World Religion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

World Religion - Essay Example Even the smallest of objects and ideas in a practice holds some sort of symbol for that practice. Colors, scents, figures, even deities, have a significance to the need of that individual during that time. Religions were defined as being "a system of symbols [...] (Geertz)." To make the practices more realistic - and in some New Age paths, more efficient and beneficial - symbolism is used. Paganism is a New Age belief system that has a rather huge emphasis on the use of magic in their practices. Their very act of communing with Nature and divinity is considered magic; unfortunately, it is their type of magic that has given them a bad name within organized religions. The magic of pagans involves making use of symbols, chanting, reciting, or singing their aspirations, and building up energy to release into the universe in hopes of achieving what they hope to. In a religion such as Catholicism, the magic can be seen in their prayers and their taking of communion. In a sense, in regards to a Catholic praying, it is the same as a pagan performing a ritual - specific words and symbols are used to achieve one thing, and all of that is released to the divine to allow it to manifest and become something. When taking communion, the practitioner is drawing themselves closer to the divine, as the wine and wafers of the communion symbolize the divine itself. That is the similarity between the two religions - turning thoughts and hopes into something, regardless of what it is called, magic or prayer. Symbolism is an important part of both of them, as it helps to focus the intentions of the individual. No matter what each religion decides to call it, many of the acts can be seen as magic, as they are playing with a force that is outside their full understanding, hoping to get close to the divine and change their lives

Potential oppotunities n challenges wat doesthe company view as Essay

Potential oppotunities n challenges wat doesthe company view as opportunties and minimize challenges - Essay Example The fast changing environment of technology has necessitated the Hewlett Packard to meet the challenges of emerging new technology in mobile. While HP has been a leader in the computer technology and related areas, it needed to be creative in its diversification and introduce new gadgets to compete with its rivals like Apple Inc, IBM, Sony and Nokia. Palm provided HP with the opportunity to gain a competitive edge against its rivals. The three major opportunities that Palm gained through its merger with HP can be described as below: Brand creation is a major marketing technique that has massive support within and outside the business community and management strategy. ‘Brand building is needed because products are the same’ (Kotler, 2005). The brand name ensures that the product maintains a high standard of excellence at a price that a customer is willing to pay for. Therefore, the brand provides the customer with a quality product which satisfies his needs, making it as one of the key reasons that brands still enjoy the popularity amongst its customers and at the same time, attract fresh clientele. HP is an established international brand and a leader in business computing. Palm is handheld computing device with multiple functions. It is an extremely useful device for executives who are constantly on move and who are looking for gizmos which are small enough to hold in their pockets but powerful enough to be used as computer, or phone or even as an entertainment device, as and when the need arises. Globalization has changed the dynamic of the business and today the professionals need to have all the information at their tip while following a hectic schedule. So the smaller the device which can pack such features, better are its chances of capturing this target group. Hence, Palm’s association with HP would greatly enhance its brand value. Financial considerations are strong motivating factors that promote strategic

The Intensification of International Migration Essay Example for Free

The Intensification of International Migration Essay 1. INTRODUCTION Migrant flows are always from the poorest countries with a low probability of employment towards less poor and more dynamic countries where there is an opportunity to find some sort of job. Over the last few years international migration has intensified, with the media referring to the â€Å"regionalisation and globalisation† of migration. The major centers of attraction are the same: United States and the European Union, with countries in southern Europe gradually becoming immigrant receiving countries. The third major region that attracts migrants is the oil-rich Middle East. The fourth major region set to be the target for increasing numbers is Asia/Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. What are the effects of migration on the countries of origin? Funds sent by migrant to families back home often play a considerable part in the development of the local economy. However, when highly qualified people leave their home country, the investment made by the developing countries in their higher education is lost. To remedy this, programmes have to be set up to encourage immigrants to return, so that they can contribute to the economic development of their home country. The political environment in some African countries must be conflict free for African professionals overseas to return home. Africa is certainly experiencing a debilitating flight of professionals and skilled people escaping their countries’ economic crisis. The level and trend of brain drain has reached unsustainable heights. In the last few years, the brain drain has escalated in magnitude to levels that have serious implications on economic growth in countries like Zimbabwe. Why have African intellectuals and professionals left or thinking seriously of leaving their countries? Previous studies have discovered extremely high levels of dissatisfaction with the cost of living, taxation, availability of goods, and salaries. The number of poor living below the poverty datum line has surged progressively in the last few years because of economic crisis and spiraling inflation. The situation has been exacerbated by declining  real savings compounded by high levels of taxation and rising unemployment levels. The decline in real gross domestic product(GDP), is reflective of failure to attract foreign direct investment(FDI) and increased external debt due to chronic foreign currency shortages to procure raw materials, fuel, electricity and spare parts, against a background of rising production and labour costs due to high inflation have led to declining savings. The contraction in the formal sector, owing to companies’ downsizing, reducing working periods and closure, have led to significant fall in employment levels. Growing lawlessness and politically-motivated violence are some of the push factors for many intellectuals and professionals. The dissatisfaction goes deeper than economic and political circumstances to include housing, medical services, education, education and a viable future for children. Against this background, many skilled persons and professionals have migrated to other countries and the potential for emigrating among African university students and other is most probably very high. There is therefore need to enact policies in Africa to curb these massive brain drain and offer incentives to make staying and working in African countries attractive for professionals and skilled people. The broad objective of this paper is to highlight African brain drain, its causes and consequences. Brain drain is seen in this paper as a complex problem created by both endogenous and exogenous factors, which prey on the disparity between technologically developed and industrialized world, and the poor developing countries. The structure of the papers is as follows; Section I gives a general Introduction to the problem of Brain drain. Section 2 attempts briefly to conceptualize and categorize international migration and the possible causes of international migration. Section 3 gives a detailed analysis of Causes for African Brain Drain. Section 4 attempts to show the Impact and Consequences of African Brain Drain, giving Zimbabwe as an example. Section 5 Conclusion and Future Prospects and Policy Options. . 2. THE CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Some theories of international migration: There is no single, well-developed theory of international migration. Among the various models attempting to explain why international migration begins, five major approaches can be discerned: These were offered by Sharon Stanton Russell 2. Neoclassical economics: macro theory (arguably the body of theory most familiar to World Bank staff) views geographic differences in the supply and demand for labor in origin and destination countries as the major factors driving individual migration decisions. Among the assumptions of this model are that international migration will not occur in the absence of these differentials, that their elimination will bring an end to international movements, and that labor markets (not other markets) are the primary mechanisms inducing movements. Government policy interventions affect migration by regulating or influencing labor markets in origin and destination countries. Neoclassical economics: micro theory focuses on the level of individual rational actors who make decisions to migrate based upon a cost-benefit calculation that indicates a positive net return to movement. In this approach, human capital characteristics that raise the potential benefits of migration, and individual, social, or technological factors that lower costs, will lead to increased migration. Differences in earnings and employment rates are key variables, and governments influence migration through policies that affect these (e.g., through development policies that   raise incomes at the point of origin, decrease the probability of employment at destination, or increase the costs of migration). The new economics of migration views migration as a family (i.e., group) strategy to diversify sources of income, minimize risks to the household, and overcome barriers to credit and capital. In this model, international migration is a means to compensate for the absence or failure of certain  types of markets in developing countries, for example crop insurance markets, futures markets, unemployment insurance, or capital markets. Dual labour market theory holds that demand for low-level workers in more developed economies is the critical factor shaping international migration. To avoid the structural inflation that would result from raising entry wages of native workers, and to maintain labor as a variable factor of production, employers seek low-wage migrant workers. In this model, international migration is demand – based and initiated by recruitment policies of employers or governments in destination areas. World systems theory focuses not on labour markets in national economies, but on the structure of the world market-notably the â€Å"penetration of capitalist economic relations into peripheral, non-capitalist societies, â€Å"which takes place through the concerted actions of neocolonial governments, multinational firms, and national elites. International migration is generated as land, raw materials and labour in areas of origin are drawn into the world market economy and traditional systems are disrupted. 3. CAUSES OF AFRICAN BRAIN DRAIN. In the 1960s most of the African countries became independent, with the former Portuguese territories in 1975. In 1995, the last colony in Africa – South Africa – achieved majority rule. With accession to independence there was a marked change in the pace of migration. The first development plans and those subsequently adopted, accentuated existing disparities between urban areas which enjoyed the benefit of investment and rural areas. In some countries the most elementary freedoms were denied, giving rise to mass exodus of people unprecedented in the history of Africa. The gap between the economic and social development of different regions within countries and of different countries inside and outside Africa, has continued to widen over the years. Brain drain is a migration of professional people(as scientists, professors, or physicians) from one country to another, usually for higher salaries or  better living conditions. Despite the clarity of this definition, most efforts to halt the brain drain or reverse the process, especially in African countries, seem to pay little attention to economic and social imperative to brain drain, and instead, centre on appeals to the spirit of nationalism and patriotism. In extreme cases, some governments threaten to hire foreign professionals as replacement labour for those who left-a more complicated and costly option. Political Turmoil: Political turmoil is linked to the failure of economic development. As pressures of poverty, rapid population growth, disease and illiteracy and environmental degradation mount, they produce a volatile cocktail of insecurity. Resulting war, civil strife, state – sponsored terrorism, riots and other forms of political violence can lead to the displacement of large numbers of people as migrants, refugees, or asylees. In the late twentieth century, compared to previous centuries, more wars are taking place, and they are lasting longer and causing more devastation. According to Papademetriou both internal and regional conflicts, often based on religion and ethnicity, are precipitating unprecedented high levels of international migration. Economic and Political factors: The economic and political factors associated with international migration that have so far been discussed so far forces on the lack of economic development and political stability in many Third World countries. They are the major push factors in migration. The push factors are circumstances in the home environment that make a person think about leaving his normal place of abode for another part of the same country, neighbouring countries, or for a more distant place like the United Kingdom of the United States. Pull Factors i.e. those that draw people to particular destinations, are equally important. The post – World War II expansion of the industrial economies of Western Europe and North America (especially the United States) has led to immigration policies in these countries designed to meet a  burgeoning demand for cheap labour. Globalization has made possible a massive transfer of resources like technology and capital; labour has become another form of large-scale resource transfer; Although more than half of recent international migration flows are between developing countries, the flow from the Third World to industrial nations has grown to unprecedented levels. That developed countries are a magnet for the world’s migrant is evident from statistics. In 1990, half of the world’s migrants (excluding those naturalized, which would increase even more than the number in developed countries) were in industrial countries: 15-20 million were in Western Europe, 15-20 million were in North America, and 2-3 million were in the industrial nations of Asia (e.g. Japan, Taiwan).7 This globalization phenomenon has not escaped the attention  of Deepak Nayyar, who observes that: the process of globalization is bound to exercise a significant influence on the push-factors underlying international migration. It would decrease emigration pressures if it leads to a convergence of levels of income between the industrialized countries and the developing countries. But it would increase emigration pressures if it leads to a divergence in levels of income between the industrialized countries and the developing countries. Similarly, it would decrease emigration pressures if it leads to a reduction in poverty, an expansion of employment opportunities and an improvement in the quality of life for the people in developing countries. But it would increase emigration pressures if it leads to rising poverty, growing inequality, worsening employment prospects and deterioration in the quality of life of people in development countries.8 In summary it should be realized that the globalization of economies, lack of development and political stability in Third World countries, and immigration policies that reflect the need for labour in the receiving industrialized countries have thus far been proposed as the major factors explaining international migration from the Third World to the developed countries e.g. USA, UK., etc. But these alone do not adequately explain why certain countries or individuals, not others, dominate migration flows nor do they explain the particular destination choice of migrants. As earlier discussed, economic globalization, lack of development and political instability, industrial nations’ immigration policies, and linguistic and  historical ties are major factors that account for Third World immigration to developed countries in general. The same factors enable us to understand African immigration to Europe and the United States of America. Sub-Saharan Africa, like most other developing regions, has been integrated into the global economy primarily as a source of cheap primary goods and cheap labour. Initially, African labour was exploited within colonial boundaries but after World War II African labour was often actively recruited by ex-colonial European powers as competition for more expensive European labour. For example, France gave its former African colonies favoured nation status and formed agreements with such African states as Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali to promote labour migration. By 1960, about 20 000 Sub-Saharan Africans were in France; 12 000 in the late 80s. The British were less hospitable to immigrants from their former African colonies. Beginning in 1962, Africans in England were denied full social and political rights. They were subject to four immigrant control and three race relations outs that gradually withdrew their citizenship rights. Pass laws and voucher systems were introduced in order to â€Å"terminate black settler immigration and to introduce repatriation. In 1971, the British passed an immigration act to expressly limit immigration from its former colonies. It can, therefore, be said that Sub-Saharan Africa has generated significant global flows of migrants in the post-war era, mainly to ex-colonial states: Nigerian, Tanzanian, Ugandan, Asians and of late Zimbabweans have migrated to the U.K., Central and West Africans to France; Zairians (Congolese) to Belgium. However, the OECD has argued that these movements are dwafted by regional migrations within Africa. Regional labour have flowed primarily to Nigeria, South Africa, Gabon and the Ivory Coast. The main countries of emigration have been Zaire (now Congo), Angola, Mozambique, Cameroon and Botswana as well as all of the North African Nations, though rarely have their emigrants crossed the Sahara.

Challenges In Web Information Retrieval Computer Science Essay

Challenges In Web Information Retrieval Computer Science Essay An overview of Information Retrieval is presented in this chapter. This defines the need of information retrieval. This discusses how the IR problem can be handled. It discusses about the model for efficient and intelligent retrieval. It briefly defines the major issues in information retrieval. It also discusses about the necessity of retrieval and the basis of the study for the motivation of the selection of search topic for dissertation requirements of information retrieval and how it can be used in the web searching. This discusses the user involvement in the retrieval model. This chapter also defines the numbers of approaches are proposed for the user, system and data for the efficient and intelligent retrieval. The different models are focuses on the organization and storing of the data/documents. This chapter defines the need of the retrieval system and also the proposed study in the direction of efficient and intelligent retrieval. The observations are properly explored with the particular emphasis on the necessities of the information retrieval. It is very surprising in a way the information is available in the world today. This leads to the explosion of information soon. The explosion is due to the availability of data and documents online. At the same time while searching and accessing a data/document is a problem. The digitalization is a basis where the ordinary man is involve in storing a huge amount of electronic data. An electronic data can be easily transmitted via email and easily disseminated on the web. The search can be applied on the stored text to require the relevant information on any topic and reuse it. The information explosion means there is too much relevant information readily available to meet the cognitive capacity, for that we will be finding a difficulty in defining the document relevant. Now it becomes necessary for information retrieval (IR) systems to employ intelligent techniques to provide effective access to such a huge amount of available information. Particularly with the emergence of the Worl d Wide Web, users have an access to such huge amount of documents. More and more information services such as new services; library and electronic mail etc are easily available. Things are becoming online in order to provide with a prompt access to the users. The, more textual information is available on web, due to increasing size of information sources has made it difficult for the people to find relevant textual documents. The information that reaches to the user does not match with his/her interest and merely end up with the overloading him/her. The users have to select manually the relevant information from the huge bundle of information. This makes an urge demand for more effective retrieval systems to perform the efficient and intelligent retrieval of data/documents. This research effort will capture the semantics and also integrate it in IR systems. This study will explore this idea by considering in two directions. Firstly, the efficiency of search results, that can be focu sed on the statistical methods. Secondly, the need to improve upon the relevance (in semantic sense and relevant technique) has to be satisfied. This will motivate you in the direction of attempt to improve upon the document storing and query representation. Also natural language processing (NLP) technique can help to segregate/classifies the data for the best use. A relevancy technique is used not only for the efficiency of retrieval but also judge intelligently for capturing the semantics in representation of matching and representation process. The research mainly in this area has to be focus broadly in two directions. Firstly, expanding the query entered in the better representation as per used needs and secondly, determining the relevant in the document urge to representation for improved the results. If the information of any document is lost then that can be recovered by using relevance assessment technique. The relevance cannot be judge only on the on the basis of term occurrence but it depends on the existing retrieval system lie on basic retrieval models such as boolean, standard vector and probabilistic that treat both documents and queries as a set of unrelated terms. These classical models have the advantage of being simple, scalable and computationally feasible, but they do not offer accurate and complete representation. Due to this ignorance in the present classical model, the role of semantic and relative information about the document in the retrieval process is important. It is difficult to identify useful do cuments simply on the basis of words used by the author of the document, as words may mean differently in different context, as pointed out in [Zrehen S, 2000]. It is impossible to retrieve all documents pertaining to a particular subject, because such documents do not share a common set of keywords and because current search engines may or may not address semantics or context. The work focuses mainly on the semantic techniques. However, building a complete semantic understanding of the text requires human-like processing of text and is beyond the scope of this work. The objective of this work is to classify documents as relevant and non-relevant with respect to a standing query with more accuracy and less overhead. A detailed and accurate semantic interpretation is not needed for this classification [Evans David A. Zhai C.,1996]. This fact distinguishes IR application from other NLP applications. The semantic knowledge needed to define the relevance of the document and that can be easily extracted from the text with respect to the author or user. This can be implemented by approach to the overlaying facility, which helps in dealing with the relationships issue, which is one of the most important factors in the design of information retrieval systems. These techniques allow the search and retrieval systems to involve in the improve document and/or query representation. It involves into the address document semantics .It not only improved the ranking of retrieved documents, further adapt queries based on relevance feedback and improve retrieval performance. Finally, producing the relationship between the fact that so much information is being produced and at such a rate that no single technique can offer remedy to all problems, we propose hybrid approach to information retrieval and also evaluate one such model. This will explore to both directions for the efficiency and intelligent retrieval. The realization of inadequacy of the current approaches of information retrieval, work focuses on investigating intelligent techniques t hat will help in retrieving information effectively. IR enables the programs for representation, comparison, and interaction methods to implement in the system result in effective performance. The techniques that improve these aspects i.e., the representation, comparison, or interaction, will lead to intelligent retrieval. The use of overlaying facility will be capturing the relationships between the different layers of data. This will cultivate to a hybrid model by applying the efficient and intelligent technique using hierarchical and semantics approach. To improve the efficacy of an IR system, we need a better understanding of the issues involved in information retrieval and problems associated with existing traditional information retrieval systems. The algorithm/application of these techniques can provide significant benefit. This exactly defines the scope of the work. In the rest of the chapter, we first discuss the issues involved and the problems associated with current approaches to information retrieval. And the motivation behind the retrieval is discussed. The proposed work for the information retrieval is studied thoroughly. This overview also serves as a summary of the core technical contributions of this work. It briefly reviews some of the previous research aiming at necessity of the work. Lastly, it describes the organization of the dissertation 1.2. Major issues in information retrieval There are a number of issues that are involved in the design and evaluation of IR systems some of them are discussed. The first important issue to address is to choose a representation of the document. Most of the human knowledge is coded in natural language. However, it is difficult to use natural language as knowledge representation language for computer systems. The current retrieval models are based on either keywords for search or author. This keyword representation creates problem during retrieval due to polysemy, homonymy and synonymy. Polysemy involves the phenomenon of a lexeme with multiple meaning. Keyword matching may not always include word sense matching [Justin Picard Jacques Savoy ,2000]. Homonymy is an ambiguity in which words that appear the same have unrelated meanings. Ambiguity makes it difficult for a computer to automatically determine the conceptual content of documents. Synonymy creates problem when a document is indexed with one term and the query contains a different term, and the two terms share a common meaning. The previous studies indicate that human beings tend to use different expressions to convey the same meaning [Blair D., Maron M., 1990]. The recent work in developing extensive lexicon is an attempt to improve the situation [Mittendorf E. ed. Al, 2000]. Traditional retrieval models ignore semantic and contextual information in the retrieval process [Judith P. Dick, 1992], [Ounis I. Huibers T,W.C. 1997]. This information is lost in the extraction of keywords from the text and can not be recovered by the retrieval algorithms. The improving IR demands an improved representation of text, which is very important. The related issue can look forward in characterization of queries by users. This is inappropriate in this case because of v agueness and inaccuracy of the users queries, say for instance, their lack of knowledge of the subject or the inherent vagueness of the natural language itself. The users may fail to include relevant terms in the query or may include irrelevant terms. Inappropriate or inaccurate query leads to poor retrieval performance. The problem of ill-specified query can be dealt with by modifying or expanding queries. An effective technique based on users interaction is the relevance feedback. This will Improve the representation of documents and/or queries is thus central to improving IR. In order to satisfy users request an IR system matches document representation with the query representation. How to match the representation of a query with that of the document is another issue. A number of similarity measures have been proposed to quantify the similarity between a query and the document to produce a ranked list of results. The selection of the appropriate similarity measure is a very cruc ial issue in the IR system design. The evaluation of the performance of IR systems is also one of the major issues in IR. There are many aspects of evaluation; most important being the effectiveness of an IR system. Recall and precision are the most widely used measures of effectiveness in IR community. As improving effectiveness in IR is the underlying theme for evaluating any technique and is one of the core issues in this work. The evaluation of the performance of IR systems relies on the notion of relevance. The relevance is subjective in nature [Saracevic T., 1991]. Only the user can tell the true relevance. This cannot be measure as it is based on user perception. However, it is not possible to measure this true relevance. One may define the degree of relevance. The relevance has been considered as a binary concept, whereas it is a continuous function (a document may be exactly what the user wants or it may be closely related). The current evaluation techniques do not support this continuity. The number of relevance frameworks has been proposed in [Saracevic T., 1996]. This includes the system, communication, psychological and situational frameworks. The most inclusive is the situational framework, which is based on the cognitive view of the information seeking process and considers the importance of situation, context, multi-dimensionality and time. A survey of relevance studies can be found in [Mizzaro S. ,1997]. Most of the evaluations of IR systems so far have been done on document test collections with known relevance judgments. The large size of document collections also complicates text retrieval. Further, users may have varying in need of documents. Some users require answers of limited scope, while others require documents having wide scope. These different needs can require that different and specialized retrieval methods be employed. The work attempts to handle some of these problems by proposing techniques. To improve representation of docume nts and queries and by incorporating new similarity measures. Information retrieval models based on these representations and similarity measures have been proposed and evaluated in this work. The another factor that decreases search engine usefulness is the dynamic nature of the Web, resulting in many dead links and out of date pages that have changed since indexed. But even accepting these factors, finding relevant information using Web search engines often fails. The document retrieval systems typically present search results in a ranked list, ordered by their estimated relevance to the query. The relevancy is estimated based on the similarity between the text of a document and the query. Such ranking schemes work well when users can formulate a well-defined query for their searches. However, users of Web search engines often formulate very short queries (70% are single word queries [Motro, 98]) that often retrieve large numbers of documents. Based on such a condensed representat ion of the users search interests, it is impossible for the search engine to identify the specific documents that are of interest to the users. Moreover, many webmasters now actively work to influence rankings. These problems are intensify when the users are unfamiliar with the topic they are querying about, when they are novices at performing searches, or when the search engines database contains a large number of documents. All these conditions commonly exist for Web search engine users. Therefore the vast majority of the retrieved documents are often of no interest to the user; such searches are termed low precision searches. The low precision of the Web search engines coupled with the ranked list presentation force users to examine through a large number of documents and make it hard for them to find the information they are looking for. As low precision Web searches are inevitable, tools must be provided to help users cope with (and make use of) these large document sets. Such tools should include means to easily browse through large sets of retrieved documents. 1.3 Necessity of present work The motivation for this research is to make search engine results easy to browse. The document classification algorithms attempt to group similar documents together. The Classification / Grouping the results of Web search engines can provide a powerful browsing tool. The automatic grouping of similar documents (document groups) a feasible method of presenting the results of Web search engines. 1.3.1 Classification: The document groups have initially been investigated in Information Retrieval mainly as a means of improving the performance of search engines by pre-clustering the entire corpus [Jardine and van Rijsbergen, 71]. The cluster hypothesis [van Rijsbergen, 79] stated that similar documents will tend to be relevant to the same queries, thus the automatic detection of clusters of similar documents can improve recall by effectively broadening a search request. However we are investigating classification as a means of browsing large retrieved document sets. We therefore need to slightly modify the group classification which suit to the domain. This can be attempted for user-class hypothesis is that users have a mental model of the topics and subtopics of the documents present in the result set; similar documents will tend to belong to the same category in the users model. Thus the automatic detection of clusters of similar documents can help the user in browsing the res ult set. The classification and the groups of the documents with respect to the author can help users in three ways: (1) it can allow them to find the information they are looking for more easily, (2) it can help them to realize faster that a query is poorly formulated (e.g., too general) and to reformulate it, and (3) it can reduces the fraction of the queries on which the user gives up before reaching the desired information. For example, if a user wishes to find salsa recipes on the Web, and performs a search using the query apple, only 10% of the returned documents will be related to apple recipes (the rest will relate to apple music, apple products that can be bought on the web and a software product called apple; many documents will have no apparent connection to apple at all). If we were to cluster the results, the user could find the group relating to apple recipes and thus save valuable browsing time. We have identified some key requirements for document clustering of searc h engine results. The support vector machine is used to implement such types of cluster techniques: 1) Coherent Clusters is the clustering algorithm should group similar documents together. 2) Efficiently browsable that the user needs to determine at a glance whether the contents of a cluster are of interest. Therefore, the system has to provide concise and accurate cluster descriptions. 3) Speed of the system should not introduce a substantial delay before displaying the results. 4) In preliminary experimentation carried out at the beginning of this study we found Web documents, and especially search engine snippets, to be poor candidates for classification because they are short and often poorly formatted. This led us to consider the use of phrases in the classification of search engine results, as they contain more information than simple words (information regarding proximity and order of words). The phrases have the equally important advantage of having a higher descriptive pow er (compared to single words). This is very important when attempting to describe the contents of a group to the user in a concise manner. The groups can be making with the keyword in respect to the subject and sub-subject or it can be in respect to the author or user. 1.3.2 Relevancy in documents: With respect to the clustering of the documents or users, they important study that is made for the retrieval is as follows. The search engines are extremely important to help users to find relevant retrieval of information on the World Wide Web. In order to give the best according to the needs of users, a search engine must find and filter the most relevant information matching a users query, and then present that information in a manner that makes the information most readily presentable to the user. The system is used to apply the technique and also work in between the user and the document to efficient retrieval the relevant document. Moreover, the task of information retrieval and presentation must be done in a scalable fashion to serve the hundreds of millions of user queries that are issued every day to a popular web search engines (Tomlin, 2003). In addressing the problem of Information Retrieval (IR) on the web, there are a number of challenges researchers are involved. Some of these challenges are dealt with and identified additional problems that may motivate future work in the IR research community. It also describes some work in these areas that has been conducted at various search engines. It begins by briefly outlining some of the issues or factors that arise in web information retrieval. The people/User relates to the system directly for the Information retrieval as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1.1 IR System Components. They are easy to compare fields with well-defined semantics to queries in order to find matches. For example the Records are easy to find-for example, bank database query. The semantics of the keywords also plays an important role, which is, send through the interface. System includes the interface of search engine servers, the databases and the indexing mechanism, which include the stemming techniques. The User defines the search strategy and also gives the requirement for searching .The documents available in www apply subject indexing, ranking and clustering (Herbach, 2001).The relevant matches are easily found. There are three major components such as data, user and system. These three components are interlinked with each other with two-way relationship. The system is a computer system and the software application loaded. The interfaces of search engine servers, the databases and the indexing mechanism, which include the stemming techniques etc, are associated in the system and i ts linked components. Similarly, user defines the search strategy (Herbach, 2001) and also gives the requirement for searching .The documents available in www apply subject indexing, ranking and clustering (Kleinberg,1999). The relevant matches easily found by comparison with field values of records. The involvement of relevance feedback technique can also be incorporated for efficient searching. And the data are a simple as documents in different formats use database, it terms of maintenance and retrieval of records but for the unstructured documents, it is difficult where we use text. Search engine developments are based primarily on the indexing range, which is assisted by www users in performing information retrieval task. The evaluation of efficient and intelligent studies have considered and an impact can be seen on system features (Kunchukuttan,2006), in particular those with which the user interacts for search assistance. The information retrieval system evaluation the compl ex environment, which measures of the utility and the usability of the search results of the system are required from a user perspective layout. The proposed model for a user-centered evaluation is based on a conceptual framework in which user-satisfaction is characterized on the variable dependent on system features and system functions. It will be simple for the database it terms of maintenance and retrieval of records but for the unstructured documents it is difficult where we use text. The same criteria for searching will give better matches and also better results. The different dimensions of IR have become vast because of different media, different types of search applications, and different tasks, which is not only a text, but also a web search as a central. The IR approaches to search and evaluation are appropriate in all media is an emerging issues of IR. The information retrieval is involved in the following tasks and sub tasks: 1) Ad-hoc search involve with the process where it generalizes the criteria and searches for all the records, which finds all the relevant documents for an arbitrary text query; 2) Filtering is an important process where the users identify the relevant user profiles for a new document. The user profile is maintained where the user can be identified with a profile and accordingly the relevant documents are categorized and displayed; 3) Classification is involved with respect to the identification and lies in the relevant list of the cl assification. This works in identifying the relevant labels for documents; 4) Question Answering Technique involves for the better judgment of the classification with the relevant questions automatically frames to generate the focus of the individuals. The tasks are described in the Figure 2. Figure 1.2: Proposed Model of Search Engine. The field of IR deals with the relevance, evaluation and interacts with the user to provide them according to their needs/query. IR involves in the effective ranking and testing. Also it measures of the data available for the retrieval. The relevant document contains the information that a person was looking for when they submitted a query to the search engine. There are many factors influence a persons to take the decision about the relevancy that may be task, context, novelty, and style. The topical relevance (same topic) and user relevance (everything else) are the dimensions, which help in the IR modeling. The retrieval models define a view of relevance. The user provides information that the system can use to modify its next search or next display. The relevance feedback is as to how much system understands the user in terms of what is the need, and also to know about the concept and terms related to the information needs. The retrieval uses the different techniques such as the web pages contains links to other pages and by analyzing this web graph structure it is possible to determine a more global notion of page quality. The remarkable successes in this area include the Page Rank algorithm (Tomlin, 2003), which globally analyzes the entire web graph and provided the original basis for ranking in the various search engines, and Kleinbergs hyperlink algorithm (Herbach, 2001, Kleinberg,1999), which analyzes a local neighborhood of the web graph containing an initial set of web pages matching the users query. Since that time, several other linked-based methods for ranking web pages have been proposed including variants of both PageRank and HITS (Kleinberg, 1999, Joachims, 2003), and this remains an active research area in which there is still much fertile research ground to be explored. This may refer to the recent work on Hub and researchers from where it identifies in the form of equilibrium for WWW sources on a common theme/topic in which we explicitly build into the model by taking care of the diversity of roles between the different types of pages (Herbach,2001) .Some pages are the prominent sources of primary data/content and are considered to be the authorities on the topic; other pages, equally essential to the structure, accumulate high-quality guides and resource lists that act as focused hubs, directing users to suggested authorities. The nature of the linkage in this framework is highly asymmetric. Hubs link heavily to authorities, and they may have very few incoming links linked to them, and the authorities are not link to other authorities. This is completely a suggested model (Herbach,2001), is completely natural; relatively anonymous individuals are creating many good hubs on the Web. A formal type of equilibrium consistent model can be defined only by assigning the weights to the two numbers called as a hub weight and an authority weight .The weights to each page are assigned in such a way that a pages authority weight is proportional to the sum of the hub weights of pages that link to it to maintain the balance and a pages hub weight is proportional to the sum of the authority weights of pages that it links to. The adversarial Classification (Sahami et al.,1998) may be dealing with Spam on the Web. One particularly interesting problem in web IR arises from the attempt by some commercial interests to excessively heighten the ranking of their web pages by engaging in various forms of spamming (Joachims, 2003). The SPAM methods can be effective against traditional IR ranking schemes that do not make use of link structure, but have more limited utility in the context of global link analysis. Realizing this, spammers now also utilize link spam where they will create large numbers of web pages that contain links to other pages whose rankings they wish to rise. The interesting technique applied will continually to the automatic filters. The spam filtering in email is very popular. This technique with concurrently involved the applying the indexes the documents. The current study will propose a hybrid semantic model where is a combination algorithm and the application used for the efficient and intelligent retrieval model. This will involve the different practices for the retrieval the system will be playing an important role. Further the tri-sectional considering system, document and user are identified by applying the Analytical Hierarchal process (AHP) model. This study will help to you carry out the algorithm, application and the models associated with them with respect to these components. 1.5. Organization of the thesis The thesis is organized into seven chapters including the present chapter which introduced IR problem, presented a brief review of the work done in the field and provided an overview of our work. An outline of the remaining chapters follows. The intelligent and efficient Information Retrieval needs to explain the data organization, the user prospects and also the user interface system study and its importance. The different tests for the present theoretical investigations are reported in the thesis, have been organized as follows: The understanding of the theoretical analysis of proposed methods to explain the various intelligent and efficient structural algorithm and application based approach; the techniques have been discussed in further consecutive chapters. Also, it is adequate to take a real scenario that the interaction mechanism between the layers of user and data are important to define the model with their properties. Briefly the remarkable success achieved from the present models has been given below. The understanding of basic parameters for efficient and intelligent retrieval needs the formulation of an effective and intelligent retrieval and this is outlined in Chapter II. To make information retrieval study successful, there is the need to prioritize their efforts in terms of user, system and data centric aspects, because of the range interactions they are effective up to the second-hierarchy. The forces occur between the layer itself and also by joining to the upper/lower layer within the system. A straightforward extension is possible since; these systems are open-ended and allow data and user to join them with internal requirements and for a complete collection of document/data etc. The effective parameters as relevancy, ranking and layout have been incorporated in the implementation of analytical hierarchical process (AHP) for analysis. In order to make the proposed work more revealing, the applicability of these parameters has been explored for the further focus on the proposed model to describe the interaction and interrelation between the data and user as presented in Chapter II. The research study provides a theoretical background of IR techniques, which helps in designing the retrieval model. The detailed study will be defined on the basic concept in establishing the relationship between the system and data primarily. There are different techniques that are based on this relationship/link to define the efficient data retrieval, which has been investigated, and results presented in Chapter III. The later part of this chapter explores Intelligent Data processing and analysis with respect to the intelligent data retrieval by using different techniques used for designing the retrieval model. The detailed study will define the basic concept in establishing the relationship between the system, user and data primarily. There are different techniques that are based on this relationship/link to define the intelligent data retrieval. This is very much dependent on the semantics of the individual layer as per user interest or taste. The links between the two objects is to change the strength of the object. The objects are powerful, based on incoming and outgoing link i.e. the popularity of the object. Based on strength, this object can be considered as highest ranked object and also relevant one. Effective interrelation is successful in explaining popularity of object with consistent behavior. Semantics annotation framework helps in intelligent retrieval by using natural semantics. The Vector Space Model and Latent Semantic Indexing techniques are theoretically analyzed in Chapter IV. The research used an effective inte

The Inevitable Spread of Soviet-backed Communism in Eastern Europe Essa

The Inevitable Spread of Soviet-backed Communism in Eastern Europe At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States were principle players involved with reshaping post-war Europe. The region most affected policy changes was Eastern Europe, which includes those states that would eventually fall behind the Iron Curtain. While the camaraderie between the Big Three deteriorated, Soviet-backed communism was spreading across Eastern Europe. The argument during this time was that expansionism was inevitable since Stalin had already decided to establish Soviet power and Soviet-typed systems in the lands his army occupied; resistance was pointless. While nothing in history is inevitable, to a great extent, expansionism was highly probable, especially due to Eastern European political traditions, its political structure after World War II and the West's inactivity in the region which left the area more susceptible to Soviet-backed communism. As George Schopflin states, "Stalin, however ruthless and powerful he may have been, w as not possessed of superhuman abilities" (58). Prior to the war, Eastern Europe did not have a history of strong democratic traditions. Schopflin, who describes the region as "backward and authoritarian" goes on to say, "The bulk of the population was excluded from any significant control over political decision-making and tended to acquiesce in the old, established patterns of rule and deference" (38). From 1918 to 1944, Eastern Europe was dominated by great empires, such as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, but almost overnight, that structure toppled, leaving a power vacuum. During the years between World War I and World War II, Eastern Europe looked to the West for a suc... ...ge Anglo-Soviet relations and conceded much of Eastern Europe. However, it was beneficial to the British and the Americans to sacrifice the region because they needed evidence to define the Soviet Union and communism as the enemy. Soviet-backed communist expansion was not inevitable, but it was greatly aided by international factors and Eastern European domestic factors. Bibliography Ash, Timothy. "Hungary's Revolution: Forty Years On" The New York Review. McCauley, Martin, ed. Communist Power in Europe 1944-1949. New York: Harper & Row publishers, 1977. Schopflin, George. Politcs in Eastern Europe 1945-1992. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Seton-Watson, Hugh. The East European Revolution. London: Methuen & Co., 1956. Yergin, Daniel. Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977.

The Life and Mind of Jerry Garcia in Conjunction with Howard Gardners Model of Creativity :: Howard Gardner Jerry Garcia Paperes

The Life and Mind of Jerry Garcia in Conjunction with Howard Gardner's Model of Creativity "We always though of the Grateful Dead as being the engine that was driving the spaceship that we were traveling on."-Ken Babbs, a former Merry Prankster "Daddy is sleeping. Don't touch the guitars." -Heather Garcia In his Creating Minds, Howard Gardner states the purpose of his book as an examination of the "...often peculiar intellectual capacities, personality configurations, social arrangements, and creative agendas, struggles, and accomplishments" (6). In this paper I will examine the life and creativity of John Jerome Garcia from the framework and theories provided by Gardner, from the perspective of aptness in the musical intelligence. One of the most significant events of Jerry Garcia's childhood occurred when he was four and brother Clifford, "Tiff," was eight. "We'd been given a chore to do...he'd hold the wood and I'd chop it...he was [messing] around and I was just constantly chopping." Jerry lost about half of his right ring finger. This was the first of many losses Jerry experienced that would affect his life and musical style. The Early Years Born in San Francisco, Jerry Garcia was the son of a registered nurse and an immigrant big bandleader. When Garcia's band broke up, he went into the bar business. It was right after the Depression. "It was a job he had to take to survive. Back then, you had to take any damn thing." Continuing the pattern of loss, Garcia drowned when Jerry was five. It is notable that he grew up with a single parent, an environment that characterizes many of today's children's formative experiences. When his father died, his decided to continue the bar business. As a result of this, what was left of the Garcia family moved around the San Francisco area quite frequently during the childrens' formative years. All the family members the children knew lived within a five-block radius. This enabled them to have an even bigger run of the city, as they would often ride the train around town to visit relatives. Prodigiousness One of the issues in Gardner's model is the child prodigy. We see this reflected best in Picasso, less so in Einstein. Jerry was quite the opposite. His musical career was characterized by very, very hard work. As former wife Sara recalled, "He'd be in a bad mood if he couldn't practice for several hours a day" (32). "He'd get into an absolute funk if he couldn't get something absolutely right" (47).

Performance Management Systems

Performance Management System Sparrow and Hiltrop (1994) suggest that â€Å"performance management is essentially a strategic management technique that links business objectives and strategies to individual goals, actions, performance appraisal and rewards through a defined process. † They also believe that â€Å"the most important feature of an effective performance management system is its ability to be seen as a method of continuously securing improvement’s in the performance of teams and individuals against pre-defined business strategies and objectives. From reading through the quotes of Sparrow and Hiltrop I understand performance management to be a system which identifies the strengths and weaknesses of individuals or teams of employees. From then speaking to the employees in a formal manner, in which you are praising them for their achievements throughout the year i. e. promotion, raise or a company car, but also explaining to them where they could improve them selves to be motivated in following the objectives and strategic plans of the company.Job performance within management performance reveals several terms that are often used interchangeably, such as performance appraisal, performance assessment, performance evaluation and job appraisal. However, in general terms, they are regularly all concerned with measuring an individual’s performance in a given job against preset work standards and involve designing a formal system to facilitate observation, monitoring, analysis, feedback and target setting. Since of late I have had my own performance appraisal done in my part time job in a large fast food restaurant I will be constructing my essay around performance appraisal.In my essay I will be looking at how performance appraisals help improve motivation within the work force, I will explain how the system operates currently, provide evidence that base criticism of the system, and suggest practical and implementable improvements. His tory Its roots started in the early 20th century; it can be linked to Taylor’s scientific management theory. Taylor thought that workers should be paid and rewarded by meeting specific work targets. If the workers met these targets, he would then pay his workers fairly for the tasks and goals met.He would also give regular feedback to his workers. This point ties in with performance appraisal, by Taylor rewarding and giving feedback to his workers he was demonstrating how if workers did well they would be rewarded for their efforts. Also by giving his workers feedback he was showing how the task could be better or to the correct standard. Taylor also believed that workers should be trained and developed, which is also relevant to today’s role of performance appraisal. However Taylor assumed the way of thinking like an autocratic manager, where he thought workers where only motivated by money.But as performance appraisal has expanded and grown with time, it has seen tha t workers are not just motivated by money. Performance appraisals started out as being a simple method of income justification. Appraisals were used to decide whether or not the salary or wage of an individual employee was justified. If the employee’s performance was found to be unsatisfactory then the employees’ wages would be cut. However, on the other hand if the employees work was found to exceed the manager’s expectations, then the employee would find him/herself with a pay rise.Very little consideration was given to developing the employees’ skills and talents in the work place. It was seen that a cut or rise in pay was good enough for the employee to work harder or keep working hard. More often or not this system failed. Motivational research showed that workers with evenly the same work abilities could be paid the same but one individual’s motivational principles could be completely different to someone else’s. Pay rates are importan t to workers but it is not the only characteristic that influences an employee’s performance.By the research discovered once employee’s where financially safe workers would then look for morale and self-esteem to motivate them. I associate this research finding with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Once a worker knows that they are physiologically safe, they then start to move up the pyramid, they would realize that money does not influence them to be motivated to work hard at work anymore. Instead they will look to be socially accepted in the company and that their hard work is valued and recognized within the company.When a worker has been with a company after a length of time and has been rewarded with rises in pay, they will then look to getting promotions and move higher up in the company. Present Appraisals Once managers recognized that workers were not motivated by money anymore, they realized things had to change. So in today’s working environment, th ere can be five key steps to setting up a performance appraisal. * Develop an appraisal form. * Identify performance measures. * Set guidelines for feedback. Create disciplinary and termination procedures. * Set an appraisal schedule. Developing an appraisal form Appraisals should be done justly, consistently and accurately to protect the employees’ interests and to protect your company from legal liability. A way to ensure consistency is to use a standard appraisals form for each worker. The form used should focus only on the essential job performance areas. This makes the appraisal more meaningful and relevant and allows the appraiser and the appraised address the issues that matter most.The job performance areas that should be included on the performance appraisal form are job knowledge and skill, quantity of work, quality of work, work habits and attitude to others and communication skills. In each area, the appraiser should have a range of descriptors to choose from i. e . very bad, bad, good, very good and excellent. Depending on how specific the descriptors are, it is often important that the appraiser also have extra space included on the form to provide their thoughts behind his or her rating. Identifying performance measuresIdentifying and developing performance measures can be one of the more time-consuming parts of creating a performance appraisal system however; it is one of the most powerful. Standard performance measures objectively measures some of the more subjective job performance areas, such as work habits. The appraiser can establish an objective measure for attendance by defining the acceptable number of times an employee can be late for work or absent during a certain time frame. Standard performance measures don’t always work for other subjective areas, such as attitude.In these cases, it’s still important to be as objective as possible in your appraisal. Don’t attempt to describe attitude, instead, describe t he employee’s behavior, which is what expresses the attitude, and the consequences of that behavior for the practice. For example this employee has failed to support his/her co-workers. When another member of his/her department is absent, he/she refuses to take on the additional tasks required to process patients in a timely manner. This behavior causes patient backlog, places a burden on staff and compromises effective teamwork.Managers should work with their employees in each position to gather quantitative data, examine historical patterns of volume and determine qualitative measurements that reflect the company’s mission and goals. Setting guidelines for feedback Feedback is what performance appraisals are all about. So before human resource management, implement the performance appraisal system, make sure that all the managers that will be conducting appraisals knows what kind of feedback to give, how to give it and how to get it from the employee in return.Many m anagers make the common error of glossing over an employee’s deficiencies and focusing only on his/her strengths. It is by explaining their weaknesses that employees can take ownership of their performance and role in the practice. And when given the support they need to make improvements in these areas, employees learn to take pride in their work and are willing to take on new tasks with confidence. After the appraiser has discussed the results of the appraisal with the employee, the appraiser should encourage the employee to give some constructive feedback.They should ask the employee whether he/ she agree with their assessment, and/or invite suggestions for improvement. In my appraisal, I was told that I was doing a good job but also where I could improve. The company is also thinking of sending me on a one day course to gain some more skills, for me to improve in my job. Creating a disciplinary and termination procedures In some cases, even after a thorough performance ap praisal and a discussion of expected improvements, an employee will continue to perform poorly.Human resources need to be prepared to handle such a situation by having well-defined, written disciplinary and termination procedures in place. These procedures should outline the actions that will be taken when performance worsens. In most cases companies will firstly proceed with a verbal warning. If the employee still performs badly a written warning is then issued. If there is no improvement or a recurrence, then termination is the situation if not ultimately resolved. Setting an appraisal scheduleOnce human resource management has built their performance appraisal system – the appraisal form, the performance measures, the feedback guidelines and the disciplinary procedures – they just need to decide when to conduct the performance appraisals. Some practices do all employee appraisals at the same time of year, while others conduct them within 30 days of each employeeâ₠¬â„¢s anniversary of employment. In my opinion the latter may work better since it spreads the work of the appraisals out for employer and employee. Whichever way they decide to schedule the appraisals, they must ensure that each appraiser consistently meets the deadline.Ignoring employees’ overdue appraisal will make them feel devalued and may hurt morale and performance. For me my performance appraisal was a week after my anniversary of starting in the restaurant. This is the easiest way for this company as so many people work there. From my own experience my appraisal was not a formal event. I was told when I came into work that my manager wanted to see me, which made me feel anxious and worried. It was informal and very relaxed. In this instance I would criticize the way the appraisal was held.In researching for this topic performance appraisals should be formal and official. Since I was offered the chance to go one the course, it made me very confident that I was doing a good job. It motivated me to work harder for the company. From working a year in the company people will notice who is doing a good job and who maybe not, especially when the boss is gone. My suggestion would be that employee’s confidentially review their co-workers using the appraisal forms. However this will only work is people are not too nasty and use this against their co-worker. .