A Poetry Analysis Justice Essay Example For Students

A Poetry Analysis Justice Essay In the piece Justice, the author included victims of notorious crimes in the Philippines who encountered at least any f the following: kidnap, rape, hazing, manslaughter, massacre, and murder. The literary piece Justice by Christine Caramel Villain is a poem written in the form of concrete poetry known as Carmen figurate, in which the words are typographically arranged in such a manner that a visual image is formed. In using shaped verse, the poet creates an illustration of a lifeline. The rises and falls, or the peaks (to represent the highs) and valleys (to represent the lows) of the fluctuation of the lifeline, which in electrocardiography (a noninvasive medical procedure for recording electrical activities of the heart) indicates that a certain individual is still living as characterized by his/her active heartbeat, are composed of names of victims murdered in the Philippines. The linear portion of the lifeline after a series of waves, however, is made up of iterations of the word Justice, which is written in a repetitive way for emphasis and further retention to the memory of the readers. In electrocardiography, the flat line implies that the beating of the heart has already terminated, thereby causing death. According to the author, the reason for the placement of the names within the yeoman part of the lifeline is to depict that the cases pertaining to the concerned people are yet unsolved and unclosed, or still withheld and hanging. As a result, the memory of the demise of the injured party lives on in spite of them being already deceased. On the other hand, the author has committed some minor mistakes in writing the names of the victims by way of misspelling a few of them (I. . , Chris instead of Crisp in Crisp Mended, Stateliest instead of Easterlies in Easterlies Eviction, Rockwell instead of Rachel in Rachel Groaned, and Regis instead of Regales in Marvin Regales). Other name entries are also mistaken for the reason that in one case, the surname linked to the first name is incorrect (Chapman instead of Hellman in Maureen Hellman) and in another, the first and s econd names are interchanged Cohn Roland instead of Roland John in Roland John Chapman). As for the organization of the names, the following sequence is maintained: Marjory Aching, Jacqueline Aching, Maureen Hellman, Roland John Chapman, Jesus Lenin, Nadia Blanch, Crisp Mended, Easterlies Eviction, Carmela Eviction, Jennifer Eviction, Geraldine Palm, Given Grace Sibilance, Ray Bernard Appearance, Rachel Groaned, Marvin Regales, and Marc Andre Marcos. However, the author failed to be consistent with the order of the names at the endmost part of the lifeline in which the last input is Marvin Regales instead of Rachel Groaned, provided that the order of the name list is the basis for succession. Other errors marked in the work include the failure to insert Roland John Chapman in between Maureen Hellman and Jesus Lenin at the first sequence of the names. Other names are as well deficient such as Biz at the second sequence, Men at the third sequence, and Erg at the latter sequence mentioned. Space fillers are also added so as not to ruin the figure and to discipline the use of names t fit the form (such as ma after Groaned at the second sequence and sad after Given at the third sequence). But this does not actually suffice and is not proper since the text should be as important as the shape, hence being called Carmen figurate (visual poem) and not merely Carmen (poem) or figurate (image) alone. If fillers are supplied, the main purpose of the poetry, which is to preserve congruity between the figure and the content, is by all means defied. As for the spatiality of the poem, however, commas or spaces are not used to separate one person from another. The names are keyed in one after another and without interruption. Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant by Emily Dickinson analysis EssayEven the seven-time repetition of the word Justice at the flat segment of the lifeline is written with no pauses at all. Punctuation marks are not even utilized per SE. On the other hand, although names are written repetitively to signify importance, the poem might have been more effective if it is appropriately punctuated with the aid of commas for short and slight pauses, or semicolons for the intention of a caesura or an extended pause before shifting from a thought or idea t the succeeding one. However, if the aim is to establish a complete stop, a period can be employed. Also, it would be of assistance if the initial letter of the names is write in capital letters to show that each person is important. Moreover, the upper and lower ends of the zigzag lines should entirely carry the names of the victims instead of breaking then placing them in separate lines. Aside from the order of the names, however, there is little attempt at harmonious arrangement (Holcomb, 2007) f the poetry. There is no other particular pattern observed than the mere arrangement of the names. The author, in this literary work, used run-on lines that are suggestive of continuous reading. Lastly, the objective of the poetry, which is to find meaning and explanation yet not in the literal sense is accomplished, since the concept of Justice is embedded within an illustration of a lifeline. This suggests, as represented in the graph, that Justice in the Philippines is dead, as the cases of the abused involved in murder have still not progressed over the years. This may also mean that criminal Justice in the country is already limping, for some witnesses of the crimes are unwilling to lodge complaints, support prosecutions, (Asian Human Rights Commission).

Web Portal Essay Example

Web Portal Essay Automatic Identification of Temporal Information in Tourism Web Pages Stephanie Weiser*, Philippe Laublet**, Jean-Luc Minel* * MoDyCo, UMR 7114, CNRS 200 avenue de la Republique, 92001 Nanterre ** LaLIC, Universite Paris-Sorbonne Maison de la recherche, 28 rue Serpente 75006 Paris E-mail: steph. [emailprotected] com, Philippe. [emailprotected] fr, [emailprotected] fr Abstract This paper presents our work on the detection of temporal information in web pages. The pages examined within the scope of this study were taken from the tourism sector and the temporal information in question is thus particular to this area.The differences that exist between extraction from plain textual data and extraction from the web are brought to light. These differences mainly concern the spatial arrangement of the text, the use of punctuation and the respect of traditional syntactic rules. The temporal expressions to be extracted are classified into two kinds: temporal information that concerns one parti cular event and repetitive temporal information. We adopt a symbolic approach relying on patterns and rules for the detection, extraction and annotation of temporal expressions; our method is based on the use of transducers.First evaluations have shown promising results. Since the visual structure of a web page is very important and often informs the user before he has even read the text, a semiotic study is also presented in this paper. 1. Introduction With the methods of the Semantic Web, portal applications can be created, relying on ontologies. For these applications and many service applications, temporal information is often essential. For example, a tourism web portal would need information about the type of tourism object and its location in time and space.In addition, the extracted information must be stored in the knowledge base according to the ontology used by the application. In this paper we will focus on temporal information in tourism web pages. The temporal informat ion has to be detected, extracted and annotated. The annotation format will probably rely on existing XML tools (Stern 2007). To perform these tasks, we encountered three main kinds of difficulties. First, we have to deal with complex, imprecise temporal information. Of course, single dates are easy to process but more complex expressions, such as periods or repetitive information (e. . from March to July, open every day except Tuesday), must be treated as well. Second, after being extracted, the information needs to be linked to the proper tourism object. If the web page concerns only one object, this is straightforward, but some web pages concern many objects and an analysis is therefore necessary to decide how to link each piece of information to its object. Third, the web pages we deal with are all of the same type: tourism web pages. However, they vary a lot as they are made by different people, have different forms and concern different types of tourism objects.We will try to show that a semiotic study of some pages is necessary to take into account some of their specificities. The work presented in this paper is situated within the framework of the EIFFEL project. Its main objective is to create a portal in the area of tourism with different functionalities. This portal, for use by the local tourism sector, will include a specialised search engine. It will allow users to find and collect precise and essential information in context. It will also help the territory as a French region to promote its services. This is a wideranging project (Noel et al. 008) which is based on web semantic technologies, knowledge representation and linguistic methods and expertise. It includes automatic identification, selection and extraction of various items from the Web according to existing ontologies. This project involves mainly two companies – Mondeca and Antidot – and three laboratories – LIRMM (CNRS), INRIA-Rocquencourt and MoDyCo (CNRS). Our co rpus, meaning that the pages have been collected for this particular study, in a precise context, is composed of more than 5000 tourism web pages in French. These pages were collected by automatic crawling of websites.They were collected by the company Antidot and transformed into XML files in order to make them more suitable for automatic processing. 2. Temporal Information in Web Pages The detection and extraction of temporal information is a subject that has already been widely studied (Battistelli et al. 2006), but mostly in the context of â€Å"printed textual objects† and not in texts specifically written for web pages. One of the aims of this paper is to show that studying the same type of temporal information is very different when it takes place in a web context.In tourist guide books, for example, the information is a lot more structured and standardized than on our web sites, which are extremely diverse and do not follow a 127 common page model. Every entry of a gu ide concerning a particular tourism object is often structured in the same way and contains the same type of information. Linguistic markers allow us to locate each piece of information. Punctuation is very rigorous and facilitates interpretation, especially automatic interpretation. On the other hand, on web pages, punctuation – if there is any – is rarely correctly used.More often, white spaces or new lines are used as separators. Even if the analysis of a text is not easy, a lot of syntactic tools already exist to perform this task automatically. For example, it is possible to build the syntactic tree of a given sentence, find the verb, etc. However, some complicated tasks, such as anaphora resolution, can make the analysis of texts a lot more complex. What we are interested in here is that the difficulties that are encountered for web pages are very different from those that text analysis presents.For example, in a tourism guide book1, each restaurant entry is stru ctured in the same way: name, address, phone number, metro station and opening details, e. g. ouvert tous les jours (open every day). Each item can easily be automatically processed. The problem is that, on a web page, the same kind of information would more likely look like the web page presented in figure 1. integrating temporal and spatial reasoning into XML query and transformation operations. Their work has lead to WebCal, a program which provides calendrical calculations for web services. 3. Tool and Method for the Temporal Expression DetectionWe have a symbolic approach relying on patterns and rules for the detection, extraction and annotation of temporal expressions (in French). We do not use any machine learning techniques. Our method relies on the use of transducers, created using the graphical interface of the Unitex corpus processor2. Unitex provides an intuitive and user-friendly method for creating transducers, which tag the output (as opposed to regular expressions wh ich do not modify the output). A wide variety of patterns can be recognized and tagged by our transducers, from very simple expressions to very complex ones.On one hand, generalizations can be made (such as using the symbol to tag all numbers). On the other hand, the transducers can be very detailed and precise for particular cases, for example, to recognize expressions such as a lexception du mois de mai – except in May. Here are a few examples of the expressions to be detected: (1) Le 21 avril April, the 21st (2) Du 10 au 21 mars From the 10th to the 21st of March (3) Du lundi au vendredi, 9h – 11h From Monday to Friday, 9am-11am (4) Inauguration du musee le 7 juillet 2006 Inauguration of the museum on the 7th of July 2006 (5) En Juillet et Aout ouvert tous les jours.Hors cette periode, fermeture le mercredi soir, le jeudi toute la journee et le dimanche soir. Horaires douverture: de 12h00 a 14h00 de 19h00 a 22h00. Open every day in July and August. Outside this peri od, closed on Wednesday night, all day Thursday and on Sunday night. Opening times: from noon to 2pm from 7pm to 10pm. Figure 1: Example For now, there is no tool able to interpret that Chez Paul et Bernadette Colas is the name of a Bed Breakfast or that Ouvert du 15 fevrier au 30 (open from February 15th to 30th) is its opening information.This is why the extraction of temporal information from texts can not be directly applied for Web pages: there is no standardized â€Å"syntax† for web pages. Our work is close to that of (Tenier et al. 2006). The object of their work is to extract, from web pages, information about contributors to scientific events. Our approach is more general since the web pages analyzed by these authors follow spatial arrangement rules while spatial arrangement on our pages is completely free. Our work is also close to that of (Bry et al. 2003) who aim at 1 3. 1. ClassificationAs shown in these examples, the type of temporal information to be identifi ed varies. Two main types can be highlighted: temporal information that concerns one particular event and repetitive temporal information. For the first type there are dates (concert on October 1st), periods (festival from May to June), and times (the concert starts at 8:00). For the second there are times (the museum opens at 10am), periods (the restaurant is open from Monday to Saturday) and exceptions (the camping ground is open all year long except in January). More complex examples, such as from MarchLe guide du routard – Paris balades 2007 p. 231 :  « Le SaintAmour 2, av. Gambetta, 75020. 01-47-97-20-15. Metro PereLachaise. Ouvert tous les jours  » (Open every day) 2 Unitex: http://www-igm. univ-mlv. fr/~unitex 128 to July, open every day except Tuesday, can also be included in this classification. In addition, not every occurrence of temporal information needs to be detected, since they do not necessarily concern a tourism object. For example, a single date, which is not introduced by a linguistic marker such as heure douverture (opening time) probably does not concern a tourism object.Single dates like these often concern the web page itself as in Derniere modification : 25/10/2006 (last modification : 25/10/2006). Therefore, we have been careful not to detect these dates. One problem that has been encountered is that some lexical marks are ambiguous. For example is Friday and Sunday night to be interpreted as meaning Friday night and Saturday night, or rather Friday all day and Saturday night? The context is therefore necessary to remove the ambiguity. For this example, if the object is a concert, the first interpretation will probably be the right one.For the whole corpus of 100 pages, we obtain a recall rate of 92% and a precision of 76%. Figure 2: Recall for the first evaluation 3. 2. Technical Information The tool Unitex, which uses dictionaries based on the tables of the LADL3, allows the user to process corpora on the lexical, syntact ic and morphological levels. It allows for the identification and tagging of structures which correspond to regular expressions, represented by finite state graphs. This graphical representation makes using Unitex more intuitive than the use of long regular expressions.We built our transducers using this tool, following the linguistic study that listed the patterns of temporal expressions that could be found on web pages. The set of transducers includes one main transducer and 23 secondary graphs. These transducers include 88 lexical markers (like ouverture – opening, mars – March, inauguration) and 22 grammatical markers (like sur – on, le – the, dans – in). Figure 3: Precision for the first evaluation The important variation in the results is due to the fact that there are not a lot of temporal expressions to detect in the pages (7 for sets 1 and 3, 9 for set 2, 20 for set 4 and 8 for set 5).The precision for set 5 is especially low because one p age contains a forum with 4 temporal expressions that are detected but do not concern a tourism object. 4. Evaluations 4. 1. First Evaluation The transducers allowing the detection of temporal information were manually created from a study of a set of pages. In order to evaluate and optimise them, we tested them on sets of 20 web pages, randomly manually selected from our corpus. This operation was performed five times and the transducers have thus been tested on 100 different pages. The results of this experiment are presented in the diagrams below.Recall and precision were calculated for each set of 20 pages (figure 2 and figure 3). 4. 2. Second Evaluation A different procedure was used for the second evaluation. We deliberately manually selected 25 pages containing temporal information. Some of these pages were randomly opened and selected when they were found to contain temporal information; for the others our transducers were applied to more than 200 pages and those with result s were selected. For these 25 pages, the recall is 39,1% and the precision is 46,5%. Here are a few numbers to explain these figures. These pages contain 69 expressions to detect.The transducers match and tag 58 expressions: 27 are correctly detected, 3 are falsely detected (they should not be detected because they do not correspond to temporal tourism information), 28 expressions are incompletely detected and 25 expressions are missed. We are faced with two kinds of incomplete expressions. In the first kind a part of the expression is not matched, Laboratoire d’Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique – the tables were created by Maurice Gross and consist in a classification of lexical units according to syntactic and distributional criteria. 3 129 or example in toute la journee de 8h00 a 19h00 (all day long from 8:00am to 7:00pm), only the underlined part is detected. In the second kind of incomplete expressions, each pattern to be matched is detected in two or more matches, for example ouvert tous les jours en juillet et aout (open every day in July and August) is detected in two matches. 16 of the 28 incomplete expressions produced by our system correspond in fact to 5 correct expressions. Horaires Lundi Mardi Mercredi Jeudi Vendredi Samedi Matin 8h30-12h00 8h30-12h00 8h30-12h00 8h30-12h00 8h30-12h00 10h00-11h30Ap-midi 14h00-18h00 14h00-18h00 14h00-18h00 14h00-18h00 14h00- Figure 5: vertical table of opening times A human user would understand both of these tables without the slightest problem. For an automatic treatment, however, it is more complicated. If we do not look at the structure, but only at the text, the first table would then contain â€Å"Horaires lundi mardi mercredi jeudi vendredi samedi matin 08h30 12h00 08h30 12h00 08h30 12h00 08h30 12h00 08h30 12h00 10h00 11h30 ap. midi 14h00 18h00 14h00 18h00 14h00 18h00 14h00 18h00 14h00 †: a text flow that is incomprehensible.The second table would contain â€Å"Horaires Matin Ap-midi Lundi 8h30-12h00 14h0018h00 Mardi 8h30-12h00 14h00-18h00 Mercredi 8h3012h00 14h00-18h00 Jeudi 8h30-12h00 14h00-18h00 Vendredi 8h30-12h00 14h00 – Samedi 10h00-11h30 † it is clearer but it is very different from the text of the first one, for exactly the same meaning. Technical tools that allow a specific markup for headers in the table exist. But the web pages of our corpus are mostly built by professionals from the tourism sector and not by professional web designers: they do not use these technical tools.Consequently, only graphical elements and lexical content allow interpretation of these kinds of tables. In order to take into account these semiotic marks in automatic processing, the structure of the pages must be studied. An analysis of the XML tree is therefore necessary (Tenier et al. 2006). The high number of missed expressions is due to the fact that isolated dates without context are voluntarily ignored in order to avoid incorrect detections (li ke in derniere modification : 25 avril 2006 – last modification: April the 25th 2006).Some pages presenting an event schedule contain more than 10 dates without context that are therefore not detected. 22 out of the 25 missed expressions are concerned by this problem, which will be solved in the near future. 5. The Semiotic Marks For now, only textual information is taken into account, but a web page presents information in many other ways. The visual structure of a web page often informs the user before he has even read the text. For example, the structure could allow him to understand that the page concern one single object and not a collection of objects.In the same way, the formatting style (font, size, colour) can be very meaningful since it can often be assumed that two items written in the same font and colour are linked. One difficulty lies in automatically interpreting these semiotic marks. Many things are understandable at first sight for a human being but are hard to specify for automatic processing. On web pages, tables are commonly used to present information. They need a special treatment since their interpretation is not straightforward. 6. Conclusion In this paper we have presented our work on the detection of temporal information in web pages.We have focused on the differences that exist between extraction from plain textual data and extraction from the web. In addition, we introduced our main linguistic resource, our transducers, which could be used for many different NLP applications. We also presented the results obtained in applying these transducers to our corpus. The transducers that have been presented will be improved. They will be enriched with information concerning the type of tourism object, in order to determine the links between the temporal information detected and what they refer to.The work on semiotic marks will be continued in order to implement the study of the structure of the pages, analysing XML trees. Figure 4: O pening times table The figure 4 is an example of a table of opening times found on a web page. The first row contains the names of the days, the second row contains the opening times in the mornings and the last row contains the opening times in the afternoons. The information could have been presented in a vertical table as the one shown in figure 5: 130 7. Acknowledgements The project EIFFEL (ANR-05-RNTL-007) is funded with an ANR grant. .References Battistelli, D. , Minel, J. -L. , Schwer, S. (2006). Representation des expressions calendaires dans les textes : une application a la lecture assistee de biographies, Traitement Automatique des Langues, 47, 3, pp. 126. Bry, F. Lorenz, B. Ohlbach, H. J. Spranger, S. (2003). On Reasoning on Time and Location on the Web, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Germany, pp. 6983. Noel, L. , Carloni, O. , Moreau, N. , Weiser, S. (2008). Designing a Knowledge-Based Tourism Information System, Int. J. f Digital Culture and Electr onic Tourism, Special Issue on National Tourism Organisations and Exploitation of Information Technologies, to be published. Stern, R. -D. (2007). Expression linguistique du temps et representation ontologique : OWL-Time et etude des adverbiaux temporels, Memoire de Master IILGI, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne. Tenier, S. , Toussaint, Y. , Napoli, A. et Polanco, X. (2006). Instantiation of relations for semantic annotation, In the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence WI 2006, pp. 463-472 131

Spartan Military essays

Spartan Military essays I chose to do my final project on the military tactics, techniques, requirements, and lifestyle of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta. When we discussed this topic in class, I was very interested in how much emphasis the Spartans put on the military. I wanted to learn more about this subject and also answer some of my own questions I had that we may not have covered in class. The word Sparta actually has two separate meanings, which contradict each other. The first meaning of the word is bravery, and the second is barren. I interpret the second meaning in the way that, the Spartan lifestyle was barren in that they focused solely on their military and not on all the other pleasures of life. The city-state of Sparta was located on the Peloponnesus, a peninsula just southwest of its rival state, Athens. Spartans looked at themselves as military powerhouses and all their discipline, from birth to adulthood, was directed toward war. Any child that was born with a deformity, mental illness, or that was physically handicapped was killed. Children first began military training at the age of seven. These boys were organized into small groups and those who were the most courageous were made captains. The boys slept in dormitories on hard beds, and ate black broth and porridge. They wore the simplest clothing and spent very little time learning music or literature. Each day they were drilled in gymnastics and military exercises. These boys were taught that retreat or surrender in battle was disgraceful and dishonorable. They learned to endure pain and hardship without complaint and to obey all orders without question. The boys were allowed to steal food to satisfy th eir hunger, but if they were caught they would be whipped. This was not done to promote dishonesty, but rather to develop slyness among the boys. It is said that a Spartan boy, who had stolen a fox for his dinner, would rather allow the fox to knaw on his f...

American College Essay Assistance

American College Essay Assistance American College Essay Assistance American College Essay Assistance: Choose The One You Can Trust The number of different custom writing services is rather impressive nowadays and sometimes it is rather difficult to make a choice of American college essay assistance that you can entrust your essay writing. Of course, when you turn to some custom writing, you want to get a work that will bring you a high grade. However, far not all of the custom writing services offer qualified American college essay assistance and due to this fact the level of trust to custom writing services has a little bit decreased. Custom Writing Is Not Cheating How is it possible not to come across cheating while using this or that American college essay assistance? Well, as being a customer, you always face some part of danger to come across cheaters, as even when you come to the supermarket you can buy not fresh meat or, for example, expired milk. However, you have some definite ways to protect you from cheating. Trust Our Professionalism and Get 100% Original Custom Essay While you choose American college essay assistance, pay attention to the following details if you want to determine custom writing service you can trust. Thus, never make use of American college essay assistance offered to you for the miserable price. No one will deliver you a qualified content for the low price, as the work of writing academic pieces costs a lot. Of course, no one tells you to choose the most expensive American college essay assistance, however, make use of affordable servicing, but not cheap one. We Deliver College Essays On Time! One more thing to pay attention to is a deadline of completing your order. If American college essay assistance delivers your order in the duration of several hours, well, immediately suspicion arouses that the essay, you are going to receive will not be written from the scratch; just it will be copied/pasted from some source. Of course, plagiarized essay will never bring you a high grade that is for sure. Many of the American college essay assistants provide the guarantee of highly qualified service; some American college essay assistance does not do it. If you want to be sure that custom writing company is really a professional one, ask for the guarantees you have while being a customer. After getting a reply, you will obviously understand whether this or that American college essay assistance is worth of being used or it is better to look for some other American college essay assistance: Our American College Essay Assistance Is Affordable! While choosing custom writing company you either follow all the above-mentioned pieces of advice or make use of our custom writing service that guarantees the best assistance possible for a reasonable fee! Read also: Topics for a Research Paper Proposal Writing Services Report Writing Help AP Biology Essays Term Paper Editing

Grant Review and Evaluation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Grant Review and Evaluation - Essay Example The scrutiny is necessary because I will not entrust an unknown organization (Sargeant & Lee, 2004) with my money and I need to ensure that I am giving my money to the people who will use it for human welfare only. Frankly speaking I do not trust the organization at this point and will need proof of its effectiveness regarding the ability to serve suffering children in the future. The human value of compassion has compelled me to grant you the money (Canda, 1988) because I have to respond to the noble cause of serving unfortunate children; but I can practice compassion by granting you the least possible amount and my compassion will grow as your operations will expand and become more effective in attainment of the objectives. I am talking openly in this regard due to my sincere intentions and wishes to see your organization in a better and respectable position and I want you to give me more reason to give you more funds. To prove your claim of serving the unfortunate children, you actions and their consequences should bring forth positive results; which are as yet lacking. Furthermore, I pardon about my extremely ruthless behavior but I feel that my actions are necessary in order to make you thrive as an organization. I would like you to work hard in order to win the confidence of donors, thus paving the way for further funding. I wish you good luck in your quest for excellence in the field of humanitarian relief activities. Additionally, I request you to arrange my visit of the facility you are running so that I can evaluate your outlook and performance as it may motivate me to offer more funding in the future. Moreover, to evaluate the living conditions of the children living at your establishment, I need to interview a few children. This will enable me to get a first-hand knowledge of the conditions of the children who are being supported by your

Dissatisfaction with Working Conditions in the New York Bank Essay

Dissatisfaction with Working Conditions in the New York Bank - Essay Example It is evidently clear from the discussion that after the recession, all stakeholders of the Bank of New York expected the situation to turn around and growth to be exponential, which has not been the case. The marketing and customer care departments are responsible for retention of old customers and acquisition of new ones, respectively. These departments fall under the human resource management whose work is to find, train, employ and retain the best human resource. John Doe is the marketing manager for the New York branch of the bank of New York. He is responsible for organizing his team whose work is to attract new customers into the firm. While the customer care department has improved its services and managed to retain a high percentage of existing customers, the marketing manager has failed to organize his team to bring in new ones. At first, John was remarkably effective in disseminating his duties and organizing his team, a task he is failing these days. John has a masterâ₠¬â„¢s degree in management, a degree he acquired after working in the bank for two years. He can successfully organize the marketing team based on his high qualifications and work experience since he has worked in the bank for 4 years. In fact, before the recession, he was doing an admirable job and the bank had new customers flocking it halls resulting in high profits. When the recession hit, it affected John more than any other employee; colleagues suggest that the economic slowdown gave him time to rethink his career path. The management had observed that the marketing department employees were not achieving their set targets, and few of them even cared about it; they seemed to have lost hope in their role at the bank. As observed by all stakeholders, employees in the marketing department always have something to complain about their work, the bank, customers and many other aspects of their jobs. Results revealed that all of them are quite demotivated; they work just to pay their bills. In addition, all employees in a group that should work as a team for maximum productivity work as separate entities, significantly compromise their work due to inefficiency resulting from duplication of efforts. This duplication is because of failure in the set communication channels. The management has to do something about the affairs in the marketing department as the disorganization resulting from John’s inefficiency is jeopardizing the future of the bank. The main proposal is for the management to facilitate changes that will result to improved communication, encourage innovation, increased consultation with employees, and high but sustainable efficiency in use of resources. Little communication, or lack of it, among employees and between employees and management, has caused the situation to reach alarming levels. There should be forums where employees can let the management know about all their concerns on matters affecting them in the workplace, and management should have a way of voicing its concerns while considering employees’ welfare. Members of the group should work together to encourage bonding, ensuring that each of them feels as part of a team rather than work in isolation. Communication of employees with the management should not occur when the former are receiving absolute orders, it should include consultations before the latter makes far-reaching decisions.

Set Up and Operate a Business in Foreign Country Essay Example for Free

Set Up and Operate a Business in Foreign Country Essay This paper deals with the international business. It emphasizes on the means to start the business and the cost associated with the initiation of the business. It also describes the most important aspect of managing human resource. Because of the competitive environment, the need to do the business internationally has increased. This paper provides the overview of the two countries i. e. china and South Africa. Broad description of the legal processes that were supposed to be followed by the company to initiate business in the China has been explained. Apart from this, the staffing of local and expatriate staff along with the labor organization and legislation of the foreign country has been described. Therefore, the paper provides detailed analysis of the conditions that should be kept in mind while establishing business in the foreign country. Introduction International business is a term, which is used collectively to describe issues relating to the firm’s operations with interests in numerous countries. These firms are sometimes referred as multinational corporations. The main area of concern in the international business is the cultural considerations. These considerations include dissimilarity in law and legal systems, living standards, language barriers, climate and many more (Cherunilam, 2005). All these issues need to be overcome for an MNC in order to obtain success in an overseas venture. Nationwide economic growth and globalization of the economy provide an outstanding background for businesses in China as compared to the South Africa. Nevertheless, the growth of the company and sustainability can be hampered by the factors like industry consolidation, economic reform and globalization. The project of building substantial companies and integrating them effectively into the global marketplace is a complicated task. Reasons: Why Company Going Global Many companies and businesses get into international selling because of the existence of competitive environment. This environment compels the company to move further rather than staying at the same stage and size by just focusing on the quality. Another reason of growth and expansion is the fear of loosing the customers. If the company would not show sustainable growth, competitors would move ahead and chances of loosing of customers will increase (Cherunilam, 2005). Other general reasons for going international are: political changes like changes in the regulation of work and safety and economic changes that include cost of production. If there is an increase in the cost of production at home, company looks for places where cost of production is reasonable. The four major objectives that compel the company to go for international business are: to enlarge the sales, to successfully get hold of the resources, to diversify the sources of sales and to look for the diversifying the supplies (Kazmi, 2002). Overview Population China: China is a socialist republic and the most populous country with population over 1. 3 billion. It is having 90. 9% literacy rate (male: 95. 1% female: 86. 5%). The average educational achievement in China is low. South Africa: South Africa is a nation of diverse origins, languages, cultures and beliefs with population over 47-million. It is having 86. 4% literacy rate (male 87% female 85. 7%) of total population. The average educational achievement in South Africa is very low. Geographical Location  China: China is located in Eastern Asia bordering the East China Sea, Korea Bay, Yellow Sea and South China Sea between North Korea and Vietnam. China has mountains, high plateaus, deserts in west and plains, deltas, and hills in eastern region. The geographic coordinates of China are 35 °00N, 105 °00E. The total area coverage of China is 9,596,960 square kilometers (land area is 9,326,410 square km and water is 270,550 square km). China is the worlds third-largest country in total area after Russia and Canada, and the second largest country by land area. The total land boundary is 22,117 km and the border countries are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burma, India, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam. China’s coastline is 14,500 km (China, 2008). South Africa: South Africa is located at the southern region of Africa. The geographic coordinates of South Africa are 29 00 S, 24 00 E. The total area is 1,219,912 sq km. The total land boundary is 4,862 km and the border countries are Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Its coastline is 2,798 km. South Africa’s northwest region is desert and eastern is well watered. GDP, Per Capital Income, Current Inflation Rate, Unemployment Rate China: The GDP is $3. 42 trillion and officially recorded GDP growth rate is 11. 4% in 2007, per capital income is $ 2000, inflation rate is 7% in 2007 and it has jumped to 8. 7 percent in February after severe winter storms disrupted the economy and worsened food shortages (Chinas inflation at decade high, 2008). Unemployment rate in urban area is 8%-10% (China Unemployment rate, 2008). South Africa: The GDP is $283 billion, real GDP growth rate is 5. % in 2007, per capita income is $ 5700, inflation rate is 7. 1% and unemployment rate is 23% in Sep. 2007 (South Africa: Profile, 2008). Type of Legal System China: The legal system is based on civil law system. It is derived from Soviet and continental civil code legal principles. The legislature holds the power to interpret the acts. There are seven categories of laws in china’s legal system; these are: the constitution and related laws, civil and commercial laws, administrative laws, economic laws, social laws, criminal laws, and litigation and non-litigation procedural laws (The Constitution and Legal System, 2008). South Africa: The legal system is based on Roman-Dutch law and English common law. There is an independent judiciary in South Africa. Constitutional Court and Supreme Court are the highest court in the country. Constitutional Court deals with constitutional matters and Supreme Court deals with the final appeals of all the other matters. The bill of rights provides fundamental political and social rights to South Africas citizens (South Africa, 2008). Type of Economic System China: China is a major economic power and it has great potential of the development. Previously, the public sector was in dominant position, but after 2001, a socialistic market economy is taking place in China and the intensive mode is replacing the extensive mode of economic growth (Economic System, 2008). South Africa: The South African economy is an industrialized and productive economy. It has inadequate distribution of income wealth. Labor is divided into formal and informal sector. Formal sector is more developed, which is based on agriculture, manufacturing, services and mining. South Africa is looking forward for privatization along with free arket economy and favorable investment climate (Economy: South Africa, 2008). Type of Political System China: The National People Congress is the highest authority of state power in China. The people congress system is the fundamental political system in China. The representatives are elected by people at all levels. South Africa: The South African Republic is a federal state constituting of a national government and nine provincial governments. The constitution of South Africa was adopted in 1996 and implemented officially on 4 February, 1997. President of South Africa is the executive head of the state and leads the cabinet. He is elected for a two five year terms by the parliament (South Africa, 2008). Estimates of Future Economic Growth General Economic Projects China: China has become the world’s fastest growing economy after the economic reforms in 1979. It has achieved 11. 4% GDP growth rare in 2007. Industrial manufacturing expansion has contributed in China’s rapid economic growth. European Union, Japan, United States, Hong Kong and ASEAN are the major trading partner of China. Rapid economic growth of China results in an increase in income, which in turn makes China a huge market for a variety of goods and services. So it would be beneficial for any company to start operation in China. South Africa: In previous years, South African economy was not doing well. Government was facing the problem of unemployment and poverty. But in recent years, country is seeking to achieve stable growth rate. To promote economic growth, South Africa is making optimal use of available resources and reducing completer dependence on primary sector industries. South African companies are now investing in retail, banking services, telecommunication and shipping industry. Government is seeking to liberalize its economic policies to attract FDI and increase future economic growth and now outsider companies may think to start its operations in South Africa. Social and Cultural Factors Social factor in China: In China, the main focus of the business entities is on the corporate social responsibility. The Chinese region has become the region full of opportunities for MNC’s in these days because of the rapid rise, elaborating receptiveness and growing consumer market. The social factors reflect the true picture of society’s attitude towards the corporate. The symmetrical society structure stimulates forces on businesses for concentrating on corporate social responsibility (Kyoon, 2007). Cultural factors in China: Understanding the culture of a country is one of the important factors in front of modern organizations. The traditions and customs vary among towns, cities and provinces in China. The social network structures in China assist in understanding the information sharing between the people (Kyoon, 2007). The Chinese environment is now open for the outsiders. The cultural values include the belief in God, unity, optimism and readiness to work together according to the rules of law. Social factor in South Africa: The social environment of South Africa is highly imbalanced and not much developed. It suffers from the problems of increasing population, poverty, illiteracy and lack of resources. The population of South Africa was 40. 6 million in 1996, which is growing rapidly at the rate of 2% per year. If the same trend continues, then by the year 2035, the population of South Africa will be approximately 86 million. This will be a problematic situation as the country has limited resources to support its increasing population. There is already a pressure on the resources to meet the needs and requirements of the people (Social Environment, 1999). Many people in the country live in informal and inadequate houses and just half of the population lives in towns and cities. Many people living in rural as well as urban areas even do not have access to water supply, electricity, sanitation and other services. Nowadays, the urban population of South Africa is rapidly increasing because of factors like growing employment opportunities, land reform and restitution and immigration from other countries. Unemployment and poverty are the major problems in South Africa that affect the social life of the people. The poverty level is the highest among the Black population of South Africa. It has reached up to a level of 60%. The education level of the country has increased as compared to the previous year levels, as the country has reformed its educational system. Almost, all South Africans now have access to education but still about 7. 5 million people are functionally illiterate. Such factors contribute to high crime rates in the country that have noticeably increased in the urban areas. These and other factors contribute to the high crime rates currently experienced in many urban centers. To promote sustainable development and reduce social imbalances such as poverty, unemployment and pressure on natural resources, the Government has developed a number of policies and passed a number of laws aiming at some constructive work in this direction. These include the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a White Paper on Population Policy, and the National Crime Prevention Strategy (Social Environment, 1999). Cultural Factor in South Africa: Africa has a diverse cultural environment with about 800 languages spoken all over the continent. Among these, South Africa have 11 official languages of its own, i. e. English, Afrikaans, Tsonga, Xhosa, Ndebele, Southern Sotho, Zulu, Tswana, Venda, Northern Sotho, and Swati. There are many cross-cultural challenges that are critical to success and organizations should be prepared to face these challenges. Analysis  The company has chosen china for its operations as china has successfully emerged as the best suitable market for the consumer products, especially in terms of the growth rate, potential and the market size. China is providing huge benefits to attract the players from the United States. The growth graph of the china depicts that the market of the consumer electronics is growing with a CAGR of 11. 7 percent from the year 2002 to 2006. Future also shows the greater intensity of market growth. There is a greater possibility of bright future in Consumer Products. The Company is willing to start its operation. Another major factor for establishing operation in china is the population as it is regarded the driving factor for any business. Apart from this, there is a well established market of credit card, which has increased the popularity of the consumer products in the country (Windsor Jones, 1999). China is the highly populous country and demands for consumer products are fuelling with greater pace. In china, urban centers are emerging which are called secondary cities, which comprise of 8 to 10 million people. These cities have huge buying power and industrial development. These cities would be best for the company’s operations and are located interiorly away from the cost. Tsingtao is a city, which is suitable for the operation of the company because its urban area is quickly expanding. It is also having excellent connections with the countryside. The disposable income of the people is quite similar to the people in the bigger cities. Another reason for selecting this place is that the people in this city show greater likeability towards the product of the United States and relate the product with greater degree of integrity. People show positive view and experience towards the U. S consumer products. Operations In order to establish operation in china, company’s chairperson should visit these cities, must talk to the local officials and begin networking. Apart from this, the most important thing is to analyze the competitors’ working and strategies. Another step that the company can adopt is subcontracting, which can be done by forming joint ventures with the manufacturers of china. If the company doesn’t possess enough resources for joint venture, company can go for forming the partnership or consortium in the United States. This consortium acts as the legal entity, which can form partnership with the Chinese manufacturer. The advantage of the consortium is that it reduces risk and the cost for the company (Barron, 2006). While selecting the operations, evaluation should be made based on the analysis of cash accounting and not on absorption accounting. As in absorption accounting, the fixed costs are prorated over small volume of production and thus the number obtained can deter company from moving production to a subcontractor. The other operations include: integrity of product and trade safety, fair balanced economic development, financial sector reform, security energy efficiency, sustainability in environment and bilateral investment. All the above mentioned reforms would help the company to establish business opportunities in china. The agreement between the United States and China that relates to conduction of business with extensive cooperation covers the issue of climate change, environmental sustainability and energy security. This type of agreement would advance the innovation in the technology and the acceptance of extremely-efficient and clean energy technology will encourage the development of technology so as to address the changes in the climate and promoting natural resources. Three major factors, which can determine the success in the Chinese market and should be kept in mind, are: †¢Culture: Understanding of Chinese culture and behavior can provide better option to fulfill the demands of the customers. †¢Value Proposition: This includes having the knowledge of technical know how and understanding the level of competitiveness. †¢Negotiation: The Company should implement negotiation technique as per the way of Chinese. Success of doing business in China depends greatly on the extent of adoption to the requirements of he local customs instead of the value proposition of foreign investors. Legal processes In the process of starting a new business, Legal and regulatory processes play a very vital role. Legal processes include several restrictions, intrusive bureaucracy, dissimilar understanding of regulations from place to place even between authorities and recent formulations of policies that are aimed at safeguarding the domestic companies. Therefore, before starting any operation in the foreign country (china) the company should understand regulations and their applications before entering into any agreement. The company should look for legal proposals from experienced professional firms. Due attention should be given to the financial and legal background and also on the reputation of key partners. Apart from this, partners and employees should be educated on the protection of the intellectual property. If required, the rights can be enforced but for this, all the terms and conditions should be well known. Management Organization Structure Organization structure plays a vital role in determining the success of the company in the host country. Therefore, there is a requirement of change in the organization structure in order to accommodate a firm’s internationalization approach in answer to the worldwide competition. Significant research has shown that the structure of the firm must be conducive to the strategy implementation. In simple words, it can be said that the structure should â€Å"fit† the strategy. Managers should work towards achieving the fit between the structure and the strategy (Gupta, 2007). Management organizational structure refers to the representation of a formal structure, which describes relationship inside an organization. The level to which authorization is assigned ascertains centralization and decentralization. Most of the MNC’s in their initial phases of globalization utilized an international section traversing certain regions of the world to manage the functions in those regions. Matrix organizational structure is very effective for the business. The structure of the organization is decentralized, which merge the advantages of being large with the agility and concentration of smaller organizations. The small segments of the business assist in concentrating more on the needs and equirements of the customers and employees effectively. The company’s employees are associated with the goals and objectives for an established global enterprise. The organization is mainly focusing on the way in which the products and services are delivered to the customers. The development and marketing of products and services in an effective provision provide specialized and quality services to external and internal customers. The autonomous operating companies broaden the geographic reach of the associates around the world and provide larger marketplace and product focus. This way, the employees get closer to the customers and business. The employees would be able to gain more sensation of ownership in driving the business. The employees are authorized to aim their business to fulfill the varying needs of customers inside their regions (Mathew, 2003). The decentralized operating companies, associates and business sections are joined in the organization structure, which ensures that the activities are aligned with the overall strategic objectives. All the employees perform their work systematically with the high ethical standards. As the company rises, the structure also develops, assuring the effective growth of the business portfolio. In recent years, the business sections have constituted shared service groups that raise and confirm the capabilities of the individual companies in the elementary domains of responsibility. The corporate headquarters in the U. S. function with the family of companies for producing great synergism and efficiency by collaboration, dispersion of better patterns and organization of shared business information. The corporate headquarters render direction and services in different critical areas, which include human resources, finance, advertising, and law. The consequences of environmental circumstance (instability of technology), industrial circumstance (production technology) and organization structure on the involvement of customer in product development are the main areas of concentration in China (Windsor Jones, 1999). The earlier results demonstrate that for going through customer orientation in the firms at China, the company has to modulate towards market driven economic entities.