Destination: Costa Rica Essay

Folks, in just a short while, you will all be going to Switzerland. Yes, you heard me right, Switzerland. If you think you are in the wrong group of tourists, then you are mistaken because you are all going to the Switzerland of Central America, Costa Rica. Indeed Costa Rica has sometimes been likened to Switzerland because of the nation’s â€Å"comfortable lifestyle, peaceful democracy and overwhelming natural beauty† (Firestone et. al 20). Furthermore, Costa Rica is home to over four million Ticos – this is what Costa Ricans call themselves. You can consider yourselves lucky to have the opportunity to get a taste of what Costa Rica offers because this country is known to be the most user-friendly nation in Central America. This means plenty of cheap buses that can take you to the most beautiful tourist spots, several accommodations waiting to make you feel at home, and a multitude of decent eateries and restaurants in most corners of the country. However, since Costa Rica boasts of a higher standard of living compared to its neighboring countries, prices tend to be slightly higher. Yet do not fret, this only means you are certain to experience quality goods and services throughout the country (Firestone et. al 20-22). Moreover, Costa Rica is the third smallest country in Central America, with a land area of 19,730 square miles. It is actually a bit smaller than West Virginia so you can visit all the places in your itinerary in just a short period of time. Furthermore, the country is bounded by Nicaragua in the north, Panama in the south and southeast, the Caribbean Sea in the northeast, and the Pacific Ocean in the west and southwest. It is further defined by three geographical regions, namely, the Pacific lowlands with steep cliffs and narrow white beaches; the central highlands with temperate and populous basins; and the Caribbean lowlands with flat plains and flowing streams. Though this naturally rich country is a tropical one, the best time to visit is in the summer or â€Å"verano† by the end of the year. Nonetheless, if you wish to know what their wet season feels like, then go there in the middle of the year to experience winter or â€Å"invierno. In addition, whether in â€Å"verano† or in â€Å"invierno,† one can never go wrong with Costa Rica’s flora and fauna. Tropical rainforests, tropical dry forests, and coastal vegetations, and various species of amphibian and reptiles, mammals, birds, and insects (Foley & Cooke, 7-17) – these just depict the beauty and richness nature blessed Costa Rica with. Looking back in time, the Spanish were the first to be captivated by t his richness. In fact, they optimistically referred to the country as the â€Å"Rich Coast† when they began settling in the region in 1522, thinking that it holds several gold and other mineral reserves. Yet they only found little and so they shifted to agriculture. Moreover, together with other provinces in Central America, Costa Rica declared independence from Spain in 1821, after almost three centuries of ruling. These newly-independent provinces formed an alliance. Because of border disputes though, the federation failed to thrive so Costa Rica withdrew and declared its sovereignty in 1838. The years that followed were smooth-sailing with a peaceful democracy beginning in 1899. This positive development persists up to this very day with only two notable disruptions – one in 1917-19 when Federico Tinoco governed with dictatorship and the other in 1948 when Jose Figueres led an armed uprising following a doubtful presidential election (US Department of State). Hence, Costa Rica has since been peaceful, not to mention, progressive. A close look at its economy would reveal that it has enjoyed a stable economic growth before the global economic crisis. Instrumental to this growth are the country’s export commodities such as coffee, sugar, and beef as well as the widening trade of industrial and specialized agricultural products. Moreover, Costa Rica has kept its 15 to 20 percent poverty rate for almost 20 years. In addition, foreign investors are attracted to enter the country because of its political stability, high quality of education, and fiscal incentives. Needless to say, tourists like you, who are attracted to the rich biodiversity of the country, contribute greatly to the economy as ecotourism continues to develop and strengthen (Central Intelligence Agency). This ecotourism of Costa Rica is in fact one of the country’s fastest improving sector (Tourist Spots Organization). In fact, the government has signed various trade agreements with other countries. Who knows, this trip of yours may be a product of one of those agreements. So once you land in Costa Rica, either through the international airport Juan Santamaria in San Jose or the Daniel Oduber in Liberia (Costa Rica Tourism), your first instinct would be to go directly to that tourist spot of your choice. Well in this case Costa Rica has plenty, from national parks to mountains and volcanoes, from beaches to cultural sites – Costa Rica has these options and more that would suit various tastes. For those who want to head out straight to the waters, Cocos Island and Puerto Viejo Beach are just two options. A choice of water sports such as kayaking, surfing, and scuba diving as well as rich marine life await visitors in these top spots. For those who wish to witness the natural wonder of the country at its best, try Tortuguero National Park and Tenorio Volcano National Park. For the nature lovers, a trip to Poas Volcano to see the two crater lakes may be an option. For the adventurous ones, rock climbing and hiking in Chirripo Mountain may be the perfect activities. For the animal lovers, Monteverde Reserve, which houses the extinct gold toad as well as squirrels, wild pigs, and porcupines, may just be the right place. For those who want to see two attractive spots in one location, the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, which comprises of the Junquillal Bay Wildlife Refuge and the Rincon de la Vieja National Park, may be the best spot. For those who wish to spend a quiet time in the city, the Teatro Nacional de Costa Rica may offer the peace you long for (Tourist Spots Organization). However, in visiting these marvelous tourist spots, it is important that you get to know Ticos in order to deal with them well. For one, they opt to think small, go slow, and avoid risks, anxiety, and overwork. They also put high value to their families and tend to give them favored treatments. They likewise have a strong belief on equality than most Latin Americans and further hold a strong sense of personal honor and dignity regardless of their social status. Hence, it is very important to note that you need to avoid embarrassing another person especially in public. Moreover in decision-making, a consensus is more likely to happen, which sometimes slows down the process. Hence, showing of impatient attitude is discouraged and lowers credibility. Furthermore, as time and deadlines may be flexible, be tolerant and understanding of delays and put in mind that courtesy and enjoyment are more important than time. Remember to address Ticos properly with Mr. /Senor, Mrs. Senora, or Miss/Senorita plus the last name. Also, avoid resting your feet on any furniture but footstools. Finally, when you decide to head out to the beach, shorts for men will do while too much revealing clothes for women will not (qtd. in Tacey, 1-3). With these, I hope you now have a clear picture of what your tour to the Switzerland of Central America will be like; yet no lecture or discussion of the place would surpass the real thing. So make the most out of what Costa Ri ca can offer and be sure to enjoy.

New Hoarding Technique for Handling Disconnection in Mobile

Literature Survey On New Hoarding Technique for Handling Disconnection in Mobile Submitted by Mayur Rajesh Bajaj (IWC2011021) In Partial fulfilment for the award of the degree Of Master of Technology In INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (Specialization: Wireless Communication and Computing) [pic] Under the Guidance of Dr. Manish Kumar INDIAN INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, ALLAHABAD (A University Established under sec. 3 of UGC Act, 1956 vide Notification no. F. 9-4/99-U. 3 Dated 04. 08. 2000 of the Govt. of India) (A Centre of Excellence in Information Technology Established by Govt. of India) Table of Contents [pic] 1.Introduction†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 3 2. Related Work and Motivation 1. Coda: The Pioneering System for Hoarding†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 4 2. Hoarding Based on Data Mining Techniques†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 5 3. Hoarding Techniques Based on Program Trees†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 8 4. Hoarding in a Distributed Environment†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 9 5.Hoarding content for mobile learning†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 10 6. Mobile Clients Through Cooperative Hoarding†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 10 7. Comparative Discussion previous techniques†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 11 3. Problem Definition†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 11 4. New Approach Suggested 1. Zipf’s Law †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 2 2. Object Hotspot Prediction Model†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢ € ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 13 5. Schedule of Work†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 13 6. Conclusion†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 13 References†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 14 . Introduction Mobile devices are the computers which are having wireless communication capabilities to access global data services from any location while roaming. Now a day’s mobile devices are supporting applications such as multimedia, World Wide Web and other high profile applications which demands continuous connections and Mobile devices are lacking here. However, mobile devices with wireless communication are frequently disconnected from the network due to the cost of wireless communication or the unavailability of the wireless network.Disconnection period of mobile device from its network is called as offline period. Such offline periods may appear for different reasons – intentional (e. g. , the available connection is too expensive for the user) or unintentional (e. g. , lack of infrastructure at a given time and location). During offline periods the user can only access materials located on the device’s local memory. Mobile systems typically have a relatively small amount of memory, which is often not enough to store all the needed data for ongoing activities to continue.In such a case, a decision should be taken on which part of the data has to be cached. Often we cannot count on the user’s own judgement of what he/she will need and prefetch. Rather, in our opinion, some sort of automatic prefetching would be desirable. Uninterrupted operation in offline mode will be in high demand and the mobile computer systems should provide support for it. Seamless disconnection can be achieved by loading the files that a user will access in the future from the network to the local storage. This preparation process for disconnected operation is called hoarding.Few of the parameters which complicate the hoarding process are prediction of future access pattern of the user, handling of hoard miss, limited local hoard memory and unpredictable disconnections and reconnection, activities on hoarded object at other clients, the asymmetry of communications bandwidth in downstream and upstream. An important point is to measure the quality of the hoarding and to try to improve it continuously. An often used metric in the evaluation of caching proxies is the hit ratio. Hit ratio is calculated by dividing the number of by the total number of uploaded predictions.It is a good measure for hoarding systems, though a better measure is the miss ratio – a percentage of accesses for which the cache is ineffective. In this work we have given brief overview of the techniques proposed in earlier days and also given the idea for the new hoarding technique. 2. Related Work and Motivation Before the early 1990’s, there was little research on hoarding. Since then, however, interest has increased dramatically among research scientists and professors around the globe and many techniques have been developed. Here we have listed few of the techniques and also will discuss them in brief. Coda: The Pioneering System for Hoarding †¢ Hoarding Based on Data Mining Techniques ? SEER Hoarding System (inspired by clustering technique) ? Association Rule-Based Techniques ? Hoarding Based on Hyper Graph ? Probability Graph Based Technique †¢ Hoarding Techniques Based on Program Trees †¢ Hoarding in a Distributed Environment †¢ Hoarding content for mobile learning †¢ Mobile Clients Through Cooperative Hoarding 2. 1 Coda Coda is a distributed file system based on client–server architecture, where there are many clients and a comparatively smaller number of servers.It is the first system that enabled users to work in disconnected mode. The concept of hoarding was introduced by the Coda group as a means of enabling disconnected operation. Disconnections in Coda are assumed to occur involuntarily due to network failures or voluntarily due to the detachment of a mobile client from the network. Voluntary and involuntary disconnections are handled the same way. The cache manager of Coda, called Venus, is designed to work in disconnected mode by serving client requests from the cache when the mobile client is detached from the network.Requests to the files that are not in the cache during disconnection are reflected to the client as failures. The hoarding system of Coda lets users select the files that they will hopefully need in the future. This information is used to decide what to load to the local storage. For disconnected operation, files are loaded to the client local storage, because the master copies are kept at stationary servers, there is the notion of replication and how to manage locks on the local copies. When the disconnection is voluntary, Coda handles this case by obtaining exclusive locks to files.However in case of involuntary disconnection, the system should defer the conflicting lock requests for an object to the reconnection time, which may not be predictable. The cache management system of Coda, called Venus, diff ers from the previous ones in that it incorporates user profiles in addition to the recent reference history. Each workstation maintains a list of pathnames, called the hoard database. These pathnames specify objects of interest to the user at the workstation that maintains the hoard database. Users can modify the hoard database via scripts, which are called hoard profiles.Multiple hoard profiles can be defined by the same user and a combination of these profiles can be used to modify the hoard database. Venus provides the user with an option to specify two time points during which all file references will be recorded. Due to the limitations of the mobile cache space, users can also specify priorities to provide the hoarding system with hints about the importance of file objects. Precedence is given to high priority objects during hoarding where the priority of an object is a combination of the user specified priority and a parameter indicating how recently it was accessed.Venus per forms a hierarchical cache management, which means that a directory is not purged unless all the subdirectories are already purged. In summary, the Coda hoarding mechanism is based on a least recently used (LRU) policy plus the user specified profiles to update the hoard data-base, which is used for cache management. It relies on user intervention to determine what to hoard in addition to the objects already maintained by the cache management system. In that respect, it can be classified as semi-automated.Researchers developed more advanced techniques with the aim of minimizing the user intervention in determining the set of objects to be hoarded. These techniques will be discussed in the following sections. 2. 2 Hoarding based on Data mining Techniques Knowing the interested pattern from the large collection of data is the basis of data mining. In the earlier history of hoarding related works researchers have applied many different data mining techniques in this arena of mobile hoa rding. Mainly clustering and association rule mining techniques were adopted from data mining domain. . 2. 1 SEER Hoarding System To automate the hoarding process, author developed a hoarding system called SEER that can make hoarding decisions without user intervention. The basic idea in SEER is to organize users’ activities as projects in order to provide more accurate hoarding decisions. A distance measure needs to be defined in order to apply clustering algorithms to group related files. SEER uses the notion of semantic distance based on the file reference behaviour of the files for which semantic distance needs to be calculated.Once the semantic distance between pairs of files are calculated, a standard clustering algorithm is used to partition the files into clusters. The developers of SEER also employ some filters based on the file type and other conventions introduced by the specific file system they assumed. The basic architecture of the SEER predictive hoarding syste m is provided in figure 1. The observer monitors user behaviour (i. e. , which files are accessed at what time) and feeds the cleaned and formatted access paths to the correlator, which then generates the distances among files in terms of user access behaviour.The distances are called the semantic distance and they are fed to the cluster generator that groups the objects with respect to their distances. The aim of clustering is, given a set of objects and a similarity or distance matrix that describes the pairwise distances or similarities among a set of objects, to group the objects that are close to each other or similar to each other. Calculation of the distances between files is done by looking at the high-level file references, such as open or status inquiry, as opposed to individual reads and writes, which are claimed to obscure the process of distance calculation. pic] Figure 1. Architecture of the SEER Predictive Hoarding System The semantic distance between two file referen ces is based on the number of intervening references to other files in between these two file references. This definition is further enhanced by the notion of lifetime semantic distance. Lifetime semantic distance between an open file A and an open file B is the number of intervening file opens (including the open of B). If the file A is closed before B is opened, then the distance is defined to be zero.The lifetime semantic distance relates two references to different files; however it needs to be somehow converted to a distance measure between two files instead of file references. Geometric mean of the file references is calculated to obtain the distance between the two files. Keeping all pairwise distances takes a lot of space. Therefore, only the distances among the closest files are represented (closest is determined by a parameter K, K closest pairs for each file are considered). The developers of SEER used a variation of an agglomerative (i. e. bottom up) clustering algorithm called k nearest neighbour, which has a low time and space complexity. An agglomerative clustering algorithm first considers individual objects as clusters and tries to combine them to form larger clusters until all the objects are grouped into one single cluster. The algorithm they used is based on merging sub clusters into larger clusters if they share at least kn neighbours. If the two files share less than kn close files but more than kf, then the files in the clusters are replicated to form overlapping clusters instead of being merged.SEER works on top of a user level replication system such as Coda and leaves the hoarding process to the underlying file system after providing the hoard database. The files that are in the same project as the file that is currently in use are included to the set of files to be hoarded. During disconnected operation, hoard misses are calculated to give a feedback to the system. 2. 2. 2 Association Rule-Based Techniques Association rule overview: Let I=i1,i2†¦.. im be a set of literals, called items and D be a set of transactions, such that ?T ? D; T? I. A transaction T contains a set of items X if X? T. An association rule is denoted by an implication of the form X ? Y, where X? I, Y ? I, and X ? Y = NULL. A rule X ? Y is said to hold in the transaction set D with confidence c if c% of the transactions in D that contain X also contain Y. The rule X? Y has support sin the transaction set D if s% of transactions in D contains X? Y. The problem of mining association rules is to find all the association rules that have a support and a confidence greater than user-specified thresholds.The thresholds for confidence and support are called minconf and minsup respectively. In Association Rule Based Technique for hoarding, authors described an application independent and generic technique for determining what should be hoarded prior to disconnection. This method utilizes association rules that are extracted by data mining techni ques for determining the set of items that should be hoarded to a mobile computer prior to disconnection. The proposed method was implemented and tested on synthetic data to estimate its effectiveness.The process of automated hoarding via association rules can be summarized as follows: Step 1: Requests of the client in the current session are used through an inferencing mechanism to construct the candidate set prior to disconnection. Step 2: Candidate set is pruned to form the hoard set. Step 3: Hoard set is loaded to the client cache. The need to have separate steps for constructing the candidate set and the hoard set arises from the fact that users also move from one machine to another that may have lower resources.The construction of the hoard set must adapt to such potential changes. Construction of candidate set: An inferencing mechanism is used to construct the candidate set of data items that are of interest to the client to be disconnected. The candidate set of the client is constructed in two steps; 1. The inferencing mechanism finds the association rules whose heads (i. e. , left hand side) match with the client’s requests in the current session, 2. The tails (i. e. , right hand side) of the matching rules are collected into the candidate set.Construction of Hoard set: The client that issued the hoard request has limited re-sources. The storage resource is of particular importance for hoarding since we have a limited space to load the candidate set. Therefore, the candidate set obtained in the first phase of the hoarding set should shrink to the hoard set so that it fits the client cache. Each data item in the candidate set is associated with a priority. These priorities together with various heuristics must be incorporated for determining the hoard set. The data items are used to sort the rules in descending order of priorities.The hoard set is constructed out of the data items with the highest priority in the candidate set just enough to fil l the cache. 3. Hoarding Based on Hyper Graph Hyper graph based approach presents a kind of low-cost automatic data hoarding technology based on rules and hyper graph model. It first uses data mining technology to extract sequence relevance rules of data from the broadcasting history, and then formulates hyper graph model, sorting the data into clusters through hyper graph partitioning methods and sorting them topologically.Finally, according to the data invalid window and the current visit record, data in corresponding clusters will be collected. Hyper graph model: Hyper graph model is defined as H = (V, E) where V={v1 ,v2 ,†¦ ,vn } is the vertices collection of hyper graph, and E={e1 ,e2 ,†¦ ,em } is super-edge collection of hyper graph (there supposed to be m super-edges in total). Hyper graph is an extension of graph, in which each super-edge can be connected with two or more vertices. Super-edge is the collection of a group of vertices in hyper graph, and superedge ei = {vi1, vi2, †¦ inj} in which vi1,vi2 ,†¦ ,vin ? V . In this model, vertices collection V corresponds to the history of broadcast data, in which each point corresponds to a broadcast data item, and each super-edge corresponds to a sequence model. Sequence model shows the orders of data items. A sequence model in size K can be expressed as p = . Use of hyper graph in hoarding are discussed in paper in details. 4. Probability Graph Based Technique This paper proposed a low-cost automated hoarding for mobile computing.Advantage of this approach is it does not explore application specific heuristics, such as the directory structure or file extension. The property of application independence makes this algorithm applicable to any predicative caching system to address data hoarding. The most distinguished feature of this algorithm is that it uses probability graph to represent data relationships and to update it at the same time when user’s request is processed. Before d isconnection, the cluster algorithm divides data into groups.Then, those groups with the highest priority are selected into hoard set until the cache is filled up. Analysis shows that the overhead of this algorithm is much lower than previous algorithms. Probability Graph: An important parameter used to construct probability graph is look-ahead period. It is a fixed number of file references that defines what it means for one file to be opened ‘soon’ after another. In other words, for a specific file reference, only references within the look-ahead period are considered related. In fact, look-ahead period is an approximate method to avoid traversing the whole trace.Unlike constructing probability graph from local file systems, in the context of mobile data access, data set is dynamically collected from remote data requests. Thus, we implemented a variation of algorithm used to construct probability graph, as illustrated in Figure 2. [pic] Figure 2. Constructing the prob ability graph The basic idea is simple: If a reference to data object A follows the reference to data object B within the look-ahead period, then the weight of directed arc from B to A is added by one. The look-ahead period affects absolute weight of arcs.Larger look-ahead period produces more arcs and larger weight. A ’s dependency to B is represented by the ratio of weight of arc from B to A divided by the total weight of arcs leaving B. Clustering: Before constructing the final hoard set, data objects are clustered into groups based on dependency among data objects. The main objective of the clustering phase is to guarantee closely related data objects are partitioned into the same group. In the successive selecting phase, data objects are selected into hoard set at the unit of group. This design provides more continuity in user operation when disconnected.Selecting Groups: The following four kinds of heuristic information are applicable for calculating priority for a grou p: †¢ Total access time of all data objects; †¢ Average access time of data objects; †¢ Access time of the start data object; †¢ Average access time per byte. 2. Hoarding Techniques Based on Program Trees A hoarding tool based on program execution trees was developed by author running under OS/2 operating system. Their method is based on analyzing program executions to construct a profile for each program depending on the files the program accesses.They proposed a solution to the hoarding problem in case of informed disconnections: the user tells the mobile computer that there is an imminent disconnection to fill the cache intelligently so that the files that will be used in the future are already there in the cache when needed. [pic] Figure 3. Sample program Tree This hoarding mechanism lets the user make the hoarding decision. They present the hoarding options to the user through a graphical user interface and working sets of applications are captured automatic ally. The working sets are detected by logging the user file accesses at the background.During hoarding, this log is analyzed and trees that represent the program executions are constructed. A node denotes a file and a link from a parent to one of its child nodes tells us that either the child is opened by the parent or it is executed by the parent. Roots of the trees are the initial processes. Program trees are constructed for each execution of a program, which captures multiple contexts of executions of the same program. This has the advantage that the whole context is captured from different execution times of the program.Finally, hoarding is performed by taking the union of all the execution trees of a running program. A sample program tree is provided in Figure 3. Due to the storage limitations of mobile computers, the number of trees that can be stored for a program is limited to 15 LRU program trees. Hoarding through program trees can be thought of as a generalization of a pr o-gram execution by looking at the past behaviour. The hoarding mechanism is enhanced by letting the user rule out the data files. Data files are automatically detected using three complementary heuristics: 1.Looking at the filename extensions and observing the filename conventions in OS/2, files can be distinguished as executable, batch files, or data files. 2. Directory inferencing is used as a spatial locality heuristic. The files that differ in the top level directory in their pathnames from the running program are assumed to be data files, but the programs in the same top level directory are assumed to be part of the same program. 3. Modification times of the files are used as the final heuristic to deter-mine the type of a file. Data files are assumed to be modified more recently and frequently than the executables.They devised a parametric model for evaluation, which is based on recency and frequency. 3. Hoarding in a Distributed Environment Another hoarding mechanism, which was presented for specific application in distributed system, assumes a specific architecture, such as infostations where mobile users are connected to the network via wireless local area networks (LANs) that offer a high bandwidth, which is a cheaper option compared to wireless wide area networks (WANs). The hoarding process is handed over to the infostations in that model and it is assumed that what the user wants to access is location-dependent.Hoarding is proposed to fill the gap between the capacity and cost trade-off between wireless WANS and wireless LANs. The infestations do the hoarding and when a request is not found in the infostation, then WAN will be used to get the data item. The hoarding decision is based on the user access patterns coupled with that user’s location information. Items frequently accessed by mobile users are recorded together with spatial information (i. e. , where they were accessed). A region is divided into hoarding areas and each infostation is responsible with one hoarding area. 4. Hoarding content for mobile learningHoarding in the learning context is the process for automatically choosing what part of the overall learning content should be prepared and made available for the next offline period of a learner equipped with a mobile device. We can split the hoarding process into few steps that we will discuss further in more details: 1. Predict the entry point of the current user for his/her next offline learning session. We call it the ‘starting point’. 2. Create a ‘candidate for caching’ set. This set should contain related documents (objects) that the user might access from the starting point we have selected. 3.Prune the set – the objects that probably will not be needed by the user should be excluded from the candidate set, thus making it smaller. This should be done based on user behaviour observations and domain knowledge. 4. Find the priority to all objects still in the hoarding set after pruning. Using all the knowledge available about the user and the current learning domain, every object left in the hoarding set should be assigned a priority value. The priority should mean how important the object is for the next user session and should be higher if we suppose that there is a higher probability that an object will be used sooner. . Sort the objects based on their priority, and produce an ordered list of objects. 6. Cache, starting from the beginning of the list (thus putting in the device cache those objects with higher priority) and continue with the ones with smaller weights until available memory is filled in. 5. Mobile Clients Through Cooperative Hoarding Recent research has shown that mobile users often move in groups. Cooperative hoarding takes advantage of the fact that even when disconnected from the network, clients may still be able to communicate with each other in ad-hoc mode.By performing hoarding cooperatively, clients can share their hoar d content during disconnections to achieve higher data accessibility and reduce the risk of critical cache misses. Two cooperative hoarding schemes, GGH and CAP, have been proposed. GGH improves hoard performance by al-lowing clients to take advantage of what their peers have hoarded when making their own hoarding decisions. On the other hand, CAP selects the best client in the group to Hoard each object to maximise the number of unique objects hoarded and minimise access cost. Simulation results show that compare to existing schemes.Details of GGH and CAP are given in paper. 2. 7 Comparative Discussion previous techniques The hoarding techniques discussed above vary depending on the target system and it is difficult to make an objective comparative evaluation of their effectiveness. We can classify the hoarding techniques as being auto-mated or not. In that respect, being the initial hoarding system, Coda is semiautomated and it needs human intervention for the hoarding decision. T he rest of the hoarding techniques discussed are fully automated; how-ever, user supervision is always desirable to give a final touch to the files to be hoarded.Among the automated hoarding techniques, SEER and program tree-based ones assume a specific operating system and use semantic information about the files, such as the naming conventions, or file reference types and so on to construct the hoard set. However, the ones based on association rule mining and infostation environment do not make any operating system specific assumptions. Therefore, they can be used in generic systems. Coda handles both voluntary and involuntary disconnections well.The infostation-based hoarding approach is also inherently designed for involuntary disconnections, because hoarding is done during the user passing in the range of the infostation area. However, the time of disconnection can be predicted with a certain error bound by considering the direction and the speed of the moving client predicting when the user will go out of range. The program tree-based methods are specifically designed for previously informed disconnections. The scenario assumed in the case of infostations is a distributed wire-less infrastructure, which makes it unique among the hoarding mechanisms.This case is especially important in today’s world where peer-to-peer systems are becoming more and more popular. 3. Problem Definition The New Technique that we have planned to design for hoarding will be used on Mobile Network. Goals that we have set are a. Finding a solution having optimal hit ratio in the hoard at local node. b. Technique should not have greater time complexity because we don’t have much time for performing hoarding operation after the knowledge of disconnection. c. Optimal utilization of hoard memory. d. Support for both intentional and unintentional disconnection. e.Proper handling of conflicts in hoarded objects upon reconnection. However, our priority will be for hit rati o than the other goals that we have set. We will take certain assumptions about for other issues if we find any scope of improvement in hit ratio. 4. New Approach 4. 1 Zipf’s Law It is a mathematical tool to describe the relationship between words in a text and their frequencies. Considering a long text and assigning ranks to all words by the frequencies in this text, the occurrence probability P (i) of the word with rank i satisfies the formula below, which is known as Zipf first law, where C is a constant.P (i) = [pic] †¦. (1) This formula is further extended into a more generalized form, known as Zipf-like law. P (i) = [pic]†¦. (2) Obviously, [pic]†¦. (3) Now According to (2) and (3), we have C[pic] [pic] Our work is to dynamically calculate for different streams and then according to above Formula (2) and (4), the hotspot can be predicted based on the ranking of an object. 4. 2 Object Hotspot Prediction Model 4. 2. 1 Hotspot Classification We classify hotsp ot into two categories: â€Å"permanent hotspot† and â€Å"stage hotspot†. Permanent hotspot is an object which is frequently accessed regularly.Stage hotspot can be further divided into two types: â€Å"cyclical hotspot† and â€Å"sudden hotspot†. Cyclical hotspot is an object which becomes popular periodically. If an object is considered as a focus suddenly, it is a sudden hotspot. 4. 2. 2. Hotspot Identification Hotspots in distributed stream-processing storage systems can be identified via a ranking policy (sorted by access frequencies of objects). In our design, the hotspot objects will be inserted into a hotspot queue. The maximum queue length is determined by the cache size and the average size of hotspot Objects.If an object’s rank is smaller than the maximum hotspot queue length (in this case, the rank is high), it will be considered as â€Å"hotspot† in our system. Otherwise it will be considered as â€Å"non hotspot†. And t he objects in the queue will be handled by hotspot cache strategy. 4. 2. 3 Hotspot Prediction This is our main section of interest, here we will try to determine the prediction model for hoard content with optimal hoard hit ratio. 5. Schedule of Work |Work |Scheduled Period |Remarks | |Studying revious work on Hoarding |July – Aug 2012 |Complete | |Identifying Problem |Sept 2012 |Complete | |Innovating New Approach |Oct 2012 |Ongoing | |Integrating with Mobile Arena as solution to Hoarding |Nov- Dec 2012 |- | |Simulation And Testing |Jan 2013 |- | |Optimization |Feb 2013 |- | |Simulation And Testing |Mar 2013 |- | |Writing Thesis Work / Journal Publication |Apr –May 2013 |- | 6. Conclusion In this literature survey we have discussed previous related work on hoarding. We have also given the requirements for the new technique that is planned to be design.Also we are suggesting a new approach that is coming under the category of Hoarding with Data Mining Techniques. Recen t studies have shown that the use of proposed technique i. e. Zipfs-Like law for caching over the web contents have improved the hit ratio to a greater extent. Here with this work we are expecting improvements in hit ratio of the local hoard. References [1]. James J. Kistler and Mahadev Satyanarayanan. Disconnected Operation in the Coda File System. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 3–25, 1992. [2]. Mahadev Satyanarayanan. The Evolution of Coda. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 85–124, 2002 [3]. Geoffrey H. Kuenning and Gerald J. Popek. Automated Hoarding for Mobile Computers.In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP 1997), October 5–8, St. Malo, France, pp. 264–275, 1997. [4]. Yucel Saygin, Ozgur Ulusoy, and Ahmed K. Elmagarmid. Association Rules for Supporting Hoarding in Mobile Computing Environments. In Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering (RIDE 2000), February 28–29, San Diego, pp. 71–78, 2000. [5]. Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishna Srikant, Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Databases, Chile, 1994. [6]. GUO Peng, Hu Hui, Liu Cheng. The Research of Automatic Data Hoarding Technique Based on Hyper Graph.Information Science and Engineering (ICISE), 1st International Conference, 2009. [7]. Huan Zhou, Yulin Feng, Jing Li. Probability graph based data hoarding for mobile environment. Presented at Information & Software Technology, pp. 35-41, 2003. [8]. Carl Tait, Hui Lei, Swarup Acharya, and Henry Chang. Intelligent File Hoarding for Mobile Computers. In Proceedings of the 1st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM’95), Berkeley, CA, 1995. [9]. Anna Trifonova and Marco Ronchetti. Hoarding content for mobile learning. Journal International Journal of Mobile Communications archive V olume 4 Issue 4, Pages 459-476, 2006. [10]. Kwong Yuen Lai, Zahir Tari, Peter Bertok.Improving Data Accessibility for Mobile Clients through Cooperative Hoarding. Data Engineering, ICDE proceedings 21st international Conference 2005. [11]. G. Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley, 1949. [12]. Chentao Wu, Xubin He, Shenggang Wan, Qiang Cao and Changsheng Xie. Hotspot Prediction and Cache in Distributed Stream-processing Storage Systems. Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC) IEEE 28th International, 2009. [13]. Lei Shi, Zhimin Gu, Lin Wei and Yun Shi. An Applicative Study of Zipf’s Law on Web Cache International Journal of Information Technology Vol. 12 No. 4 2006. [14]. Web link: http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

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Week 5 Individual Assignment - Essay Example The purpose of this paper is to describe the strategic plan, leadership considerations, and other factors that will allow Gene One to achieve the transformational process successfully. The former CEO of the company Don Ruiz had the right idea in mind when he developed the idea of turning the company into a publicly traded entity. Don has passed away and Gene One is currently in dying need of a new CEO that is able to transform the company so that it can become an efficient public enterprise. The three primary goals of Gene One are to grow its revenues by 40%, to raise additional capital, and to develop new products. The timeline for completion of the IPO process is a maximum of 36 months. Prior to his death Don Ruiz had made remarks in the scenario that he might not be the right person to lead the company in the transformational process. Now that the company has to fill his vacancy the human resource department must recruit a new CEO. This CEO has to have the right leadership style to inspire the staff into believing that the direction of the company is the right path. The chief executive officer position is the top managerial position within a corporation. Due to the changes that are occurring within Gene One the new CEO has to be a true leader in order to ensure his troops follow the manager’s guidance. A leadership style that is well suited for the CEO position at Gene One Corporation is a charismatic leadership style. A charismatic leader can be defined as a leader who by force of their personal abilities is capable of having a profound and extraordinary effect on followers (Schermerhorn & Hunt & Osborn, 2003, p. 300). An example of a charismatic leader is Martin Luther King. Charismatic leaders have high moral beliefs, great interpersonal and communication skills, and the ability to inspire others to achieve higher levels of performance. At Gene One

Research Critique Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Research Critique - Essay Example Suggestions and alternatives on how to improve these strengths and weaknesses shall also be considered. The research subject of this critique is relevant to the practice as it evaluates the effects of securing fall prevention policies in hospitals, especially for the elderly and those with limited and compromised mobility. This topic is also relevant as it displays the benefits of a fall prevention program in the hospital with the end hope of securing improved patient outcomes. Critical evaluation The title of the article is clear and very much precise. It is short enough to warrant interest from the reader, but also concise in its description of the research. It also provides the foundations of the research in terms of its variables and clinical setting. It does not however specify the subject respondents for the research, whether they be elderly patients in critical care or those who have compromised mobility. These details would have made the title more concise and encompassing. T he abstract is adequately written. It clearly provides a condensed version of the contents of the study, noting the research questions, aims, and objectives of the study (Polit and Hungler, 1997). The methods of the study have also been specified in the abstract, including the results and conclusion (Parahoo and Reid, 1988). The abstract is however overly long, made up of more than 250 words. Abstracts should average about 100 to 200 words (Ingham-Broomfield, 2006). The background/introduction of the study clearly identifies the purpose of the article. The authors detail the conceptual basis for the study, while also identifying gaps and health issues in the practice. The aims and objectives of the study were also identified in the research, particularly specifying the general direction of the research paper (Parahoo and Reid, 1988). The only weakness which can be seen in the introduction is that not all the essential details for the background of the study are identified in the tex t instead, they are incorporated into the text for the reader’s extrapolation. As for the literature review, it is not clearly identified as a distinct part of the research. Instead, it is incorporated and summarized in the introduction. Nevertheless, all the important details for the literature review are contained therein (Polit and Hungler, 1997). Original and primary sources have been used by the authors. The studies included in the literature review detail what is currently known about the research topic, the gaps in the knowledge, the significance of the study, and the position of the study within the current body of knowledge (Polit and Hungler, 1997). A broad understanding of the topic has been made possible through the literature review and the authors were able to use the studies to guide their methodology in their research. The review also assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the methods used in the previous studies and to use such data to guide their research (Burns and Grove, 2001). The other methods were also critiqued in order to analyze their applicability to their current research. In reviewing the research’s literature reviewed, more studies could have been discussed or drawn out in order to provide more support for the study. These studies would have strengthened the research foundation and provided more details to guide the researchers. The design for the study – comparative –

Discussing psychologist perspectives and their use Essay Example for Free

Discussing psychologist perspectives and their use Essay Cognitive- This approach is portrayed by two theorists; Jean Piaget and George Kelly. This perspective refers to age-related changes in knowledge and acts of knowing plus understanding. Research shows that this approach is the best treatment practised for almost every single disorder, another positive point to this perspective is that its really quick with lasting changes; it also helps people become more confident and boost people with learning difficulties self-esteem. Its also very easy and works for a majority of people. The negatives to this perspective are that it can be seen as non-person centred, its not effective for lower functioning clients, and some clinicians feel that it doesnt address other issues. This can be used in health and social care through helping individuals who misread situations, as this approach mainly helps people with learning difficulties so it can help certain individuals come to terms with some irrational thoughts they may have. Biological- This perspective is about the view of personality that focuses on the way behaviour and personality are influenced by neuro-anatomy, biochemistry, genetics or evolution. This perspective also helps people understand how and why we have a certain diseases. The positives to this approach; the more we know about the brain, the more we should be able to explain how we operate and to understand what makes us tick. Also the main strength to the biological approach is that chemotherapy, ECT and psychosurgery can be used to treat the symptoms of abnormal behaviour directly and in a very short time. The negatives to this approach are the risk of side effects- e. g. in case of chemotherapy there is the risk that patients may become psychologically and physically dependent on the drugs involved. Symptoms often recur when the treatment stops, so many patients have to be re-admitted to hospital. It also raises serious ethical issues. Other things people look upon as negative is the fact that its hard to determine the extent to which genetic inheritance influences behaviour. This perspective can be used in health and social care through the use of developmental norms, this means making sure that a young child is developing properly, so that their behaviour and understanding matches that if their chronological age.

Walmart Case Essay Example for Free

Walmart Case Essay Walmart has thrived in a very competitive industry by building on its founding principles and developing arguably the industries best supply chain. It has integrated its sales to its suppliers, streamlined order fulfillment and driven down its costs, which is one of its key founding principles, â€Å"Our purpose is helping our customers save money so they can live better† (Grant text, 5 walmart core 5 values). Walmart has had great success in North America, but its cultural values have not translated well in other parts of the world. Great sales growth has not translated into significant margins. Walmart has incurred losses on its international operations. Carrefour (founded in France) and Walmart both retreated from Germany. Some of the key issues facing Walmart include adapting their founding 5 core principles to vastly different cultures; the drive to cut costs clashes with treating the employees as part of family (which part of the family has more value? Is treated with integrity? ); the drive to cut costs has been driven far down the supply chain to a myriad of suppliers, sub-suppliers and sub-sub-sub suppliers†¦. how can Walmart audit or control these suppliers†¦standards imposed by Walmart? Current Situation Brief History Walmart has grown over the past 50 years from a local ‘general merchandiser’ with 15 stores in Arkansas to become the largest in the world with over 10,000 stores world-wide. Wal-Mart’s six market segments are: groceries; fashion clothes; pharmacy; health clinics; financial services; and music downloads. Its main North American competitors are Target, Dollar General and Costco. Walmart has four formats plus on-line that it has adapted to its international expansion. These formats have not always been successful, especially in their foreign expansion with retreats in Germany, South Korea and losses in Japan. The formats are: The smallest are neighbourhood formats averaging 42,000 square feet Traditional Discount store averaging 102,000 square feet Sam’s Clubs averaging 127,000 square feet Super Centers averaging 187,000 square feet No matter who we are or where we come from, our values pull us together and keep us together. They constantly push us forward to become a better and stronger company. Mike Duke, Walmart President CEO Sam Walton drove this growth founded on five(5) core principles with its roots in small town US family values: Integrity: Be Trustworthy and honest in all your business activities (Sam valued Honor) Opportunity: If, you work hard and do a good job, you will be promoted (approx.. 75% of store managers started as associates) Family and Community: Your customers, suppliers and associates are your neighbours. Work with a purpose: Deliver them the lowest costs (EDLP) and their lives will be improved. Responsibility: Make the world a better place These became Wal-Mart Stores 3 core values: The Value Statement: Service to the customer, Respect for the individual and Striving for excellence. From the website: Delivering a seamless shopping experience; Talent is key to success; Benefiting our communities. The Mission Statement: Save Money/Live Better (from the website). There is consistency in Sam’s values and Walmart’s stated values today. Walmart built its US operations using a hub and spoke system. The hub (distribution center) supports the spokes (stores). Each wheel was the launch board to the next hub and spoke as a hub could support growth of sufficient stores to build a new hub. Today Walmart has expanded overseas primarily through joint ventures or acquisitions and then built wheels to support the new regions. Additional distribution models such as Remix and the integration of IT systems have been built to streamline ordering, deliveries and drive costs further down the supply chain. Expansion overseas and growth have impacted margins, at least in the international operations, and affected the ability to centrally control the operations and keep the personal relationships between head office and the individual store managers. Porters 5 forces the resource based approach (C. K. Prahad Core Competencies) to firm analysis The External Environment Porters 5 forces can be termed the outside-in approach to industry and firm analysis. The general merchandising industry is very competitive with few to no barriers to entry, buyers can easily switch among many substitute products with cost becoming the primary factor of choice for buyers. The only strength for a merchandiser is the choice among many suppliers. Barriers to new entrants (Low) Few to none Location and min financing Power of Suppliers (HIGH) Little power; many substitutes Power of Buyers (HIGH) Many alternatives; can price compare; customer service is of minimal concern Substitutes (Low) Most products have many substitutes Industry Competitors Intense rivalry; no obvious barriers to entry; suppliers have little power; the only avenue for uniqueness is internal competencies Based on the porters 5 forces analysis, we found the general merchandise industry is not attractive. We need to use a different model to assess Wal-Marts’s competitive advantage The real competitive advantage for any firm is how it uses its resources, but more importantly its capabilities to create competitive advantages over its rivals. The resource based view as â€Å"popularized by C. K. Prahad†¦. ’The Core Competence of the Corporation† will be used to evaluate Wal-Marts core competencies and its ability to leverage these competencies to create a sustained competitive advantage. Walmart’s Resources and capabilities (The internal environment) Tangible resources: 22-24% debt to total assets has remained stable; ability to borrow Their working capital has remained steady at 0. 9 to 1; pay bills as they come due Major investment in fixed assets at 56-58%; stores and fixtures to support sales growth US Super centres: 3022; 629 US discount stores (declining numbers); 611 US Sam’sclubs; 196 US Neibourhood Markets; 5651 International units†¦lots of stores 23% ROE will allow Wal-Mart to easily raise funds in the equity markets Walmart’s financial strength allows it to finance growth without increasing its leverage. Its debt to equity and working capital has remained stable over the past 10 years with little impact from the financial crisis. This, in combination with the industry’s highest return on equity, means Wal-Mart can borrow at a very low weighted (WACC) average cost of capital (interest costs have averaged less than 5% of long-term debt) or raise capital in the stock market at favorable prices. Its major investments are in inventory and fixed assets. The fixed assets are supported by 93% long-term debt and equity financing meaning part of working capital is supported by long-term financing. This is a conservative approach and explains why Wal-Mart was not greatly impacted by the credit crunch brought about by the financial crisis. Intangible resources Founding 5 core principles: small town values; EDLP; community; responsibility; opportunity Proprietary distribution sw systems- satellite RDFI for logistics mgmtand inventory control Links all stores, to system all the way to suppliers; tracks items Own their own satellite; use EDI with suppliers; POS to suppliers for inventory reorders Store layout Growth through Hub and spoke (distribution) system Cross-docking system: minimal warehousing; goods go immediately from dist pts to stores; minimizes costs Customer satisfaction guarantee program; use of greeters EDLP Decentralized store management: layout,pricing, sales strat by dept mgrs. , product mix within store Use of IT to integrate entire value chain Communication and supervision structure keeps stores close to HO Reg VP? 10-15 Dist Mgrs ? 8-12 stores; VP visit stores/no offices; data accum M-th; data anal Fri-sat; decision made Sat; Dist mgrs. Contacted sat for following week Wal-Mart’s founding principles as enshrined in its mission and vision give’s every associate right up to the management team a focus and an understanding of where each component of the value chain. fits in this picture and where each of their jobs and duties lie. There is no doubt, nor is there any drift. Each job has a purpose within Sam’s greater vision. Greeting the customer or stocking what is in demand is all part of the â€Å"Customer Satisfaction Guarantee†. The distribution (RDFI), purchasing (EDI) and sales (POS) systems have been integrated in order to control costs at all parts of the value chain. In effect driving costs back to the suppliers. This singular focus on cost has allowed Wal-Mart to pass this savings to its customers. This has been facilitated by minimizing bottle-necks using cross-docking and REMIX and growth with the hub and spoke strategy including regional mega distribution centers such as Shanghai China to support global growth. Decision making at the customer level has been decentralized to the store level allowing store managers and department managers control over layout, input on pricing and products on the shelf. This allows for EDLP (everyday low pricing) to be competitive at the local level in all regions. The weekly meeting is a hallmark of Wal-Mart. It has been changed to monthly, but the weekly gathering of information to facilitate decisions from the corporate to store level remains. The VPs meet with their district managers who visit all their assigned store managers (stores) gathering the intelligence needed to drive the strategy and the tactics. This information is culled to develop ongoing strategies from supplier acquisition or termination to individual store strategies all to facilitate â€Å"Save more, Live better†. Human Resources Empowered sales associates 94% of employees have health benefits With one year or more of service employees are covered by a pension Pay scale is higher than competitors All store managers from around the world participate in a monthly meeting via satellite (formerly the famous Wal-Mart weekly meetings) Wal-Mart’s employees (or associates) are family. They are your neighbours. Associates are empowered and when deserved, promoted . They are given better than average health benefits and wages. All associates are covered by a pension plan. Associates will someday become the VP’s, district managers and managers. They are Sam’s community to be treated with honour and respect, just the same as the clients. Capabilities Corporate Functions Multi-district mgr/VP coordination worldwide to Benton HO Centralized purchasing from Benton HO Management Info Complete integration of sales, inventory and supplier information through sophisticated IT systems to facilitate managerial decision making Eg. The VP/Dist mgr/Store mgr meetings and data gathering Operations Operational efficiency Centralized and proprietary supply chain system allows Walmart to drive down costs at all stages of the supply chain more efficiently than their competitors Walmart is able to use the capabilities of its EDI, POS and other data systems and combine this with the VP’s weekly info gathering exercise to make weekly managerial decisions. This is more sophisticated and faster than the competitions Store design; layout of aisles; and stocking of shelves benefits from the information capabilities REMIX Program: uses 3rd distribution

Challenges Faced by Managers in the Public Sector

Challenges Faced by Managers in the Public Sector There are different levels of management in the three different sectors of the economy. There are non-managerial employees, first-line managers, middle managers and the top managers. Robbins et al ;( 2009). This essay will critically evaluate the challenges faced by managers in the public sector organisations. The essay will assess the roles of the manager in this sector and the difficulties managers encounter whilst carrying out their duties. The challenges posed by organisational structure and design with an example from the Northampton Borough Council, the issues due to the organisational culture, privatisation of some of the public sector services, the strategic management of the public sector and the complexities due to the constant changing environment in which these organisations operate, and the challenges to managers of the most recent comprehensive budget cuts, will be evaluated in this essay. The typical roles of a manager in any organisation is to organise, lead, plan and control the activities of the people and other resources within it towards achieving the objectives of that organisation; Naylor (2004). The role a manager plays is dependent on the level of management position although each level has its challenges. At the senior level, the managers role is much broader and in depth and it requires creativity and innovativeness; Robbins et al (2009). The senior manager is involved in decision making, strategic management planning and control, the manager, at this level of management is expected to have an understanding of all areas of the organisation to enable sensible handling of any given situation Hanagan;(2008). The role of the manager did not change in the 21st century rather the method of carrying out the above mentioned roles are different, for instance the manager has to organise work differently, communication is more sophisticated such as, the use of internet, mobile telephones and e-mail. In recent times, the management of change is considered as the most important skill of management due to the pace of change in the 21st century Hanagan, (2008).The rapid changes in technology, enormous improvements in communication, the increase in focus on global economy, and the environment are issues to the modern day manager. In addition to the above, the role of the manager in the public sector is challenged by the constant changes in legislation and political policies subject to government in power Hanagan (2008). An organisation is an arrangement which has been set up for a particular purpose. Robbins et al (2009). Different organisations belong to different sectors of the economy. There are three sectors; the public, the private and the third sector such as social enterprises. This three sectors have some common characteristics which are: they all have distinct purpose, each organisation is made up of people, and all create a structure within which the people could carry out their duties Robbins et al(2009). Organisations are grouped as public sector depending on certain factors such as; how much the organisation competes with similar organisations, goods and services are charged indirectly and how much it allows itself to be influenced by demand and supply of goods and services. The less such organisations are influenced by the above factors the more the organisations are considered as public sector organisations Hanagan (2008). Instances of these organisations are; Local Government council, Libraries, the National Police Force, the Defence Ministry, Colleges and Universities. The common features of these organisations are; they are set up to fulfil specific purposes, they are service motivated, they are accountable to many stakeholders and the public, they carry out their duties for the good of the people and they are funded through the use of taxpayers money. Avery important challenge to a manager whether in the public sector or in the private sector is to be aware of their relevant s takeholders and operate the organisation in ways which will yield maximum returns to each stakeholder group Bloisi et al (2007). The public sector organisation has a centralised organisational structure whereby authority and decision making is made at the senior managerial level. Organisational structure is a connected arrangement of positions and work units through which the important tasks of an organisation are subdivided and categorised to form decision centres from where the strategic plans of the organisation are carried out Bloisi et al (2007). Most of these organisations have a Matrix design structure which enables double responsibility and reporting roles with particular projects. Bloisi et al (2007). The managers in the matrix organisation are challenged by the constant need to resolve conflicts due to differences in perspectives and priority Bloisi et al (2007). For instance, the organisational structure of the Northampton Borough Council has over five managerial levels of management. According to Nicole Macdonald, a HR Manager Strategy with the council, one of the challenges they have is getting approval to carry out plans as quickly as possible. The council has about forty-seven councillors through whom decisions are made. These councillors represent different political fronts. Sometimes it is difficult to reach a consensus on certain issues and therefore arriving at a decision is elongated said, Cassie Triggs, a Democratic Chief Executive Services Manager at the Northampton Borough Council. The manager in the private sector will in relation to their organisational structure which is much flatter be able to arrive at a decision much quicker. Private sector organisational structures are designed to embrace the pace of changes in technology and also to survive. Flatter structure allows for incorporation of ideas from almost every employee in the organisation Bloisi et al (2007). The manager in the private sector will be challenged by how to control an employee wh o is working from home and coming to the place of work only one day in a working week Naylor (2004). Included in the challenges encountered by managers in the public sector are challenges due to the cultural beliefs of the organisation. Organisational culture is the way we do things around here Robbins et al (2009). According to Meek (1988), organisational culture could be used as a means to find out how people behave in a complex setting Hanagan, (2008). Organisational culture can be something abstract or peoples perception and experience within an organised setting. According to Stacey, the culture of any group of people is that set of beliefs, customs, practices and ways of thinking that they have come to share with each other through being and working together. Hanagan (2008). According to Handy, there are four major types of organisational cultures; the power culture in which the power and authority is from one person in a central position, the role culture which is labelled as a bureaucracy where the role of the individual specialists are more important than position and power , the task culture is about the activity which is being carried out and lastly the person culture which focuses more on what individuals do in a particular setting Mullins (2005). The challenge of managing cultural change in a public sector organisation will depend on how strong the existing culture is and the weight of the proposed change Hanagan (2008).The difficulty is in bringing about the change. For instance the Further and Higher Education Act which made colleges and higher education in England to become Corporate Bodies Limited by Guarantee indicates that organisational culture can be overtaken by accountability to more prominent stakeholders as the organisation would want to survive Hanagan (2008). The challenge is even more where there is existence of subcultures within the organisation. For decades, Public organisations have been managed by people who have been raised into managerial positions through years of service to the organisation, for instance; football clubs were managed by ex-footballers, and schools were managed by former teachers, local government council by people who were promoted through long years of service Hanagan (2008). There are difficulties faced by managers moving from the private sector to the public sector. The manager from the private sector is more focused on profits and accounting to shareholders, decision making is simplified, there is much flexibility and autonomy, there is power and authority attached therefore, the challenge to the private sector manager moving into the public sector will be changing the profit making, quick decision making mindset, there is less power and authority, no flexibility and autonomy Hanagan (2008). These challenges are not without approaches with which the managers could use to minimise them. For instance, the managers could use the recruitment process to recruit people who will fit into the existing culture, by the method of questioning they are made aware of what is important in the organisation, the induction process, promotion policy, training and development Hanagan (2008). Following the challenges posed by organisational structure, design and culture, are the challenges which managers face with the move of the UK government in the 1980s to privatise some of the services of the public sector when they realised that the costs of providing services were becoming too much, costs were weighing much on National budgets and the motive to make public sector organisations to work more effectively and efficiently Hanagan (2008). The move gave rise to such contractual arrangements as the Public Private Partnership (PPP) and the London underground contractual arrangement which came from a simpler Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which was set up to establish contracts between the local authority controlled London Underground and Tubelines and Metronet Hanagan (2008). Privatisation as defined by Bryan Hurl (1992), is the sale of government owned equity in nationalised industries or other commercial enterprises, to private investors with or without the loss of government control of the organisation. There are three methods which have been used by the government, these are; denationalisation which is the sale of public sector assets, deregulation which is removal of barriers to entry to a previously protected market to allow private enterprises to compete and franchising whereby the public sector provides the finance and the private sector provide the services Hurl (1992). One of the key principles of managing resources to deliver better services is by setting up strong partnerships which means that various departments of the public sector are relying on other public, private and third sector to deliver public services, these organisations, most of the time may have better expertise and better understanding of the needs of the citizens Bourn (2003, p26). The increasing difficulty with which public services are delivered is a challenge. According to the National Audit Office, delivery of public services are no longer the duty of a single department for instance, different organisations are involved in provision of criminal justice such as the police, the crown prosecution service, the forensic Science service and the courts. Changes in economic conditions and unforeseen circumstances could place much demand for public services, for instance, the sudden rise in unemployment during the most recent inflationary period. The volume and value of benefits payment made by the job centre plus or the unexpected foot and mouth disease and its effect to the public requires a good resource management Bourn (2003 p18). Some of the services provided by the public sector organisations are; Defence by the Army, Public Health by the NHS, Direct service delivery agencies which handle payments of benefits, issuing of prescriptions and National insurance numbers, processing of student loans, access to heritage, museums and galleries, developing frameworks for other service providers such as regulation of educational standards, teacher training and social housing, promotion of business opportunities abroad, transport integration, purchasing information technology systems and professional services and others. The challenge to the manager is the ability to coordinate and monitor the different service chains involved in the delivery of public services and also the difficulty in ensuring that resources are channelled appropriately to the provision of the most required service Bourn (2003 p.20) . Strategic thinking, planning and continuous are important in every organisation Bloisi et al (2007). Strategic thinking means being able as a manager to device ways to balance both the human, technical and the limited resources of the organisation and the environmental forces Bloisi et al (2007). The public sector manager has no power and authority, no autonomy and flexibility and therefore may not have as much influence in the decision making as their counterpart in the private sector Hanagan (2008). Strategic management is used in the public sector to find out schedules of activities in the sector which fit into the political agendas taking into consideration the politicians who might be looking for quick returns which they can point to as their successes and achievements Hanagan (2008). This means that the strategic planning has to be short term. There is lack of clarity in relation to what the manager is trying to achieve. There is the constant challenge to the manager in the public sector as to whether you are trying to fulfil your statutory obligation, please the politicians, follow the directions of the board or the people for whom the services were meant for. The manager in the public sector is challenged as he cannot change or alter the system. There are too many stakeholders, interest groups to satisfy in the public sector therefore the manager in this sector has to device different kinds of ways to deliver information to the different groups in the public who believes they have a stake in the public sector, such methods are through, governing bodies, advisory committees, taskforces, public meetings and public announcements Hanagan (2008). The manager in the private sector uses strategic management to review actions, slow down processes and hence make changes where necessary, the manager in the private sector has a profit making mindset and therefore considers product viability, the private secto r manager has power and authority, flexibility and autonomy and therefore decision making is quicker. The private sector manager is accountable to shareholders Bloisi et al (2007). The public sector is funded by the government and the managers are accountable to whichever ruling political party at any given time. According to the National Audit Office, before the 1998 public service agreements, different departments were funded annually with some exception such as the Department of Health, so there was uncertainty as to whether funding will be the same as the previous year or reduced or increased. This was a challenge to managers as there was no certainty with the flow of funds to make long term plans as the private sector with assurance of long term financing. The agreement was set out with the awareness of the aims, ideals and targets of the various departments Bourn (2003 p.20). Assessed so far are internal factors which challenge managers in the public sector however there are certain external factors which managers have to contend with as well. Some of these are; the speed of technology which has affected every process in organisations irrespective of sector, the force of competing interests who are not ordinary rivals to gain customers but those seeking for resources and those trying to make their points to be heard and the fluctuations in social behaviour which starts with movements in peoples expectations and values Bloisi et al (2007). Finally, managers are currently facing challenges due to the recent comprehensive budget cut. There is greater demand for services however there are fewer resources to meet demand. It is morally challenging to managers to prioritize who to help and who not to In conclusion, Suggested approaches from management science which could alleviate some of the challenges are; the systems approach and contingency approach. With systems approach, managers could discuss their departmental needs in terms of the general organisational requirement. The use of this approach requires open communication and the removal of barriers between the individual departments, also the approach shows management consideration of all the systems involved, synergy that is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, open and closed systems, limits, movements of information, materials and feedback through which the manager could monitor and evaluate progress reports Hanagan (2008). The second recommended approach is the contingency approach. This approach says that different problems requires different ways of solving them it all depends on how much experience the manager has because what might work well in one situation may not work well in another situation Hanagan (2008). Applica tion of this approach requires that the manager recognises several view points, one of which is the pragmatic view point. Pragmatic viewpoint says that no approach is generally acceptable which means that the manager has to check the motives for every action taken for instance, the services being delivered, the availability of equipment required and also the internal and external environment Hanagan (2008).

An Invasion of Haiti is Averted by Accord To Restore Aristide :: essays research papers

An Invasion of Haiti is Averted by Accord To Restore Aristide 1993- President Clinton needed a significant foreign policy victory to boost his sagging political career, and Haiti seemed to be the "perfect opportunity" to do this. 1994- Even after a year of frenzied negotiations no tangible results were in sight and the "perfect opportunity" seemed to be turning in to yet another nightmare for the President. However , this was not to be and President Clinton turned near defeat in to a resounding victory, with the help of former president and skilled negotiator, Jimmy Carter. September 19, 1994- Today the threat of invasion is over and, "a society (American society) that doesn't rest comfortably with the burdens of imperialism can breathe easy". American troops will enter Haiti as "peace keepers" and not as members of an invading force. In order to arrive at a peaceful solution several concessions had to be made by U.S government negotiators and Haitian dictator, General Raoul Cedras. 1) The U.S government let General Cedras and his cohorts "save face" by allowing the military junta to step down, after their parliament passed a general amnesty for the military. If this had not happened the U.S government would have had to oust the ruling party by using force, and this would have made the junta look bad. 2) The U.S agreed to lift the economic sanctions imposed on Haiti as soon as possible. 3) The U.S also dropped it's insistence that General Cedras and two of his military commanders leave the country. On it's part, the Haitian Junta agreed to hand over power to the democratically elected government of exiled Haitian leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The key to solving this complex problem was former President, Jimmy Carter. All through the crisis, Jimmy Carter stayed in direct contact with General Cedras, who he had come to know well while acting as an independent election- observer during the Haitian elections in 1993. Carter knew the situation on the ground and offered to act as a go-between. However, White House officials declined his offer initially. This was partly because they were upset that Carter had publicly disagreed with some of the current administration's policies as regards North Korea. When negotiations between the U.S and the Haitian government broke down, President Clinton went on national television and announced that United States armed forces would soon invade Haiti. This move wasn't aimed at ending negotiations but at making a last ditch attempt to arrive at a peaceful solution.