The author made some valid arguments for home schooling, he also mentioned objections regarding the lack of socialising-skills learnt in home-schools. In the business-sector however, employers look at both. They would rather hire a person with an average academic performance and good social skills, than an excellent academic performance and none whatsoever. The same applies to team-working abilities that are learned in a public environment.
- 18/06/2002
- 10:38:04
- Score: 4 out of 6 people found this comment useful.
I read quite a lot on this for a course in Management Information Systems. Particularly in the area of conflicts between technical staff and management, I believe differences arise between left brain and right brain thinking. In the left side of the brain we think more logical, rational and analytical, while in the right side we think more intuitive and synthetical. A lot of companies use steering committees combining both types of staff to diffuse creativity with logical thinking and find a common strategy. I wish I read this essay before I did the exam :)
- 13/06/2002
- 17:28:27
- Score: 11 out of 17 people found this comment useful.
in my opinion, Putin played it very smart to cooperate with the USA. They have an excess in oil supply and need the oil-pipes to run through their country and not Iran. (The Economist) The US needs to decrease its dependancy on the Middle-east for oil, so it benefits them both (my own theory). The whole anti-missile thing is a cover for an increased role of the government (own theory)! Every republican president needs a war to become popular, as is clear with Bush jr. It is very doubtable that the programm will actually work, but it results in the people feeling safer, and the cooperation with Russia. However it should be noted that Russia was also participating in the International Space Station, in which they failed to meet deadlines, and increased the burden on NASA and the European Space Agency (New Scientist).
- 11/06/2002
- 09:01:57
- Score: 7 out of 10 people found this comment useful.
They show insight and interest in the subjects. However they have to be backed up by proof, like other literature or somebodies theory, etc...It is true that you should never write "I think" or anything containing the first person, but you can write "it can be argued" or "as the research showed", etc... For the rest the essay was short, but decent :)
- 07/06/2002
- 21:04:15
- Score: 25 out of 27 people found this comment useful.
Actually in a report recently released in the UK, there is every reason to believe that life-span will increase indefinitely. The benefits of pharmaceutical research (started in the US in the 60s) is finally starting to pay off, it seems. Make way for GM-Humans! For anyone interested in the paper, it is in Science-journal June 2002.
- 04/06/2002
- 08:39:55
- Score: 5 out of 6 people found this comment useful.
I particularly liked the part about Microsoft, but thought that you should have integrated the other examples more, instead of splitting them up and risking repetition of argument. Furthermore any essay of this word-length and clearly at a post-highschool level needs references, I'm sorry. At my institution (university) I would lose about 20% just for that!
- 04/06/2002
- 08:32:27
- Score: 8 out of 9 people found this comment useful.
I have to say that I felt fairly similar to the author, when I was a kid. My parents were big-time chain-smokers when I was small, and my sister soon joined them, just to give it a try. I find that while smokers do have dubious motives for starting to smoke, what clearly keeps them smoking is 1. an addiction and 2. the great feeling of it 3. boredom and 4. the lack of an alternative. People have been taking in nicotine for thousands of years, but they did it by chewing leaves (or something) which is not harmfull (!), perhaps nicotine-gum is the best way to go?
- 03/06/2002
- 13:52:11
- Score: 7 out of 8 people found this comment useful.
Here's my 2 cents...At the moment 80% of world trade is located around three trade-zones: NAFTA, EU, and ASEAN (International Business - Hill 2000). The reason for this is that trade-zones have a less fluctuating exchange-rate, so the author is right about the EU benefitting world-trade. Equally, about 11% of trade is in S-America and less than 1% in Africa. At the same time, there is some concern about the EURO raising prices (Economist May 2002). Particularly shops in some German provinces actually just swapped the DM-sign for the EURO-sign, doubling the price! Clearly the process is not well regulated, though in Holland some laws prevented such blunders!
- 03/06/2002
- 13:29:07
- Score: 5 out of 5 people found this comment useful.
There is an economic theory that explains this behaviour partially, called "game theory". People act in accordance of a group, in the fear of punishment (see www.gametheory.net).Equally some bigger companies donate money, in public of course, for the simple reason of advertisement. That is actually a type of marketing that I approve of :)
- 03/06/2002
- 13:18:57
- Score: 4 out of 5 people found this comment useful.
Theoretically you would have no access to the harmfull stuff. In reality there are many sources as has been proven in the case of drugs. You would walk to a local dealer to buy cigarettes at inflated prices, oo which the government would receive taxes, and maybe your dealer would throw a line like: "Hey I got some coke, you want some?" The point is illegalising drugs causes gateway-drugs, legal drugs can be controlled! While I realise that this is no solution to smoking-related diseases and death, I believe that alternatives should be found that do not cause harm to others instead.
- 27/05/2002
- 18:34:10
- Score: 3 out of 5 people found this comment useful.
There is quite a good atricle about this in the economist,unfortunately I only have the printed edition so I can't provide a link. But basically French Michelin is ignoring shareholder-rights in Poland and skimming money of a Polish company in which it owns 66%. There is some more about stakeholder and French government consent. Unfortunately I can't remember it all but after somechecking,I can say that some of the biggest scandals concerning stakeholders vs shareholders are in Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania), apart from Enron of course. Again much info on the net! Furthermore I agree with the last comment, the author should post references in a comment, though it's a good essay!
- 26/05/2002
- 16:50:10
- Score: 7 out of 7 people found this comment useful.
Agreed that Nurture greatly influences behaviour, though some scientists might say that Biology is a reason for nurture taking place. But the question is how far do we want to take this nurture-thing anyway. For decades now people have been undergoing cosmetic surgery to boost their confidentiality, and loose that which is natural to them. It is the human desire to overcome the natural process of selection. Now with gentetics, where the future looks like we can influence humans in the embryonic stage to become perfect, there are great fears that humanity will loose it's strength in its hetergeneousity, and we are moving towards a homogeneous society. And is there any way of stopping this? Some say "No" since nobody wants to be left behind. Even laws imposed by the US government to illegalise "certain" stem-cell and cloning research can be avoided by travelling to countries like China that could potentially be very interested in this technology. Will this create a gap between those that can afford the technology/treatment, and those that can not? Definitely yes! And for that there is no solution as yet! Not only GM-foods, but GM-humans the future will bring!
- 25/05/2002
- 08:23:39
- Score: 14 out of 14 people found this comment useful.
An article in the economist was discussing this recently. In the UK, cigarettes cost £ 4.20 for 20, that's $ 6 in the US and three times as much as a pack in the EU. The reason is that smokers are paying for their treatment. Ironically, non-smokers are much more expensive for the government to maintain, due to their longer life-span, and it more than likely that smokers are actually indirectly paying for the non-smokers' pensions.There are many reasons to not outlaw the use of cigarettes. The main one is that it creates a black-market, and hence can make it a gateway-drug. Interestingly after the Dutch government (sort-of) legalised Marihuana (they ignore the use of it, but it's not legal) it seized becomming a gateway drug, and the % of addicts to heroin or other hard drugs is one of the lowest in the world.The best thing to prevent people from smoking would be to introduce the use of alternatives to "death-sticks" as they are called sometimes. In other words, a non-killing cigarette.
- 23/05/2002
- 08:28:51
- Score: 7 out of 7 people found this comment useful.
When the author mentioned "less distracing" it made me think of an article I read defending single-sex schools. The argument was that such schools would offer less distractions and since both sexes have different ways of learning would actually increase their level of learning by specialising on them. The British government is seriously considering to increase the nr of such schools for the above reasons. Me being a guy don't mind low-cut dresses, it is a girls choice to wear them after all. And couldn't the school just provide lab-coats to prevent accidents, something they would have to do anyway even if the student was in uniform?
- 22/05/2002
- 06:53:02
- Score: 8 out of 8 people found this comment useful.
Compliments to the author. (S)He covered it pretty much. Cultural differences, Differences in Coporate Governance, International Trade and history. Additional in-depth research can be done in Toyotism and TQM, the reasons for the current crisis, and context and cultures (high context vs low cultures, monochronic vs polychronic cultures, Hofstede's Power Distance, Masculinity/Femininity, Indiviudalistic vs collectivistic cultures indexes) all found on the web! And yes, references would have been appreciated!
- 20/05/2002
- 03:18:50
- Score: 6 out of 7 people found this comment useful.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the essay, it was well-written and presented. But it was biased towards favouring American policy, and that religion and nationalist countries are the cause of anti-globalist movements. How do you define anti-globalist movements? Tarrifs and trade-barrier, as correctly mentioned in the essay. But the true anti-globaliser recently seems to be the USA herself! Steel-tarrifs, farm-subsidies, all these give inefficient industries an unfair advantage, rather than letting other countries, that could provide the service much better. There is a lot of sceptism towards globalisation in third world and US's recent moves might lead those countries to put up trade-barriers as well, and it is a step back! Furthermore, the Islam-religion states "accept all people of all religion and live in peace." Terrorism has recently been provoked by 1. the US putting a military base down in Saudi-Arabia without the consent of the people, and 2. Israel enslaving the Palestinian people, as they have done for the last 20 years or so, but this has been ignored by the western world. In addition when the author writes: The level of such struggle is highly present in all countries worldwide (except the States), I think there is a fair amount of examples that state the opposite. Take Bush's last election-fiasco for example.
- 19/05/2002
- 09:24:16
- Score: 10 out of 13 people found this comment useful.
This is referring to the rice-cooker. China is a country that rates very highly on Hofstede's collectivist country list. That means that decisions are based on group opinion. The risk of introducing innovative products is that group-opinion might lead to a negative response. Taking the rice-cooker as an example, the Chinese rice-cooker has been in existence for 20-30 years. Group-opinion may well be, if the shoe already fits, why buy a new one. This information is derived from a study comparing Australian customers to Chinese. A chinese proverb says: "the bird that flies higher than the rest will get shot first." For the rest it's not a bad essay. The author left out the part that contracts are not very respected in China, and most business-negotiations are based on guanxi-style networking. Trust, hierarchy, ingroup, retourning favours, most mentioned in the essay, is called Guanxi or Guanxi-Wang (Guanxi-network).
- 19/05/2002
- 09:06:22
- Score: 9 out of 9 people found this comment useful.
New Scientist recently published an article in its series on globalisation. It gave some interesting examples how innovation was affecting rural life in India. India is a country separated by it's caste system. This has lead a lot of innovation programs and funding to be misallocated. The rich get the money and don't want to share. Essantially, just introducing a few computers and the internet to a local fishing village, had the effect of providing navigational advice, etc to aid their main economy. Since it was so successful they introduced this to several other villages and formed networks. Since a lot of them don't speak english, they adopted a querty-keyboard to their local hindi, enabling them to communicate. This is innovation on a small scale, but shows the potential that lies within the indian people. see more at wwww.newscientist.com
- 18/05/2002
- 08:54:37
- Score: 6 out of 8 people found this comment useful.
Right, here are some terms to what the author was referring to:Business Process Engineering (BRP) referes to computerising all functions as integrating them to one. It was introduced in the 70s. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an evolution of BRP, introduced in the 90s. It is essentially the same but better, more flexible and centralised. Lean Manufacturing was an adaptation of ERP, based on the Japanese Total Quality Management (TQM) and Toyotism phillosophy. It enabled to minimise waste in the supply chain and minimise inventory/stock. The final chapter in the "Management Information System (MIS)" Saga is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It was introduced 1999/2000 and is a response to globalisation and the Net, enabling a better communication between sites in different countries, segementation etc. Basically every company has an ERP system locally and CRM connects them all together. The Internet made this happen, and the software is also used for online-sales, Customer Service, etc. Important to note is that the failure rate with these standardised packages is quite high and requires support from top-management, good planning and training of the users. Every big company has a system like this in place right now, however the effects vary from industry to industry and can lead to a more efficient structure in the company (i.e. faster information, downsizing of depatrments). Hmm, maybe I should just right an essay on this? Lata :-P
- 17/05/2002
- 16:14:08
- Score: 5 out of 6 people found this comment useful.
Being a student of marketing, I am naturally sceptical of advertising and the messages they contain. The author makes a point of tv being better than tv, but there are more people who change the channel during a tv advertisement than on the radio! There is also the question of information-overload as well as invasion of privacy! This is a debated issue especially with SMS and email advertising! Another question that could be asked is how ethical is it to advertise to under-12 year olds? The point of this post was not to criticise, but to question and inspire anyone writing an essay on the subject.
- 17/05/2002
- 15:51:40
- Score: 4 out of 7 people found this comment useful.
This is for people who want to do a topic on Management Information Systems failure, It is also a suitable anecdote to an NHS essay. Basically in 1992, the British government tried to automise the emergency call --> ambulance dispatch system. The emergency stations actually received over a million calls a day, and everything was done by paper, phone and radio. So the government decided to introduce a system that cost £ 1.5 million, and would take 6 months. The whole thing was aborted after 36 hours! A programmer had left a piece of code in one a program, which lead to a complete system crash. As a result ambulance were taking over 11 hours to reach an emergency site (it was 40 min. before) and in total it is estimated that 20 people died. This is one of the most well-documented cases of MIS failure in history and will shock you to bits when reading old articles (available on the web!) about it!
- 15/05/2002
- 14:11:06
- Score: 9 out of 11 people found this comment useful.
Look at nature, there is no such thing as a set partner. Arranged marriages were another way of humans intervening in nature, trying to controll it. The increasingly heterogeneous society, obviously made people realise that they have a choice, both women and men! But that's just phillosophising, there are just as many reasons speaking for long-term relationships as there are against.
- 14/05/2002
- 12:32:41
- Score: 10 out of 10 people found this comment useful.
WHat is this a McDonalds commercial? Yes it's all true, but maybe McDo's recent troubles in France should be mentioned. McDonalds is basically a brand that does well in Anglo-Saxon countries, but has some problems in extremely nationalised countries like France for example. In any essays, bringing several perspectives on an issue can give you a better mark (it shows research and objectivity). In addition there should have been more marketing theory involved, as well competitors?
- 14/05/2002
- 12:26:38
- Score: 5 out of 6 people found this comment useful.
A good description, however it makes me wonder if maybe all people have the "disease" to some extent. I mean what are dreams and day-dreams, if not halluciantions. And what person does not at times need to withdraw from society, to maybe get some perspective. I know I do! As a matter of fact when I do go through to these periods, I do hear voices (which are just my thoughts), and when I'm in a social environment, I hear my thoughts but at a lower level. So, does that mean that I want to take anti-psychotic drugs? Not really, because it defines my personality and also my creativity! So diagnose this Freud!
- 13/05/2002
- 17:32:50
- Score: 9 out of 10 people found this comment useful.
I agree with the author, cloning could make a significant improvement to all our lives. But at the same time there is some validity to those opposed! Cloning is not as yet a stable science and should be treated with caution. For example Dolly the sheep is ageing much fast then normal. At the same time, significant improvements are being made in other areas of research such as artificial livers for example, where scientists have just discovered how to replicate the system of veins or arteries moving through the liver. However there are still problems with antibody-rejection. So the lesson is, that there are no easy solutions. Yes, research should continue in cloning, but do not forget that alternative solutions exist and can possibly be safer.
- 09/05/2002
- 12:11:46
- Score: 12 out of 12 people found this comment useful.
Well basically it is a good essay, it does portray some of the key-issues regarding organisational change. However, the use of references was limited, the case described was referring to an experience by the author and something readers may not be able to identify with (or use to cheat in that respect). It should be stressed that some form of theoretical content should be reflected in any essay on this site, or broad examples. The reason is that partial or whole contents of these essays can then be used in other essays (by the cheaters). Unfortunately the latter was not the case here, although (as was mentioned) good key-issues were mentioned.
- 08/05/2002
- 12:02:45
- Score: 3 out of 5 people found this comment useful.
The author is definitely only describing the army with a positive undertone. No negative aspects of the so-called "warrior-mentality"? he also only uses 2 references and no current events to enforce his argument (Afghanistan, Gulf-War, Kosovo, Vietnam, Korea?). Not an objective essay, sorry!
- 06/05/2002
- 17:19:36
- Score: 6 out of 7 people found this comment useful.
Where is all this stuff comming from? Did the author of this essay live in some cave all his life?The distance between earth and the moon is 240,625 miles and not "ninety-four million miles" as the author claims. And it is generally believed that the effects of passing through the Van Halen belt would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill (statistically it could affect 1 in a 1000). I do think that this was a well researched piece of fantasy! I enjoyed reading it and give it a grade A for imagination ;)
- 28/04/2002
- 20:43:32
- Score: 9 out of 10 people found this comment useful.
"Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.""There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.""America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white - but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color."read more at:http://www.arches.uga.edu/~godlas/malcomx.html
- 28/04/2002
- 20:12:53
- Score: 9 out of 9 people found this comment useful.
May I point out that:1. There is as yet NO definite proof that that Osama Bin Laden is guilty of the September 11 bombings.2. The rest of the world is NOT at war with Osama Bin Laden.3. Pakistan is a dictator-state and, since it's support of the US's military activities, has and will continue to receive economic aid and an ease of the national debt, making Pakistan's "unbiased" opinion less than credible.4. It was the establishment of an US military base in Saudi Arabia, after the gulf war, that have PARTIALLY contributed to O.B.L.'s and others' fanatic anti-Americanism.The question is who should be on trial here, Osama Bin Laden or American foreign policy? While I sincerely disaprove of the WTC bombings, I think that making somebody the "Anti-Christ" is not exactly the solution to the problem, but could lead to further fanaticism.I have rated this essay as good for it's controversial content. Please feel free to add to my list, or criticise!
- 27/04/2002
- 20:00:12
- Score: 6 out of 6 people found this comment useful.
I saw the magnificent seven a long time on me and consider it a classic. In my experience the original is usually better than the remake so I really want to see the seven samurai. I basically agree with nickel dog. This feels incomplete, what's really missing is a conclusion to top it all of. It is a good review though.
- 19/04/2002
- 23:19:49
- Score: 5 out of 6 people found this comment useful.
This was one of the first times I read about the subject and it shows the continuously growing rift between developed and lesser-developed regions on our planet. It looks like the big brother nations will soon know if your crossing a red light or are being a good boy/girl.
- 19/04/2002
- 09:44:08
- Score: 4 out of 4 people found this comment useful.
I am currently in the process of writing an essay on "comparing Chinese Guanxi (interpersonal relationships) with Western Network in Marketing" and found this essa to be an excellent source of information!
- 18/04/2002
- 14:58:52
- Score: 5 out of 7 people found this comment useful.
I thought the author had a refreshing perspective on the movie and explained it well. As to renewal of ancient myths, 2001 gave me the idea that space was big, quiet and boring. Since I don't know what the going myth was before the movie, I cannot comment on the impact of 2001, although I have heard that a lot of people were impressed with it. Kubrick was an excellent photographer, who used stunning visual effects in his movies to underline simple story-lines. Please feel free to criticise me on my point of view, I'm sure it's not perfect!
- 18/04/2002
- 12:10:30
- Score: 9 out of 10 people found this comment useful.