Human Resource as Strategic Partners Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Human Resource as Strategic Partners - Essay Example You have stated that the company's board had increased the production goals by 50% in the next two quarters after which, problems for the human resource department such as absenteeism, low employee morale, lack of motivation, and high employee turnover. Altogether, these led to lower level of production and product quality. As stated above, there are four key areas which needed to be looked into. I suggest that your company adopt the following key major strategies. One of the essentials of a good organization is a communication system which facilitates the flow of organization within all the levels of the business. The management should see to it that the lower level managers and frontline employees are given significant information about the decisions of the business organization. With this, employees should be looked at as strategic partners of the company to achieve its goals. The company should be able to let the employees know their importance in the business to boost their morale. Employees are often put off when management treats them as equipments. Communication of business decisions to employees makes them feel a stronger sense of belongingness as well as reminds them of their importance in the company. With this, I believe that your company should communicate the production goals to your employees.

Emission Reduction Essay Example for Free

Emission Reduction Essay In every economic activity, both positive and negative implications compound such activities. The positive implications include employment increase, supply of goods and market, supply of public goods, environmental control above others. However, every economic activity is as well a compound of negative implications. These are called negative externalities. They include pollution, environmental degrading, increase in crime, and social evils above others. Emission reduction like any other negative externality calls for a very dynamic tools of control. Generally, the basic control of negative externalities by corporations in the economy is through the government taxation imposition. The government would impose a corporate tax levy which is substantially equivalent to the cost of the emission to the environment. Through such levy, the government uses passive methods of compensation to the community over such impacts of the emission. Through the tax levy, the cost of operation to the plant is increased. (Prencipe, Davies, Hoboday, 2003) Economically, taxation provides two cost related variables with which the plant should choose from. Firstly, through higher cost of production which may perhaps outweigh its level of market profits, the plant may be forced out in the market. This is because high tax levy is synonymous to an increase in the cost of production. With high cost of production the plant is at a competitive disadvantage in the highly competitive market. It may then opt to choose an alternative method of investment. (Prencipe, Davies, Hoboday, 2003) Elsewhere, such tax is a disincentive in the choice of production method. From the broad alternative of energy production e. g. use of electric turbines to generate power. Use of environmental friendly method would then call up such tax levied formerly. The basic purpose of higher taxes by the government towards negative externalities is to provide a disincentive in specific lines and methods of operation which are harmful to the environment. It is a tool for choosing alternative methods of production.

Disgrace: Parent-Child Relationships Essay -- Literary Analysis

Family is often a common theme that is shared across many of J.M Coetzee novels. Family members are usually distant to each other or the relationships between parents and children do not succeed in a conventional way. When Coetzee allows for members to engage in relationships with one another they are either â€Å"strained† or tainted by â€Å"violence† (Splendore 148). This is especially true in his novel Disgrace. In Disgrace David Lurie, an English professor, is arguably forced to resign from his position at the University, because of this Lurie moves to his daughters’ farm in Eastern Cape. The pair appears to have a normal relationship most of the time, but there is some obvious discomfort. As time progresses the relationship begins to improve, only to be ruined by an attack. Lurie is locked up, beaten and set on fire, where Lucy, his daughter, is gang raped and left with a pregnancy. It is at this point that their relationship begins to crumble. Alth ough Lurie loves his daughter it is his failed attempts to understand her situation and his eagerness to push her in the right direction that lead to a colder, more distant relationship. Lurie’s displays of love towards Lucy are undeniable. From the attack on Lurie shows overwhelming amounts of love for Lucy. This is mostly apparent during the attack, where Lurie very seldom shows any concern for his own well-being, but shows enormous amounts for Lucy’s, even when his own life is in jeopardy. As soon as Lurie regains consciousness, and realizes that he has been locked in the bathroom he begins to worry about â€Å"his child in the hands of strangers† and that â€Å"whatever is happening to her will be set in stone† (Coetzee 94). With these thoughts in mind Lurie attempts to escape by kic... ...e end of the novel Lucy and Lurie have grown so far apart that they rarely speak or spend any time together, this is all a result of the problems that Lurie’s arrogance to her situation. Works Cited Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace . New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Print. Dooley, Gillian. J. M. Coetzee and the power of narrative . Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010. Print. Kossew, Sue. "The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J.M Coetzee's Disgrace." Research in African Literatures 34.2 (2003): 155 162. Project Muse . Web. 26 Oct. 2010. McDonald, Bill. Encountering disgrace: reading and teaching Coetzee's novel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. Print. Splendore, Paola . ""No more mothers and father": The Family Sib-Text in J.M Coetzee's Novels." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.3 (2003): 148-161. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Web. 26 Oct. 2010

Short-Term Memory: The Second Stage in Memory Processing

Introduction to Psychology Psychology 101, Section 8 October 26, 2010 Short-Term Memory The short-term memory is the lead to our long lasting remembers. Short-term memory is the second stage in the memory processing (Huffman). The short-term memory is the part of the memory that temporarily stores and processes information from the sensory memory and holds it until it decides if the information will be sent to the third stage or long-term memory (Huffman). The short-term memory stores a mixture of perceptual analyses information (Huffman).The short-term memory works in different ways to increase its small capacity; it uses rehearsal and chunking to be able to remember more things at once (Huffman). Rehearsal is when a person repeats information over and over again to maintain it fresh in the memory and chunking is grouping separate pieces of information into a single group (Huffman). The short-term memory is also known as the â€Å"working memory† because it’s always re ceiving information from the sensory memory and sending to the long-term memory (Huffman).I will be discussing the difference between short-term memory and long-term memory, the theory of decay, and the working memory. Difference The main difference between short-term memory and long-term memory is the capacity that each one has. According to Michael E. Martinez the two memories work together a cognitive architecture or the mind’s basic structure. In the short-term memory a person can only think of a few ideas at a time (Martinez). One of the characteristics of the short-term memory is that is small compare to the long-term memory which has a larger capacity (Martinez).Information flows between the short-term memory to the long-term memory, depending on the direction and different kinds of thinking results (Martinez). Short-term memory is the route entry to long-term memory or the holding template until the long-term memory processes are complete (Lewis). One example the Mart inez gives is when information flows from short-term memory into long-term memory it produces learning. When information leaves flows from long-term memory back to short-term memory is called recognition or recall, which happens whenever we think about a previously known fact, person, or event (Martinez).Each memory has it’s owe limitations; the short-term memory has a small capacity making it hard to think about many things at once, while the long-term memory does not record experience completely and accurately (Martinez). Unlike the long-term memory the short-term memory has chunking, which allows the short-term memory to hold more and more information. The capacity does not change but chunk grows in complexity which allows the short-term memory to handle more data (Martinez). DecayDecay is a theory that has a long history in accounting for forgetting (Berman, Jonides, and Lewis). This is said to happen because as time passes, information in the memory erodes and is less av ailable for retrieval (Berman, Jonides, and Lewis). Berman, Jonides, and Lewis present different experiment to examine if decay is a cause of forgetting. One study that they present is the classic study of Peterson and Peterson (1959): â€Å"Consider the classic study of Peterson and Peterson (1959), originally thought to provide strong evidence for decay.In this experiment, participants were given a letter trigram to store, followed by a retention interval that varied from 3 to 18 s. During the retention interval, participants were required to count backward by threes to prevent rehearsal of the memorandum. Following the retention interval, participants recalled the item in memory. Peterson and Peterson found that performance declined as retention intervals increased, and the authors attributed this decline to increasing decay of the memory trace with increasing time.The attribution of this effects to decay mechanism is, however, suspect. † The arguments that counting backwa rd could not be a source of interference because their secondary task differed from the item to be stored in memory (Berman, Jonides, and Lewis). But the case is that counting task requires short-term memory retention, which is the main memory task (Berman, Jonides, and Lewis). Another problem in assessing the role of decay on short-term memory is the habitual tendency of rehearse materials that are to retain (Berman, Jonides, and Lewis).An example that Berman, Jonides, Lewis give is when we look up a phone number in the directory and then walk to the phone, we rehearse the number in our head until it is dialed. They are trying to come up with different techniques to prevent rehearsal, to get an accurate gauge of whether decay has an effect on memory (Berman, Jonides, and Lewis). Working Memory Theory based research has revealed that working memory is a system that allows a person to maintain task goals, update memory to meet current demands, and to separate memory to form relations hips (Shelton, Matthews, Hill, and Gouvier).The working memory is also referred to a general purpose system that is responsible for the active task or goal relevant information while simultaneously processing other information (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). The general purpose system includes: problem solving, reading, coordination and planning, and the basic intellectual functions, which leads to research on the capacity of the working memory (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). â€Å"Beginning with Daneman and Carpenter (1980), most researchers have utilized complex working memory span tasks in which to-be-remembered items are interspersed with some processing activity. For nstance, in the reading span task participants attempt to remember words or letters while reading and comprehending sentences. These tasks can be contrasted with simple memory span tasks in which TBR items are presented without any additional processing activities.The complex span tasks nicely capture the idea that the of processing and storage are needed to fully understand the essence of working memory and tap its capacity. Furthermore, these tasks can be used to estimate an individual’s working memory capacity and examine the correlation between this capacity and other important cognitive abilities (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). The possible that the complex span tasks do not file overall resources abilities but rather that the processing task displaces items from the working memory (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). Also according to the task-switching view, a person may place an item in the working memory, and a rapid switching mechanism is needed to refresh the item before it is lost due to decay (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). The faster the information can be complete and switch back to decaying representations, the better the overall performance will be (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer).There is also a difference in the amount of capacity from individual to individual (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). There are two components that individuals may differ on: first component is the need to actively maintain information over the short term and the second is the need to retrieve information that could not be actively maintain due to a large number of incoming items (Unsworth, Spillers, and Brewer). The short-term memory has it’s mysteries due to the amount of information that one can keep and pass on.One thing is for sure is that without it we will not know what information are relevant for one to keep or decay. Now one can understand the relationship and difference between short-term and long-term memory, the theory of decay, and why the short-term memory is the working memory.References Berman, M. , Jonides, J. , & Lewis, R. (2009). In search of decay in verbal short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,35(2), 317-333. doi:10. 1037/a0014873. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database. Huffman, K. (2010). Memory,(9th ed. Psychology in action. (242-275) Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Lewis, D. (1979). Psychobiology of active and inactive memory. Psychological Bulletin,  86(5), 1054-1083. doi:10. 1037/0033-2909. 86. 5. 1054. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database. Martinez, M. (2010). Human Memory The Basics. Phi Delta Kappan,  91(8), 62-65. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database. Shelton, J. , Elliott, E. , Matthews, R. , Hill, B. , & Gouvier, W. (2010). The relationships of working memory, secondary memory, and general fluid intelligence:  Working memory is special. Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition,  36(3), 813-820. doi:10. 1037/a0019046. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database. Unsworth, N. , Spillers, G. , & Brewer, G. (2010). The contributions of primary and secondary memory to working memory capacity: An individual differences analysis of immediate free recall. Journal of Experimental Psycho logy: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,  36(1), 240-247. doi:10. 1037/a0017739. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

Role of Media and Islam in Pakistan’s Politics

With the end of the cold war, the drive towards democratization assumed center state. Out of a total 206 states in the world, 195 claims to be either democratic or republican. In spite of it, the nature and function of many self pro claimed democratic systems leave much to be desired. This has led to international efforts, led by the US, to engage in the twin task of democracy promotion and democracy protection. India joined the community of the democracies in 2000, at the turn of the millennium, and later became a member of the UN democratic funds in2005.It has sought to contribute to the efforts aimed at promotion and strengthening of democracy in its own way. The author of the book under review, Professor Muni, calls it â€Å"significant shift† in India’s foreign policy. As a close followers of India’s foreign policy he has tries to isolated the â€Å"democracy dimension† in India’s foreign policy towards its immediate neighbors on an individual country basis over three distinct phases, which makes interesting readings. Professor Muni has enough experience as an academic and a diplomat to comment on such an important issue with great care and diligence.After a brief review of theories of democracies and its interface with foreign policy, the author situates the Indian experience over three different phases. He argues during the first phase (1947-1960s) soon after freedom from colonial rule, India emphasis â€Å"independence and nationalism†. The principal architect of Indian foreign policy, Jawahar Lal Nehru, set out to build of free, cooperative and peaceful Asia. This explained Nehru’s vociferous argument in favor of inclusion of communist china in the comity of nations as an independent state.He went on to fashioned his policy of non alignment as a main benchmark of India’s foreign policy and try to stay out of the bipolar power politics. His policies towards neighboring countries demonstrated his pr edilection for democracies in spite of the compromises he made to protect the strategic and economic interests of India. The author makes a detailed analysis of Nehru’s approach towards Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Myanmar and Pakistan and concludes that Nehru’s preferences for democracies was often trumped by India’s vital security concerns.During the second phase (1960s-2000) the successors of Nehru, the author argues, adopted a pragmatic policy devoid an idealism that marked the Nehru years. The post 1962 (sino-indian war) years, as Nehru confessed shocked him out of his idealism and prepared the grounds for unapologetic realism in Indian foreign policy. Professor Muni demonstrate through his narrative of twists and turns of Nepalese politics that Indian supported democratic moments in Nepal when its suited its strategic interests unencumbered dilemma that characterized by Nehruvian years.All through, the main driver of India’s policy towards neighbors was t o keep the region free from adversarial influences. The security challenges post by china and Pakistan largely determined the parameters of India’s foreign policy since the 1970s. Even as India evolved as a democratic nation and institutions promoting democratic values took firm roots in the country, during this phase there was no enthusiasm to propagate democracy and encourage democratic forces in the neighborhood.Nevertheless, India played an important role in the liberation of East Pakistan in 1971, integrated Sikkim in 1975 and supported exiled democratic forces from Myanmar in 1970s and 1980s. Democracy mattered only when it converged with India’s strategic interests. However, india choose to diassociate it self from democratic forces in the mid 1970s. in Bhutan, india’s sided with the king and discouraged the popular movement raised by Bhutanis of Nepales region. It is quiet and other india forced the nepaled king to negotiate with the democratic forces in 1988.In the case of Myanmar, since the late 1980s, it decided to mend its relationship with the military Junta and ignore the democratic forces to balance china’s increasing proximity to Myanmar. The third phase since the start of new millennium as found India in the company of US, seeking to promote and protect democracy around the world. India has calibrated its policy towards its neighbors accordingly. Despite its aversion from the maost of Nepal, it played a critical role in the mainstreaming of this group and revived the democratic process.Despite playing a modest but critical role in Bangladesh’s return to democracy in 1990, it has maintained a study aloofness from the rough and tumble of Bangladesh politics. In recent years a fresh wave of the democracy swept the neighborhood. The author has appreciated India’s diplomatic responses to these changes. There is also a brief discussion on India’s efforts and indo-US coordination in the process of reco nstruction and democratization in Afghanistan since 9/11.The author implies that in view of India’s strategic interests in Afghanistan, it is imperative for India to continue with its developmental work despite attacks on its citizens by paksitan-sponsopred terrorists. In some author suggest that in its conduct of foreign policy, India should not blindly follow the US at the cost of its strategic interests. The book provides useful insights to India’s neighborhood policy over the last six decades. The author brings to bear his personal interaction many leading actors in both India and Nepal to present his analysis of Nepalese politics forcefully.His study of other neighbors of India somehow struggles to come that level of compliance and intensity. To be share to the author, given india’s leverage in Nepal and its ability to influence its politics, Nepal was certain to attract that much attention and care. However, one wondered if the author have accorded some sp ace to India’s reaction to the imperfect nature of Srilankan democracy with its lack of emphasis on inclusivity and pluralism. Given the threat it posed to the Srilankan polity and deep Indian involvement in the 1980s, Srilanka deserved some attention in the book.To the conclusion reader of the book finds the book and the author holds a strong grip over the material and issue it contained. The book deserve the attention of foreign policy analysts and scholars of international relations in India because in recent years India has sought to spell out its neighborhood policy tentatively with emphasis on building a web of interdependencies the neighbor and finally the book is a good depiction of India’s foreign policy specially in reference to its influences the democratic scenario in the outer world.