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Stephanie Newell (751) says that the postcolonial perspective on literacy and identity tends to be international in its remit. It introduced concepts of identity or models of identity formation that embrace ethnicity, authenticity, mimicry, and revolution as well as a return to conservative traditionalism. The term postcolonial, according to Newell (751), is a challenging one that is difficult to define because some authors use it to refer to the period immediately following the end of colonial rule whereas others use it to embrace the culture of a country that was once colonialized. One author who uses the term in the latter form is Bill Ashcroft (11) who suggests that postcolonial analysis "rises to engage issues and experiences which have been put out of the purview of metropolitan theory." In essence, Ashcroft (4) asserts that there are many identity models to be found in postcolonial countries that include those based on gender, generation, social class, ethnicity, languages other than English,

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When a product has a high elasticity of demand, a small change in price leads to a large change in the quantity demanded. When companies sell items whose costs increase over time, changing the price to accommodate those cost increases may result in a loss of market share and of total revenue if there is a significant loss of sales due to price elasticity. A company that sells a product with high price elasticity at a time when it can reduce its costs an

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Introduction In a previous time in American culture, social networking in real life included harnessing the people you knew and their resources to benefit in a variety of ways, from increased social activity to career advancement. As Hyatt (2008) notes, "Networking has clearly shown social as well as economic (jobs, contracts, sales, information, etc.) benefits in real life" (p. 2). In real life social networking, individuals typically know the people they know with little knowledge of whom their contacts know. Known as "first-degree" contacts; the power of your network increases dramatically if you can "tap the network of your first-degree contacts" (Hyatt, 2008, p. 1). In this real life networking environment, one of the main challenges was keeping track of the contacts of others on top of managing our own contacts. Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of what are known as online social networks (OSNs), like Second Life.com, MySpace.com, and Fa

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According to an essay published online by the U.S. Department of State, the three main concepts of the Monroe Doctrine were: (1) separate spheres of influence for the Americas and Europe, (2) non-colonization of the Americas by Europeans, and (3) non-intervention. President Monroe's administration warned the imperial European powers against interfering in the affairs of the newly independent Latin American nation-states or potential United States territories. While Americans generally objected to European colonies in the Americas, they also wanted to increase United States influence and trading ties throughout the region. In return for non-intervention in the Americas, the United States promised that it would not become involved in European affairs (Monroe Doctrine, 1823). According to another essay published by the State Department, in announcing his decision not to seek a third term as President, George Washington presented his Farewell Address in a newspaper article September

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According to an article written by Rebecca Hellerstein published on the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston website, economists define inflation as a sustained rise in the general level of prices. High inflation is bad for the economy. High inflation adversely effects economic performance. Even moderate levels of inflation can distort investment and consumption decisions. Reducing inflation also has costs associated with the including lost output and higher rates of unemployment. The goal of the United States government is to maintain low and relatively stable levels of inflation in the 2 percent to 3 percent per year range

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Beginning in 1952 when Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser deposed the king and established a new regime led mainly by military officers, Egypt's economic system undertook a new form of "Arab socialism" that placed an emphasis on governmental direction of the economy (Sodaro, 2004). These policies emphasize the state's responsibility for guiding the economy and were executed in tandem with strong authoritarian government. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Egypt underwent a gradual but ongoing transformation which is reflected in its macroeconomic policies on both the fiscal and monetary levels. This essay will explore current policies and then present recommendations as to how fiscal and monetary policy in Egypt can be improved to foster ongoing economic development. Panizza (2001) has suggested that one of the major macroeconomic problems faced by Egypt in the 1990s despite growth was the presence of liability dollarization and pass-through form exchange rate to prices which limi

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The following presents the debate over whether the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea or the Reed Sea. The two views are explained and supported with evidence. In the Bible, the tale of The Exodus includes the use of the phrase yam suph to refer to the body of water that the Isralites crossed after leaving Egypt. Whether this term translates into Red Sea or Sea of Reeds or Seaweed, remains unclear. Some think the Isralites journey included the Gulf of Suez, which branches up from today's Red Sea and others believe it included the large delta at the mouth of the Nile in the North of Egypt. Moses' description in the Bible (Exodus 12:31-42) states that Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron during night to take their flocks and herds and go to worship the Lord. The Egyptians urged people to leave the country in a hurry so they would escape death. As instructed by Moses, the Israelites asked the Egyptians for silver, gold, and clothing and the Egyptians gave them what was asked which led to the plundering of the Egyptians. The Israelites then journeyed from Ramsus to Succoth. The Israeli

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Klein and Maxson (2006) note that within the criminal justice system, a gang is defined as a group of people who associate continuously for the common purpose of engaging in criminal or delinquent activities. This paper examines why people join gangs, and describes the typical gang member in terms of age, gender, race, and culture. The paper concludes with an examination of the effects of poverty on gang membership and the crimes gangs commit. Reasons Why People Join Gangs Egley and Arjunan (2002) report that the National Youth Gang Survey if 2000 revealed that there are several reasons why young people join gangs. These reasons include a search for love, and belonging and the need for some sort of structure and discipline. Often, young people want a group that they can commit to. There can also be a need for recognition and/or power, companionship, excitement, and activities. In some cases, teens are looking for a sense of self-worth, status, and acceptance. Others see the g

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Introduction Due to changes wrought from technology and globalization, organizations have restructured from top-down hierarchies loaded with middle-management to flatter, leaner organizations that have replaced middle management with self-directed work teams or groups that have greater accountability and responsibility for achieving organizational goals. The increasing importance of work groups or teams demands leaders who effectively manage team dynamics to generate high levels of performance. This analysis will provide a discussion of how leaders can develop high-performance teams, focusing on group demographics and cultural diversity. A conclusion will address one proven method for developing highly motivated work teams. Body Along with the trend in business of greater reliance on empowered work teams or groups is the trend of an increasingly diverse workforce. Unprecedented numbers of women and minorities now makeup a significant percentage of the Americ

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Introduction There is great debate over the ultimate impact on individuals of commercial advertising in the U.S. media. Some maintain that advertising is beneficial, in that it helps consumers become aware of the differentiation that exists among different products or helps shoppers compare price and value of potential purchases. However, most people argue that because of the fallacies most advertisements rely on to sell products, they are detrimental to individuals in the long-run. Heavy mass advertising can lead to numerous ill effects, including massive credit card debt from over-purchase, increased nagging of parents by children affected by ads, sexual exploitation of females, and increased aggressive behavior in men from exploitation of the "machismo" factor in products advertised to males. This analysis will use three distinct advertisements to illustrate these potentially negative aspects of commercial advertising. Body As one of my peer

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The rise of Buddhism in Thailand during the 18th and 19th centuries can be attributed to King Mongkut, whose exemplary practice of the Buddhist way of life strengthened and enhanced interest in Buddhism. Mongkut is best known in Western cultures for his relationship with the Victorian governess hired to teach his children, which was immortalized in the movie versions of The King and I, featuring "sensationalized accounts of Siamese court life" (Ross 70). Mongkut was not the "musical clown" or the "irrational despot" that the movies suggested, but "was in reality a distinguished and enlightened monarch, very much in the tradition of that preeminent Indian Buddhist ruler of the distant past, Emperor Ashoka" (Ross 71). The rightful heir to the Siamese throne upon his birth in 1804, Mongkut was nevertheless passed over by the State Council for a half-brother, yet he "calmly remained on in the peace and quiet of the meditative monastic life he had been living for some years" rather tha

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Near the end of the film, as she breaks up with her long-time boyfriend, Brooke Meyers says to Gary Brobowski "I don't know how we got here" (Reed, 2006). Completely incompatible and deep in a quagmire of irreconcilable differences; the couple's expectations, notions of love, poor communication, and lack of effective conflict resolution are how they get "there." The only thing the two share in common is that they fell in love, but that feeling is long gone as we watch a series of sour exchanges and incidents that only drive them further apart despite sharing the same condo because neither will relinquish its ownership to the other. This analysis will explain how the expectations, notions of love, communication challenges, and lack of conflict resolution skills undermines the couple's love. Relevant theories of sociology, including social exchange and conflict theory, will be offered to support the analysis. A conclusion will argue whether the couple should remain apart or

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Too much data can be a problem with database storage. When there is too much data, the data becomes an impediment that stands in the way of seeing and understanding the data that is important to the business. Thus, it is vital to keep data pared down to what is really usable and helpful. With too much data, information systems can become bogged down and system turnaround time can slow, there is a greater chance of the wrong data being used, and it is difficult and time-consuming-if not impossible-to sort through the data when needed to find a particular piece of data that is necessary for a task. Moreover, since companies must back up their data nightly and invest in data storage, situations similar to Southern Co.'s, where the company was "diligently backing up nightly...outdated or extraneous data, such as casual e-mail messages" can represent a substantial cost to the business without producing any business advantage (Jackson-Higgins, 2003, p. 1). As Calpine Corp. found out, it is important to "organize and analyze the data," not just capture it all; Calpine "nearly drowned in its own firewall event logs" (Jackson-Higgins, 2005, p. 1). On the o

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Albert Camus's "The Guest" embodies the existentialism that prevails among the author's works. French existentialism was a philosophy promoted by Jean-Paul Sartre, and that Camus found "was widely misunderstood as a philosophy of hopelessness" (Wyatt). Sartre defined existentialism as "a humanism," suggesting that "if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence"-man (Sartre). He asserted that "If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself" (Sartre). Although Camus did believe that life was "absurd-defying logical explanation, and ultimately irrational," he also "considered life valuable and worth defending" (Wyatt). Although in American thought, existentialism was held to be "devoid of morality," Camus in fact had "a strong ethical system" (Wyatt). Camus opposed nihilism, Nietzsche's idea that lif

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My personal moral philosophy derives in part from my expectation of becoming a nurse and therefore a person responsible for the well-being of others and in part from the philosophy of Act-Utilitarianism. Act-Utilitarianism is the doctrine that what makes an action right is that it maximizes happiness (Schick & Vaughn, 1999). Everyone is considered. It is also known as traditional Utilitarianism. Happiness is seen as the only thing that is intrinsically valuable. The total amount of happiness in the world should be maximized. Happines

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Introduction Despite more than $100 billion spent annually by industries in the United States, in Approaches to Evaluation of Training Deniz Eseryel (2002) maintains not more than "10 percent of these expenditures actually result in transfer to the job" (p. 4). Because of this there is a need to adopt more comprehensive programs of evaluation of training that use automated expert systems and take into account the need for multiple levels of evaluation in a collaborative process. One of the models of evaluation of training that is gaining considerable attention is the theory of evaluation developed by Kirkpatrick that extends goal-based evaluation models and "translates into four levels of evaluation...known as reaction, learning, behavior, and results" (Eseryel, 2002, p. 2). Kirkpatrick's goal-based, four-level model of evaluation of training is in contrast to modern systems approaches to evaluation of training that include the Context, Input, Process, Product (CI

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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is increasingly common among members of the military services, especially those who have served in theaters of operation or war such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Ira Katz (2007), Deputy Chief of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, stated that at the end of the first half of fiscal year 2007, almost 720,000 military men and women separated from the armed forces after service in Iraq and Afghanistan and over 250,000 sought health care in Veterans Administration facilities, with approximately 45,000 individuals receiving care for post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is perhaps the most common mental disorder exhibited by returning American military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan (Katz, 2007; Greiger, 2007). Greiger (2007) states that about 12-20 percent of all combat soldiers returning from Iraq have probable PTSD while 7-15 percent have probable depression. These data suggest that PTSD is a major post-military service health problem which

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The film Babel portrays both the lyrical and the grotesque literary elements in its contrast of interpersonal war/war/peacetime and self-perfection via education and training. The lyrical element of the movie centers on the deep emotion evoked by the scene in which Brad Pitt's character desperately tries to save his wounded wife, and the one in

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In Susan Fournier's 1998 article, "Consumers and their brands: Developing relationship theory in consumer research," the author posits that customers have relationships with their brands and that brands can be "relationship partners" for customers. This paper will examine Fournier's argument in the light of brand relationships that customers have with Verizon and Disney, asserting that Fournier is indeed correct and customers can have relationships with brands. Fournier (1998, p. 344) maintains that, in order for customers and brands to have a relationship with each other, there must be interdependence between them, an attribute that is enhanced to the extent that "brands are animated, humanized, or somehow personalized." Moreover, brand relationships(like relationships between people(reflect common qualities between the two participants. In her case study of Jean, Fournier points out that Jean's brand portfolio is consistent with her own "life themes" of "marginality

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From the Christian position of the just war, the United Nations' withdrawal of troops from Rwanda in 1994 was unethical. Just war doctrine, according to Augustine of Hipo and others including Hugo Grotius, requires that Christians avoid initiating wars of aggression but that they respond when human rights are violated, when aggression has targeted them, and when a failure to respon

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There are a number of elements connected to Lorraine Hansberry's drama A Raisin in the Sun that made it a groundbreaking piece of drama when it first played to theater audiences in the 1950s. It was certainly groundbreaking in that it was the first play ever produced on Broadway written by a black woman. The play revolves around the conflicts within the Younger family, but also external to the African American family living in racist America. The play was groundbreaking because it showed details of black family life to white audiences on a level never before seen in popular entertainment. The play was also groundbreaking during this era because of its primarily black cast, but also because of its themes that imply whites have cheated African Americans out of their piece of the American Dream. From candid expressions of hostility toward whites to criticizing run-down tenement conditions, this analysis will discuss some of the groundbreaking elements in A Raisin in the Sun.

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Drunk driving results in a substantial number of injuries and deaths each year. In 2005 alone, 254,000 people sustained injuries in alcohol-related accidents (Policarpio), and in 2006, it is estimated that 17,602 people died in alcohol-related traffic crashes; this amounts to "an average of one every 30 minutes" ("Did You Know..."). This figure represents 41% of the total number of traffic fatalities for the year, 42,642 ("Did You Know..."). The Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization, MADD, states that "On average someone is killed by a drunk driver every 39 minutes" ("Did You Know..."). Clearly, drunk driving results when someone drives while intoxicated, but the causes and effects of drunk driving go much deeper than that. This paper will explore the issues that cause the behavior, as well as the effects of drunk driving on individuals and others. Most people are aware that "Drinking and driving don't mix." Despite their awareness that drinking can affect th

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The Enlightenment was an era in which philosophers and other scholars constructed a new understanding of the role played in human affairs by reason, by freedom, and by individualism. Challenges to such view emerged in the Romantic, Post-Romantic and subsequent periods of man's historical development. This essay will consider challenges to Enlightenment ideas and values as reflected in a set of diverse works, some from fiction and some from philosophy and political science. The specific challenges addressed with be the Romanic construction of man as bound inextricably to Nature and influenced as much by the natural world as his own reason and the growing recognition of the failure of society to provide for meaningful advancement for the vast majority of humans, who lacked essential freedom and individual autonomy as a consequence of industrial capitalism. One must consider, in the context of the failure of post-Enlightenment society to guarantee or provide support for individua

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Christopher Asch (2008) appears to have transformed a doctoral dissertation comparing the views and experiences of two famous Mississippi figures from the civil rights movement era into a full length nonfiction text. This is Asch's first published book. It is clear from his introduction that the book was written in order to provide a contrast between the lived experiences of an affluent, powerful, white Southern male (Senator James O. Eastland) and a poor, barely educated civil rights female activist (Fannie Lou Hamer) who was his neighbor in Sunflower County, Mississippi. As Asch (2008) points out, it would be difficult to find a pair of Mississippians more diametrically opposed to one another. Whereas Eastland as a long time member of the U.S. Senate and a devout white supremacist resisted all efforts to end segregation, Hamer was equally active in the struggle to bring about true equality for all Americans. Asch (2008) traces the lives of these two indivi

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The examination of nature in poetry is a longtime convention, possibly as old as poetry itself. Nature in a poem can be a figure of speech, a symbol of an idea or emotion or person or other thing, or perhaps even an object of direct scrutiny. Alternatively, it can be something less concrete, something deliberately rendered elliptically to draw in the reader even as the reader is frustrated by an ambiguous meaning. One could say that these various effects are amplified with modern poetry, inasmuch as modern poetry is less likely than its literary antecedents to adhere strictly to traditional forms or rhyme schemes. 1. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" The symbolic potency of nature is evoked in Stevens's "Blackbird." In thirteen numbered stanzas varying from two to five lines, the poet presents an image of a blackbird in thirteen separate natural environments, or rather in thirteen different aspects. At the same time, the blackbird is present in frames of huma

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