Racism The Main Causes Of Police Brutality - 709 Words

Police brutality has been an issue for many decades and still is a concern that people have. Officers shouldn’t even think about using that type of violence around people unless it is absolutely necessary. Police brutality has even come to a point of death. According to Encyclopedia.com, police brutality is â€Å"the use of any force exceeding that reasonably necessary to accomplish a lawful police purpose†. In other words, police brutality is when an officer takes advantage of their power. Racism is one of the main points that police brutality is involved. Most reports of police brutality deal with racism. Over more than five centuries, different people have suffered from violence by these officers. Police use deadly â€Å"forces† and that can†¦show more content†¦What â€Å"problem† officers are is officers who either have a record of being abusive or have many records of complaints from the public. These type of officers should be receiving special monitoring, training, and counseling in order to prevent that they will not be involved in any other future incident of misconduct and brutality. Many people disagree on whether or not officers should be given that â€Å"second chance† because of their crimes. This is a debate going on for officers who have used unnecessary violence against people and people are wondering if they should be getting any special treatments. Some believe that they shouldn’t be working for the government any more because it is not fair for them to commit a crime and not have a harsh punishment. Police are legally allowed to use physical or even deadly forces for very dangerous individuals when it is necessary only. If an officer is to use their force when it is not called, it can be considered as police brutality. Another form of police brutality is when an officer uses their forces more than they need to in a situation (nolo,2017). These are the two biggest ways that basically define police brutality. Police officers are expected to serve and protect the citizens but some of these officers might take things too far where they don’t know when to stop. This can lead into serious issues. According to nolo.com, â€Å"In November 2013, police officers in Tullytown,Show MoreRelatedEssay On Police Brutality1478 Words   |  6 Pagesongoing, which leads to police brutality. In â€Å"Why Are So Many Black Americans Killed By Police?†, Carl Bialik, reveals racism (consciously or not) leads to police brutality of African Americans. Kia Makarechi in â€Å"What The Dat a Really Says About Police and Racial Bias†, shows evidence of African Americans receiving more police brutality because of racism. Clint Smith in â€Å"Racism, Stress, and Black Death†, conveys how studies show that African Americans are receiving police brutality due to day-to-day discriminationRead MoreDr. Wolfe s Sociological Training910 Words   |  4 Pages1. In Dr. Wolfe’s statement on the recent events that have taken place in Baltimore he talks about police brutality, crime, racism, and inequality. Dr. Wolfe’s sociological training affects the way he looks at these events. In his statement he talks about how police brutality is not just happening among â€Å"a few bad apples† but instead how it is a systemic issue. He may be right but he also may be wrong. Dr. Wolfe is trained to study race, the criminal justice system and the relationship between bothRead MorePersuasive Essay On Police Brutality1467 Words   |  6 PagesHow can we trust the ones that’s killing us? Law enforcement and police officers play a major role in our community. They help those in need keep us safe. Nationwide they also kill an average of 3 people every day. I thought whenever you become an officer, you have sworn to protect us. Police brutality is a major issue in our society today. Police work is dangerous. In the past, police officers were considered peacekeepers. Police have been occupied in shootings, severe beatings, and unnecessarilyRead MoreRace, Race And Racism Essay1396 Words   |  6 Pagesbetter understanding of the terms, race and racism in society (critical race theory) (Stefancic and Delgado 1995, 177). By using the critical race theory and examining incidents of police misconduct, this will determine whether or not race plays a crucial factor. Additionally, this project encompasses a vast knowledge of the criminal justice system and the police departments of the United States of America. Furthermore, one must keep in mind that â€Å"police work is dangerous, difficult, and unappreciatedRead MorePolice Brutality1519 Words   |  7 Pagesfive centuries, black people have endured violence in many different ways. Today, police officers use deadly, excessive force that leads to inexcusable assaults, beatings and shootings. This demonstrates the governmentÐ ¢s role in initiating and prolonging racial suppression and provides the explanation for police brutality to become a federal crime(Black Radical Congress, 3). In history, racist violence, police brutality, has been used to suppress the racial blacks and to preserve power and privilegesRead MorePolice Misconduct and Police Brutality985 Words   |  4 Pages We hear about police misconduct case and wonder, Why don’t they do anything to stop this? Many say that we should keep the police officers’ perspective in mind. Others say that these actions are due to racism or post 9/11 paranoia. Whatever the excuse may be for these cases, there should be no need for violence anywhere. Police brutality videos go viral and reveal to the world that it actually happens and that it may happen to you too. This pervades people with fear and anger because theirRead MorePolice Brutality Is A Trend Essay1579 Words   |  7 PagesUnfortunately, police brutality is a trend that continues to increase daily. In fact, the Washington Post stated there was 807 people shot, and killed by police in 2016. Not to mention, in 2015 there was 901 people shot, and killed by police in the United States. However, there are many underlying factors that lead to any police involved shooting, or police brutality incident that occurs. Furthermore, it is impor tant to understand these factors, so officers could prevent any more police brutality incidentsRead MoreI Never Had It Made Written By Legendary African American Major League Baseball Player1457 Words   |  6 Pagesthe treatment of minorities in recent events in the US (Wyche). This is his main reason for the protests, but in different cases, oppression and the alleged brutality of police towards minorities are other causes to the actions that have been taken. Kaepernick’s decision to sit for the national anthem has sparked â€Å"copycat† protests around the country. The primary cause of the protests to the national anthem is racism towards minorities and people of color. The most significant effect is thatRead MoreMichelle Alexander s The New Jim Crow Essay1123 Words   |  5 Pagesany other racial group in the United States. Although this statement is partially true, Alexander misses the fact that in recent years, other racial groups have been affected by the same unjust profiling done by authorities. Recently, overall police brutality and racial profiling has seen an increase in the United States population. Furthermore, unprovoked or inappropriate use of force by authorities has sparked conversation in America racial profiling and incarceration rates in the country. Due toRead MorePolice Brutality : A Social Problem1548 Words   |  7 PagesPolice brutality is a social problem faced in many communities around the world. Focusing on North America, the problems and central focuses on police brutality stem from racism and the excessive abuse of power. Police brutality is defined as unmerited, excessive and aggressive abuse, police brutality is a phenomenon that causes irreparable harm to its victims. The abuse may be physical or psychological, and the victims can feel the effects of this abuse for a lifetime. These effects include not

Child Marriage Should Be Legal - 952 Words

Children should be able to experience their childhood and be able to enjoy those worriless year not worry about anything. Living life is not all about growing up, it about living and enjoys it to help making yourself happy about what have accomplished and experience. A child should not have to choose between their childhood and their parent or a religion. Both girls and boys are affected by child marriage, but girls are affected in much larger numbers and with greater intensity. Child marriage is seen across the country but it is far higher in rural than in urban areas. Girls from poorer families, castes and tribes, and with lower education levels are more likely to marry at a younger age. Child marriage has been a popular situation in India, which leads to so many children losing their childhood and becoming an adult to fast. A child shouldn’t be married off before they become women because they grow up to fast and forget how to be child and become a woman with lot of responsible to handle before reaching the age 18-year. When a child get marriage at a young age they re not beneficial form anything that is happen them it s just hurting them. Being married so young limit their opportunities and early marriages can lead to numerous medical and psychological problems, particularly in relation to early child-births where the mother is not physically mature. The misconceptions about child is that people believe that the kids are living together, but when these girls getShow MoreRelatedChild Marriage Should Be Legal989 Words   |  4 Pagesreality for these girls. Marriage should be an happy, joyful, and an enjoyable celebration of love for two people who are in lov e, but for most girls in India and other country this has become and nightmare that they can t wake up from. 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Crowdsourcing Human-based Computation and Amazon Mechanical Turk Free Essays

string(148) " During the Great Depression, out-of-work clerks tabulated higher mathematical functions in the Mathematical Tables Project as an outreach project\." In a companion blog post to his June 2006 Wired magazine article, Jeff Howe posited the first definition of crowdsourcing: â€Å"Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers. We will write a custom essay sample on Crowdsourcing: Human-based Computation and Amazon Mechanical Turk or any similar topic only for you Order Now † Daren C. Brabham was the first to define â€Å"crowdsourcing† in the scientific literature in a February 1, 2008, article: â€Å"Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.† In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—submit solutions which are then owned by the entity that broadcasted the problem—the crowdsourcer. In some cases, the contributor of the solution is compensated monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization. Crowdsourcers are primarily motivated by its benefits. One of these includes the ability to gather large numbers of solutions and information at a relatively inexpensive cost. Users are motivated to contribute to crowdsourced tasks by both intrinsic motivations, such as social contact,  intellectual stimulation, and passing time, and by extrinsic motivations, such as financial gain. Due to the blurred limits of crowdsourcing, many collaborative activities are considered crowdsourcing even when they are not. Another consequence of this situation is the proliferation of definitions in the scientific literature. Different authors give different definitions of crowdsourcing according to their specialties, losing in this way the global picture of the term. After studying more than 40 definitions of crowdsourcing in the scientific and popular literature, Enrique Estellà ©s-Arolas and Fernando Gonzà ¡lez Ladrà ³n-de-Guevara developed a new integrating definition: â€Å"Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate bringing their work, money, knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that what the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken†. Henk van Ess emphasizes the need to â€Å"give back† the crowdsourced results to the public on ethical grounds. His non-scientific, non-commercial definition is widely cited in the popular press: â€Å"Crowdsourcing is channeling the experts’ desire to solve a problem and then freely sharing the answer with everyone† Crowdsourcing systems are used to accomplish a variety of tasks. For example, the crowd may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design or distributed participatory  design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation), or help capture, systematize, or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science). History The term â€Å"crowdsourcing† is a portmanteau of â€Å"crowd† and â€Å"outsourcing,† coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article â€Å"The Rise of Crowdsourcing†. It has been argued that crowdsourcing can only exist on the Internet and is thus a relatively recent phenomenon., however, long before modern crowdsourcing systems were developed, there were a number of notable examples of projects that utilized distributed people to help accomplish tasks. Historical examples The Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) may provide one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing. An open call was made to the community for contributions by volunteers to index all words in the English language and example quotations of their usages for each one. They received over 6 million submissions over a period of 70 years. The making of the OED is detailed in The Surgeon of Crow Thorne by Simon Winchester. Crowdsourcing in genealogy research Genealogical research was using crowdsourcing techniques long before computers were common. Beginning in 1942 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon church) encouraged members to submit information about their ancestors. The submitted information was gathered together into a single collection. In 1969 in order to encourage more people to participate in gathering genealogical information about their ancestors, the church started the three-generation program. In this program church members were asked to prepare documented family group record forms for the first three generations. The program was later expanded to encourage members to research at least 4 generations, and became known as the four-generation program. Institutes that have records of interest to genealogical research have used crowds of volunteers to create catalogs and indexes to records. Early crowdsourcing competitions Crowdsourcing has often been used in the past as a competition in order to discover a solution. The French government proposed several of these competitions, often rewarded with Montyon Prizes, created for poor Frenchmen who had done virtuous acts. These included the Leblanc process, or the Alkali Prize, where a reward was provided for separating the salt from the alkali, and the Fourneyron’s Turbine, when the first hydraulic commercial turbine was developed. In response to a challenge from the French government, Nicholas Appert won a prize for inventing a new way of food preservation that involved sealing food in air-tight jars. The British government provided a similar reward to find an easy way to determine a ship’s longitude in the The Longitude Prize. During the Great Depression, out-of-work clerks tabulated higher mathematical functions in the Mathematical Tables Project as an outreach project. You read "Crowdsourcing: Human-based Computation and Amazon Mechanical Turk" in category "Papers" Modern methods Today, crowdsourcing has transferred mainly to the Internet. The Internet provides a particularly good venue for crowdsourcing since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they are not being physically judged or scrutinized and thus can feel more comfortable sharing. This ultimately allows for well-designed artistic projects because individuals are less conscious, or maybe even less aware, of scrutiny towards their work. In an online atmosphere more attention is given to the project rather than communication with other individuals. Crowdsourcing can either take an explicit or an implicit route. Explicit crowdsourcing lets users work together to evaluate, share, and build different specific tasks, while implicit crowdsourcing means that users solve a problem as a side effect of something else they are doing. With explicit crowdsourcing, users can evaluate particular items like books or webpages, or share by posting products or items. Users can also build artifacts by providing information and editing other people’s work. Implicit crowdsourcing can take two forms: standalone and piggyback. Standalone allows people to solve problems as a side effect of the task they are actually doing, whereas piggyback takes users’ information from a third-party website to gather information. Types of crowdsourcing In coining the term of â€Å"crowdsourcing†, Jeff Howe has also indicated some common categories of crowdsourcing that can be used effectively in the commercial world. Some of these web-based crowdsourcing efforts include crowdvoting, wisdom of the crowd, crowdfunding, microwork, creative crowdsourcing and inducement prize contests. Although these may not be an exhaustive list, they cover the current major ways in which people use crowds to perform tasks. According to definition by Henk van Ess that has been widely cited in the popular press, â€Å"The crowdsourced problem can be huge (epic tasks like finding alien life or mapping earthquake zones) or very small (‘where can I skate safely?’). Some examples of successful crowdsourcing themes are problems that bug people, things that make people feel good about themselves, projects that tap into niche knowledge of proud experts, subjects that people find sympathetic or any form of injustice.† Crowd voting Crowd voting occurs when a website gathers a large group’s opinions and judgment on a certain topic. The Iowa Electronic Market is a prediction market that gathers crowds’ views on politics and tries to ensure accuracy by having participants pay money to buy and sell contracts based on political outcomes. Threadless.com selects the t-shirts it sells by having users provide designs and vote on the ones they like, which are then printed and available for purchase. Despite the small nature of the company, thousands of members provide designs and vote on them, making the website’s products truly created and selected by the crowd, rather than the company. Some of the most famous examples have made use of social media channels: Domino’s Pizza, Coca Cola, Heineken and Sam Adams have thus crowdsourced a new pizza, song, bottle design or beer, respectively. Crowdsourcing creative work Creative crowdsourcing spans sourcing creative projects such as graphic design, architecture, apparel design, writing, illustration. etc. Some of the better known creative domains that use the Crowdsourcing model include 99designs, DesignCrowd, crowdspring, Jade Magnet, Threadless, Poptent, GeniusRocket and Tongal Crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the process of funding your projects by a multitude of people contributing a small amount in order to attain a certain monetary goal. Goals may be for donations or for equity in a project. The dilemma right now for equity crowdfunding in the USA is how the SEC is going to regulate the entire process. As it stands rules and regulations are being refined by the SEC and they will have until Jan. 1st, 2013 to tweak the fundraising methods. The regulators are on edge because they are already overwhelmed trying to regulate Dodd – Frank and all the other rules and regulations involving public companies and the way they trade. Advocates of regulation claim that crowdfunding will open up the flood gates for fraud, have called it the â€Å"wild west† of fundraising, and have compared it to the 1980s days of penny stock â€Å"cold-call cowboys.† The process allows for up to 1 million dollars to be raised without a lot of the regulations being involved. Companies under the current proposal will have a lot of exemptions available and be able to raise capital from a larger pool of persons which can include a lot lower thresholds for investor criteria whereas the old rules required that the person be an â€Å"accredited† investor. These people are often recruited from social networks, where the funds can be acquired from an  equity purchase, loan, donation, or pre-ordering. The amounts collected have become quite high, with requests that are over a million dollars for software like Trampoline Systems, which used it to finance the commercialization of their new software. A well-known crowdfunding tool is Kickstarter, which is the biggest website for funding creative projects. It has raised over $100 million, despite its all-or-nothing model which requires one to reach the proposed monetary goal in order to acquire the money. UInvest is another example of a crowdfunding platform that was started in Kiev, Ukraine in 2007. Crowdrise brings together volunteers to fundraise in an online environment. Most recently, the adult industry gained its own site in the way of Offbeatr. Offbeatr allows the community to cast votes on projects they would like to see make it to the funding phase. â€Å"Wisdom of the crowd† Wisdom of the crowd is another type of crowdsourcing that collects large amounts of information and aggregates them to gain a complete and accurate picture of a topic, based on the idea that a group of people is on average more intelligent than an individual. This idea of collective intelligence proves particularly effective on the web because people from diverse backgrounds can contribute in real-time within the same forums. iStockPhoto provides a platform for people to upload photos and purchase them for low prices. Clients can purchase photos through credits, giving photographers a small profit. Again, the photo collection is determined by the crowd’s voice for very low prices. In February 2012, a stock picking game called Ticker Picker Pro was launched, using crowdsourcing to create a hedge fund that would buy and sell stocks based on the ideas coming out of the game. These crowdsourced ideas, coming from so many people, could help one pick the best stocks based on this idea that collective ideas are better than individual ones. Microwork Microwork is a crowdsourcing platform where users do small tasks for which computers lack aptitude for low amounts of money. Amazon’s popular Mechanical Turk has created many different projects for users to participate in, where each task requires very little time and offers a very small amount in payment. The Chinese versions of this, commonly called Witkey, are similar and include such sites as Taskcn.com and k68.cn. When choosing tasks, since only certain users â€Å"win†, users learn to submit later and pick less popular tasks in order to increase the likelihood of getting their work chosen. An example of a Mechanical Turk project is when users searched satellite images for images of a boat in order to find lost researcher Jim Gray. Inducement prize contests Web-based idea competitions, or inducement prize contests often consist of generic ideas, cash prizes, and an Internet-based platform to facilitate easy idea generation and discussion. An example of these competitions includes an event like IBM’s 2006 â€Å"Innovation Jam†, attended by over 140,000 international participants and yielding around 46,000 ideas. Another example is Netflix Prize in 2009. The idea was to ask crowd to come up with a recommendation algorithm which was more accurate than Netflix’s own algorithm. It had a grand prize of US$1,000,000 and it was given to the BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team which bested Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10.06% Another example of competition-based crowdsourcing is the 2009 DARPA experiment, where DARPA placed 10 balloon markers across the United States and challenged teams to compete to be the first to report the location of all the balloons. A collaboration of efforts was required to complete the challenge quickly and in addition to the competitive motivation of the contest as a whole, the winning team (MIT, in less than nine hours) established its own â€Å"collaborapetitive† environment to generate participation in their team. A similar challenge was the Tag Challenge, funded by the US State Department, which required locating and photographing individuals in 5 cities in the US and Europe within 12 hours based only on a single photograph. The winning team managed to locate 3 suspects by mobilizing volunteers world-wide using a similar incentive scheme to the one  used in the Balloon Challenge. Open innovation platforms are a very effective way of crowdsourcing people’s thoughts and ideas to do research and development. The company InnoCentive is a crowdsourcing platform for corporate research and development where difficult scientific problems are posted for crowds of solvers to discover the answer and win a cash prize, which can range from $10,000 to $100,000 per challenge. InnoCentive, of Waltham, MA and London, England is the leader in providing access to millions of scientific and technical experts from around the world. The company has provided expert crowdsourcing to international Fortune 1000 companies in the US and Europe as well as government agencies and nonprofits. The company claims a success rate of 50% in providing successful solutions to previously unsolved scientific and technical problems. IdeaConnection.com challenges people to come up with new inventions and innovations and Ninesigma.com connects clients with experts in various fields. The X PRIZE Foundation creates and runs incentive competitions where one can win between $1 million and $30 million for solving challenges. Local Motors is another example of crowdsourcing. A community of 20,000 automotive engineers, designers and enthusiasts competes to build offroad rally trucks. Implicit crowdsourcing Implicit crowdsourcing is less obvious because users do not necessarily know they are contributing, yet can still be very effective in completing certain tasks. Rather than users actively participating in solving a problem or providing information, implicit crowdsourcing involves users doing another task entirely where a third party gains information for another topic based on the user’s actions. A good example of implicit crowdsourcing is the ESP game, where users guess what images are and then these labels are used to tag Google images. Another popular use of implicit crowdsourcing is through reCAPTCHA, which asks people to solve Captchas in order to prove they are human, and then provides Captchas from old books that cannot be deciphered by computers in order to try and digitize them for the web. Like Mechanical Turk, this task is simple for humans but would be incredibly difficult for computers. Piggyback crowdsourcing can be seen most frequently by websites such as Google that mine one’s search history and websites in order to discover keywords for ads, spelling corrections, and finding synonyms. In this way, users are unintentionally helping to modify existing systems, such as Google’s ad words. Crowdsourcers There are a number of motivations for businesses to use crowdsourcing to accomplish tasks, find solutions for problems, or to gather information. These include the ability to offload peak demand, access cheap labor and information, generate better results, access a wider array of talent than might be present in one organization, and undertake problems that would have been too difficult to solve internally. Crowdsourcing allows businesses to submit problems on which contributors can work, such as problems in science, manufacturing, biotech, and medicine, with monetary rewards for successful solutions. Although it can be difficult to crowdsource complicated tasks, simple work tasks can be crowdsourced cheaply and effectively. Crowdsourcing also has the potential to be a problem-solving mechanism for government and nonprofit use. Urban and transit planning are prime areas for crowdsourcing. One project to test crowdsourcing’s public participation process for transit planning in Salt Lake City has been underway from 2008 to 2009, funded by a U.S. Federal Transit Administration grant. Another notable application of crowdsourcing to government problem solving is the Peer to Patent Community Patent Review project for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Researchers have used crowdsourcing systems, in particular Mechanical Turk, to aid with research projects by crowdsourcing aspects of the research process such as data collection, parsing, and evaluation. Notable examples include using the crowd to create speech and language databases,and using the crowd to conduct user studies. Crowdsourcing systems provide these researchers with the ability to gather large amount of data. Additionally, using crowdsourcing, researchers can collect data from populations and  demographics they may not have had access to locally, but that improve the validity and value of their work. Artists have also utilized crowdsourcing systems. In his project the Sheep Market, Aaron Koblin used Mechanical Turk to collect 10,000 drawings of sheep from contributors around the world. Sam Brown (artist) leverages the crowd by asking visitors of his website explodingdog to send him sentences that he uses as inspirations for paintings. Art curator Andrea Grover argues that individuals tend to be more open in crowdsourced projects because they are not being physically judged or scrutinized. As with other crowdsourcers, artists use crowdsourcing systems to generate and collect data. The crowd also can be used to provide inspiration and to collect financial support for an artist’s work. Additionally, crowdsourcing from 100 million drivers is being used by INRIX to collect users’ driving times to provide better GPS routing and real-time traffic updates. Demographics The crowd is an umbrella term for people who contribute to crowdsourcing efforts. Though it is sometimes difficult to gather data about the demographics of the crowd, a study by Ross et al. surveyed the demographics of a sample of the more than 400,000 registered crowdworkers using Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete tasks for pay. While a previous study in 2008 by Ipeirotis found that users at that time were primarily American, young, female, and well-educated, with 40% having incomes $40,000/yr, in 2009 Ross found a very different population. By Nov. 2009, 36% of the surveyed Mechanical Turk workforce was Indian. Of Indian workers were male, and 66% had at least a Bachelor’s degree. ? had annual incomes less than $10,000/yr, with 27% sometimes or always depending on income from Mechanical Turk to make ends meet. The average US user of Mechanical Turk earned $2.30 per hour for tasks in 2009, versus $1.58 for the average Indian worker. While the majority of users worked less than 5 hours per week, 18% worked 15 hours per week or more. This is less than minimum wage in either country, which Ross suggests raises ethical questions for researchers who use crowdsourcing. The demographics of http://microworkers.com/ differ from Mechanical Turk in that the US and India together account for only 25% of workers. 197 countries are represented among users, with Indonesia (18%) and Bangladesh (17%) contributing the largest share. However, 28% of employers are from the US. Another study of the demographics of the crowd at iStockphoto found a crowd that was largely white, middle- to upper-class, higher educated, worked in a so-called â€Å"white collar job,† and had a high-speed Internet connection at home. Studies have also found that crowds are not simply collections of amateurs or hobbyists. Rather, crowds are often professionally trained in a discipline relevant to a given crowdsourcing task and sometimes hold advanced degrees and many years of experience in the profession.Claiming that crowds are amateurs, rather than professionals, is both factually untrue and may lead to marginalization of crowd labor rights. Motivations Many scholars of crowdsourcing suggest that there are both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that cause people to contribute to crowdsourced tasks, and that these factors influence different types of contributors.For example, students and people employed full-time rate Human Capital Advancement as less important than part-time workers do, while women rate Social Contact as more important than men do. Intrinsic motivations are broken down into two categories, enjoyment-based and community-based motivations. Enjoyment-based motivations refer to motivations related to the fun and enjoyment that the contributor experiences through their participation. These motivations include: skill variety, task identity, task autonomy, direct feedback from the job, and pastime. Community-based motivations refer to motivations related to community participation, and include community identification and social contact. Extrinsic motivations are broken down into three categories, immediate payoffs, delayed payoffs, and social motivations. Immediate payoffs, through monetary payment, are the immediately received compensations given to those who complete tasks. Delayed payoffs are benefits that can be used to generate future advantages, such as training skills and being noticed by potential employers. Social motivations are the rewards of behaving pro-socially, such as altruistic motivations. Chandler and Kapelner found that US users of the Amazon Mechanical Turk were more likely to complete a task when told they were going to â€Å"help researchers identify tumor cells,† than when they were not told the purpose of their task. However, of those who completed the task, quality of output did not depend on the framing of the task. Another form of social motivation is prestige or status. The International Children’s Digital Library recruits volunteers to translate and review books. Because all translators receive public acknowledgment for their contribution, Kaufman and Schulz cite this as a reputation-based strategy to motivate individuals who want to be associated with institutions that have prestige. The Amazon Mechanical Turk uses reputation as a motivator in a different sense, as a form of quality control. Crowdworkers who frequently complete tasks in ways judged to be inadequate can be denied access to future tasks, providing motivation to produce high-quality work. Criticisms There are two major categories of criticisms about crowdsourcing, (1) the value and impact of the work received from the crowd and (2) the ethical implications of low wages paid to crowdworkers. Most of these criticisms are directed towards crowdsourcing systems that provide extrinsic monetary rewards to contributors, though some apply more generally to all crowdsourcing systems. Impact of crowdsourcing on product quality Susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts. Since crowdworkers completing microtasks are paid per task, there is often a financial incentive to complete tasks quickly rather than well. Verifying responses is time consuming, and so requesters often depend on having  multiple workers complete the same task to correct errors. However, having each task completed multiple times increases time and monetary costs. Crowdworkers are a nonrandom sample of the population. Many researchers use crowdsourcing in order to quickly and cheaply conduct studies with larger sample sizes than would be otherwise achievable. However, due to low worker pay, participant pools are skewed towards poor users in developing countries. Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation or too few participants. Crowdsourcing markets are not a first-in-first-out queue. Tasks that are not completed quickly may be forgotten, buried by filters and search procedures so that workers do not see them. This results in a long tail power law distribution of completion times. Additionally, low-paying research studies online have higher rates of attrition, with participants not completing the study once started. Even when tasks are completed, crowdsourcing doesn’t always produce quality results. When Facebook began its localization program in 2008, it encountered criticism for the low quality of its crowdsourced translations. One of the problems of crowdsourcing products is the lack of interaction between the crowd and the client. Usually there is little information about the final desired product and there is often very limited interaction with the final client. This can decrease the quality of product as client interaction is a vital part of the design process. It is usually expected from a crowdsourced project to be unbiased by incorporating a large population of participants with a diverse background. However, most of the crowdsourcing works are done by people who are paid or directly benefit from the outcome (e.g. most of open source projects working on Linux). In many other cases, the resulted product is the outcome of a single person’s endeavour who creates the majority of the product while the crowd only participates in minor details. Concerns for crowdsourcers Ethical concerns. Because crowdworkers are considered independent contractors  rather than employees, they are not guaranteed a minimum wage. In practice, workers using the Amazon Mechanical Turk generally earn less than the minimum wage, even in India. Some researchers considering using Mechanical Turk to get participants for studies have argued that this may be unethical. Below-market wages. The average US user of Mechanical Turk earned $2.30 per hour for tasks in 2009, versus $1.58 for the average Indian worker. While the majority of users worked less than 5 hours per week, 18% worked 15 hours per week or more, and 27% of Indian users said income from Mechanical Turk is sometimes or always necessary for them to make ends meet. This is less than minimum wage in either country, which Ross et al. suggest raises ethical questions for researchers who use crowdsourcing.[ When Facebook began its localization program in 2008, it received criticism for using crowdsourcing to obtain free labor. Typically, no written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements are made with crowdsourced employees. For users of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, this means that requestors have final say over whether users’ work is acceptable; if not, they will not be paid. Critics claim that crowdsourcing arrangements exploit individuals in the crowd, and there has been a call for crowds to organize for their labor rights. Difficulties in collaboration of crowd members, especially in the context of competitive crowd sourcing. Crowdsourcing site InnoCentive allows organizations to solicit solutions to scientific and technological problems; only 10.6% of respondents report working in a team on their submission. How to cite Crowdsourcing: Human-based Computation and Amazon Mechanical Turk, Papers

Human Resource Management Work Design Pilot at CERA †Free Samples

Question: Discuss about the Human Resource Work Design Pilot at CERA. Answer: Introduction Human resource management is the recruitment and proper utilisation of the available workforce to optimise the performance of any company. The director of Human Resources has the responsibility of hiring and supervising the employees, and providing consultation to the managers of any organisation regarding training and development, plans related to the staff, and the companys budget and labour fields. The human resource manager also has the responsibility of ensuring the safety of the employees, in addition to taking care of their welfare and performing their induction and orientation (Tang, Pee Iijima, 2013). The foundation of any organisation lies solely on its employees; the results that are attained are because of the numerous human minds that are working to produce the outcome. It can be said that technology is replacing or reducing the involvement of humans, but it should not be forgotten that humans only are making the machines, and they also need to be operated or at least supervised by one. Stephen Hawking has stated that a day might come when artificial intelligence would replace the involvement of humans, and only the people at the top of the organisation in the supervisory roles would remain functional. Work design pilot at CERA CERA was looking to hire new employees to its team of educational professionals, practitioners and researchers. The Director of Learning Analytics would be responsible for conducting research and demonstrating the newly available tools and systems for the purpose of assessing and directing instructional processes. The Director of Instructional Impact makes and conducts research on the individual performance of the students by collecting data and form cooperatives with educators to assess efficiency. The ideal qualifications would be to have a strong knowledge and a preferably formal training regarding assessment and analysis, while being able to work as a flexible and independent leader. For any organisation, the strategy it follows while running the business has a direct impact on the way the job roles are designed and allocated together. Therefore, the tactics that a cost-oriented company will employ will be different from that of a company that wants to lay more emphasis on innovation or differentiation. Work design is therefore dependent on the strategies and policies, in which the organisation is functioning, and also on how it sees itself in the environment (Hogan Coote, 2014). For any work design, there are four basic approaches: Motivational, Mechanistic, Biological, and Perpetual motor approaches. Motivational job design approach Autonomy Task identity Intrinsic job feedback Ability/skill requirements Extrinsic job feedback Ability/skill variety Social interaction Task significance Task/goal clarity Growth/learning Mechanistic job design approach Job specialisation Single activities Specialisation of tools and procedures Task simplification Repetition Spare time Automation Perpetual motor job design approach Lighting Information-output requirements Displays Information-processing requirements Programs Memory requirements Other equipment Stress Printed job materials Boredom Workplace layout Information input requirements Biological job design approach Strength Size difference Lifting Noise Wrist movement Climate Endurance Work breaks Seating Shift work Jobs that support innovative behaviour In a dynamic business environment, it is essential that the employees implement innovative behaviour to ensure the success of an organisation. This is because innovation is given importance all over the world. There are important factors that affect an individuals behaviour, like the relationship they have with the management, the overall cultural climate of the company, their job description, and also, their individual differences. Psychological factors such as the workers level of interest and dedication towards their work will affect their individual creativity, since innovation is nothing but the ability to generate ideas that are more creative (Paterson, Luthans Jeung, 2014). The innovation is affected by how the worker perceives the climate of the organisation. An individual will behave in accordance with the consequences as outlined in the expectancy theory of motivation. This is also influenced by the expectations that the employee has from their organisation, and it differs from individual to individual. Explaining innovative behaviour using performance and image outcome expectations Innovative behaviour can be defined as the implementation of new ideas, processes or procedures to increase the performance and outcome. This can be done by using new processes of work, improved methods of investigation and application, and by keeping track of newer technological processes. Innovation is therefore the conception and the implementation of newer and more creative ideas, which are useful for the success of the organisation (Wallace, 2016). For improved employee behaviour and performance, it is important that the organisations employ the best and the most skilled workers. Years of research has concluded, that innovative behaviour is not one-dimensional. It is more than just the implementation of creative ideas; it is the identification of the problem, the development of the solution, and the required support for it (Madrid et al., 2014). The importance of innovation in the workplace is a developing idea; however, there have been insufficient studies to actually examine employee behaviour. Some studies that had been conducted assessed the behaviour of only those sectors that had workers that were empowered, or were transformational leaders. It has been suggested by theorists of social exchange that there is a whole series of interactions that give rise to the commitment and the freedom over time, in any workplace. It is assumed that a good deed done by any of the workers will get reciprocated at some point by the person who benefits from or receives it. This implies that when workers are able to have a high-quality relationship with the employers and are satisfied with the output of their workplace input, they are more willing to invest and respond with better performances, while also fulfilling the obligations they might have to the management or the supervisor. These workplace relationships develop and can be maintained if both the involved parties understand its importance and can provide for it (Hsu Chen, 2015). Social exchange theory: The background to workplace relationships A key factor of this Social Exchange Theory is that the trust, loyalty and commitment in any relationship take time to develop. In addition to time, the situations also need to be ideal. This means, that the workers need to keep in mind the rules of the workplace, and in the process, help to foster mutually helpful workplace relationships. Even the organisation needs to implement a mechanism that aids its workers in solving work-based issues. In other words, the supervising body needs to be supportive, and the employees should be able to understand that. However, there are no firm rules regarding this; an employee will undertake a social exchange only when the benefit is greater than the investment this is similar to any economic exchange. Innovative behaviour models The innovative behaviour of individuals are affected by a total of twelve factors, which can be categorised into four groups: Characteristics of the organisation the expressed strategies and the size of the organisation Characteristics of the intersection between employee and employer the hierarchy, the work culture, and the aims outlined by the organisation Characteristics of the actual individuals eagerness to learn, an ambitious personality Characteristics of the innovation itself the potential and goals of the organisational policies Job satisfaction and innovation Here, the relationship between performance and job satisfaction is to be addressed. The foundation of this idea is in the fact that a worker with high job satisfaction will be more willing to perform their duties in a better manner (De Clercq, Dimov Belausteguigoitia, 2016). The leadership gets affected in the same way; a team of employees that perform well will result in a happier and more satisfied manager or supervisor. Innovation might get limited when employees have a job satisfaction they may support decisions that might not be beneficial for the company, as employees with a secure job are less likely to consider the financial shortcomings that the governing body is facing. A more relaxed structure of pay and leaves make workers appreciate their job security, but this cannot make up for the lack of a future vision encompassing the past and future performance and success rates. Promoting innovative behaviour When it comes to the challenges that the management faces while governing any organisation, it is no surprise that human capital tops the list ("Forbes Welcome", 2017). It is followed suit by the challenge of innovation, and it is one of the top five concerns all over the world. Human capital and innovation are interlinked; a good attempt at innovation is dependent on the strength of the leadership in the organisation. At CERA, it is essential that the management have a strong role in the administration, and the following nine aspects can be said to drive innovation: A joint vision by the leaders and their colleagues One cannot just give directives or orders and expect their employees to follow them blindly, no matter how grand the strategy might be. A better outcome is guaranteed when the leader consults with his employees before making any decisions; a partnership is better than a commanding approach (Yoshida et al., 2014). Building trust It is absolutely important for the leader to have trust for their employees (Agarwal, 2014). CERA needs to incorporate the idea that their employees are trusted and therefore valued to ensure that their visions are realised. A leader who trusts their workers earns the trust of the employees as well. Moreover, one needs to feel safe in order to take the risks that could be necessary for the organisation. Willingness to change the status quo Leaders should know the difference between the right and the politically correct in order to be innovative (Mutlu, 2014). It does not matter if such leaders are said to be contrary to the environment as they are the ones who are, in the long run, successful and efficient in innovation. Expertise The leaders who have a profound knowledge of their field and what their workers are working on are more likely to be innovators. They are intellectually curious, but are equally aware of the core functioning of their group. Goals are set high The benchmark for success should be set high, and the workers should be encouraged to reach those goals. They should believe that they can reach that target, no matter how challenging it might be. Speed A leader who is innovative moves fast, as they hold the belief that a task can be finished in a better manner much more quickly than by delaying it. Leaders who work slowly have reduced results than those who are fast and therefore more productive. The need for information Maintaining transparency and being communicative with the team is one of the main characteristics of an innovative leader. Asking and answering relevant questions is also important, and it helps to be successful in innovation. Teamwork It should always be about about the team, never about the individual. Co-operation is the key to the success of any innovative idea (Schippers, West Dawson, 2015). Diversity and inclusion It is necessary for innovation that the team takes into consideration all points of view and the opinions of all the members. The blending of different creative processes and experiences gives rise to innovative solutions. Conclusion Innovative behaviour is dependent on a number of factors, especially on the leader and how their relationship is with the other members of the team. It is important for them to trust and motivate the other workers to ensure the realisation of newer and better ideas, all the while keeping the goals sky-high to make it a challenging experience as well. The human resource management has probably the most critical of tasks when it comes to managing an organisation, as any company is defined by the efficiency of its workforce. In the present world, innovation is an ever-evolving issue. Human capital is the most important factor to innovative performance, and a high level of innovation can be achieved by effective functioning of the Human Resource Management. Effectively designed and synchronised human resource management encourages people to initiate innovation, as it is important for achieving the necessary goals. Recommendations CERA should keep in mind that the expectation from leaders by the workers directly affects innovative behaviour. The exchanges between the leaders and members, the style of solving problems, and the atmosphere for innovation are among the less complex factors that are involved. The creativeness and the attitude towards innovation are affected by four factors characteristics of any group task, the knowledge diversity or the skills of the members of that group, the integrating group processes, and external demands. On further analysis, it can be said that innovative behaviour is explained by different variables, because of which the models are nearly impossible to compare (Anderson, Poto?nik Zhou, 2014). Human resources management aims to encourage innovation by assigning employees to work in teams. Outlining the necessary roles in teamwork is a necessity in organisational development. The importance of teamwork has not attracted much attention; it is a relationship between the degree to participation and innovation and the technical aspects of the organisation. Also, when employees undergo a range of experiences, they will become more open and willing to changes and implementation of newer ideas, and also to consider their own ideas and the requirements for skill development (Battistelli, Montani Odoardi, 2013). People who are exposed to more variety are undoubtedly better at solving problems than those who have a narrow scope of work. References Agarwal, U. (2014). Linking justice, trust and innovative work behaviour to work engagement.Personnel Review,43(1), 41-73. Anderson, N., Poto?nik, K., Zhou, J. (2014). Innovation and creativity in organizations: A state-of-the-science review, prospective commentary, and guiding framework.Journal of Management,40(5), 1297-1333. Battistelli, A., Montani, F., Odoardi, C. (2013). The impact of feedback from job and task autonomy in the relationship between dispositional resistance to change and innovative work behaviour.European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,22(1), 26-41. Boudreau, K. J., Lakhani, K. R. (2016). Innovation Experiments: Researching Technical Advance, Knowledge Production, and the Design of Supporting Institutions.Innovation Policy and the Economy,16(1), 135-167. De Clercq, D., Dimov, D., Belausteguigoitia, I. (2016). Perceptions of adverse work conditions and innovative behavior: The buffering roles of relational resources.Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice,40(3), 515-542. Forbes Welcome. (2017). Forbes.com. Retrieved 16 May 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackzenger/2015/05/14/9-behaviors-that-drive-innovation/#75933b847593 Hogan, S. J., Coote, L. V. (2014). Organizational culture, innovation, and performance: A test of Schein's model.Journal of Business Research,67(8), 1609-1621. Hsu, M. L., Chen, F. H. (2015). The Cross?Level Mediating Effect of Psychological Capital on the Organizational Innovation ClimateEmployee Innovative Behavior Relationship.The Journal of Creative Behavior. Litchfield, R. C., Ford, C. M., Gentry, R. J. (2015). Linking individual creativity to organizational innovation.The Journal of Creative Behavior,49(4), 279-294. Madrid, H. P., Patterson, M. G., Birdi, K. S., Leiva, P. I., Kausel, E. E. (2014). The role of weekly high?activated positive mood, context, and personality in innovative work behavior: A multilevel and interactional model.Journal of Organizational Behavior,35(2), 234-256. Mutlu, M. (2014).Line managers influence on innovative behavior of employees(Bachelor's thesis, University of Twente). Paterson, T. A., Luthans, F., Jeung, W. (2014). Thriving at work: Impact of psychological capital and supervisor support.Journal of Organizational Behavior,35(3), 434-446. Schippers, M. C., West, M. A., Dawson, J. F. (2015). Team reflexivity and innovation: The moderating role of team context.Journal of Management,41(3), 769-788. Tang, J., Pee, L. G., Iijima, J. (2013). Investigating the effects of business process orientation on organizational innovation performance.Information Management,50(8), 650-660. Wallace, J. C., Butts, M. M., Johnson, P. D., Stevens, F. G., Smith, M. B. (2016). A multilevel model of employee innovation understanding the effects of regulatory focus, thriving, and employee involvement climate.Journal of Management,42(4), 982-1004. Wu, C. H., Parker, S. K., De Jong, J. P. (2014). Need for cognition as an antecedent of individual innovation behavior.Journal of Management,40(6), 1511-1534. Yoshida, D. T., Sendjaya, S., Hirst, G., Cooper, B. (2014). Does servant leadership foster creativity and innovation? A multi-level mediation study of identification and prototypicality.Journal of Business Research,67(7), 1395-1404. Yu, C., Yu, T. F., Yu, C. C. (2013). Knowledge sharing, organizational climate, and innovative behavior: A cross-level analysis of effects.Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal,41(1), 143-156.

Away Essays - Coral Reefs, Coral, Away, Free Essays, Term Papers

Away Essays - Coral Reefs, Coral, Away, Free Essays, Term Papers Away KRISTY HEWITT 11B AWAY ANALYTICAL ESSAY Throughout Away many characters go through changes, Gwen changes from a nagging housewife into a sympathetic and more balanced individual. Roy goes from being very insecure about life to knowing how to deal with his problems and live life as it comes. Coral, is also very insecure about life after the death of her son, she is longing for attention and doesnt know how to be around people. By the end of the play she is at least trying to be social and be around people. At the beginning of the play Gwen is a nagging housewife. She is always right, well she thinks she is anyway. She changes into a more sympathetic and balanced individual. Vic has showed her to put love, not possessions and status, first. She was obsessed with orderliness and comfort because of her deprived childhood. This has ruined her relationships with her husband and Daughter. Towards the end of the play Gwen hears of Toms illness (Leukemia) this turns her towards more humane and fitting values. Gwen at the Beginning: Act 2 Scene 2 Well do you think theyll pack themselves? Do you think holidays happen on their own? to Gwen at the end: Act 4 Scene 1 What do you think of me? You must hate me? Why do you still bother? Roy goes from being in complete denial as he lost his son in the Vietnam War to being a little more caring and understanding toward others. He doesnt talk to his wife Coral very much except to patronize her and give her lectures about snapping out of it his insensitivity extends Coral Grief period beyond what it need be. He threatens her with Electro-compulsive therapy (a physical horror to follow her mental one.) This forces Coral into total isolation and to run away. By the end of the play Roy is seeking for forgiveness, as well as love and reconciliation from Coral. (When he kisses her hands.) Roy at the Beginning: Act1 Scene 3 I thought I told you to stay in the car! to Roy at the end: Act 3 Scene 3 Coral? Sweetheart? Come back to the party. Coral was deep in grief at the beginning of the play, her worldview was distorted by the pain she can not escape. Her husband Roy is of little help, so she turned to others in hope of their willingness to help. The substitute son Rick and to some extent Tom. The play The stranger on the shore helps express her predicament and the taking of belief in life that she has found. In the end she is finally reunited with Roy and this changes her life. She begins to over her grief and live life as it comes. Coral at the start: Act 2 Scene 3 I dont ignore anyone. To Coral at the end: Act 3 Scene 3 I like to talk. Everyone goes through changes thoughout their lives some are noticeable and some are not so noticeable. Some changes are drastic and some are only minor. You can never know when someone will change it just happens. We all change at different stages of our lives.

Tips on How to Set College Goals

Tips on How to Set College Goals Having goals in college can be a great way to stay focused, motivate yourself, and keep your priorities in order when things get stressful and overwhelming. But just how can you set your college goals in a way that sets you up for success? Think About Your End Goals What kind of goals do you want to achieve during your time in school? These goals can be large (graduate in 4 years) or small (attend a study session for chemistry once a week for at least a month). But having a main goal in mind is the first, and perhaps most important step, in setting realistic goals. Be Specific With Your Goals Instead of Do better in Chemistry, set your goal as Earn at least a B in Chemistry this term. Or better yet: Study at least an hour a day, attend one group study session a week, and go to office hours once a week, all so that I can earn a B in Chemistry this term. Being as specific as possible while setting your goals can help make your goals as realistic as possible- meaning youll be more likely to achieve them. Be Realistic About Your Goals If you barely passed most of your classes last semester and are now on academic probation, setting a goal of earning a 4.0 next semester is probably unrealistic. Spend some time thinking about what makes sense for you as a learner, as a student, and as a person. If youre not a morning person, for example, setting the goal of waking up at 6:00 a.m. every morning to hit the gym is probably not realistic. But setting the goal of getting in a good workout after your Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon Shakespeare class probably is. Similarly, if youve been struggling with your academics, set reasonable goals that focus on helping you make progress and improve in ways that seem reachable. Can you leap from a failing grade last semester to an A this semester? Probably not. But you can aim to improve to, say, at least a C if not a B-. Think About a Realistic Timeline Setting goals within a time frame will help you set deadlines for yourself. Set goals for a week, a month, a semester, each year (first-year, sophomore year, etc.), and graduation. Every goal you set for yourself, too, should have some kind of time frame attached. Otherwise, youll end up putting off what you need to do since theres no deadline by which you promised yourself youd reach your goal. Think About Your Personal and Intellectual Strengths Setting goals can be challenging for even the most driven, determined college students. If you set yourself up to do things that are a bit too challenging, however, you can end up setting yourself up for failure instead of for success. Spend some time thinking about your own personal and intellectual strengths. Use your strong organization skills, for example, to create a time management system so you stop pulling all-nighters every time you have a paper due. Or use your strong time management skills to figure out which co-curricular commitments you need to cut in order to focus more on your academics. In essence: use your strengths to find ways to overcome your weaknesses. Translate Your Strengths Into Details Using your strengths- which everyone has, so dont sell yourself short!- is the best way to get from idea to reality. When setting goals, then, use your strengths to make sure you: Have a plan and a way to get there. What is your goal? What specific things are you going to do to reach it? By when?Have a way to check your progress. How will you know if your goal is working? When will check in with yourself to see if youre making the smaller steps you need to take along the route to reaching your big goal?Have a way to hold yourself accountable. What will happen if you dont do what you promised yourself youd do? What will you change?Have a way to adapt to change. Inevitably, something will happen that will throw a wrench in your plans. So what will you do to adjust to change? Being too strict with your goals can be counterproductive, too, so make sure youre flexible.Have rewards built in along the way. Dont forget to reward yourself for reaching mini-goals along the way to reaching your big goals! Setting and working toward goals takes major work and dedication. Reward yourself to keep your motivation up and to, well, just be nice to yourself. Because who doesnt like a little recognition, right?

Critique a photography show Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Critique a photography show - Essay Example He was trying to put across excitement. Looking at the way the woman’s hands are spread out, one gets the feeling of balance and exactitude. The woman’s hands are positioned in a way to give her perfect balance as she tackles the wave. Looking at the wave that the woman in the image is riding, one could say that the roughness of the wave is intended to portray challenges and she appears to be taking the wave head on. One could further say that the image portrays one who is facing life’s challenges head-on while knowing full well how to go about it; they have achieved balance in their life. Looking at another image of a lady who is clasping her hands, closing her eyes and tilting her head to the sky as if in prayer, one gets a feeling of innocence. The artist was trying to convey synergy. This can be shown by the simple way the lady is clasping her hands, the simple way she has closed her eyes as she is not doing it forcefully, and the serene environment that seems to surround her. All these coupled with the warm radiant colours of her clothing serve to convey calmness. She seems to be tilting her head to the sky as if seeking something that she knows is there. Looking at another image, this one of a painted man’s face, one gets the feeling that the artist was trying to convey aggression. From the use dark colours to paint his face, and the pattern employed in the painting; diagonally across his face, one gets the feeling that the man is getting ready for combat. From his untidy hair, one gets the feeling that the artist was trying to convey hostility. This is also achieved from the dark colour of his t-shirt. The grey background also adds to the feeling of aggression. In all the three images, the artist has beautifully used colour and shape to put across different emotions that one instantly connects with on examination of the images. The first image seems to

Case Management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Case Management - Assignment Example However, people tried to kill my dream by discouraging me into joining the nursing school. For this reason, I diverted into legal studies, where I managed to get a degree in 1998. However, I now seek to pursue my dream and have decided to branch off into nursing. Through getting a place in the nursing school, I will be able to nurture my talent, hence contribute to a healthy society. I realize that people pass through different stages, both pleasurable and unpleasant. During these times, I enjoy being a source of encouragement to people. For instance, when an individual is on his/her deathbed, I sympathize with him/her by giving comfort, and other material needs. In moments of joy, for instance, birth, I rejoice with the new mother and seek to give any assistance that would contribute to their joy. Through this, I have learned to share intimate times with people, hence encouraging me to pursue a career in nursing. Joining the nursing school will allow me to become well equipped with the skills of nursing. In addition, I will apply the skills gained in a veteran hospital where I have worked for six years now. Through this work, I have gained experience of working with both sick and well veterans. However, I have realized that I need to learn a few more concepts and skills in order to give my services satisfactorily. Thus, the skills gained in the nursing school will make my skills better. Apart from working in the veteran hospital, I intend to visit marginal societies, where treatment is minimal and give assistance. For instance, I will contribute to the profession by visiting Africa, where I intend to use my skills to save the lives of many people. Some, for instance, are ignorant of healthy ways of living, thus experience high rates of mortality frequently. Therefore, apart from offering services, I intend to train other nurses, who will assist in saving lives. Moreover, I will teach people ways of taking care of other patients at home, eating

Critically evaluatThe key challenge facing HR Managers in the 21st Essay

Critically evaluatThe key challenge facing HR Managers in the 21st century is to facilitate management of culture within organiz - Essay Example Proceeding from this, it is necessary to find a fundamentally new approach to priorities. The most important factor within any organization is its employees, and consumers -outside it. There is a strong need to turn the consciousness of workers towards the consumer, but not towards their supervisors, towards profit, but not wastage; towards the initiative, but not the indiscriminate fulfillment. It is necessary to make a way to social norms, based on sound economic sense, and do not forget about morality. The modern concept of development of production lies in the fact that the maximum productivity, quality and competitiveness can be achieved only by means of personal involvement of every employee; such strategy can stimulate each employee to improve the production process at their workplace first, and at the enterprise as a whole in the future. Involving staff in the process of production improvement makes a creative atmosphere and becomes a powerful motivator for staff to work that allows each employee to reveal their experience and creative ability. The central element underpinning the management is the professional nature of modern organizational management in economy of market. The term â€Å"manager† implies professional governors hired (Bach, 2005). In fact, it is a kind of social stratum, which plays a prominent role in society. What is the professional human resource manager? Since corporate culture generates the responsibility and the ability of people - a competitive advantage, the personnel manager has the following strategic objectives, which must be addressed. Nowadays, first of all, HR manager should possess some special knowledge and skills in the field of production and management, ability to work with people in different spheres of activity. Managers’ activity (regardless of rank and scope) is focused on finding and managing resources, ensuring effective and sustainable development of the organization, taking into account the lon g-term perspectives. It is important to creating competitive advantages through increased level of responsibility of personnel, using the means associated with the management of corporate culture. High corporate culture is able to attract and retain staff, establish the company's reputation, attract high- skilled workers and consumers, as well (Jaffee, 2001). Desire to update and adapt corporate culture to the changing conditions of the environment requires the provision of mutual respect between consumers and employees, continuous improvement of working conditions of staff. Employees’ involvement in various activities, related to marketing, contributes to their self-esteem (especially professional), the development of personal initiative, improve personal effectiveness. HR-service, along with other business units, should perform a variety of functions - from providing basic operations to strategic planning to succeed. However, many specialists in human resources management c ommit common mistakes - they tend to focus their attention either on strategic components of management exclusively or on tactical, while it is important to balance the strategic and tactical actions (Jaffee, 2001). One of the main strategies of the HR manager is providing a competitive advantage over other companies, with the help of diligent capacity building, promoting the growth of the employees' competence in the professional sphere. Nowadays the activity of HR-managers can

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari English Literature Essay

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari English Literature Essay The monk who sold his Ferrari is a story about Julian Mantle, a high-profile attorney with an extreme schedule and a set of priorities that centre on wealth, power and reputation, which provides a tactic to living a simple life with greater balance, strength, courage and abundance of joy. This story by Robin S. Sharma is the tale of Julian Mantle, a lawyer brought head on with a spiritual calamity. The fable starts in a  glorious garden  with a  lighthouse  in the middle of the soil. Out of the lighthouse walks a  nine foot tall, nine hundred pound Sumo wrestler who is naked apart from a  pink wire cable  covering his private areas. He trips over and falls on a  stopwatch,  which had been lying on the floor, and loses consciousness. Nevertheless, the wrestler wakes up to the  fresh perfume of yellow roses  coming from a distance and when he looks over there, he discovers that there is a diamond-studded pathway there. He takes that pathway only to continue on in this magnificent life and to complete his journey of spiritual importance and search for inner peace. Julian Mantles spark of life begins to flicker and so he begins a life-changing journey and unearths the ancient ethnicity of India. During this journey he learns the value of time as the most important commodity and how to cherish relationships, develop joyful thoughts and live fully, one day at a time. Julian Mantle, being the exceptional lawyer he was, had achieved everything most people would like to have: professional triumph with a seven-figure income, a luxurious mansion in a neighbourhood occupied by celebrities, a private jet, a summer home on a tropical island and his cherished possession a flashy red Ferrari parked in the centre of his driveway. Suddenly he had to come terms with the unforeseen effects of his disturbed lifestyle. John, who is a friend as well as co-worker of Julian, narrates the story. He begins by describing Julians extravagant way of life, his over-the-top courtroom theatrics, which constantly made the front pages of newspapers and his late night trips to the citys most excellent restaurants. The turning point in Julian Mantles life came about when he collapsed in the courtroom all of a sudden. The doctors said that it was his obsession with work that had caused him the heart attack. The last few years Julian had worked day and night without caring about his mental and physical health. That helped him become a very rich and successful lawyer but took charge of his physical, as well as mental state. At the age of fifty-three he looked like he could be seventy and to top that, he had lost his sense of humour. At the hospital, he had refused to meet any of his colleagues and then on one fine day he quit the law firm and packed off without saying where he was headed. Three years passed without any news from Julian then one day he stopped by to surprise his friend and former colleague John, who was now a pessimistic older lawyer. However Julian, in the past three years, had been astonishingly altered into a healthy man with physical exuberance and spiritual vigor. His heart attack shook him into realization mode and Julian Mantle decided to sell all his property and left for India. The author talks about Julians odyssey, how he met the sages of Sivana who had an enormous effect on him. Julian Mantle discloses his story of transformation and his secrets of a happy and rewarding life with his friend John. Julian portrays to him Sivana a small place located in the Himalayas, the land of rose-covered huts, composed blue waters with white lotuses floating on the surface, adolescence and liveliness, stunning glowing faces, fresh and exotic fruits. He tells John about the sages of Sivana who knew all the secrets of how to live life happily and how to accomplish ones dreams and attain ones destiny. Julian narrates his experiences with Yogi Raman, the leader of the sages of Sivana, as he was the person who taught Julian the secret of leading a happy life. He narrates to John the fable that contained the seven virtues for a life abundant with inner peace, joy and prosperity of spiritual gifts. Mantle reveals the seven virtues of enlightened learning. Them being 1) master your mind, 2) follow your purpose, 3) practice kaizen, 4) live with discipline, 5) respect your time, 6) selflessly serve others and 7) embrace the present. He tells John the methods that he learned from Yogi Raman on how to tackle our minds with simple techniques like the heart of rose technique and the secret of lake technique. He tells John how to develop the mind and how to use obstacles for expanding knowledge ones self. He talks about establishing and pursuing our own principle and teaches John the ancient art of self-leadership with practices such as do the things you fear and the five step method for attaining goals. He expands about the importance of self-discipline and respect for time. He describes techniques such as the ancient rule of twenty and the vow of silence. He teaches John, as well as the reader, on how to focus on the priorities and thus maintain stability and simplify life. He gives examples that prove that determination is the essential virtue of a fully actualized life. Julian teaches John the virtue of self-sacrifice in serving others. He asks John to embrace the present and live in the present. He tells him not to sacrifice happiness for accomplishment and to relish the journey of life and live as though each day was his last. Towards the end of the book Julian asks John to spread these secrets for the benefit of other people. Embracing John like the brother he never had, Julian departs. The message is a bit too clichà ©d and the lectures too finicky for the reader who is more or less familiar with the values and insights gathered by Julian Mantle from the sages of Sivana. Each of the things Julian Mantle came across on his spiritual journey signifies something important. 1) The magnificent garden represents ones mind It is important to cultivate ones mind on a daily basis. Letting only positive thoughts into the mind is essential. Negativity should be considered a sin. 2) The lighthouse signifies our principles in life. A persons life is restricted and so it is vital to concentrate on ones lifes main aims. Laugh, love and live everyday fervently. As Julian had learnt at from the Great Sages, every day should be treated as ones last one. 3) The sumo wrestler symbolizes self-development This involves building strength of character, developing mental toughness and facing problems bravely. The word Kaizen  means the never-ending and daily development of ones self. It signifies crossing the limits in order to develop mind, body and spirit in spite of fear, danger and anxiety. 4) The pink wire cable signifies control A wire cable consists of many strings that have been woven together. The strings, by themselves, are feeble and yet, together when they form the cable it is strong. Determination and discipline are like the strings that need to be woven together to make the mind and body strong. Discipline and self-control are the acts of controlling the mind and this can be done by replacing weak and negative thoughts with strong and positive ones. 5) The stopwatch represents time: Time is the most important service of ones life and it is essential to learn how to make the most use of the time given. Time is fixed and everyone must be able to live life to its complete potential. It is said that time mastery  is the foundation of  life mastery. 6) The fragrance of the fresh yellow roses denotes service 7) The diamond-studded pathway represents enlightened living Live an enlightened, blissful and rewarding life. Live and believe in the now factor. As Julian Mantle had learnt, live in the present and think that every day is the last one. In brief, The monk who sold his Ferrari written by Robin S. Sharma should be regarded as one of his best written books as it looks into the deeper aspects of life; those aspects being the reasons as to why each person is themselves.

Essay example --

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome through Minority Populations Prevalence of this problem is to understand if there is a safe or acceptable level of alcohol consumption for pregnant women and to understand the role of culture with these issues. Culture refers to a scheme of living in a particular environment that have evolved among a particular group of people and transmitted within and between generations. Darwin believes that environmental pollutants cause epigenetic changes natural selection or survival of the fittest to the genetics shaping human pregnancy and the risks of babies developing diseases in the next generation. Ones we learn to see culture as dynamic rather than static we will understand the ecological context. Watson and Bandura hold similar philosophy, at best, conceptualized culture as a tool kit from which strategies for action drawn from specific purpose, poverty (Sigelman & Rider, 2013, 2009). There are several reasons for the uneasiness evoking cultural explanations, first being, to those who construe culture as a distinctive product of a particular group of people, culture can be described and interpreted because such explanations cannot be considered objective. Second, conceptual, and methodological issues that confront scientists who are will to consider culture as an explanatory variable. It is difficult to define culture, conceptually and operationally, even when its different components. Disaggregated into it is various components. Even when precise definitions are possible, social variables operate in a highly complex context, often interacting with a host of other influential variables such that it is difficult to isolate is effect. Finally, there are cultural sensitivities to consider. A search fo... ... alcohol dependence: Obstetricians and gynecologic implications, 496. (2011). Reaffirmed 2013. Retrieved January 13, 2014, from http://www.acog.org/Resources_And_Publications/Committee_Opinions/Committee_on_Health_Care_for_Underserved_Women/At-Risk_Drinking_and_Alcohol_Dependence_-_Obstetric_and_Gynecologic_Implications Hand, L. (2013). Fetal alcohol syndrome:Prevalence high in child care systems. Retrieved January 13, 2014, from http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/810622 May, P. A., & Gossage, J. P. (2001). Estimating the prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome: A summary, 25, 3, 159-67. Retrieved January 15, 2014, from https://login.libproxy.edmc.edu/login?url=http:/search.proquest.com.libproxy.edmc.edu/docview/222393485?accountid=34899 Sigelman, C. K., & Rider, E. A. (2013, 2009). Life-span human development (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

In many ways the ideas in this dystopian novel are more important than the characters – with the exception of Offred and Moira

In many ways the ideas in this dystopian novel are more important than the characters – with the exception of Offred and Moira. The other characters tend to function as members of groups or as representatives of certain ideological positions. However, as Offred insists, every individual is significant, whatever Gilead decrees, and her narrative weaves in particularities: she continually writes in other voices in sections of dialogue, in embedded stories and in remembered episodes. It is a feature of Atwood's realism, even within a fabricated futuristic world, that she pays dose attention not only to location but to people and relationships. OFFRED Offred, the main protagonist and narrator, is trapped in Gilead as a Handmaid, one of the ‘two-legged wombs' valued only for her potential as a surrogate mother. Denied all her individual rights, she is known only by the patronymic Of-Fred, derived from the name of her current Commander. Most of the time she is isolated and afraid. Virtually imprisoned in the domestic spaces of the home, she is allowed out only with a shopping partner and for Handmaids' official excursions like Prayvaganzas and Salvagings. At the age of thirty-three and potentially still fertile, she is a victim of Gileadean sexist ideology which equates ‘male' with power and sexual potency, and ‘female' with reproduction and submission to the point where individuality is effaced. Offred's narrative, however, does not possess such diagrammatic simplicity, for she resists such reductiveness by a variety of stratagems that allow her to retain a sense of her own individuality and psychological freedom. She refuses to forget her past or her own name when she was a daughter, lover, wife and working mother; she refuses to believe in biological reductionism; and she refuses to give up hope of getting out of her present situation. She knows what she needs to pay attention to: What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth †¦ Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be' (Chapter 24). Offred's greatest psychological resource is her faculty of double vision, for she is a survivor from the past, and it is her power to remember which enables her to survive in the present. It is not only through flashbacks that she reconstructs the past (though these are her most effective escape routes from isolation, loneliness and boredom), but even when she walks down the road she sees everything through a double exposure, with the past superimposed upon the present, or to use her own layered image from Chapter 1, as a ‘palimpsest' where the past gives depth to the present. She has perfected the technique of simultaneously inhabiting two spaces: her Handmaid's space (or lack of it) and the freer, happier spaces of memory. Though she is forbidden to use her own name, she keeps it like a buried treasure, as guarantee of her other identity (‘I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day – Chapter 14). She gives her real name as a love token to Nick, and he in turn uses it as an exchange of faith when he comes for her with the black truck (‘He calls me by my real name. Why should this mean anything?' Chapter 46). Offred does not trust the reader with her real name, however, which is a sign of her wariness in a precarious situation, though there is a fascinating essay by a Canadian critic, Constance Rooke, which argues that it is coded into the text and that Offred's real name is June. What is most attractive about Offred is her lively responsiveness to the world around her. She is sharply observant of physical details in her surroundings, she is curious and likes to explore, and she has a very lyrical response to the Commander's Wife's beautiful garden. She observes its seasonal changes closely, for that garden represents for her all the natural fecundity and beauty that are denied by the regime but which flourish unchecked outside the window. It is also a silent testimonial to her own resistance: ‘There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light' (Chapter 25). Her response to the moonlight is equally imaginative, though noticeably tinged with irony, which is one of her most distinctive characteristics: ‘a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but A God, how beautiful anyway' (Chapter 17). Offred consistently refuses to be bamboozled by the rhetoric of Gilead, for she believes in the principle of making distinctions between things and in the precise use of words, just as she continues to believe in the value of every individual. Of the men in her life she says: ‘Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other' (Chapter 30). It is this sharpness of mind which informs her wittily critical view of her present situation, as in the satisfaction she gets out of teasing the young guard at the gate. ‘I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there' (Chapter 4). Her attitude is discreetly subversive but never openly rebellious. She watches for those moments of instability which she calls ‘tiny peepholes' when human responses break through official surfaces. Offred is mischievous, but, more seriously, she yearns for communication and trust between people instead of mutual suspicion and isolation. Ironically enough, her fullest human relationship in Gilead is her ,arrangement' with the Commander. This provides her with a ‘forbidden oasis', for it is in their Scrabble games that Offred is at her liveliest and hermost conventionally feminine. In his study, Offred and the Commander relate to each other by old familiar social and sexual codes, which alleviates the loneliness both feel. It is after her first evening that Offred does something she has never done before in the novel: she laughs out loud, partly at the absurdity of it all, but partly out of a reawakening of her own high spirits. Yet she is too intelligent ever to forget that it is only a game or a replay of the past in parodic form, and her outing to Jezebel's confirms this. For all its glitter, her purple sequined costume, like the evening, is a shabby masquerade, and in the clear light of day she is left sitting with ‘a handful of crumpled stars' in her lap (Chapter 46). Living in a terrorist state, Offred is always alert to the glint of danger, as in her first unexpected encounter with Nick in the dark where fear and sexual risk exert a powerful charge which runs through the novel to its end. Their love represents the forbidden combination of desire and rebellion, and it is through that relationship that Offred manages to find new hope for the future and even to accommodate herself to reduced circumstances in the present, like a pioneer who has given up the Old World and come to the wilderness of a new one: ‘I said, I have made a life for myself, here, of a sort. That must have been what the settlers' wives thought' (Chapter 41). Offred shows through her detailed psychological narrative how she can survive traumas of loss and bereavement and how she manages to elude the constraints of absolute authority. We know little about her physical appearance because the only time she ever mentions it is when she is at her most bizarre, in her red habit with her white winged cap or in her purple sequined costume at Jezebel's. But we know a great deal about her mind and feelings and her sense of wry humour. We also know that she is a highly selfconscious narrator and that she is aware of contradictions and failings within herself She knows that she lacks Moira's flamboyant courage, and she accuses herself of cowardice and unreliability, just as at the end she feels guilty for having betrayed the household who imprisoned her. Yet, despite her own self-doubts, Offred manages to convince us of her integrity. She survives with dignity and she embraces the possibility of her escape with hope. Her narrative remains a witness t o the freedom and resilience of the human spirit. Offred and Moira are the two main examples of feminist positions in the novel (unlike the older women Serena Joy and the Aunts). Yet they are very different from each other, for Offred's resistance always works surreptitiously and through compromise, whereas Moira is more confrontational. Offred represents Atwood's version of a moderate heterosexual feminism in contrast to Moira's separatist feminism. MOIRA Moira, always known by her own name because she never becomes a Handmaid, is strongly individual, although she is also a type of the female rebel. This is a position which can be viewed in two ways, and both of them are illustrated here. From Offred's point of view Moira is the embodiment of female heroism, though from the Gileadean authorities' point of view she is a ‘loose woman', a criminal element, and her story follows the conventional fictional pattern of such rebellious figures: when Offred last sees her she is working as a prostitute in Jezebel's. Even here, Moira manages to express her dissidence, for she remains a declared lesbian and her costume is a deliberate travesty of feminine sexual allure, as Offred notices when she meets her again on her night out with the Commander. Moira's own wryly comic comment on it is, ‘I guess they thought it was me' (Chapter 38). Moira, too, is a survivor of the American permissive society, a trendy college student who wears purple overalls and leaves her unfinished paper on ‘Date Rape' to go for a beer. Much more astute about sexual politics than Offred, she is an activist in the Gay Rights movement, working for a women's collective at the time of the Gilead coup. When she is brought into the Rachel and Leah Centre she is still wearing jeans and declares that the place is a ‘loony bin' (Chapter 13). She cannot be terrorised into even outward conformity-, instead she tries to escape and succeeds on her second attempt. She manages to escape disguised as an Aunt. Always funny and ironic, to the other women at the Centre she represents all that they would like to do but would not dare: ‘Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In the light of Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd' (Chapter 22). Moira continues to surface in Offred's narrative, bobbing up in memory, until her devastatingly fimny final appearance at Jezebel's. Behind the comedy, however, is the fact that Moira has not managed to escape after all, and as an unregenerate has been consigned to the brothel, where she tells Offred that she has ‘three or four good years' ahead of her, drinkingand smoking as a Jezebel hostess, before she is sent to the Colonies. Our last view of Moira is on that evening: ‘I'd like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn't happen' (Chapter 38). Moira is one of the spirited feminist heroines, like Offred's mother and Offred's predecessor in the Commander's house who left the message scrawled in the closet. The sad fact is these women do get sent off to the Colonies or commit suicide, which Offred herself refuses to do. Offred and Moira are both feminist heroines, showing women's energetic resistance to the Gilead system, but there are no winners. Neither compromise nor rebellion wins freedom, though it is likely that Offred is rescued by Nick. However, their value lies in their speaking out against the imposition of silence, challenging tyranny and oppression. Their stories highlight the actions of two individual women whose very different private assertions become exemplary or symbolic. Their voices survive as images of hope and defiance to be vindicated by history. SERENA JOY Serena Joy, the Commander's Wife, is the most powerful female presence in Offred's daily life in Gilead, and as Offred has plenty of opportunity to observe her at close quarters she appears in the narrative as more than just a member of a class in the hierarchy of Gileadean women. As an elderly childless woman she has to agree to the grotesque system of polygamy practised in Gilead and to shelter a Handmaid in her home, but it is plain that she resents this arrangement keenly as a violation of her marriage, and a continual reminder of her own crippled condition and fading feminine charms. The irony of the situation is made clear when Offred remembers Serena Joys past history, first as a child singing star on a gospel television show, and later as a media personality speaking up for ultra-conservative domestic policies and the sanctity of the home. Now, as Offred maliciously remarks, Serena is trapped in the very ideology on which she had based her popularity: ‘She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with her' (Chapter 8). Serena's present life is a parody of the Virtuous Woman: her only place of power is her own living room, she is estranged from her husband, jealous of her Handmaid, and has nothing to do except knit scarves for soldiers and gossip with her cronies or listen to her young voice on the gramophone. The only space for Serena's self-expression is her garden, and even that she cannot tend without the help of her husband's chauffeur. If flowers are important to Offred, so are they too to Serena, and she often sits alone in her ‘subversive garden', knitting or smoking. To see the world from Serena's perspective is to shift the emphasis of Offred's narrative, for these two women might be seen not as opposites but as doubles. They both want a child, and the attention of them both focuses on the Commander of whom Serena is very possessive: ‘As for my husband, she said, he's just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It's final' (Chapter 3). Offred seldom knows what Serena is thinking, though there are indications of her attitudes and tastes in the jewels and the perfume she wears and in the furnishings of her house: ‘hard lust for quality, soft sentimental cravings' as Offred uncharitably puts it (Chapter 14). There is also evidence of a certain toughness in Serena's cigarette-smoking and her use of slang, not to mention her suggestion that Offred, unknown to the Commander, should sleep with Nick in order to conceive the child she is supposed to produce: ‘She's actually smiling, coquettishly even; there's a hint of her former small-screen mannequin's allure, flickering over her face like momentary static' (Chapter 31). But Serena has her revenges too: she has deliberately withheld from Offred the news of her lost daughter and her photograph which Offred has been longing for. By a curious twist, Serena occupies the role of the wife in a very conventional plot about marital infidelity, as well as in the privileged Gileadean sense. She is one of the points in the triangular relationship which develops between Offred and the Commander: ‘The fact is that I'm his mistress †¦ Sometimes I think she knows' (Chapter 26). Actually, she does not know until she finds the purple costume and the lipstick on her cloak. It is a clich6-like situation, but Serena's own pain of loss goes beyond this conventional pattern: †¦ Behind my back,† she says. â€Å"You could have left me something.†Ã¢â‚¬Ëœ Offred wonders, ‘Does she love him, after all?' (Chapter 45). Serena is still there in her house, standing anxiously beside the Commander at the end as Offred is led out through the door. Her farewell to Offred is wifely in an old-fashioned sense which has none of the pieties of Gilead: †¦ Bitch,† she says. â€Å"After all he did for you (Chapter 46). THE OTHER COMMANDERS' WIVES These merely exist as a gaggle of gossips in blue, for Offred knows nothing of their lives apart from overhearing snatches of their conversation at Birth Days, Prayvaganzas or social visits, when they make scandalous comments about their Handmaids. Only the Wife of Warren achieves a moment of grotesque individuality when she is seen sitting on the Birth Stool behind Janine, ‘wearing white cotton socks, and bedroom slippers, blue ones made of fuzzy material, like toilet-seat covers' (Chapter 21). There is also one other unfortunate Wife who is hanged at the Salvaging, but Offred does not know what her crime was. Was it murder? Was it adultery? ‘It could always be that. Or attempted escape' (Chapter 42). THE AUNTS Like the Wives, the Marthas, the Econowives and most of the Handmaids, these are presented as members of a class or group, every group representing a different female role within Gilead. With their names derived from preGileadean women's products, the Aunts are the older women who act as female collaborators on the orders of the patriarchy to train and police Handmaids. They are a paramilitary organisation, as is signified by their khaki uniforms and their cattle prods, and, as propagandists of the regime, they tell distorted tales of women's lives in the pre-Gileadean past. The villainesses of the novel, they are responsible for the most gruesome cruelties, like the female Salvagings and the Particicutions, as well as for individual punishments at the Rachel and Leah Centre. Only Aunt Lydia is individuated, and that is by her peculiar viciousness masquerading under a genteel feminine exterior: ‘Aunt Lydia thought she was very good at feeling f6r other people' (Chapter 8). A particularly sadistic tormentor, Aunt Lydia is an awful warning that a women's culture is no guarantee of sisterhood as Offred's mother's generation of feminists had optimistically assumed, but that it is also necessary to take account of some women's pathological inclinations towards violence and vindictiveness. OFGLEN AND OFWARREN Only two of the Handmaids, Ofglen and Ofwarren Ganine), emerge as individuals, one because of her courage and rebelliousness and the other because she is the conventional female victim figure. Both are casualties of the Gileadean system. Ofglen has no past life that Offred knows about, but she does have a secret life as a member of the Mayday resistance movement which she confides to Offred after weeks as her shopping partner. There is nothing exceptional about her appearance except her mechanical quality which Offred notices, ‘as if she's voice- activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels' (Chapter 8). Offred is proved right in her suspicions, for under the disguise of Handmaid, Ofglen is a sturdy resistance fighter. She identifies the alleged rapist as ‘one of ours' and knocks him out before the horrible Particicution begins. She also dies as a fighter, preferring to commit suicide when she sees the black truck coming rather than betray her friends under torture. Offred learns this from her replacement, the ‘new, treacherous Ofglen', who whispers the news to her on their shopping expedition. Janine is a female victim in both her lives: before Gilead when she worked as a waitress and was raped by a gang of thugs, then as a Handmaid. At the Rachel and Leah Centre she is a craven figure on the edge of nervous collapse, and consequently one of Aunt Lydia's pets. Though she has her moment of triumph as the ‘vastly pregnant' Handmaid Ofwarren in Chapter 5, she is also a victim of the system with which she has tried so hard to curry favour. Even at the Birth Day she is neglected as soon as the baby is born and left ‘crying helplessly, burnt-out miserable tears' when her baby is taken away and given to the Wife (Chapter 21). There is no reward for Janine. Her baby is declared an Unbaby and destroyed because it is deformed; Janine becomes a pale shadow overwhelmed with guilt; finally, after the Particicution, when Offred sees her again, she has slipped over into madness. OFFRED'S MOTHER Offred's mother and her life belong to the history of feminism which is being recorded in this novel, for she joined the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, campaigning for women's sexual and social freedom. As an older woman she continued to be a political activist, and at the time of the Gileadean take-over she disappeared. Only much later does Offred learn that she has been condemned as an Unwoman and sent to the Colonies. Like Moira, and possessing the same kind of energy, Offred's mother resists classification. In an odd way she even resists being dead, for she makes two startling appearances in the present, both times on film at the Rachel and Leah Centre. On one occasion Offred is shocked to see her as a young woman marching toward her in a pro-abortion march, and later Moira reports seeing her as an old woman working as slave labour in the Colonies. Offred's mother is, however, more than a feminist icon. She haunts her daughter's memory, and gradually Offred comes to understand her mother's independence of mind and to admire her courage. Her mother is evoked in a series of kaleidoscopic images: at a feminist pornographic book burning (Chapter 7), with a bruised face after an abortion riot (Chapter 28), and as an elderly woman proudly defending her position as a single parent to Offred's husband, while accusing her daughter of naivet6 and political irresponsibility. It is her jaunty language which Offred remembers as distinguishing her mother: A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not that your father wasn't a nice guy and all, but he wasn't up to fatherhood. Not that I expected it of him. Just do the job, then you can bugger off, 1 said, I make a decent salary, I can afford daycare. So he went to the coast and sent Christmas cards. He had beautiful blue eyes though. (Chapter 20) An embarrassing but heroic figure, this is the woman whom her daughter misses when it is all too late, though Offred continues her dialogue with her mother in her own mind as a way of keeping her alive: ‘Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies' (Chapter 21). Finally Offred tries to lay her mother to rest, but without success: ‘I've mourned for her already. But I will do it again, and again' (Chapter 39). Deprived of the freedoms which her mother fought for, Offred learns to admire her mother's courage and to value her memory as a vital link with her own lost identity. Her elegy to her mother underlines the thematic motif of Missing Persons, and particularly lost mothers and daughters, which runs through the novel. MALE CHARACTERS The few male characters in this novel seem little more than functionaries of the patriarchal state or functional to the workings of the plot. Most of them have no names but only group identities like ‘Angels' or ‘Eyes' or ‘the doctor', while Professor Pieixoto is a satirical sketch of a male academic. Only three male characters are given any individuating characteristics. They are Offred's Commander, her lover Nick, and her absent, vanished husband Luke. THE COMMANDER The Commander is the most powerful authority figure in Offred's world. He is a high-ranking government official, and he is head of the household to which Offred is assigned. It is his first name which she takes, though whether as a slave or as a parody of the marriage service is never made clear. Yet he is an ambiguous figure, substantial but shadowy, whose motivations, like his career in Gilead, remain unclear to Offred; even in the ‘Historical Notes' his identity remains uncertain. As a Commander he wears a black uniform and is driven in a prestige car, a Whirlwind. He is an elderly man with ‘straight neatly brushed silver hair' and a moustache and blue eyes. He is slightly stooped and his manner is mild (Chapter 15). As Offred observes him with his gold-rimmed glasses on his nose reading from the Bible before the monthly Ceremony, she thinks he looks ‘like a midwestern bank president', an astute judgement, as he tells her much later that before Gilead he was in market research (Chapter 29). The image he presents is that of male power, isolated and benignly indifferent to domestic matters, which include his Wife and his Handmaid. This is, however, not entirely true, for Offred has seen him earlier on the day of the Ceremony, a figure lurking in the shadows outside her room, who tried to peer at her as she passed: ‘Something has been shown to me, but what is it?' (Chapter 8). It is only after the official Ceremony, performed by the Commander in full dress uniform and with his eyes shut, that Offred has the chance to get to know him a little and his stereotypical male power image begins to break down. It is he who asks her to visit him ‘after hours' in his study, for he is a lonely man who desires friendship and intimacy with his Handmaid and not the serviceable monthly sex for which she has been allocated to him. In his Bluebeard's chamber, what he has to offer is not ‘kinky sex' but Scrabble games and an appearance of ‘normal life', with conversation and books and magazines, all of which he knows are forbidden to Handmaids. On his own private territory the Commander is an old-fashioned gentleman with an attractive sheepish smile, who treats Offred in a genially patronising way and gradually becomes quite fond of her. ‘In fact he is positively daddyish' (Chapter 29). He seems to have the ability to compartmentalise his life (in a w ay that Offred cannot manage) so that he can separate her official role as sexual slave from her unofficial role as his companion. In many ways the Commander's motives and needs remain obscure to Offred, though they do manage to develop an amiable relationship, which from one point of view is bizarre and from another is entirely banal: ‘The fact is that I'm his mistress' (Chapter 26). Yet their relationship is still a game of sexual power politics in which the Commander holds most of the cards, as Offred never allows herself to forget. For all his gallantry, he remains totally trapped in traditional patriarchal assumptions, believing that these are ‘Nature's norm' (Chapter 34) and allow exploitation of women, as his comments and conduct at Jezebel's suggest. Their private sexual encounter there ends in ‘futility and bathos' and is strongly contrasted with Offred's meeting with Nick later that same evening. As she leaves his house for the last time, Offred sees the Commander standing at the living-room door, looking old, worried and helpless. Possibly he is expecting his own downfall, for nobody is invulnerable in Gilead. Offred has her revenge, for the balance of power between them has shifted: ‘Possibly he will be a security risk, now. I am above him, looking down; he is shrinking' (Chapter 46). The academics go to some trouble later to establish the Commander's identity: he may have been ‘Frederick R. Waterford' or ‘B. Frederick Judd'. Waterford, it is revealed, had a background in market research (which seems most likely), while the more sinister Judd was a military strategist who worked for the CIA. Both of them ‘met their ends, probably soon after the events our author describes'. NICK Nick is presented as the central figure of Offred's romantic fantasy, for he is the mysterious dark stranger who is her rescuer through love. He also hasa place in her real world, of course, as the Commander's chauffeur and the Commander's Wife's gardener. He ‘has a French face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles' (Chapter 4) and a general air of irreverence, wearing his cap at a jaunty angle, whistling while he polishes the car, and winking at Offred the first day he sees her. At the household prayers he presses his foot against hers, and she feels a surge of sensual warmth which she dare not acknowledge. In the daytime he is rather a comic figure but at night he is transformed into Offred's romantic lover, the embodiment of sexual desire. This transformation is made all the more piquant because he is always acting under orders, either as the Commander's messenger or as the lover chosen for Offred by the Commander's Wife. From their first unexpected encounter in the dark living room (Chapter 17) theirs is a silent exchange which carries an unmistakable erotic charge. It is Nicles hands which make his declaration: ‘His fingers move, feeling my arm under the night-gown sleeve, as if his hand won't listen to reason. It's so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy (Chapter 17). As a subordinate, Nick, like Offred, has to remain passive until ordered by the Commander's Wife to go to bed with Offred. On that occasion his attitude is not directly described but veiled by Offred's three different versions of that meeting. Certainly she falls in love with him, and in defiance of danger she returns many times to his room across the dark lawn on her own. Towards the end, she tells him that she is pregnant. Nevertheless, her description of their love-making is suggestive rather than explicitly erotic, and Nick tends to remain a mysterious figure. Even at the end when he appears with the Eyes to take her away, Offred really knows so little about him that she almost accuses him of having betrayed her, until he calls her by her real name and begs her to trust him. Ever elusive, he is the only member of the household not there to see her depart. We want to believe that Nick was in love with Offred, and we must assume from the ‘Historical Notes' that he did rescue her and that he was a member of Mayday resistance. However, as a character he is very lightly sketched and it is his function as romantic lover which is most significant. LUKE Luke, Offred's husband, is one of the Missing Persons in this novel. Probably dead before the narrative begins, he haunts Offred's memory until he fades like a ghost as her love affair with Nick develops. He is the one person Offred leaves out when she tells the story of her past life to Nick (Chapter 41), though she is still worrying about him at the end (Chapter 44). He is also the most fragmented character in the text, appearing briefly as a name in Chapter 2, and then gradually taking on an identity as Offred's lover, husband and the father of her child. He is a figure whose life story stopped for Offred at a traumatic point in the past: ‘Stopped dead in time, in mid-air, among the trees back there, in the act of falling' (Chapter 35). Through her reconstruction Luke appears as a late twentieth-century ‘liberated man', full of courage and humour and remembered by Offred entirely in his domestic relations with her. He is an older man who has been married before, so that there is an ironic parallel drawn between him and the Commander. Offred remembers their affair when she goes with the Commander to Jezebel's, for it is the hotel where she and Luke used to go (Chapter 37). She retains the memory of a strong loving partner, and her detailed recollections are of Luke cooking and joking with her mother, of lying in bed with her before their daughter was born, of collecting their daughter from school. We never know what Luke's job was, but Offred recalls his supportive behaviour when she lost her job at the time of the Gileadean take-over and her resentment against him for being a man (Chapter 28). Luke figures insistently in Offred's recurring nightmare of their failed escape attempt, not only in that final image of him lying shot face down in the snow, but also in her recollections of his careful preparations and his coolly courageous attempt to take his family to freedom over the Canadian border. His afterlife in the novel is very much the result of Offred's anxieties about what might have happened to him. Is he dead, or in prison? Did he escape? Will he send her a message and help her to escape back into their old family life? ‘It's this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in the message' (Chapter 18). It is also her hope of this message which keeps the image of Luke alive. The anxieties we may feel for his fate are projections of Offred's own.