement if the user can choose among different schemes and are designed indiscriminately. 6.6 List of Price Options Different pricing options can be combined and offered as a list of price options. In geomarketing services, the two-part tariff is often combined with an additional pricing option, the uniform pricing scheme. Under the uniform pricing scheme, the user pays the price (p2 ), which is proportional to the data transferred. Usually the tariff per volume purchased (p2 ) is higher in the uniform pricing scheme than the price (p1 ) proposed in the two-part tariff scheme, but the user need not pay an annual membership fee or license. The user profits if he is an occasional user, who needs a small volume of data. The sum he is willing to pay in this case is lower than the annual membership or license fee plus the cost of the data transferred.

Macy’s Essay Example

Macy’s Essay Example Macy’s Essay Macy’s Essay Macy’s is a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of Federated Department Stores, Inc.   It is a part of a retail organization, which sells a wide range of merchandise such as apparel and accessories for men, women, and children, home furnishings, cosmetics, and other consumer goods.   The operations of Macy’s are largely affected by pressures from its competitors including department stores, mass merchandisers, specialty stores, and other retailers.   Apart from competitors, Macy’s operations are also affected by the spending levels of general consumer, which are characterized by consumer confidence and employment levels. In the past years, Macy’s, under the governance of Federated Department Stores, Inc., has been focused on four key priorities in order to improve business.   These priorities include simplifying pricing, improving overall shopping experience, differentiating and editing merchandise assortments, and communicating better with customers a more brand focused marketing. The Federated Department Stores, Inc. in which Macy’s is an indirect subsidiary believes that a total marketing strategy will surely improve company success as well as gain advantage over its competitors.   As such, it has implemented the 5 P’s of marketing, which include the 4 P’s (product, promotion, place, and price) and an added P, that is, people.   In terms of product, the company eliminated intermediaries’ costs, which allowed good quality, produced higher margins, and lowered consumer prices.   As to promotion, the national television advertising served as a significant factor for Macy’s.   Through Macy’s standing as a single national brand of Federated Department Stores, Inc., the production costs have been lowered.   Consequently, the cost per exposure of national television is low.   On the other hand, the company makes it a point to strike a balance between national branding and local implementation of its products.   In terms of price, the company offers value for its customers through lower costs for products, administration, store operations, and marketing.   The fifth and final factor for the company’s total marketing strategy is people.   The company believes in well-trained and committed professionals that can offer great value for business and consumers.   Its people encompass passion for fashion, attention to detail, and belief in the power of store display. On the other hand, one of Macy’s largest competitors is JC Penney.   JC Penney also belongs to the retail industry.   It is focused on conducting extensive customer research, measuring marketing productivity, product development and sourcing, developing new training programs for its employees and minimizing operational risks related to communication and information systems. In 2006, JC Penney began making use of an online survey in order to accumulate customer feedback on store shopping experience.   The information obtained is utilized by the company’s stores to enhance efforts on improvements, which will better meet its customers’ needs. JC Penney monitors its external environment as part of its efforts on measuring marketing productivity.   Its external environment includes retail competitors, consumer trends, current economic outlook, and retail industry.   The company makes use of post-event analyses and other measurement tools to understand strategies, strengths and weaknesses, and performance of its competitors. JC Penney has acknowledged that it should be able to maintain its reputation among its constituents in order to achieve its strategies.   The company supports individual responsibility to its customers, investors, regulators, suppliers and the public through training, code of ethics, policies, and mechanisms.   It has maintained that it should focus on its integrity and reputation, which has always been a key aspect in the company’s success. Macy’s and JC Penney both belong in the retail industry.   As such, it is inevitable that competition is situated between the two companies.   Although Macy’s has already established its competitive position, a defense strategy should always be a priority to keep up with the changing strategies of its competitors such as JC Penney.   Company goals should always be able to complement its business strategy, thus, entails several key success factors.   The competition among retail companies is getting stiff.   Macy’s can open its doors to investors as it expands operations in order to meet its strategic objectives.   The company may get additional resources through initial public offering of their shares after which will be directed to a secondary market.   If Macy’s would be able to open to investors and eventually penetrate into a reputable secondary market, it will indicate more opportunities for the company to raise the necessary funds.   Another possible way is the forging of business combination or acquisition of smaller competitors in order to integrate the resources of combined business segments. As to promotion and advertising, Macy’s should provide considerable information for new services and monthly promotions.   The advertising technique to be used by Macy’s should be conventional yet practical and should be preferred by most clients who do not want to waste time going through a lot of links before they finally reach their selections or purposes.   If Macy’s intends to harness the power of the internet in doing business, it should also consider the design of the website as this would serve as the interface between itself and its clients or customers.   Macy’s should ensure that browsing over the website is convenient and components appearing thereon are functional.

Impact of Science on Society Essay Example

Impact of Science on Society Essay Example Impact of Science on Society Essay Impact of Science on Society Essay the sky was made up of eight concentric crystalline spheres, each one carrying a planet and the outermost one carrying the stars, which were supposed to rotate east to west. This circular motion, being heavenly, was perfect-except for these planets going what looked like backwards from time to time. Well, that particular little inconvenience was solved by putting each planet in a littie epicycle, or mini-orbit, spinning round and round while still remaining attached to its own individual main phere, which still rotated east-west like it was supposed to. That way, the planets only appeared to go backwards sometimes. The real explanation, that the Earth was moving as well and that this caused the appearance of retrograde motion, was unacceptable within the cosmological paradigm that was still operative in the Renaissance. It was unacceptable because it would have had philosophical and theological implications that were too hot to handle. The Bible would have been seen to be wrong, for example, because it said the Earth didn’t move. So epicycles fit the bill, and kept things the way they were supposed to be. However, you had to have over 70 of them, and even then they didn’t work absolutely perfectly. â€Å"Saving the appearances at all costs† in that way is generally how we react to little inconsistencies in our paradigm. If your paradigm is the rock of ages for you-and it always is-then you let go of it only with immense reluctance. We are, paradigmatically speaking, extremely conservative. Look at how often change is fought in history. Here’s an example that always tickles me. The chain of events back in the twelfth century that set Europe going economically after the Dark Ages was essentially the textile revolution. A new loom came in from Arab Spain. It had foot pedals, which left the weaver’s hands free to weave faster and make more cloth cheaper. The Dutch weavers smashed the thing up because it would have put people out of work. (That was a new idea in the twelfth century. ) A generation later, when the dust had settled, in came the spinning wheel from left field-a total surprise from China. It made thread very much faster than before. When the wheel and the loom were put together, the production of cloth skyrocketed. So there were more riots, because the cloth was linen, which was 8 T h e Legacy of Science made from a plant and was cheaper than feeding sheep and making wool, so the rioters were sheep farmers. But soon everybody was wearing linen, because it was cheap, and throwing it away when they wore holes in it. So there was this giant pile of linen rag lying around fourteenth-century Europe. The price of paper dropped like a stone, because linen rag paper was the best ou could make. There were more riots-sheep farmers again, because parchment was sheepskin, and it had become too expensive to use. So here was enough paper around to put o n the walls, and the scribes were going like gangbusters and pretty soon they were on strike for higher wages because it was a seller’s market. Everybody wanted their paperwork done because the Black Death was just over and everybody was inheriting like crazy. There jus t wasn’t enough writing ability to go around, until Gutenberg came along in 1450 with the printing press. Now this was something the Church wanted like a hole in the head, because it would encourage free thinking-until they realized that you could print indulgences with it. People bought the indulgences, because when they did that they got remission of some sins. With all the demand for instant salvation that followed, the Church made a million-money to build the Vatican, pay Michelangelo’s bill, and generally get involved in prestigious projects that made certain German clerics really mad at this consumerist, moneymaking approach to religion. One of these Germanic chaps nailed up his criticisms, and there was the Reformation. It’s a little oversimplified, maybe, but you get my drift. People in general would rather fight than switch. So, to repeat myself, if the paradigm fits and people resist innovation, why does change happen at all? Well, let me give you some examples of the mechanisms that operate to produce change, and you’ll see why it isn’t that simple. To begin with, often you just don’t know change is coming. Even if you’re personally involved, you may be looking the wrong way at the time, like young William Perkin of London in 1856. Around then, everybody wits looking for benzene rings and chemistry was the flavor of the month, and Perkin, a chemist, was trying to be the young science hero who would save the great British empire by discovering the way to make artificial quinine chemically. You see, 9 The Impact of Science on Society our administration and army chaps were dropping like flies out in the Far Eastern colonies because of malaria, and artificial quinine would have fixed things up right. Besides that, we were having to buy natural quinine from the Dutch in Java, and they charged an outrageous price for it. So that great motivator, money, was also at work. Well, after a bit Perkin came up with some interesting sludge, but one thing it wasn’t was artificial quinine, so he threw it down the sink, and discovered that he had invented the world’s first aniline dye. Made a million. Sometimes, though, you may be looking in the right direction, but you don’t see what’s happening. In 1778, just after you people had gone off on your own and left us with no more South Carolina pitch to put on the bottom of our ships to protect them from rot, the rather seedy ninth Earl of Dundonald in Scotland thought up a plan to recoup the family fortunes by getting tar out of the coal from a couple of mines on his land. This tar would replace the pitch and make Dundonald a rich man. Unfortunately, the British government had already shifted to copper-bottoming its ships, so Dundonald’s coal-heating kiln, where he made the tar, was useless, and so were the vapors he had been watching coming out of the kiln. In fact, he’d even been lighting them and generally playing around, shooting flames out of a tube. He happened to mention this to his friend James Watt, and three years later, Watt’s sidekick â€Å"invented† coal gas. Dundonald died in poverty. However, even when you get what you’re looking for and you know you’ve got it, things can go haywire. Take Benjamin Huntsman, clockmaker, looking for a better clock spring in 1740 because pendulum clocks were no good at sea and you needed a clock to work out longitude, and in an era of great maritime expansion east and west, longitude was kind of essential. Now Huntsman happened to live near a glass works, and he saw the glassmakers putting in chips of old broken bottles, doing hightemperature remelts, and coming out with really great glass. So he tried the trick with steel. It worked, and there was what he wanted, the world’s greatest spring. The point was, Huntsman’s steel would also cut anything you could think of, so what it did for the lathe, and machine tools in general, and micrometers, and precision engineering, and steam engine cylinders, and the whole Industrial Revolution was something nobody could ever have 10 The Legacy of Science reamed of-least of all Huntsman, who sat there saying, â€Å"What happened? † Sometimes the catalyst for major change will simply come in, totally unexpectedly, from outside your paradigm. Take the case of the compass. It came in from China via the Arabs in the twelfth century. Nothing much happened until Sir Francis Drake came back from over here complaining about the way the needle did funny things when you got across t o this side of the Atlantic. Queen Elizabeth’s doctor took time off (18 years) to look at why, and decided that the Earth was a gigantic magnet with poles. OK, so what? Well, to carry out his experiments, he built himself a lot of balls of various substances-lodestone, amber, sulfur, glass, and so on-to represent the Earth, so he could see what they did to his compass. As he busily rubbed these balls to make them attractive to his needle, he noted somewhat disinterestedly that sulfur was very attractive, and added a minor footnote to that effect. Around 1640 the mayor of Magdeburg in Germany, one Otto Guericke, read the aforesaid footnote and tried the trick again. While he was rubbing his sulfur ball one day to make it attractive, it cracked and gave off a spark, and-yes, you guessed it-electricity. From the compass. From China. Even if you’d spoken Chinese you wouldn’t have seen that one coming! One of the most common ways change is generated is through interaction between one factor and another, and usually in unexpected concatenations. Take the skills a goldsmith has. He’s good at working soft metals and using molten alloys, and the hallmark of a good goldsmith is just that, his hallmark, the punch that puts his impress on his work. If you are capable of seeing that punched image in reverse, you can see how to cast a shape in the pattern made by the punch. And the pattern could be a letter, in metal, which is why printing was invented by a goldsmith-that’s what Gutenberg was. This interaction that can lead to change is often caused by imbalance, a kind of domino effect. The well-known modern one is that of the superplants. They give great yield-better than the old, less productive types. But they replace variety with a monoculture, and, if disease hits that, you’ve got no fallback. That kind of domino effect-the knock-on effect of imbalance in one area upon another-gave us one of the major scientific 11 T h e Impact of Science o n Society discoveries in history. When cannons started being popular in the mid-fourteenth century, they pushed up the demand for metal, and that got people deeper into the ground than before. One of the things they found was that the deeper you go, the wetter it can get, and the old suction pumps wouldn’t lift the water up higher than about 30 feet. Well, this problem caused all sorts of grief until one of Galileo’s boys, called Torricelli, worked out that it had something to do with atmospheric pressure. A friend of a friend of his went up a mountain with a tube of mercury to see if pressures were different up there and down here. Well, they were, but what was the gap at the top of the tube full of mercury? It was the thing everybody said didn’t exist-the vacuum. And suddenly you had barometers, airpumps, a new view of interstellar space, and a very different basis for science. Now, the mechanism by which change can be generated isn’t by any means always a technology-technology interaction. Take the ultimate effect of the telescope. When Galileo looked through it he saw satellites circling Jupiter. That blew a hole in the Earth being the center of everything, took humanity off its special philosophical pedestal, and prepared the way for a universe that wasn’t arranged the way Aristotle had said, but the way Newton was to say-like a giant clock, running by itself, with God maybe long gone on other business. Religion took a knock from that from which it never fully recovered. The German mathematician and businessman Gottfried Leibniz, working on the planetary dynamic problem at the same time as Newton and looking at the kinds of mathematics you’d need to measure infinitesimal rates of change in movement, decided that he had his hands on a tool of cosmic philosophical significance. If you could measure that infinitesimally, were you getting to be able to measure the basic units of existence? If you were, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant a bit later, you could discover and measure the way all things shaded into all other things at that scale. The new philosophy became known as. naturphilosophie. Its concept of â€Å"oneness in all† spawned romantic poetry and music, nationalism, and revolutions including yours. It won’t surprise you to know that Jefferson wm a naturphilosophe. Naturphilosophie also helped to bring about modern medicine. In 1810 a French surgeon named Xavier Bichbt, another follower of the new philosophy, went looking for the vital, infinitesimally small bits in his I 12 T h e Legacy of Science business, and found body tissue-20 types of it. Incidentally, he set the fashion for grave robbing and also noticed that, if you were sick, changes showed up later on in the tissues of your unfortunate corpse. Maybe these happenings could be correlated. So pathological anatomy was born, and with it the modern idea of disease as a localized phenomenon, as well as the opportunity to look for, and find, bacteria. Canal building, spurred by the transportation needs of the industrial revolution in Britain at the beginning of the last century, turned up fossils in the strata they were cutting through. However, mysteriously, some of the fossils were of animals that didn’t exist any more, and most of the strata didn’t have fossilized humans in them. Well, here was a big problem! God was supposed to have made everything a t once, during creation, and yet here were some animals that obviously had failed, and no people back at the beginning of everything. So what was this-mistakes by God, with some things having been created later than others? Well, you know where that led. By the time the geologists had finished discovering that the extent of the entire fossil record through time was like an eyeblink compared with the age of the Earth, it was a simple matter for the whole thing to be organized into a new view of things by Darwin. This brings us to the materialist, physicalist world we live in today, where people maybe aren’t something special created by God in his own image but just a pile of chemicals. This is also a world where one interpretation of what Darwin meant by â€Å"the survival of the fittest† boosts rugged individualism and makes life not so easy on the underprivileged, and where his idea of â€Å"perfectable humans behaving according to laws like the rest of the organisms in nature† and, therefore, being part of societies that perhaps can be â€Å"changed for the better† is alive and well and regimented in the Siberian labor camps. I went through all those examples of change in action at length to give you a good idea why, when paradigms start to shift, the unexpected way they go is a shock to the system. This is why any time you do manage to produce a way of thinking or of doing things that seems to work well, you hang onto it. If you can work out a way to maximize what your society can do with the tools at its 13 T h e Impact of Science on Society disposal-give it the widest flexibility in terms of individual action and at the same time protect it from random, maverick action with some kind of rules-great. That’s why the institutions survive; they’re set up with the tools of the time and they’re systems that permit routinization of the group’s operating problems SO the individual members can get on with working or having fun while the institutions handle the day-to-day running of the place. So we keep the institutions that appear to do a good enough job because it’s easier than handling the problem of assessing how well whatever new tools you might have come up with could handle the same basic daily problems in radically restructured institutions. So never mind if the institutions don’t quite fit the new paradigm you’re moving into with your new tools; it’s better than experimenting. Corn, after all, is only corn because it’s stood the test of time. So most of the institutions we live with are, in some aspect or another, anachronistic. Take the law. Cross examination originated far from the courtroom, as a teaching technique in eleventh-century Italy for making sense out of old manuscripts. The technique was called glossing. Another institution, the language I’m speaking now, effectively froze when it was printed in grammars in the fifteenth century. The modern university started life as a place in twelfth-century Bologna designed to train lawyers to handle jurisdictional and property cases, particularly between the Pope and the Emperor. Many of the internal structures of our universities, at least in Britain, remain unchanged since that date. Representational government is something that was thought up in the eighteenth century when only the foolhardy few would risk the mud and the bandits to get to London or Philadelphia. We hang onto institutions as if they still meant what they did originally, as if the paradigm in which they originated hadn’t shifted. We accept politicians talking about what they can do to the economy as if the world still consisted of independent, separate sovereign states whose acts had no effect on each other, or as if the meaning of fundamental beliefs had not changed. One good example is yours: â€Å"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness† means nothing like what John Locke meant when he thought about it in the seventeenth century. Our freewheeling adaptation of t today would have shocked him rigid. â€Å"Liberty† for Locke meant 14 The Legacy of Scaence knowing and accepting where you stood in society and sticking to the rules that governed social class mobility, such as it was. â€Å"Happiness† meant amassing property and riches without being bothered by government! He would have thought we were living in anarchy. Be that as it may, we regard the institutions and their associated slogans as helping to preserve cohesion and stability in our paradigm-except that this is a cohesion and stability which is, as you’ve seen, at best transient. Once the French philosopher and permanent exile Rend Descartes got his hands on the way we in the West thought, stability and permanence went out the window. Before Descartes and his seventeenth-century paradigm shift, you said credo ut intelligam-I believe, and through my belief I come to understand. After him you switched it around: intelligo ut credam-give me the facts and I’ll let you know. In his great Disc o w s Sur la Methode (or, â€Å"how to think†), he gave us the modern approach. He called it methodical doubt. He said, â€Å"If they tell you it’s certain, call it probable. If it’s probable, call it possible, and if the deal is that it’s possible, forget it. † And Cartesian methodical doubt is the engine of the modern scientific world and the bringer of accelerating rates of change. So, where have we ended up? If the mechanisms of change are as serendipitous and as hard to second guess as I have suggestedand we are, thanks to Descartes and others, in a world of increasing rates of change-are there any lessons to be learned from the past to help us at least adapt? Is it true that those who are not prepared to learn from the past are condemned t o repeat it? Do we really only know where we’re going if we know where we’ve been? Well, there are repeating factors, back then, that seem to be present when change occurs, much the way cholesterol is with heart attacks, present and only maybe causative. First there’s the one that appears to be the most obvious, that change happens because you need it-â€Å"Necessity is the mother of invention† and all that. There’s an interesting study of Europe up through the late Middle Ages that seems to show that innovation happens and is taken up most in areas of marginal circumstances and stress, and least where things are pretty comfortable. Let’s look at the ancient Egyptians. When you’ve established the simple fact that once a year the Dog Star, Sirius, appears just 15 T h e Impact of Science on Society before dawn (after having been invisible for seventy days) and one day later the Nile floods and dumps fertilizer and water on the land, and that it does so with extraordinary exactness every year, you develop a calendar just to tell you which day Sirius is going to appear, dig your irrigation canals, and sit back. That’s all you need in the way of new tricks, so Egyptian society never changed after that initial step. It never needed to, in 3000 years. But the ancient Greeks? Well, put yourself in their position. In the eighth century B. C. you live on narrow coastal strips in what is now modern Turkey, in littIe city states with just enough to survive on. The weather is lousy and uncertain, and the barbarians are clobbering you with regularity. You’ve got to get out and trade, make a buck, just to keep going, so you think up ways of systematizing the method of hustling business. You look up at the sky, and what you see is not Sirius rising and nothing else; you see a great road map for your seaborne traders to use. You work out star tables to navigate by, and the more you look, the more you see that the permanent perfection of the night sky is a lot different from the temporary mess down here. So curiosity becomes a way of life. No wonder the Greeks invented their particular form of curiosity. (They called it philosophia. ) It’s what you get when you’re looking for answers. In a sense, it was Greek philosophy, born of their difficult circumstances, their desire for answers to questions, that started change happening in Western culture. What got it accelerating, though, was something else, and that’s the ease with which people communicated, moved ideas around. The easier you cross-talk, the faster change happens. Take medieval Europe. When the Vikings and the Saracens and the Hungarians stopped the rape-and-pillage stuff in the tenth century, people started coming out of the woodwork and building little roads toward each other and traveling along them. The next thing you know, you got the medieval water-powered industrial revolution, which kicked the European economy into high gear within three generations. In the Renaissance, a hundred years after the arrival of printing, you had 20 million books, most of them in specialties that could only exist when the specialists had a way of reading each others’ stuff. This gave us nothing less than the scientific revolution of the 16 The Legacy of Science sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a slew of people talking the kind of incomprehensible stuff most of you live with in your area of expertise. Don’t be insulted; how much do you understand of the language of paleontology? Specialization is essential. I’d hate to have flown here in a plane designed by a plumber. To return to my point about communication, in the nineteenth century, after the development of electromagnetic systems for moving messages around (Le. , the telegraph and the telephone), the whole body of modern science emerges-in particular, physics. So, the ability to communicate seems to be a basic factor in the mechanism of change, and we have communications today that make earlier forms look like hieroglyphs painfully chiselled out in stone. New developments in areas like magnetic bubble domain memories and superconducting materials will enhance our ability to use data beyond anything we’ve even begun to think of. With our present facility for communication, we’re doing more of one particular trick than at any time before. And that trick, it seems to me, is putting things together. Let me suggest a new axiom: juxtaposition is the spice of life. Humanity’s biggest talent, unique t o us, is juxtaposing, finding and operating novel relationships between things or ideas. Indeed, at the turn of this century in Vienna, a group of thinkers who were to have a profound influence on Einstein (the positivists, led by Ernst Mach) came t o the conclusion that all science could talk about was relationships. This was after Michelson and Morley had failed to find the ether. You remember that up in Cleveland in the 1880’s the two of them were looking for a medium that would be the carrier of light, magnetism, and electricity. Everybody called this medium â€Å"ether. † Well, Michelson and his friend were trying to show that the two halves of a split light beam would come back together again, out of phase, because one-half had been shot in the direction of the Earth’s travel against the so-called stream of ether) and would take a while, and the other, which had gone perpendicular to the ether, and so wouldn’t suffer drag, would return early. Actually, there had been no difference at all. The beams arrived back simultaneously. Then Fitzgerald, in Dublin, made things worse by saying that this was because the forward motion of the Earth was contracting one part of the instrument exactly the right amount to give the 17 The Impact of Science on Society forward-moving beam a shorter route to travel, so it could get back exactly that much faster, and match its other half. And, the experiment could never be carried out without that happening. SO, whether or not there was an ether, you’d never be able to find out, since all you could get would be the local-effect results from your work. That led the positivists to state that science could only ever produce relative, not absolute, results. All you could talk about was relationships. But I mean relationships in a rather more limited sense-the sense of the way properly original thinking involves juxtapositions that have never happened before. Of all the mechanisms of change, it seems to me that this is the fundamental one, the on-the-spot local â€Å"fitting together† of disparate phenomena that comes up with the kind of changes I’ve been describing. This ability to juxtapose is not a very surprising one; it’s logical enough in the light of our own neurophysiology. Recent ideas on neural activity suggest that the brain operates in a very associative way, with small neuron clusters containing core concepts, rather in the way a battery holds a trickle charge. These core concepts would be irreducibly small fragments of sounds or sights, or any phenomena that you experience. And these clusters are all, in some way, apparently interconnected, set up in microcolumns and macrocolumns, each column made up ofmillions of these lit,tle clusters of neurons. Now, if you consider that the brain passes information by means of synaptic junctions (the bits where one neuron almost touches another) and that there are potentially more of those kinds of connections in the brain than there are atoms in the known universe, you get a feel for the immensity of the network. With this ssociative system, to retrieve data, you go in, so to speak, anywhere on the network and find the target by association. Given the scale of things, an associative approach might be the only way the whole huge complex could work. Anyway, retrieval by association would be a good survival mechanism, because it would make you very flexible. The other interesting thing about functioning in that associative way is that as you head along the associative links toward the target, you may become aware of other core clusters that you weren’t aware of before, because in a sense you simply drive through them. That, in the simplest sense, would be why the brain is 18 The Legacy of Science i capable of associative chains of thought like this one: look, see, water, glass, mirror, image, painting, oil, Arabs, desert, sand, castle, and so on. It’s why poetry works: â€Å"What oft was said but ne’er so well expressed. † Jokes appear to work like that too; the punch line makes an association you hadn’t thought of before, and you laugh because you didn’t get to the new associative link before the person telling the joke (which is bad for survival, but, as it turned out, you weren’t in any danger). Let me try what I mean. Take the concepts â€Å"bird† and â€Å"fruit. † All of you have those concepts associated in your own personal way in your network. I don’t know whether it’s like mine, with â€Å"bird† and â€Å"fruit† associated by â€Å"trees,† but let me see if I can put those two concepts together in a way that they’ve not been put together in your brain before, and we’ll see if my theory works. A drunk goes up to his host at a party and says, with all that clarity used by the very small and young: â€Å"Excuse me. Do lemons whistle? † To which his host replies: â€Å"No, lemons don’t whistle. Why do you ask? † And the drunk says, very chagrined: â€Å"Oh. In that case, I have just squeezed your canary into my gin and tonic. † You see what I mean. What I’m saying is that the basic mechanism of change-the juxtaposition, in a novel relationship, of apparently unrelated phenomena- may operate in the same way a good joke does! It may also be why change is almost always so serendipitous and unexpected-and hard to forecast. Given all I’ve said so far, let me be extremely speculative. We’ve seen how the model I’m talking about functions, and some of the ways in which it’s changed. We’ve seen how difficult it is from within the paradigm to see why moving to a new model would be beneficial-â€Å"Better to keep the devil you know. † We’ve seen that when paradigms are about to crack, there’s generally some social unrest going on. In Copernicus’s time it was barbecuing freethinkers (they called them heretics). With Darwin it was supposed to be the end of beliefs and standards. In the thirteenth century they said paper would devalue the words written on it, and for Gutenberg it was, â€Å"Printing will take away our memories. With us, it’s all the words you see in the media: alienation, frustration, me-generation, immorality, illiteracy, and so on. So is our paradigm about to go through some of the agonies I’ve 19 T h e Impact of Science o n Society been describing? Is it due t o shift? Well, obviously it is. But let me suggest that instead of moving to a radically new paradigm, we may, because of the tremendous faci lity for interaction that communications gives us, be moving to a no-paradigm culture. If a paradigm is, and has always been, a structure built on an agreed core of common beliefs, knowledge, value judgments, social constraints, and so on, then are we heading the opposite way, to a situation of no common agreed center, of shifting, pragmatic local standards, with failure of what we used to call consensus and regionalism globally on the increase again after the early years of P a x Americana, with the nation-state obsolete, and so on? We would be a society physically and psychologically fragmented, because with soft energy options and telecommunication, â€Å"centralization† and â€Å"economies of scale† (those catchwords of the last years of the Industrial-Revolution paradigm we’re coming to the end of) are no longer necessary. To those of us condemned to repeat the lessons of history because we won’t learn from them, what I’m describing sounds like a frightening prospect. Chaos is what it sounds like, but isn’t what’s happening just a paradigm shifting (like all the others did) because we’re ready for the shift? Change occurs ultimately because we want it to. We have the tools because at some time we decided we wanted them. These new tools, provided by science and technology, are more than just tools-they’re instruments of social revolution, violent or peaceful. As the tools change, so too does the ability of society to organize itself. Once we needed god-kings, or feudal lords, or absolute monarchs, or no sex before marriage, or empires, or 12-hour days, or whatever, to keep ourselves together. Now, maybe, we don’t need centralized social structures and rigid regulatory mechanisms any more. We are, after all, as Immanuel Kant said, creatures of the imperative. If the ethics start to get in the way, we dump them. But let’s take a brief look at the kind of behavioral social dumping we may be up against with some of the possible results of our newfound abilities t o initiate change much more readily and rapidly because we can juxtapose things inside the computer, where we have a facility for juggling the mix like never before, at a rate and in volume almost astronomical. And, by the way, for those of you who feel nice and safe because of the old sayings â€Å"Garbage 20 The Legacy of Science in, garbage out† and â€Å"A machine is only as good as the people punching the buttons,† try some of the newer heuristic systems that learn from their own experience. The main thing, it seems to me, is to remember that technology manufactures not gadgets, but social change. Once the first tool was picked up and used, that was the end of cyclical anything. The tool made a new world, the next one changed that world, the one after that changed it again, and so on. Each time the change was permanent. Using the tool changes the user permanently, whether we like it or not. Once when I was in Moscow talking to academician Petrov, I said, â€Å"Why don’t you buy American computers to get you into space quicker and more effectively? † He replied, â€Å"No fear; they’d make us think like Americans. † You only have to go back a few years in this century to see how our gestalt, our way of behaving, our values, have been changed by science. If I say just a few names, you’ll get my point: the Pill, calculators, jet airplanes, television. Take those examples and look at their secondary social effects. Yes, the Pill has made family planning feasible, but now the Third World regards it as a suspicious imperialist Western trick to keep their numbers down while we go on with our â€Å"economic imperialism. † Calculators have changed the meaning of testing people in certain kinds of knowledge, which we need to do to ensure publicly accepted standards of professional ability. Jets mean people can now fly and visit the ends of the Earth, but they also mean that we export our way of life and our sometimes unacceptable value systems to places that neither want nor need them. Television makes my life one of totally vicarious experiences. It gives me packaged glimpses of the world beyond my horizons, takes away my comfortable preconceptions, and replaces them with glossy, quick-fix substitutes that are even less good to me than my preconceptions were. All I know now is that I don’t know! To get back to my â€Å"dumping† idea, you see how the gadget changes more than just what the ad says it will do. With our rates of change, the only constant in our paradigm may well become change itself. All you can be sure of about tomorrow is that it will go on being different, and, if you’re lucky, only at the same accelerating rate. Above all, the judgmental systems from the old paradigms may 21 The Impact of Science on Society not work in that world. Today we are, in fact, the last of the old world, living with institutions that are already creaking, facing twenty-first-century problems with nineteenth-century attitudes. Most of us find difficult to accept what we might have to dump. We face questions like these: If criminality is caused by XYY chromosomes, who do you blame for a crime, and why do you punish at all? When everybody has a home computer work station, what happens to unions, the infrastructure that runs the roads and transportation systems, the community life that â€Å"work in a central location† means, the new isolation of being alone most of the time? If data banks carry all the knowledge we possess, to be accessed at need, what will be the purpose of memory, of â€Å"knowing† anything? And what happens if what you got from the machine yesterday (what we’ll call â€Å"what you know†) is different when you go back to the machine today? If you have no expertise because expertise is no longer necessary, what are you left with? If technology provides virtually free energy, with the ability to turn anything into anything else (which we can already doit’s just too expensive to be feasible), and we no longer need the raw materials we used to because we can now make them, what happens to the materials producers in the Third World? Unlimited energy, the so-called philosopher’s stone, brings far more questions than answers. Not the least of these is the new importance it will have for the planetary heat budget, which at the moment is pretty much only the business of nature. Well, my guess is (and here I remind you of the unquestionable value of any guess made from within the inevitable limitations of our paradigm) that we’re all headed for one of two kinds of future. In one future, we take on the new data systems the way we took on all the other tools in the past, with a view to making them do what we’ve always done up to now, only better, faster, and cheaper. In this case, I think we’re in for a dose of Luddite reaction as our social structures fail to take the strain of that much shift that fast in the working habits of the population, not to mention 22 The Legacy of Science the redundancies that come if all you do is replace people with machines. The other problem with that old-paradigm approach is, of course, that you do what Bell up at Yale says, and turn into a two-class society. You have the numerate, who have access t o and ability to maximize use of the data systems, and you have the leisured serfs, who don’t, and who get paid for a 10-hour week with nothing to do but wish they knew how to use their spare time. It has often been said that the public doesn’t appreciate the speed with which things have developed in data systems. I like the analogy that if your Rolls Royce had done what computers have done over the last 20 years, it would cost a dollar and do a million miles to the gallon. People, I think, just don’t understand the velocity with which this new post-Gutenberg era is coming toward us. The other future I mentioned is a good deal more difficult to forecast. It’s very much up in the air. All I can do is to be extremely speculative again. I suppose what I’m suggesting is a crash restruchring of the educational system. I’ve been a teacher myself, so I know how easy this is to say and how difficult to do. However, if we were to manage some kind of interdisciplinary curriculum that taught people not the facts, which would be obsolete before they used them, but how to use the data systems to juxtapose, to look for relationships in knowledge, to see patterns in the way things happen and affect their lives, then perhaps we would be moving toward a very different type of society, one free of a central paradigm at all. After all, the only need there ever was for a paradigm was based on the strictures placed on society by its contemporary tools-or rather, lack of them. Now we have a tool-electronic data systems-that could lift almost all of those strictures from us, that could create a society that might be pluralistic in the extreme, lacking in any of the virtues we now ascribe to concensus, materialistic in every sense, highly articulate, what we would call unethical and immoral (what it would call pragmatic), selfsufficient (what we would call isolationist), libertarian (what we would call permissive), and above all, open-minded, curious, and tolerant. Sounds like a weird mix? Well, you asked me here to speculate. But in one sense it‘s what we’ve been heading for all along-a kind 23 T h e Impact of Science on Society of controlled anarchy, kept in balance by the electronics. It’s the truest version yet of what John Locke meant by â€Å"the unfettered pursuit of happiness by every man. † And if the vision bothers you, remember that once we decide that the paradigm is shifting, we adapt extremely quickly. Your great-grandmother, after all, would have thought you a drug addict for taking an aspirin. Question: You discussed the future paradigm as perhaps being nonexistent. Is it possible that the paradigm might be evolving just as human evolution evolved to the point where it is reaching its own sense of oneness with its future? In other words, we are part of the paradigm and the paradigm is what is evolving. We are part of the evolution. Answer: The great thing about that question is that it’s unanswerable. I mean, by definition it’s shear speculation again. All we can do is talk about it because we’re inside the paradigm. These wild speculative guesses are set in concrete because they’re within my paradigm. If they sound wild you should hear what happens if you come from another planet. Question: At the end of your talk you quoted Locke and said we should all seek our own happiness. Happiness is a paradigm. We all live in dreams. Every person has his own idea of what happiness is. We have paradigms that are imposed on us by the world, but we each have our own paradigm. I don’t know what human life means without dreams that are paradigms. Answer: Yes, I think that’s very well said. All I was suggesting was that this might become more possible than in the past. I didn’t mean that you lose your paradigm. I meant that perhaps your paradigm becomes a little less constrained by everybody else’s paradigm. Question: As scientists working for the government we are often asked to forecast what new inventions we might come up with over the next year. I wonder what implications that has for our role in bringing innovation into the world. Answer: I think it’s a superb example of what I was talking about. The government decides to make you decide what you’re 24 The Legacy of Science going to discover, and if you don’t come up with it you lose the grant! Question: Of all the countries you’ve worked in, which one, in your opinion, provides the best education, and, in particular, how do you view education in the United States? Answer: That sure sounds like a quick way t o get my head chopped off! I think educational systems tend to be structured according to the societies in which they work. I mean, our educational system in England is extremely difficult, different from yours, and very elitest. A very small percentage of us go to university, and we’re used to choosing the subject that we study at university a t the age of 16. We specialize in only two subjects from ages 16 to 18, and we then take a national examination in those two or three subjects. Only one of those subjects is what we go to university for, if we pass a competitive examination to get a place at the university, and the ratio is usually about three or four hundred people to each place. Now, we have to have an elitest educational system like that because we are very small and we’ve become quite poor ever since we lost the jolly old empire. If we didn’t have that kind of high-quality turnout we wouldn’t have enough people producing enough stuff on the market for us to sell anything to anybody. So I think we have an elitest educational system not because it’s a hangover from the old imperial days, but because if we don’t produce a very, as it were, sharp-edged elite intellectually, we won’t be able to compete with giants like you on the market. Question: I would like to ask whether the, what shall I say, elite in Britain and perhaps in Western Europe believe in full employment not merely because of the necessity for having the things that people produce when they’re fully employed, but rather as occupational therapy for the masses, around the idea that idle hands do the devil’s work, and that whereas intellectuals can keep their minds occupied and out of mischief, the common man is not capable of this. George Orwell said something like this (and it’s not something I agree with), but I would remark that Eric Hoffer said the common man was lumpy with talents and could do all kinds of things besides produce goods and shouldn’t be viewed merely as a production machine. Can you speak to that, sir? 25 T h e Impact of Science o n Society Answer: Well, I can’t speak for all of Europe, but I think the French probably think that full employment’s essential and they’ve had four devaluations of the franc as a result. It seems to me that full employment is a relatively new phenomenon. We’ve slid over into economics, and I’m extremely worried-I think anybody with any sense and honesty always is, in that subject. However, I believe I’m right in saying that full employment is a twentiethcentury phenomenon. The concept didn’t exist to any great extent at all prior to that. And I think it probably came at the tail end of a very healthy, burgeoning post-Industrial Revolution in both America and Europe. I think what we’re seeing now is a transition period to what Bell calls a post-industrial society, and it’s a period aided and abetted, of course, by the recession, which is caused not by the fact that we can’t switch paradigms but because oil costs a great deal. I think the situation, fortunately for me, is so confused that no clear statement can be made on it by me or anybody else except a politician. Question: If I understand you correctly, it seem5 to me that you’re putting out the impression that our technology is running away from our society. In other words, it’s speeding up at a rate that we can’t quite keep up with. In the past, when this has happened to societies, some major upheaval has occurred, whether it be sociological or financial, economical, or revolutionary, like wars. Do you have any idea what is going to cause us t o catch up with our rapidly advancing technology? Answer: Well, I think part of what I said earlier indicates what I think about that. First let me just dispel any idea that I believe in the so-called force of technology. I mean, technology is what people do. You invent the tool because you want it, or because you perceive an imbalance or a need, or you’re just greedy. You say, â€Å"I want this piece of technology,† and it comes into existence and you use it. I think society gets technology as it gets governments that it deserves. Sometimes, but not very often, technology tends to go a little faster than our ability to keep up with it. I’m not sure that this has happened to any great extent in the past, but I’m sure that it’s about to happen now. I think anybody with any sense would recognize that electronic data systems are going to make a quantum leap in terms of the effect of juxtapositioning, as I said earlier. As to what we can do about it, it seems to me that the 26 The Legacy of Science only way to get into it is through the educational process. It’s too quick, and you can’t have a quick-fix answer. It’s no good teaching us what to do. I think you’ve got to begin with the children who are 4 years old now and start the process there. As I said, I just hope some teachers who are better than I am at organizing this kind of thing in education, which is tremendously difficult, will get on with it, but I can’t see any other way of doing that. We are up against a period of very difficult transition. Question: Being somewhat of a video game fanatic, I’ve noticed that extremely small children play video games much better than anyone else. They’re well adapted to the electronic age because they have far fewer preconceptions, apparently. The way things are going, it looks as if things are going to get less and less expensive and more and more reachable in terms of the spread of technology and the spread of knowledge. Everyone can learn. Even if we can’t feed everybody in India, we can teach them all how to read. Pretty soon everybody will have his own terminal. Now, over the years, one of the major complaints of the Third World, even the Third World in the United States, has been that they never had the chance to get a leg up because they were deprived from the start. So, could it be possible now that we really will achieve a parity of sorts because everybody will have the same chance once this technology becomes more equally spread? Answer: Well, it depends entirely on what regulations are applied to the use of the technology. If I live in a totalitarian state and I produce a computer you can bet the people who use it are going to use it in a very different way than they use it in Spokane. As Pe

Barbara Goldsmith Other Powers Essay Research Paper

Barbara Goldsmith Other Powers Essay, Research Paper Barbara Goldsmith, writer of Other Powers, demonstrated many times throughout the book that sexual relationships were domains of force dealingss in which power is displayed. One such sexual relationship where there were domains of force dealingss, in which power was displayed, is the relationship between Roxanna ( Roxy ) Hummel Claflin and Reuben Buckman ( Buck ) Claflin, where Buck had great power over his married woman Roxy. Another sexual relationship in which there were domains of force dealingss, in which power was displayed, is the relationship between Josie Mansfield and Jim Fisk where the power went both ways. The relationship between Roxy and Buck Claflin began when Buck was given a room next to Roxy at John Snyder s. They married each other four months subsequently and because of Buck s wealth he was the powerful figure in the relationship. Buck had the most power because he put Roxy to work stating lucks in impermanent collapsible shelters where the land was covered with sawdust, moistness from baccy juice. ( Goldsmith 15 ) Roxy would soothe the adult females that came up to her with her visions. She ensured adult females, during a clip when many babes were deceasing, that there dead babies were happy in the bosom of the Lord. Buck used disclosures made by Roxy, about the wickednesss of her clients, in his blackmail strategies where he became even more affluent than he already was. The fact that Buck had so much power and control over Roxy he was allowed to make whatever he wanted at anytime, which is how Victoria Woodhull was conceived. When Roxy went brainsick one time while listening to a sermonizers address, Buck became angered with her and dragged her behind a bench and forced himself into her. Buck ruled perfectly over his household. His power position over the remainder of the household was obvious and non merely his childs but his wif vitamin E were simply his belongings. This proves that Buck Claflin was the more powerful figure if non the one figure who possessed all the power within his relationship with his married woman Roxy. Josie Mansfield, one time the married woman of Frank Lawlor, became highly hapless and was unable to hold more than one frock and pay her rent. In order to do money to last, she became a cocotte and while on the occupation she met Jim Fisk, who was known for giving big money parts to any reasonably cocotte who caught his oculus ( Goldsmith 160 ) . She was highly powerful in her relationship with Fisk because of her ability to decline his money and snub his progresss. She did this for three months and in the procedure inflated her worth greatly. Finally she began to accept the money of Jim Fisk and she even had a permanent consequence on Jim Fisk s physical visual aspect. He began to pare his moustache and waxed the terminals to handlebar flawlessness ( 160 ) . He began to have on Gallic Cologne and kept his boots shined. He did fundamentally whatever he could to seek and affect Josie Mansfield and because of her great power due to her difficult to acquire manner, she benefited greatl y from Jim Fisk. She even became a adult female of great manner and she neer once more had to have on the same frock twice. It was apparent that even during times when adult females were oppressed and denied many rights, there were still chosen adult females who had what it takes to be successful in a relationship with a adult male. Both of these sexual relationships illustrate ways in which domains of force dealingss were present within the show of power. Both Buck Claflin and Josie Mansfield each were the 1s in their ain relationships that had the bulk of the power over the other. With Buck, his power was fundamentally absolute. Josie Mansfield, nevertheless, although she had great power, could hold had it easy taken away by Jim Fisk.

Antony and Cleopatra Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Antony and Cleopatra - Essay Example Therefore, it becomes debatable if he actually lost honor or gained honor over the course of the play. Berek (1981) notes that the play is full of conflicts and these conflicts are internal as well as external. For example, the conflict between Rome and Egypt is an external conflict which is reflected in political struggles as well as war in which honor can be gained or lost. For Antony however, the internal conflicts between reason and emotion as well as duty and love are more difficult to handle than war or politics. In fact, the character of Mark Antony gains as wel as loses honor because of these conflicts that he can not handle and as reported by Berek, â€Å"These fatal conflicts corrupt Mark Antony (in the older view of the play) or (as more recent critics argue) translate the lovers into a realm of pure nobility† (1981, Pg. 295). The case of Antony is also complicated by the fact that his definition of honor focuses on who he is as a person. Instead of considering himself to be honorable if he is able to vanquish his enemies or honorable if he is able to help his friends in need, he considers his honor to be his own self. He says â€Å"If I lose my honor, / I lose myself† (Act 3, Scene 4) and for him, this definition is sufficient. While we have a general idea of what were honorable acts during the times the play is set, we have no real insight into what Mark Antony considers to be the exact meaning of honor. We do however get an idea of what he could think is a loss of honor since falling in love with Cleopatra has made his lose his wife and his sense of duty towards Rome. In Act 1, Scene 2, Antony says that he could â€Å"lose himself† since he is continually doting upon Cleopatra and not focusing on his duties. At the same time, there is honor and inherent nobility in love which he considers to be more important than the duties that he feels. This sort of flip flop lets the audience know that he is indeed an honorable man but he is in