Geology of your hometown Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Geology of your hometown - Essay Example The city has four counties that are under its jurisdiction; these are Feeding, Feixi, Changfeng, and Lijiang. It also has one Sub County and four urban districts, Yaohai, Loyang, Shushan, and Baohe. Its development zones include Hefei economic and technological development area, Hefei pilot zone, and Hefei Chaohu economic development zone (Li).   Each region around Anhui province in China is unique. Hefei covers an expanse of an area of 11400 square kilometers with 37mertres above the sea level and an urban population of 7.52million people, with mandarin as a primary language spoken. It has longstanding historical traditions though it is greatly influenced by immigrant population. There is one developed Lake Known as Swan. It is next to a new build government building, and it is a beautiful place to have a picnic. The geological terrain offer an artificial beach which attracts many people especially during the summer. It has the largest number of consumer group and greatest potential for development. It is a city Center for politics, economy and culture, education, information, finance, commerce, and communication in Anhui province, China. It has the fastest growing economy because Chinese national government has given its local government funding for expansion and growth (Morris). Hefei is one of the most suitable places to live in due to its excellent public security and clean environment. In 2004, it was awarded the "China Excellent Living Environment Prize." In 2014, it was also awarded as an excellent green ecological city. The lake has wonderful scenery and many aquatic products (wu). Geology of Chaohu Lake has hot springs in it, which are rich in active mineral elements, and rare and beautiful flowers that grow in it. Hefei functions connect to national means of transportation in China with well-developed expressway network leading to all directions. Its airport owns over 30 domestic air routes and direct flights to Hong Kong, Fukuoka,

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay Example for Free

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworths romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keatss great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and womens, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary  criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwoods Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. - Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics. The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, â€Å"Romantic† is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled â€Å"Romantic movement† at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the  Ã¢â‚¬Å"organic,† â€Å"plastic† qualities of Romantic art and the â€Å"mechanical† character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that â€Å"a new heaven is begun† was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s â€Å"The world’s great age begins anew.† â€Å"These, these will give the world another heart, / A nd other pulses,† wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of â€Å"truth,† the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: â€Å"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.† The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier â€Å"cult of sensibility†; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,† and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as â€Å"feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.† It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw  the imagination as the supre me poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as â€Å"invention, imagination and judgement,† but Blake wrote: â€Å"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.† The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized â€Å"reason.† Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the â€Å"noble savage† was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the â€Å"poor Indian† of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to th e dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, â€Å"You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.† This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of â€Å"genres,† each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or â€Å"gaudy and inane,† and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language. Poetry BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express  their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Expe rience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implication s of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems â€Å"The Ruined Cottage† and â€Å"The Pedlar† (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west  of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,† continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative â€Å"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child â€Å"fostered alike by beauty and by fear† by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the â€Å"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.† In poems such as â€Å"Michael† and â€Å"The Brothers,† by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in â€Å"The Eolian Harp† (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as â€Å"Religious Musings† and â€Å"The Destiny of Nations.† Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relatio nship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as â€Å"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Frost at Midnight† (now sometimes called the â€Å"conversation poems† but collected by Coleridge himself as â€Å"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse†) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. â€Å"Kubla Khan† (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in â€Å"a kind of Reverie,† represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of â€Å"The Ancient Mariner† and the unfinished  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Christabel.† After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† (1802), another meditat ive poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his â€Å"shaping spirit of Imagination.† The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal†¦as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, â€Å"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.† The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as â€Å"the most impressive talker of his age† (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. â€Å"Melancholy† was quite the buzzword for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance one’s creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a reaction against the Enlightenment mode of thinking. Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. Thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The response of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connection with medievalism and mythology. The tales of King Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formal  level, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the structure and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to blank verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. Some criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation. He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something entirely original and completely misunderstood by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections. Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, few of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely successful  work, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifically the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworth’s poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects. There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New England Transcendental Movement. The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an optimistic brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect earned the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists working during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were crafting dens ely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism. However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his own  brilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their reappraisal of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melville’s literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that required close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melville’s writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns more than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficia lly, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and above the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human. Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the mania of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitman’s voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitman’s brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style t o verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century. Walt Whitman got his start as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitman’s democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of â€Å"strange† beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings earned him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of the  original masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poe’s theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American litera ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of suggestion and imagination. The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthorne’s deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even the grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hester’s daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthorne’s particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism. His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the conviction that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of reality was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a person’s consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† neither the reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never completely disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface. Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems of  life in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more earthy kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.

Shakespeares Hamlet - Indecision within Hamlet Essay -- Indecision He

The Hesitation/ Indecision within Hamlet      Ã‚  Ã‚   Hamlet, the hero in Shakespeare’s dramatic tragedy of the same name, goes to great lengths to establish the absolute guilt of King Claudius – and then appears to blow it all. He hesitates at the prayer scene when the king could easily be dispatched. Let’s discuss this problem of hesitation or indecision on the part of the protagonist.    In â€Å"Acts III and IV: Problems of Text and Staging† Ruth Nevo explains how the protagonist is â€Å"confounded† in both the prayer scene and the closet scene:    In the prayer scene and the closet scene his [Hamlet’s] devices are overthrown. His mastery is confounded by the inherent liability of human reason to jump to conclusions, to fail to distinguish seeming from being. He, of all people, is trapped in the fatal deceptive maze of appearances that is the phenomenal world. Never perhaps has the mind’s finitude been better dramatized than in the prayer scene and in the closet scene. Another motto of the Player King is marvelously fulfilled in the nexus of ironies which constitutes the plays peripateia: â€Å"Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.† In the sequence of events following Hamlet’s elation at the success of the Mousetrap, and culminating in the death of Polonius, all things are the opposite of what they seem, and action achieves the reverse of what was intended. Here in the play’s peripeteia is enacted Hamlet’s fatal error, his fatal misjudgment, which constitutes the crisis of the action, and is the directly precipitating cause of his own death, seven other deaths, and Ophelia’s madness. (52)    David Bevington, in the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, eliminates some possible reasons ... ...ilm, Television and Audio Performance. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. P., 1988.    Levin, Harry. General Introduction. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.    Nevo, Ruth. â€Å"Acts III and IV: Problems of Text and Staging.† Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from Tragic Form in Shakespeare. N.p.: Princeton University Press, 1972.    Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html    West, Rebecca. â€Å"A Court and World Infected by the Disease of Corruption.† Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.

Feminist Theory

Feminism refers to political, cultural, and economic movements aimed at establishing greater rights, legal protection for women, and or women's liberation. It includes some of the sociological theories and philosophies concerned with issues of gender difference. Nancy Cott defines feminism as the belief in the importance of gender equality, invalidating the idea of gender hierarchy as a socially constructed concept. Feminism has earned itself a bad reputation, but it never undermined gender differences that exist between males and females. A man can never be as good a mother as a female can.Similarly, a woman can never be as good a father as a male can. While accepting these anatomical and physiological differences between the two genders, feminism seeks for both genders to be equally respected. They are both human and as a species, humans cannot progress without either one of them. Maggie Humm and Rebecca Walker divide the history of feminism into three waves. The first wave transpi red in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, the second occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the present.In each wave of the movement, though men have taken part in significant responses to feminism, the relationship between men and feminism has been complex. Historically, a number of men have engaged with feminism. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham demanded equal rights for women in the eighteenth century. In 1866, philosopher John Stuart Mill presented a women's petition to the British Parliament and supported an amendment to the 1867 Reform Bill.An extension of feminism into theoretical or philosophical fields such as anthropology, sociology, economics, women's studies, literary criticism, art history, and psychoanalysis is called feminist theory. Feminist theory aims to understand gender inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations, and sexuality. While providing a critique of these social and political relations, much of feminist theory focuses on the promotion of women's rights and interests. Themes explored in feminist theory include discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression, and patriarchy.Today, feminist theory has manifested in a variety of disciplines such as feminist geography, feminist history, feminist theology, and feminist literary criticism and has changed traditional perspectives on a wide range of areas in human life, from culture to law. Feminist activists have campaigned for women's legal rights such as rights of contract, property rights, and voting rights while also promoting women's rights to bodily integrity and autonomy, abortion rights, and reproductive rights.They have struggled to protect women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment, and rape. On economic matters, feminists have advocated for workplace rights, including maternity leave and equal pay, and against other forms of gender-specific discrimination aga inst women. During much of its history, feminist movements and theories were led predominantly by middle-class white women from Western Europe and North America. However, at least since Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech to American feminists, women of other races have proposed alternative feminisms.This trend accelerated in the 1960s with the civil rights movement in the United States and the collapse of European colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean, parts of Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Since that time, women in former European colonies and the Third World have proposed postcolonial and Third World feminisms. Postcolonial feminists argue that oppression relating to the colonial experience, particularly racial, class, and ethnic oppression, has marginalized women in postcolonial societies.They challenge the assumption that gender oppression is the primary force of patriarchy. They object to portrayals of women of non-Western societies as passive and voiceless victims and the portr ayal of Western women as modern, educated, and empowered. Today, they struggle to fight gender oppression within their own cultural models of society rather than through those imposed by the Western colonizers. They, thus, react against both universalizing tendencies in Western feminist thought and a lack of attention to gender issues in mainstream postcolonial thought.Some postcolonial feminists, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Alice Walker, are critical of Western feminism for being ethnocentric. Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes Western feminism on the ground that it does not take into account the unique experiences of women from third-world countries or the existence of feminisms indigenous to third-world countries. This discourse is strongly related to African feminism and is also associated with concepts such as black feminism, womanism, Africana womanism, motherism, Stiwanism, negofeminism, chicana feminism, and femalism.Pro-femi nism is the support of feminism without implying that the supporter is a member of the feminist movement. The term is most often used in reference to men who are actively supportive of feminism and of their efforts to bring about gender equality. The activities of pro- feminist men's groups include anti-violence work with boys and young men in schools, offering sexual harassment workshops in workplaces, running community education campaigns, and counseling male perpetrators of violence.Pro-feminist men also are involved in men's health, activism against pornography including anti-pornography legislation, men's studies, and the development of gender equity curricula in schools. This work is sometimes in collaboration with feminists and women's services, such as domestic violence and rape crisis centers. Some activists of both genders refer to all pro-feminist men as ‘pro-feminists' and not as ‘feminists'. There have been positive and negative reactions and responses to fe minism, depending on the individual man and the social context of the time.These responses have varied from pro-feminism to masculism to anti-feminism. In the twenty-first century, new reactions to feminist ideologies have emerged, including a generation of male scholars involved in gender studies and men's rights activists who promote male equality including equal treatment in family, divorce, and anti ­discrimination law. Today, academics like Michael Flood, Michael Messner, and Michael Kimmel are involved with men's studies and pro- feminism.The United Nations Human Development Report 2004 estimated that, when both paid employment and unpaid household tasks are accounted for, on average women work more than men. In rural areas of selected developing countries women performed an average of 20 per cent more work than men, or an additional 102 minutes per day. In the OECD countries surveyed, on average women performed 5 per cent more work than men, or 20 minutes per day. On 3 Sept ember 1981. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), described as an international bill of rights for women, came into force.While Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Nauru, Palau, and Tonga have not ratified CEDAW, several countries have ratified the Convention subject to certain declarations, reservations, and objections. A number of feminist writers maintain that identifying as a feminist is the strongest stand men can take in the struggle against sexism. They have argued that men should be allowed, or even be encouraged, to participate in the feminist movement. Other female feminists counter- argue that men cannot be feminists simply because they are not women.They maintain that men are granted inherent privileges that prevent them from identifying with feminist struggles, thus making it impossible for them to identify with feminists. Irrespective of what the feminist writers maintain, the feminist movement has effected change in Wester n society, including women's suffrage, greater access to education, more nearly equitable pay with men, the right to initiate divorce proceedings and ‘no fault' divorce, and the right of women to make individual decisions regarding pregnancy (including access to contraceptives and abortion), as well as the right to own property.

Personal Philosophy of Nursing Essay

My philosophy in nursing is the devotion to deliver the utmost personal patient care I am capable of delivering to the ill, may it be physically, mentally, or emotional, as well as to the challenged in time of need. In order to define my philosophy of nursing, I had to take time out and re-examine my value system, and my beliefs. As I think about it I know I am a caring and compassionate nurse. I reminisced back to the late 70’s, my upbringing in foreign countries and having been exposed to diverse cultures, I quickly learned to revert back to the customs instilled in me by my parents and family. My mores and values of caring with my dedication indeed make a difference. With this valued exposure in my young life, these core values of nursing the beliefs instilled in me were defined by family and friends and peers and my personal as well as professional growth which made me the person I am today. Chitty defines philosophy as â€Å"philosophy is the study of principles underlying conduct, thought, and the nature of the universe† (p. 31), and Merriam-Webster more clearly defines states â€Å"pursuit of wisdom, the search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather the observational needs† (online dictionary). That’s me. I strongly belief in modern medicine and the advancements in technology, therefore it is crucial for me to keep up on current trends, translate procedures, the use of new equipment and what to expect for my patients. I respect the patient’s autonomy and their ethical behaviors. With empathy and care, I am their advocate; I am their voice when he/she is unable to speak, it is my therapeutic touch they feel and I am part of their treatment team. It is my commitment to my patient, to the organization, and my value system. I believe in the mandatory continuing education process for nurses. In order to deliver proficient patient care it is of utmost importance to me in order to remain educated on current research and trends. Keeping up with federal regulations on HIPAA gives me the power to educate my patient and to assure them that their privacy is protected and secured. The updates from the Center of Disease Control allow me to deliver the appropriate care patient specific and as well as protect my self from exposures. I am able to explain to my patient why I am wearing a mask, a gown, or why I am red-bagging all  his linens. The patient does indeed ask â€Å"silent questions† being observant by their facial expressions I can be honest and educated with my rationales. I also belief in holistic nursing; encompassing, and â€Å"nourishing the whole person, that is the body, mind and spirit† (Chitty, 2007, p 312) as well as in holistic medicine â€Å"nontraditional forms of medicine that consider the whole person rather the disease or groups of diseased organs, it also considers the body, mind, emotion, spirit connection† (Powell, p 504). It is my responsibility in incorporate gained knowledge, skills, and resources to improve my patient’s quality of life. I strongly feel and believe that every person should be covered under universal Health Care. However, Governmental constraints along with guidelines and monetary reimbursements do not allow for additional hospital stays. I am the advocate for my patient, and as a Case Manager, I will assure that to find assistance for the patient to have someone caring for him/her at home due to early discharge. We, society, neglect to accept the reality that our patient population is getting older and their healthcare needs are more serious and demanding. I realize that professional nursing draws upon the related disciplines of natural and social sciences and humanities, and it is my contribution as a nurse to the best of my abilities to facilitate maximum functional health status for my patient by collaborating with the treatment team, families, groups and the community. It is my duty and commitment as a nurse to uphold my philosophy of nursing. I continue to evaluate my mores and values and seek to continue my education, I will advocate for my patient. I will continue to care for myself, to adhere to healthy lifestyle practices and to maintain my physical, mental and emotional health in order to continue to provide care to my patients with dignity and respect. References Chitty, K.K. (2007). Professional Nursing Concepts & Challenges (5th ed.). St. Louis: ElsevierInc. Retrieved October 3, 2008 from University of Phoenix Library. Philosophy: (2008). In Merriam-Webster online Dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http:///www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/philosophyPowell, S.K. (2000) Nursing Case Management: A practical guide to success in managed care(2nd ed.), Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Praseodymium Facts - Element 59

Praseodymium Facts - Element 59 Praseodymium is element 59 on the periodic table with the element symbol Pr. Its one of the rare earth metals or lanthanides. Here is a collection of interesting facts about praseodymium, including its history, properties, uses, and sources. Praseodymium was discovered by Swedish chemist Carl Mosander in 1841, but he did not purify it. He was working on rare earth samples, which contain elements with such similar properties they are extremely hard to separate from each other. From a crude cerium nitrate sample, he isolated an oxide he called lantana, which was lanthanum oxide. Lantana turned out to be a mixture of oxides. One fraction was a pink fraction he called didymium. Per Teodor Cleve (1874) and Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1879) determined didymium was a mixture of elements. In 1885, Austrian chemist Carl von Welsbach separated didymium into praseodymium and neodymium. Credit for the official discovery and isolation of element 59 is generally given to von Welsbach.Praseodymium gets it name from the Greek words prasios, which means green, and didymos, which means twin. The twin part refers to the element being the twin of neodymium in didymium, while green refers to the color of the salt isolated by von Welsbach. Praseody mium forms Pr(III) cations, which are yellowish green in water and glass. In addition to the 3 oxidation state, Pr also occurs in 2, 4, and (unique for a lanthanide) 5. Only the 3 state occurs in aqueous solutions.Praseodymium is a soft silver-colored metal that develops a green oxide coating in air. This coating peels or spalls off, exposing fresh metal to oxidation. To prevent degradation, pure praseodymium is typically stored under a protective atmosphere or in oil.Element 59 is highly malleable and ductile. Praseodymium is unusual in that it is paramagnetic at all temperatures above 1 K. Other rare earth metals are ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic at low temperatures.Natural praseodymium consists of one stable isotope, praseodymium-141. 38 radioisotopes are known, the most stable being Pr-143, which has a half-life of 13.57 days. Praseodymium isotopes range from mass number 121 to 159. 15 nuclear isomers are also known.Praseodymium occurs naturally in the Earths crust at an abundance of 9.5 parts per million. It accounts for about 5% of the lanthanid es found in the minerals monazite and bastnasite. Seawater contains 1 part per trillion of Pr. Essentially no praseodymium is found in the Earths atmosphere. The rare earth elements have many uses in modern society and are considered extremely valuable. Pr gives a yellow color to glass and enamel. Around 5% of mischmetal consists of praseodymium. The element is used with other rare earths to make carbon arc lights. It colors cubic zirconia yellow-green and may be added to simulated gemstones to mimic peridot. Modern firesteel contains about 4% praseodymium. Didymium, which contains Pr, is used to make glass for protective eyewear for welders and glass blowers. Pr is alloyed with other metals to made powerful rare earth magnets, high strength metals, and magnetocaloric materials. Element 59 is used as a doping agent to make fiber optic amplifiers and to slow light pulses. Praseodymium oxide is an important oxidation catalyst.Praseodymium serves no known biological function. Like other rare earth elements, Pr exhibits low to moderate toxicity to organisms. Praseodymium Element Data Element Name: Praseodymium Element Symbol: Pr Atomic Number: 59 Element Group: f-block element, lanthanide or rare earth Element Period: period 6 Atomic Weight:  140.90766(2) Discovery: Carl Auer von Welsbach (1885) Electron Configuration: [Xe] 4f3  6s2 Melting Point:  1208  K  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹(935  Ã‚ °C, ​1715  Ã‚ °F) Boiling Point:  3403  K ​(3130  Ã‚ °C, ​5666  Ã‚ °F) Density:  6.77  g/cm3 (near room temperature) Phase: solid Heat of Fusion: 6.89 kJ/mol Heat of Vaporization:  331  kJ/mol Molar Heat Capacity:  27.20  J/(mol ·K) Magnetic Ordering: paramagnetic Oxidation States:  5, 4,  3, 2 Electronegativity:  Pauling  scale: 1.13 Ionization Energies: 1st:  527  kJ/mol2nd:  1020  kJ/mol3rd:  2086  kJ/mol Atomic Radius: 182 picometers Crystal Structure: double hexagonal close-packed or DHCP References Weast, Robert (1984).  CRC, Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Boca Raton, Florida: Chemical Rubber Company Publishing. pp.  E110.Emsley, John (2011). Natures Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-960563-7.Gschneidner, K.A., and Eyring, L., Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths, North Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1978.Greenwood, Norman N.; Earnshaw, Alan (1997). Chemistry of the Elements (2nd ed.). Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN 0-08-037941-9.R. J. Callow,  The Industrial Chemistry of the Lanthanons, Yttrium, Thorium and Uranium, Pergamon Press, 1967.

Is the UK still a two

Is the UK still a two Background The United Kingdom is made up of the Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which form a constitutional monarchy with the Monarch being the head of state, and the prime minister being the head of government. Under this constitutional framework, the regional governments of Scotland and Wales, the executive of Northern Ireland, and the UK government exercise their respective executive powers.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Is the UK still a two-party system? specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More On the other hand, the UK government exercises the legislative powers in collaboration with the two chambers of the legislature, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Furthermore, the Northern Ireland, the Scottish, and the Welsh assemblies do also exercise their respective legislative powers. Moreover, the judiciary is independent of the legislature and the executive, and the Supreme Court of the UK forms the highes t court (Ingle 3). Conversely, the UK political party system is made up of several political parties in which two major parties, the Conservative and the Liberal parties, control parliamentary politics and government business. In addition, the Labour party has since replaced the Liberal party as the second major party in the UK. Therefore, over the past few years, the parliamentary politics in the UK show the dominance of the Labour and the Conservative parties in forming either coalition or minority governments. Here, the two major parties have been enlisting the support of other nationalist or third parties to form the working majority (Bartle and Allen 4). As a result, the UK has other parties alongside the two major parties such as the Liberal Democrats, which was born out of the Liberal party joining forces with the Social Democratic Party in 1988. Other nationalist parties in the UK include Plaid Cymru in Wales (1925), the Scottish National Party (1934), the Democratic Unionis t Party (1971) and the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland (Ingle 5). Therefore, it is arguably correct to describe the British political party system as a two-party system because this has been the case scenario in Britain since the 18th Century through the post-war era (Webb 3). However, since the 1960s, several changes in the history of the British party system are notable, and therefore, the notion that the UK is made up of a two-party system is equally questionable. For instance, in the recent past, most third parties in the UK have shown the willingness to take up more seats during elections, and in some occasions, there has been an obvious change in electoral behavior. Additionally, the regional support for the Labour and Conservative parties is also declining significantly (Webb 4). As a result, this essay presents discussions for and against the notion that the UK is still made up of a two-party system.Advertising Looking for essay on government? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More The classic two-party system in the UK According to Webb (3), a party system is an integral part of the settlement involving the political and institutional aspects of parliamentary politics. Here, the party system is classified relative to the arithmetical criterion such as two-party or multi-party systems. On the other hand, the party system can be classified according to the level of cooperation between different parties in the system. As a result, parties can interact at the legislative, electoral, regional, and executive arenas, and in so doing, the interactions between political parties create several political authorities and jurisdictions (Kelly 7). As a result, the notion that the UK is made up of a two-party democracy depends on the level of political party interaction and the arena upon which the political interaction is based. That said, the original two parties, which constituted a two-party s ystem in the UK were the Conservatives and the Liberals (Bassett 23). In the 19th Century, the Liberals appeared to be the major governing party in the UK before the party begun an extended period of decline especially after the victory of 1906. As a result, the original two-party system underwent dramatic changes particularly through the rise of the Labour party to replace the Liberals as the second major party. Furthermore, the Liberals’ dominance weakened due to the partition of Ireland and the divided support of the Irish people who had to choose between supporting the Labour Party and the Liberals. Consequently, by 1929, the political party system in the UK was made up of three parties (Robins and Jones 34). However, it is correct for one to argue that the political party system in the UK is a classic two-party democracy in the period from 1945 to 1970. During this period, the two major parties in the UK played a central role in the understanding of the political party s ystem in the UK, which is a majoritarian democracy (Denver 588; Webb 8). Here, the existence of other parties in parliamentary politics of the UK is overshadowed by the fact that the two major parties receive most of the votes during elections, and that these parties control the government business in parliament. Additionally, the nature of electoral behavior can be described as disproportionate because the first-past-the-post system of voting that has been in place since 1945 encourages and sustains a two-party democracy in the UK, and thereby making it unlikely for other third parties to be recognized (Blau 431).Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on Is the UK still a two-party system? specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Furthermore, the first-past-the-post electoral system denies the third parties the chance to receive national support, and as a result, these parties enlist the support of regional political jurisdictions, which means that their chances of forming the working majority in parliament depend on other major parties (Clarke et al. 123). Conversely, studies show that the Labour and the Conservative parties favor the first-past-the-post electoral system despite the efforts made by the Liberals to have the UK adopt a three-party system that gives all the three parties the opportunity to form the government relative to the number of seats held by a certain party (Johnston et al. 143). As a result, the first-past-the-post system has given either of the two main parties an added advantage of receiving the majority votes except in 1974 when the Labour Party received a narrow victory. Despite receiving a small majority vote, the Labour Party continued to dominate the UK parliamentary politics through 1977 because the party enlisted the support of other third parties particularly through the Lib-Lab pact that saw the Labour and the Liberal parties forming a coalition government (Sanders 13). Conve rsely, apart from the first-past-the-post electoral system, the likelihood of either the Liberal or the Welsh and Scottish Nationalist parties dismantling the two-party system in the early 1950s was challenged by the lack of enough resources and well known candidates (Field 196). However, in 2001, the Liberal democrats and the nationalists managed to produce candidates for most of the contested seats. As a result, the move by the third parties to produce their own candidates against those of the Conservatives and the Labour Party has had a significant impact on the two-party system in the UK. Here, the supporters of third parties had a choice to make in terms of voting for either of the two main parties or none particularly when the party of their choice failed to produce the preferred candidate in a particular constituency. As a result, the third parties almost doubled their support and votes against the two main parties in the period from 1950 to 1997. However, vote sharing betwee n the third parties and the two main parties in the UK shows a little or no impact at all on the dynamics of the two-party system because the Conservative and Labour Parties still maintain unwavering dominance relative to the overall number of seats held by the two parties in the parliament to date (Whiteley et al. 354). Furthermore, the two-party system in the UK has been linked to certain aspects of electoral behavior and class alignment. Here, the two main parties enjoy political dominance because they represent the working and the middle classes (Mughan 195). Conversely, the Liberal democrats and the nationalists do not enjoy any class representation, and thus they are said to be politically disadvantaged. This electoral phenomenon is known as class alignment.Advertising Looking for essay on government? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More As a result, to control more votes and political power, the Labour party and the Conservatives must enlist the support of the majority of the working class and a considerable percentage of the middle class (Whiteley 581). That said, most studies show that the period from 1950 to 1970 was an era of class alignment whereby the strong link between electoral behavior and class status appears to have denied other third parties the opportunity to make a significant impact in the parliamentary politics (Bassett 45). During this period, the two main parties received the highest percentage of votes from the two main classes because the parties represented class interests and values. Furthermore, the Conservatives and the Labour Party had several strong-holds such as South-East England for the Conservative Party, and the North of Wale and England for the Labour Party (Denver 590). As a result, other unrepresented constituencies played a central role in deciding the electoral outcomes because the degree of support for the two main parties was marginal or more balanced. However, since the 1970s, the connection between the electoral behavior and class status has been weakening but very much intact because of another political phenomenon known as partisan de-alignment. Through partisan de-alignment, the Conservative Party managed to receive the highest support of the working class in the period from 1979 to 1992 especially after the government formed by the Labour Party became consistently incredible (Clarke et al. 126). However, the extra support for the Conservatives begun to decline in 1992 after the Labour Party regained its credibility, and the victories of the Labour Party in 1997 and 2001 can be attributed to the shift of the middle-class support from the Conservatives to the Labour party. Therefore, it is probable that the dominance of the two main parties in the UK is still intact though weak. The rise of the multi-party system in the UK Despite that the two-party system is still intact in British politics to date, the electoral behaviors and voting tactics relative to the support for the two main parties have changed in different aspects. For instance, the notion that the two main parties will take the first or the second positions in most constituencies is no longer feasible. Moreover, the Conservative Party’s popularity in some political jurisdictions such as Scotland is on the decline due to the emergence of the strong support for Liberals and nationalists. Additionally, considering that the Conservative Party was the most famous political party in Scotland, and the second best in Wales until the 1950s, it is probable that the Conservatives have lost the Welsh and Scottish support because the party has failed in many ways to represent the people of Scotland and Wales (Kelly 54). Moreover, the intensified calls for devolution in some political jurisdictions further ruined the dominance of the Conservatives. However, during Margaret Thatcher’s reign as the Prime Minister, the Labour Party survived losing out on majority votes while the Conservatives lost almost all seats in Scotland and Wales. Here, the Welsh and Scottish people supported the Labour Party because the party stood for the devolution agenda in the two regions, and therefore, through the combined support from the Liberal Democrats and other Nationalist Parties, the Labour Party survived the storm, and went ahead to regain power and political dominance at Westminster (Denver 596). On the other hand, the Liberal Democratic Party enjoys the support from most regional political jurisdictions as the second best party in parliamentary politics. In some of these regions such as England, the existence of three competing parties makes it difficult for one to clearly define the political party system that is in place (Webb 15). For instance, in the recent past, there has been evidence of a two-party system in England whereby the electorate chooses bet ween either the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives or the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats instead of the usual trend of Labour and Conservatives (Sanders 15). Furthermore, in more balanced or marginal political jurisdictions, the battle for majority votes can either be three-way or four-way. For example, in Scotland and Wales, which have their respective regional assemblies, there is evidence of proportional representation of four different parties in parliamentary elections (Johnston et al. 154). Therefore, proportional representation of political parties in some regions of the UK shows that third parties have almost regained the support of different social classes, and as a result, their influence in parliamentary politics cannot be ignored. Furthermore, most Liberal Democrats propose that introducing electoral reforms in the UK will not only end the era of social class-oriented party representation, but it will also rid the UK of unpopular policies by single parties that pretend to represent the interests of the majority of voters (Field 200). In addition, the popularity of a two-party system in the UK has declined significantly due to tactical voting. Here, tactical voting entails the various techniques used by most third parties to challenge the dominance and governance of the two major parties (Robins and Jones 56). As a result, tactical voting has been used to replace unpopular governments and ineffective opposition parties in the UK for many decades now. However, the most spectacular show of tactical voting appears in 1997 whereby the Labour Party enjoyed a clean sweep of majority seats despite the Liberal Democrats claiming a reasonable number of parliamentary seats. In addition, the Conservatives suffered a disastrous blow during the 1997 elections because the party lost almost all the seats in some regions where the tactical voting technique was successfully executed (Sanders 20). Subsequently, the Labour Party was also affected by tactical voting in 2005 whereby most voters failed to support the party because they felt that the Iraq war was unwarranted, and thus the voters were out to punish the political elite. Consequently, other third parties gained from tactical voting with the Liberal Democrats obtaining a historical tally of 62 parliamentary seats in 2005 (Denver 604). Thus, it is probable that the majoritarian system of a two-party democracy is weakening, and it will soon come to an end. Relative to the discussions above, it is arguably correct to state that the UK is still made up of a two-party system despite that the system’s popularity is weakening due to proportional representation of political parties, which threatens to replace the two-party system with a multi-party system. However, in some regions such as Scotland and Wales, the two-party system has been completely replaced by a four-party voting system whereby the Labour Party is still the dominant party, and the Liberal Democrats together with other Nationalist parties assume the second place while the Conservatives are trail in the last position (Bartle and Allen 45). Furthermore, the two main parties in the UK can no longer form the government on a minority vote, and thus, the two parties depend on the first-past-the-post system to form the working majority in parliament. Through the first-past-the-post system, which manipulates the balance the seats held by a particular political party and the total votes cast to favor the dominance of the two main parties, the influence of other third parties in politics at the national level is still overshadowed (Blau 453). Therefore, the first-past-the-post electoral system gives the impression of the existence of a two-party system in the UK to date. For instance, in the period from 2005 to 2010, there is evidence of a return to the traditional voting tactics despite the emergence of new and powerful party leaders. And in the 2010 elections, the Conservatives demonstrated their d ominance in British politics despite the popularity of the Liberal Democratic leader increasing suddenly (Bartle and Allen 65). Furthermore, Scotland shocked many by supporting the Labour Party as opposed to the Liberal Democrats, and in other regions, the support for the two main parties was almost the same as in the past years. Therefore, the probability that a two-party system is still intact in the UK is relatively high despite the electorate expressing concern over the credibility of the two main parties in delivering popular policies relative to the ever changing political and economic environments. Conclusions The essay presents the discussions for and against the notion that the UK is still made up of a two-party system. The foregoing discussions show that the Conservatives and the Labour party have been enjoying political dominance over the years with the period from 1945 to 1970 being characterized by a classic two-party system. Furthermore, the two-party system has been i n place parallel to the existence of other third parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the nationalists, which are at a political disadvantage because they lack enough resources and candidates who can make a national political impact. However, the period from 1970 to date has been marked by the emergence of strong support for third parties against the two main parties. Therefore, despite that the third parties have failed to replace the two-party system with a multi-party system, the parties have made a significant impact in British politics in terms of encouraging proportional representation of most political parties in some political jurisdictions in the UK. However, the first-past-the-post electoral system is still intact and in full support of the two-party system, and thus more needs to be done in terms of encouraging electoral reforms to counter or replace the two-party system in the UK. Bartle, John and Allen Nicholas. Britain at the polls 2010. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2010. Print. Bassett, Reginald. Essentials of parliamentary democracy. 2nd ed. London: Charles Birchall Sons Ltd, 1964. Print. Blau, Adrian. â€Å"A quadruple whammy for first-past-the-post.† Electoral Studies 23.3 (2004): 431-453. Print. Clarke, Harold, Stewart Marianne, and Zuk Gary. â€Å"Politics, economics and party popularity in Britain, 1979-83.† Electoral Studies 5.2 (1986): 123-141. Print. Denver, David. â€Å"The results: how Britain voted.† Parliamentary Affairs 63.4 (2010): 588 606. Print. Field, William. â€Å"Policy and the British voter: council housing, social change, and party preference in the 1980s.† Electoral Studies 16.2 (1997): 195-202. Print. Ingle, Stephen. The British party system: an introduction. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Johnston, Robert, Pattie Claire, and Johnston Lan. â€Å"The impact of constituency spending on the results of the 1987 British general elections.† Electoral Studies 8.2 (1989): 14 3-155. Print. Kelly, Richard. Changing party policy in Britain: an introduction. UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999. Print. Mughan, Anthony. â€Å"General election forecasting in Britain: a comparison of three simple models.† Electoral Studies 6.3 (1987): 195-207. Print. Robins, Lynton and Jones, Bill. Half a century of British politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Print. Sanders, David. â€Å"Pre-election polling in Britain, 1950-1997.† Electoral Studies 22.1 (2003): 1-20. Print. Webb, Paul. The British party system. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2000. Print. Whiteley, Paul, Sanders David, Stewart Marianne, and Clarke Harold. â€Å"Aggregate level forecasting of the 2010 general election in Britain: the seats-votes model.† Electoral Studies 3.1 (2010): 354-361. Print. Whiteley, Paul. â€Å"Evaluating rival forecasting models of the 2005 general election in Britain-An encompassing experiment.† Electoral Studies 27.4 (2008): 581-588. Pr int.

How to Pay for the Cost of a Fraternity or Sorority

How to Pay for the Cost of a Fraternity or Sorority Lets just be honest: Joining a fraternity or sorority can be expensive. Even if you dont live in the house, you likely have to pay dues, for social outings, and for all kinds of other things you werent expecting. So how can you manage to pay for the cost of going Greek if money is already tight? Fortunately, most fraternities and sororities understand that not every student can pay the full cost every semester. There are lots of places to look if you need a little extra financial help. Scholarships If your Greek is part of a larger regional, national, or even international organization, it may very well have scholarships available. Talk to some of the leaders in your campus chapter to see what they know or whom you should contact for more information on scholarships. Grants There may also be grants available, coming either from your larger organization or from organizations that simply want to support students who are involved in Greek life in general. Dont be afraid to do some searching online, check in with your campus financial aid office, and even ask other students if they know of good resources. Get a Job With the Organization on Campus If youre lucky, you can work within your fraternity or sorority and get an actual paycheck or things paid for indirectly (e.g., your room and board covered). Start asking around as soon as you realize you might be interested in this kind of arrangement; youll likely need to apply for positions in the spring if youd like to start working in them in the fall. Get a Job With the Larger Organization If your fraternity or sorority is very large on a regional or national scale, they likely need help keeping things running smoothly. Ask if there are positions that you can apply for- and work in- from your campus. The larger organization might need ambassadors, people who can write newsletters, or folks who are great at accounting. You never know what you might find open, so start asking around as soon as possible. Barter See if you can trade your skills for financial arrangements. Perhaps you have some mad skills at gardening. See if you can trade your labor in building, growing, and maintaining an organic garden for your sorority or fraternity in exchange for having your annual dues waived. Or if youre skilled in fixing computers, ask if you can work a few hours a week keeping everyones machines happy in exchange for a discount on your room and board costs. You got into college because youre smart and resourceful, so dont be shy about using those skills to help you create a financial arrangement that works for you and your desire to remain involved in your fraternity or sorority.

Eropean Union Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Eropean Union - Essay Example The European Union operates through a system of supranational institutions. These institutions include a variety of prominent branches, including the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the European Central Bank. This essay examines these branches and considers the most critical barriers to further EU integration. The different branches of the European Union have distinctly different functions. The European Commission is the recognized executive body of the European Union. This body has a broad variety of functions that includes developing legislation, decision implementation, upholding EU treaties, and running the daily measures of the union (Staab). While the United States executive branch has a single president, the EU operates with twenty-seven commissioners and a Commission President. The European Commission notably is the sole branch with the power of legislative initiative. The Council of the European Union is, along with the European Parliament, the legislative body of the European Union. ... Another prominent power of these legislative branches is their authority over the budget (Leonard). Both of the legislative bodies have equal power over the budget. If there is a disagreement between these powers there is a conciliation committee that arbitrates these disputes. Finally, the European Parliament has the power of supervision (Leonard). This means that they can establish supervisory council over issues such as natural disasters or disease. The final two branches of the European Union are the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the European Central Bank. The Court of Justice is the European Union’s judicial branch. The purpose of this branch of the EU is to ensure that treaties passed by the EU are followed and observed in the proper interpretation (Staab). This branch contains the European Court of Justice, the General Court, and the Civil Service Tribunal. The European Central Bank oversees the monetary policy of the members of the European Union (Staab). The overriding purpose of the European Central Bank is to ensure price stability through developing measures to fight against inflation. The ECB also has the notable power of issuing euro banknotes (Staab). While the European member states are able to issue their own euro bank notes, they must first receive the permission of the ECB. While the European Union has witnessed tremendous integration in recent decades there still remains prominent barriers to integration. Within this context of investigation the most prominent barriers to integration relate to trade and financial matters. While seventeen member states have adopted the Euro as their predominant currency there remains objection to full-scale implementation of this currency. One considers the current European

Company law, study case Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4750 words

Company law, study case - Essay Example 1 Thus, in Rolled Steel Products (Holdings) Ltd v British Steel Corporation the disputed transaction was not held to be void. The court came to this decision as the transaction was not wholly beyond the capacity of the company.2 The directors of a private company with just one class of shares are permitted to allot the same class of shares. In addition, they can convert securities into such shares. 3 Moreover, such directors can grant rights to subscribe to such shares. However, these share allotment activities are subject to the prohibitions of the Companies Act 2006. 4 In all other instances, share allotment is permitted to the directors of the company, only if there is specific authorisation to do so by the Articles of Association of the company or there is a company resolution to that effect. Such authorisation has to specify the maximum number of shares that can be allotted under the authorisation. 5 As such, directors are instrumental in decision making and other critical funct ions of the company. The law relating to conflict of interests is intricate, and the director of a company should seek legal advice in this regard. In addition, it is necessary to ensure that the company’s constitution provides the required authority to a director in a specific situation. 6 However, Section 175 of the Companies Act 2006 does not cover all the functions of the directors. For instance, it does not deal with instances, where a director intends to have transactions with his company. This should be permitted by the constitution of the company. Moreover, under the provisions of section 177, the director has to make proper disclose to the board of the company. 7 There should be proper flow of information to the directors of a company. This is indispensable for the proper and efficient functioning of the company. As such, it is obligator for the company board to ensure that the directors have a proper flow of information. This is essential, as there is a statutory ob ligation on directors to take into consideration particular matters at the time of taking decisions. 8 Companies formed prior to the enactment of the Companies Act 2006, can acquire the same status regarding the issue of shares, by resolving to excise the clause relating to authorised share capital from their articles of association. In addition, these companies should resolve to bestow upon their directors the powers granted under section 550 of the Companies Act 2006.9 Companies formed under the Companies Act 2006 are not limited with regard to the number of shares that they can issue. 10 Section 550 of this Act provides that in the absence of a specific prohibition in the articles of association, the directors of a company with only one class of shares are at liberty to allot shares without requiring the authorisation of the shareholders.11 In addition, section 550 of the Companies Act 2006 empowers the allotment of shares by the directors of a private company that has only one c lass of shares. Such allotment of shares does not require prior authority from the members of the company. Furthermore, this power can be precluded or restricted by the members, via the Articles of Association of the company.12 In our problem, Ben and Holly realized that the Kingdom Ltd company would not be in a position to grow without the obtention of further financing for

Sales training Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Sales training - Essay Example Three different power points will be created for the morning session, after break session and after lunch lecture. The first power point will cover the definition of sales, its goals, roles, direction and the focus of selling. This will be accomplished with a minimum of 25 slides with comprehensive speaker notes at the bottom. A minimum of 5 images must be used to show marketing dialogue, the role of sales and any related topic idea. The second power point will outline and map the sales process and images depicting models of selling will be included. For the last session, the power point presentation will cover, in a minimum of 15 slides a reflection of the video that will be used to induce hands-on experience in selling (Amy 79). All power points will be colorful and animated and questions must be used at each stage to evoke critical thinking from trainees. A laptop, projector and white board will be availed for the purpose of this training session. Video A sales marketing video wil l be obtained from youtube.com and will be availed in the last session. The video will cover field marketing and will present different scenarios that are likely to be experienced during training. Person to person sales and making sales in a conference will be two scenarios that will be captured in the video. The CD will be provided and played through the laptop. Evaluating the Learners After the three lecture sessions, a questionnaire will be handed to the trainees and they will be required to respond to the questions. Questionnaire method is superior in obtaining quick responses from the trainees as all of them respond at the same time. The questionnaire will test on the sales skills that the learner acquired and the possible methods of tackling specific problems in the marketing field. The test will continue a marketing scenario to test the learner abilities to employ effective marketing approaches in different marketing situations. Guidance Session Timing Trainer Guidance Traine e Guidance Lesson 1 1 hour 30 minutes Must emphasize definition, and mechanics of selling. questionss in power points must be asked to student. Remain interesting, use speaker note to explain Take notes, participate, ask questions Lesson 2 1hr 30 minutes Outlining and mapping of sales covered Refer to Ppt speaker notes Use questions at each point Engage learners Trainees get back to their seating positions. Note taking of crucial points Lesson 3 1hr 30 minutes The teacher will play the video twice, and then use the power point to reflect on the video. Interactive questions. Every trainee presents their opinion on the scenarios depicted in the movie Note the various key skills in marketing The timeline of the lesson will be reviewed after the first lesson. It may be wise to reduce the time for the second session and increase that of the last session as the interactive session is expected to take more time. Formative Revisions Formative revisions help to obtain information to help str eamline the instructional methods (Tuttle 122). During the instruction process, a critical observation of the training session will be engaged. The time taken to deliver the whole content designed for each lesson will be assessed. Also, the participation of the trainees will be engaged and

Change Management Issue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Change Management Issue - Essay Example The given case study represents a very common situation in the workplace. In this case, we have a situation where a person is experiencing a lack of ethical-judgment. To come close to the point, we have a case in which an individual decided that his moral principles were more desirable to the company than the policies or procedures at his workplace. The case showed that both Mr. B and Bob demonstrated unethical attitudes toward Steven, the worker within their department. Failure to take a more ethical attitude toward Steven led him to continue working in the same IT department and doing a job he hates. Applying more ethical principles at the workplace would have saved Steven from being forced to do the job he hates.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   A clue to the case can be derived from Kantian ethics. Kantian ethics is frequently referred to as deontological or rule-based ethics. Kantian ethics is traditionally concerned with what makes a principle right or wrong. Kantian ethics is based on the famous categorical imperative. In the course of his research, Kant provides people with two main formulations of the categorical imperative. Kantian ethical principles indicate that each person should act as a rational being. The Kantian approach eliminates any possible cases of lying (Kant, I, p.56, 1996). The Kantian approach to lying indicates that the philosopher supported a total prohibition of lying as a form of building relations with other people. Kant also mentioned the fact that lying cannot become a universal law for all people, thus pointing to the fact that lying is virtually impossible in the workplace. Such negative attitudes toward lying are reasoned by the fact that work relations are supposed to be built on trust and mutual understanding. Since a lie depends upon someone believing you, a person who lies shows disrespect to the other person who is placing their trust the one the liar (Kant, I, p.58, 1996). When we view Steven’s case from Kant’s theory, we see that Mr. Bob, HR, ignored his duty in order to avoid lying. Instead of ethical behavior, he became involved in cheating.   According to Kant, cheating people are the worst examples of unethical behavior in the workplace.   

Process Analysis Essay on Bias in Research Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Process Analysis on Bias in Research - Essay Example In regards to the research process, Knox (2010) stated that bias is inaccuracy in data that arises from the manipulated method of data collection and analysis that was employed in the research process.  In regards to the research process, Knox (2010) stated that bias is inaccuracy in data that arises from the manipulated method of data collection and analysis that was employed in the research process.  With reference to the writings by Sharot (2012, P. 8), cognitive bias is described as â€Å"mental errors that arise from simplified information strategies.† Hammersley (1999) further added that cognitive biases are mental errors that are predictable and consistent, and they differ from biases because they are not caused by the personal interest that leads to an inclination towards a preferred outcome. This, therefore, means that cognitive bias is caused by subconscious mental strategies that are used during information processing.   The impact of bias on research, why and how it is important to know bias When a researcher has a bias in the research process then it means that he or she will set the research design in a biased manner in order to obtain the preferred results. Additionally, the data collection process, as well as the sources, will be skewed in a manner that will conform to the results that the research prefers to obtain. To reinforce further the biases, the researcher will manipulate the data analysis process to be reassured of achieving the desired findings or results.   Osterlind (1983) stated that biases in the research process lead to the attainment of results that are not very real or factual more so when the findings are compared with the findings obtained from a research process that was unbiased. Osterlind (1983) further stated that when a research process is conducted through bias then the recommendations from the research are likely to be ineffective or invalid. This is because; the anal ysis of the problem was conducted from a biased perspective rather than from a factual perspective.   Weisberg (2010) in his writings summarily stated that the impact of bias on research is that it lowers or eliminates credibility in the entire research process and even the credibility of the research findings. Additionally, a biased researcher will also suffer from credibility issues and his or her research proficiency may be brought into question as to whether they are genuine or not.

Change Management Issue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Change Management Issue - Essay Example The given case study represents a very common situation in the workplace. In this case, we have a situation where a person is experiencing a lack of ethical-judgment. To come close to the point, we have a case in which an individual decided that his moral principles were more desirable to the company than the policies or procedures at his workplace. The case showed that both Mr. B and Bob demonstrated unethical attitudes toward Steven, the worker within their department. Failure to take a more ethical attitude toward Steven led him to continue working in the same IT department and doing a job he hates. Applying more ethical principles at the workplace would have saved Steven from being forced to do the job he hates.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   A clue to the case can be derived from Kantian ethics. Kantian ethics is frequently referred to as deontological or rule-based ethics. Kantian ethics is traditionally concerned with what makes a principle right or wrong. Kantian ethics is based on the famous categorical imperative. In the course of his research, Kant provides people with two main formulations of the categorical imperative. Kantian ethical principles indicate that each person should act as a rational being. The Kantian approach eliminates any possible cases of lying (Kant, I, p.56, 1996). The Kantian approach to lying indicates that the philosopher supported a total prohibition of lying as a form of building relations with other people. Kant also mentioned the fact that lying cannot become a universal law for all people, thus pointing to the fact that lying is virtually impossible in the workplace. Such negative attitudes toward lying are reasoned by the fact that work relations are supposed to be built on trust and mutual understanding. Since a lie depends upon someone believing you, a person who lies shows disrespect to the other person who is placing their trust the one the liar (Kant, I, p.58, 1996). When we view Steven’s case from Kant’s theory, we see that Mr. Bob, HR, ignored his duty in order to avoid lying. Instead of ethical behavior, he became involved in cheating.   According to Kant, cheating people are the worst examples of unethical behavior in the workplace.   

Adam smith biography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Adam smith biography - Essay Example During this time he lectured on various topics, and he explained for the first time his ideas of "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty", which was the basis of his influential book entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (The Wealth of Nations).1 Around 1750 Smith met the philosopher, economist and historian David Hume, one of the most famous figures of the Scottish Enlightment along Smith himself. They became close friends, and Smith was influenced by his works as it has been noted by many scholars. In 1751 Smith became a professor at Glasgow University where he lectured on logic and moral philosophy. In 1759 he published his book entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is concerned with the explanation of moral approval and disapproval. Smith finds in sympathy the solution to moral problems. After the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith payed more attention to jurisprudence and political economics in his lectures. An account of these lectures by one of Smith’s students around 1763 was edited by E. Cannan in 1896. In 1763 Smith was hired as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch. During the next years (1764-1766) Smith travelled with his pupil to Switzerland and France, where he met many intellec tual leaders as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Turgot, D’Alembert, Andrà © Morellet, Helvà ©tius, and Francois Quesnay, who was the head of the Physiocratic school whose works influenced Smith. Later on he also met Benjamà ­n Franklin.2 Smith retired from his post as tutor of the Duke of Buccleuch thanks to the life pension that he earned through that tutorship, and he returned home to Kirkcaldy, where he dedicated to the task of writing his most important work, The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776, the same year of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. His close friend Hume also died in that

The Annual Report Project Essay Example for Free

The Annual Report Project Essay General Electric, short as GE, is a leading multi-industrial company involving in energy, appliance, finance and transportation businesses. It has more than 100 years of history, and generally be viewed as one of the most successful product and service providers across continents. GE has gross revenue of more than 147 billion dollars, and is currently ranking No.6 in Fortune 500 U.S. by revenue. A. Introduction General Electric Company (GE) is a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States. Its core business contains four segments, including Energy, Finance, Technology infrastructure, and Consumer and Industrial. GE was founded initially by Thomas Edison, and then merged with Thomson-Houston Electronic Company in 1892. It was one the original 12 companies that were included for Dow Jones Industrial Average calculation in 1896, and is the only one that still being listed as of today. * Name of the Chief Executive Officer: Jeffrey R. Immelt * Corporate Headquarters: 3135 Easton Turnpike, Fairfield, CT 06828 * Ending of last fiscal year: Dec 31, 2011 * Description of the company’s principle products or services: General Electronic contains four major business sectors. GE Energy is constructed by two major departments. The Oil Gas department is a drill solution and refinery service provider, and the power department is one of the leading manufactures in designing and producing innovative, reliable, efficient, and high-performance jet engines. GE Technology Infrastructure is a business group dealing with machine production for healthcare and transportation. GE Capital is the financial service provider primarily focuses on loans and leases that it underwrites to hold on its own balance sheet rather than on generating fee by originating loans and leases. GE Home Business Solutions is another GE major business unit composed of intelligent platforms department and lighting department. The intelligent platforms are involving in producing next generation hardware and software for industrial control, and lighting department mainly engaged in home appliance production and maintenance. * Main geographic area of activity (in order of revenue significance): United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa. * Name of Company’s independent accountants (KPMG LLP). Base on the analysis of independent auditor, the GE consolidated financial statements released to the public presented fairly, in a whole, the financial position of GE as the date of Dec 31, 2011 and 2010. Also, the statements of operations and cash flows for the three consecutive years from 2009 to 2011 are conformed to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The independent accountants also declared that the GE maintained effective internal control over financial reporting as of Dec 31 2011, according to the criteria established in Internal Control-Integrated Framework issued by COSO. * The most recent price of company’s stock and its dividend per share The current price of GE stock is $20.62 as of Nov 20, 2012. The most recent dividend payment date was Oct 25, 2012 (record date was Sep 24, 2012) with amount per share of $0.17. B. Industry Situation and Company Plans GE Energy unit is a product and service provider across different energy industries, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power and renewable energy like wind or solar energy. In general, global energy business experienced a boosting period in the past twenty years due to the economic rapid growth in Asia. Coal, Oil and natural gas are top 3 widely used fossil fuels in energy industry, accounting for 55% of total energy demands. GE Energy has the advantage of applying advanced technology from drilling and production, liquefied natural gas pipelines and storage to industrial power generation and it is the largest natural gas provider in U.S. Based on GE’s patents on renewable energy, it greatly expands its business cooperation in Asia in the past three years within the countries that have great environmental issues, like China. In 2009~20011, GE acquired two wind turbine companies, Scan Wind and Wind Tower System, and became one of the largest engine manufactures, second o nly to well-known British company, Rolls-Royce plc. Healthcare in GE Technology Infrastructure business unit takes the dominant position in the field of diagnostic imaging service and integrated clinical system providers. While it has offices around the globe, the Healthcare department has major regional operation in Europe and Asia. Transportation in GE Technology Infrastructure business unit basically produces locomotive and its accompanied equipment, large electric motors and propulsion systems for mining, oil drilling and engine industries. Because of its comparative advantage of research and development, the GE Transportation unit experienced a fast expansion in the past several years, and in 2011 they announced plans to build another locomotive factory in Texas to meet the increasing demand. GE Capital has two major parts of services, aviation services, and energy financial services. The aviation service is responsible for the leasing of aircraft and associate equipment to airlines. According to 2005 Airfinance Journal Operating Lessor Survey, GE aviation service department is the largest aircraft lessor in the world by the fleet size. The success of this business is primarily due to the heavily competition between the airlines, and each airline company intends to lease cheap aircraft to reduce their cost. The capital intensive companies, like GE, has the advantage to meet their needs. Energy financial services department is primarily responsible for auxiliary role such as providing financial and technological investment in energy infrastructure projects around the world, and their major investments are the projects across the different business segment of the General Electric. GE Home Business Solutions is composed of GE Lighting and GE Intelligent Platforms. GE Lighting is well known for its household appliance traced back from Thomas Edison’s work on lighting. Because of its dominant position in the business, lighting department generates descent amount of the revenues for the whole group. In 2011 the gross revenue for GE Lighting is about 3 billion. Intelligent Platforms departments designs, manufactures, and supplies hardware and software products for industrial control and automation. Their hardware products including programmable logic controllers (PLCs), programmable automation controllers (PACs), as well as software products including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) has good reputation in the market, its major role is to provide research and development support for other GE business units to evolve their products. The revenue in Intelligent Platforms is about 135 million, and is not a huge profit resource for the whole grou p.