Evian Company web-strategy Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Evian Company web-strategy - Assignment Example applied in the process of designing a web page for advertising company’s products, together with the method of brands online image has a lot of significances. In this assignment paper, I am going to look at the Evian Company web-strategy as well as considering SOCTAC web strategy model and social marketing as used by the organization. The above two, online image and social marketing can get strategically used by different organizations towards meeting their promotional set goals. Online image of an organization’s brand only refers to the best-identified picture of the product that the company finds to have the ability to capture the markets mind (Laudon & Traver, 2002). For this case, the organization employs some IT experts who create the image of the product to get more attractive towards the targeted population. This will mean that they will take their time to know more about the brand as well as ordering for their purchase. Social marketing refers to a kind of product promotion carried out by a firm, with the primary objective of improving the well-being of the society. Unlike the other marketing conducted by an organization that target for improved company’s sell, social marketing aims at alleviating the social, economic, political, health, ideological and other aspects of the community’s well-being. This is one of the best planning models for conducting marketing since it’s easier to capture as well coming up with structures for some planning activities. It gets best applied where an organization is coming up with an overall marketing strategy as well as boosting a firm’s channeling tactics. SOSTAC entails evaluating the situation; which is the current level the organization holds, objectives; where the company is aiming to find itself, and strategy; the methodology of moving forward (Laudon & Traver, 2002). Others include tactics; the exact process of moving forward, action; the proposed plan, and finally control, determining whether the

The Federal Law in the United Arab Emirates Essay

The Federal Law in the United Arab Emirates - Essay Example These federal rules are made to ensure that all people of the federation abide by the standards set and deemed appropriate for public good and national betterment in all terms by the officiating bodies of the seven Emirates through their officials. This paper will discuss within its context the creation of the UAE federation, the constitution, the federal laws and the creation of federal business laws that already exist within UAE. Key words: federal state, federal law, constitution, business law Federal Law in the United Arab Emirates The United Arab Emirates: Starting Point The UAE is a federation of seven Emirates comprising Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain. It was formed on the 2nd of December 1971 (Latham & Watkins LLP, 2011, p. 1). The UAE federal constitution was adopted and accepted in 1996. It ensures the allocation of powers between the federal government and the government of each Emirate. It is one of the largerst countries in t he Gulf with a land area that extends to 83,000 square kilometers and a population of 2.6 million (Gulf Law, 2011). Ethnicities that comprise the total population of the United Arab Emirates are: Indians with a total census of 1.75 million, Pakistani with 1.25 million counts, Bangladeshi at a rate of 500,000, other inhabitants of Asian origin amount to one million according to the census, European and African comprising 500,000, while the population of Emirati amounts to 890,000. Majority of the people in UAE are Muslims at the rate of 96% compared to the Hindu and Christian sects present in the country. The official language is Arabic though English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali are also used widely (U. S. Department of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, 2011). The Government There is still an independent type of governance in each Emirate since the UAE is a loose federation of seven Emirates with its own ruler in each of them. Under the provisional constitution of 1971, each Emirate c ontrols its own activities and reserves considerable powers including control over mineral rights, such as oil and gas, as well as revenues. But over time the federal powers have developed slowly and the constitution has established set of rules under the creation of President as the chief of state and Vice President as second of rule, each having a fixed term of 5 year service. Other members of the government includes: a Council of Ministers, led by a Prime Minister as the head of the government; a supreme council of rulers; and a Federal National Council of 40 members wherein 20 members are appointed by the Emirate rulers and other half of 20 members are elected through an electorate by the rulers of each emirate (U.S. Department of State, Bureau on Near Eastern Affairs, 2011). Within a remarkably short span of time since the creation of the federation, the United Arab Emirates managed to create a stable country with a booming economy based on free trade. Today the economic status of UAE has earned it a reputation as one of the leading economic icons in the Middle East. This is one of the main reasons why lots of people and business builders and investors thrive to work or build businesses within boundaries of the Federation. The reputation of the Emirates as a free trade area was enhanced with rapidly developing free zones and the oil

Efficient Database Driven Reverse Mapping Dictionary

Efficient Database Driven Reverse Mapping Dictionary Building an Efficient Database Driven Reverse Mapping Dictionary ABSTRACT With the enormous availability of words in usage it is always being a challenge to find the meaning. Even the versatile speaker may thrash about finding a meaning for certain unheard words. In such cases they need some source for reference like dictionary. In traditional model for using dictionary, forward concept is implemented where it result in set of definition and it may produce a comprehensive phases. This may even confuse the user with the different concept of understanding or sometimes user could not understand the detailed concept. To overcome this concept, we facilitate reverse dictionary in which for any phases or word, the appropriate single word meaning is given. This system also facilitates to provide the relevant meaning even if that word is not available in the database. It will also produce instant output for the user input. 1. INTRODUCTION AND RELATED WORKS 1.1 ABOUT THE PROJECT:- Reverse Dictionary:- A reverse dictionary is a dictionary organized in a non-standard order that provides the user with information that would be difficult to obtain from a traditionally alphabetized dictionary. For example, A Reverse Dictionary of the Spanish Language and Walkers Rhyming Dictionary are reverse dictionaries, the organization of which is based upon sorting each entry word based upon its last letter and the subsequent letters proceeding toward the beginning of that word. Consequently, in these reverse dictionaries all words that have the same suffix appear in order in the dictionary. Such a reverse dictionary would be useful for linguists and poets who might be looking for words ending with a particular suffix, or by an anthropologist or forensics specialist examining a damaged text (e.g. a stone inscription, or a burned document) that had only the final portion of a particular word preserved. Reverse dictionaries of this type have been published for most major alphabetical languages (see numerous examples listed below). By way of contrast, in a standard dictionary words are organized such that words with the same prefix appear in order, since the sorting order is starting with the first letter of the entry word and subsequent letters proceeding toward the end of that word. Reverse dictionaries of this type were historically difficult to produce before the advent of the electronic computer and have become more common since the first computer sorted one appeared in 1974. Another use of the term reverse dictionary is for a reference work that is organized by concepts, phrases, or the definitions of words. This is in contrast to a standard dictionary, in which words are indexed by the headwords, but similar in function to a thesaurus, where one can look up a concept by some common, general word, and then find a list of near-synonyms of that word. (For example, in a thesaurus one could look up doctor and be presented with such words as healer, physician, surgeon, M.D., medical man, medicine man, academician, professor, scholar, sage, master, expert.) In theory, a reverse dictionary might go further than this, allowing you to find a word by its definition only. Such dictionaries have become more practical with the advent of computerized information-storage and retrieval systems Online Dictionary: On Line reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the Find words button. Keep it short to get the best results. In most cases youll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first. How does it work? On Line indexes hundreds of online dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference sites. By now you may have used the standard search available from the home page, which shows you a list of definition links for any word you type in. This is the reverse: Here we search our references for words that have definitions conceptually similar to the words you search for. We do this using a motley assortment of statistical language processing hacks. Online reverse dictionary (RD). As opposed to a regular (forward) dictionary that maps words to their definitions, a RD performs the converse mapping, i.e., given a phrase describing the desired concept, it provides words whose definitions match the entered definition phrase. For example, suppose a forward dictionary informs the user that the meaning of the word â€Å"spelunking† is â€Å"exploring caves.† A reverse dictionary, on the other hand, offers the user an opportunity to enter the phrase â€Å"check out natural caves† as input, and expect to receive the word â€Å"spelunking† (and possibly other words with similar meanings) as output. Effectively, the RD addresses the â€Å"word is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite remember it† problem. A particular category of people afflicted heavily by this problem are writers, including students, professional writers, scientists, marketing and advertisement professionals, teachers, the l ist goes on. In fact, for most people with a certain level of education, the problem is often not lacking knowledge of the meaning of a word, but, rather, being unable to recall the appropriate word on demand. The RD addresses this widespread problem. 2. EXISTING SYSTEM:- In the fact that it is more significant to make a reference for unheard word, user prefers a source like dictionary for better understanding. The performance allows online interaction with users Current semantic similarity measurement schemes that are highly computationally intensive. In this technique, concepts are represented as vectors in a feature (or keyword) space. The two most common methods to achieve this, latent semantic indexing (LSI) and principal component analysis (PCA), both analyze the keywords of documents in a corpus to identify the dominant concepts in the document. Subsequently these dominant concepts are represented as vectors in the keyword space and are used as the basis of similarity comparison for classification. In most implementations of Concept Similarity Problem (CSP) solutions, vectorization is done a priori, and at runtime, only vector distances are computed. Drawbacks It requires the user’s input phrase to contain words that exactly match a dictionary definition; It does not scale well—for a dictionary containing more than 100,000 defined words, where each word may have multiple definitions, it would require potentially hundreds of thousands of queries to return a result. 3. PROPOSED SYSTEM:- Report the creation of the WordStar Reverse Dictionary (WRD), a database-driven RD system that attempts to address the core issues identified above. The WRD not only fulfils new functional objectives outlined above, it does so at an order of magnitude performance and scale improvement over the best concept similarity measurement schemes available without impacting solution quality. We also demonstrate that the WRD is far better in solution quality than the two commercial RDs available. Our reverse dictionary system is based on the notion that a phrase that conceptually describes a word should resemble the word’s actual definition, if not matching the exact words, then at least conceptually similar. Consider, for example, the following concept phrase: â€Å"talks a lot, but without much substance.† Based on such a phrase, a reverse dictionary should return words such as â€Å"gabby,† â€Å"chatty,† and â€Å"garrulous.† However, a definition of â€Å"garrulous† in a dictionary might actually be â€Å"full of trivial conversation,† which is obviously close in concept, but contains no exact matching words. In our RD, a user might input a phrase describing an unknown term of interest. Since an input phrase might potentially satisfy the definition of multiple words, a RD should return a set of possible matches from which a user may select his/her choice of terms. This is complex, however, because the user is unlikely to e nter a definition that exactly matches one found in a dictionary. The meaning of the phrase the user entered should be conceptually similar enough to an actual dictionary definition to generate a set of possible matches, e.g., returning to the â€Å"talks a lot, but without much substance† example, our reverse dictionary should return words like â€Å"garrulous.† Advantages It does so at an order of magnitude performance Scale improvement over the best concept similarity measurement schemes available without impacting solution quality The system architecture diagram enables you to graphically model the applications of a system, and the externals that they interface with and data stores that they use or provide information to. The following information describes the symbols used on the diagram: Application It uses the Application symbol to represent an entire application and graphically show on this diagram how it is related to externals and data stores. Within the application definition, it can specify overall information about the application the process threads in the organization that it enables, the type of team effort being used to build it, etc. To specify more details on the implementation of the application, you can create child Data Flow diagrams or UML diagrams, depending on the nature of the application. Data Flow It can model the flow of data as it moves from one point in the system to another with the Data Flow line. The flow might be between externals and applications, or applications and data stores. Within the data flow you can model the data elements and data structures used. Data flows can split into two or more flows, or they can join to one from two or more flows. Material Flow It can model the direction of the flow of physical items and materials in the system with the Material Flow line. The flow might be between externals and applications, or applications and data stores. Data Store A Data Store symbol is where data rests when it is neither flowing nor being operated on. A data store can be a database, hard disk, floppy disk, or a file on a disk. Multi-Data Store A Multi-Data Store symbol is used to denote that multiple instances of the data store exist. This convention is used to avoid drawing a copy of a schema for each equivalent data store when you build a data model. External An External symbol represents an object that sends information or data to the system, or takes information from the system, but is not itself part of the system. Multi-External A Multi-External symbol is used to denote that multiple instances of the external exist. 4. CONCLUSION:- In this paper, we describe the significant challenges inherent in building a reverse dictionary, and map the problem to the well-known conceptual similarity problem. We propose a set of methods for building and querying a reverse dictionary, and describe a set of experiments that show the quality of our results, as well as the runtime performance under load. Our experimental results show that our approach can provide significant improvements in performance scale without sacrificing solution quality. Our experiments comparing the quality of our approach to that of Dictionary.com and OneLook.com reverse dictionaries show that the Wordster approach can provide significantly higher quality over either of the other currently available implementations 5. REFERENCES IEEE:- [1] R. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval. ACM Press, 2011. [2] D.M. Blei, A.Y. Ng, and M.I. Jordan, â€Å"Latent Dirichlet Allocation,† J. Machine Learning Research, vol. 3, pp. 993-1022, Mar. 2003. [3] J. Carlberger, H. Dalianis, M. Hassel, and O. Knutsson, â€Å"Improving Precision in Information Retrieval for Swedish Using Stemming,† Technical Report IPLab-194, TRITA-NA-P0116, Interaction and Presentation Laboratory, Royal Inst. of Technology and Stockholm Univ., Aug. 2001. [4] H. Cui, R. Sun, K. Li, M.-Y. Kan, and T.-S. Chua, â€Å"Question Answering Passage Retrieval Using Dependency Relations,† Proc. 28th Ann. Int’l ACM SIGIR Conf. Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 400-407, 2005. [5] T. Dao and T. Simpson, â€Å"Measuring Similarity between Sentences,† http://opensvn.csie.org/WordNetDotNet/trunk/Projects/Thanh/Paper/WordNetDotNet_Semantic_Similarity.pdf (last accessed 16 Oct. 2009), 2009. [6]Dictionary.com, LLC, â€Å"Reverse Dictionary,†http://dictionary. reference.com/reverse, 2009. [7] J. Earley, â€Å"An Efficient Context-Free Parsing Algorithm,† Comm. ACM, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 94-102, 1970. [8] Forrester Consulting, â€Å"Ecommerce Web Site Performance Today,† http://www.akamai.com/2seconds, Aug. 2009. [9] E. Gabrilovich and S. Markovitch, â€Å"Wikipedia-Based Semantic Interpretation for Natural Language Processing,† J. Artificial Intelligence Research, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 443-498, 2009. [10] V. Hatzivassiloglou, J. Klavans, and E. Eskin, â€Å"Detecting Text Similarity over Short Passages: Exploring Linguistic Feature Combinations Via Machine Learning,† Proc. Joint SIGDAT Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora, pp. 203-212, June 1999.

The Metamorphosis: Use Of Comedy And Irony Essay -- essays research pa

To what extent did Kafka use comedy/irony to develop his tragic, cynical view of society and family?Gregor Samsa, a young traveling salesman who lives with and financially supports his parents and younger sister, Grete, wakes up one morning to find "himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin" or insect. At first, to my surprise, he is preoccupied with practical, everyday concerns: How to get out of bed and walk with his numerous legs? Can he still make it to the office on time? Most persons would be devastated to find themselves in such a position as Gregor, but he did not seem to care much about himself, but only about his obligations, instead of panicking, he starts cursing his job : "If I did not hold back for my parents’ sake, I would have quit long ago, I would have marched up to the boss and spoken my piece from the bottom of my heart", " Well, I have not given up hope completely; once I’ve gotten the money together to pay off my parents’ debt to him, I’m going to make the big break. But for the time being, I better get up, since my train leaves at five." This is a sort of dry humour; a person in a tragic situation does not seem to notice the predicament he is in.He tries to get out of bed, but his new form does not enable him to do the things he used to do so easily. The way he describes it, can already be seen as comical : "First he tried to get out of bed with the lower part of his body, but this lower part- which by the ...

Security Manager †Working with and leading people

Task 1: Teamwork mini project The teamwork mini project demonstrates its main target to discuss the role play of a selection day at St Patrick’s College. The conduct of this role play is done by a team of three students. The job title introduced for this selection day is the post of a security manager.One of the most important responsibilities of a security manager is to monitor the security operations in the college environment. A security manager is usually responsible for maintaining and implementing of a wide range of security policies, rules and regulations. It is important to ensure that the college environment is safe for students, college staff and visitors. Another significant responsibility of a security manager is related to recruiting new security staff and delegating specific tasks. The security manager should be able to keep track of various events as well as create emergency response plans. It is also significant to conduct regular security evaluations. There are two main roles typical to a security manager: managerial role and administrative role. In terms of demonstrating his managerial role, a security manager is expected to supervise security team on issues related to sickness and absence. Other important aspects of the managerial role of a security manager include coordination of all contacts with the emergency service providers in case a serious incident occurs; contacting external contractors regarding fire system and access to security systems; and ensuring safety of the entire building at all times. In relation to the administrative role, a security manager should carry out and record daily security checks in an appropriate manner as well as manage staffing levels including rotas. Reports of daily activities and problems with equipment, property and theft issues have been identified. The duties and responsibilities of a security manager are provided below: Monitor security junior staff to patrol college premises and detect signs of intrusions and ensure security doors, windows and gates are secured; Answer alarm bells and assigns officers to investigate disturbances and also to present a list of potential problems; Ensure that the fire call points, intruder alarms, emergency lighting are tested weekly and results recorded; Ensure security alarms are set and working correctly as well as gas and electrical appliances are turned off at the end of the day; Monitor and authorise entrance and departure of students and staff, visitors and other persons to guard against theft and to maintain security of premises; Coordinate with the reception staff and provide support and cover as required; Coordinate with facility management on health and safety matters; Liaise with the borough security and supersee the transfer of any accused person to the custody of the local law enforcement personnel; Act as the main key holder for the college on all call outs and liaise with other emergency services In terms of person specification, the following aspects have been outlined: EssentialDesirable Education and qualificationHigh diploma level (HND); Bachelor’s degree in business management/ managing people; Bachelor’s degree in security management; Complete senior management security programme; Hold a recognised training certificateDegree in criminal justice/ public administration Experience and knowledgeCandidate must be 21 years and over; One year post degree; Work with security systems including CCTV and access control and producers to promote effective security operations for the protection of assets, people and data; Knowledge of CCTV codes of practice, data protection act, British standard 7499; Static guarding and mobile patrol; Experience of managing teams; Knowledge of fire safety and health and safe procedures in the workplace; Knowledge of the equality act and its relevance to the collegeWork with the police force, national guard, voluntary service; Work at an operational management level delivering security service ideally with stu dents and within a high large profile; 2 years in security force Task 3: Self-reflection Having taken part in the project at St Patrick’s College, related to a selection day, I have had an experience which has given me an exciting opportunity to experience an active process of building strong leadership skills. Teamwork usually involves various individuals and groups working together to optimise their efficiency and reach common goals, as in the case with the project performed in St Patrick’s College (Sohmen, 2013). The benefits of team working on this project are numerous. First, teamwork leads to improved morale because team members learn to take sufficient responsibility for their actions, which may result in a significant improvement of the entire project. It is important that individuals gain authority and ownership over the project (Reevy, Chamberlain and Stein2013). A second benefit of team working on the project relates to greater flexibility. This means that people have an opportunity to become more flexible as result of working together on a project. They may also solve certain problems in an efficient manner considering that they unite their efforts to achieve common objectives (Sohmen, 2013). Another benefit associated with teamwork is that of increased innovation. Every team member can share important insights into developing the project successfully. Innovation is linked with creativity, implying that team members can demonstrate solid creative skills when providing suggestions to the project (Pacios and de la Fuente, 2013). As indicated in research, teamwork contributes to increased levels of motivation, which in turn positively affects one’s creativity. My role as leader and member of the team has developed due to my active participation in the project. Conflicts and difficulties are an inevitable part of any project, including the one at St Patrick’s College, but I have been determined to solve any challenges. I have demonstrated the skills of listening to others and considering their point of view regarding important stages of the completion of the project (Reevy, Chamberlain and Stein, 2013). Research places importance on the development of empathic skills, which are important in the process of bringing a project to successful completion (Tiffan, 2014). My role as team leader in managing conflicts has mostly involved the adoption of preventative strategies focused on the idea of preventing or minimising conflicts. As a result, I have contributed to the development of ground rules for the project at its beginning, as research also considers the relevance of systematic preparation in projects (Tiffan, 2014). Moreover, I have succeeded in developing a team agreement on the precise way in which the group could resolve any problems that may appear. Another strategy is to present details on the critical resolution process in which every team member is assigned specific roles. My role as leader and member of the team also included a solid focus on reactive strategies. In other words, I have thoroughly considered my responsibility to enhance the resolution of conflicts pertaining to the project (Sohmen, 2013). For instance, I implemented a form of authoritarian approach by informing the group about the scope of the resolution. Such strategy was more formal in the sense of adhering to strict rules of project communication. As an example, I directly informed the group that the major goal of the project is to focus on recruitment strategies used in the selection of employees. This fostered a sense of enhanced teamwork based on the urgency to resolve any conflicts and difficulties as quickly as possible. However, I also included a process of flexible discussion while trying to find solutions to conflicts (Tiffan, 2014). As a whole, the effectiveness of the team in achieving the projects goals was adequate. The team members were skilled and motivated to bring the project to a successful end. In addition, the group ensured that they had complementary skills (Stupans, 2013). They were able to relate to one another in terms of technical proficiencies. The aspect of mutual accountability was present at all stages of the project. They were all responsible for the creation of a strong culture of responsibility. Each team member illustrated the presence of clearly defined roles and responsibilities (Tiffan, 2014). As part of the process of achieving the project’s goals, productivity of team members has been properly recognized and rewarded. In addition, the effectiveness of the team reflected the regular tracking of individual and group progress. In case the team members exhibited any signs of struggling with completing the project, the team has been always ready to provide support and guidance which previous research has found to be important (Sohmen, 2013). The team was able to create a positive pressure to achieve the initially projected goals. Such goals have emerged in an attempt to guide the important decisions made by team members. This shows that the team has maintained a focus on the project’s mission related to the selection of a professional to work at St Patrick’s College (Stupans, 2013). The aspect of collective responsibility has been dominant in guiding the team working while completing the project of St Patrick’s College. My role within the team especially during the selection process was quite flexible because I had an opportunity to explore various aspects of that particular process. What I have done well was to outline briefly the personal qualities required for the position of a security manager/supervisor (Adams, Cain and Giraud, 2012). I demonstrated a proper knowledge of the job role as well as presented specific skills in organising important job roles and responsibilities. Moreover, I illustrated adequate communication and teamwork skills that have contributed to the successful completion of the project. I was able to work with culturally diverse individuals and lead them accordingly (Sohmen, 2013). However, I could have done better in improving my knowledge of specific aspects of security policies, rules and regulations pertaining to the job position. I could have taken my time to explore each of these aspects in detail in order to provide a better understanding of the specificity of the profession, which could have helped me focus on selecting the right candidates (Adams et al., 2012). Although I believe I have good skills in assessing people’s potential in a particular field, I need to do more research on this topic to improve my own capacity of working with and leading culturally diverse individuals (Tiffan, 2014). I could have also improved my cultural awareness considering the highly diverse workforce of the educational institution. In conclusion, this task has been completed successfully because of the focus on teamwork at all stage of the process. Task 4: Discussion of the main financial statements of a company There are three key components involved in the financial statements of a company, which are a profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. All the key components are used as a whole, to provide a clear picture of the financial position and financial results of a company (Parker, 2009). A structure designed for each of the financial statements is considered the most important element, though the influential decision depends on the requirements of the user. The key point supporting the importance of the profit and loss statement is that it is one of the most important financial statements and users like to observe the financial statements of a company, since it has the capability to help users or businesses generate profit by examining the over financial report (Buffett and Clark, 2008). In addition, the information inserted in the profit/loss statement is mostly released in the applicable currency, so it can provide a reasonable level of accuracy. Though, profit/ loss does not show the amount of assets and liabilities required by a company to generate a profit (Parker, 2009). Moreover, its financial results are not necessarily associated with the total cash flows generated by a company. The accuracy of this statement can be suspected when the cash basic of the accounting method is used. It is important to focus on ensuring accuracy as part of the broad purpose of accounting. Thus, the profit/loss statement, when utilised, can be fairly misleading. Balance sheet is expected to be positioned at a second place by many users, since it does not provide the financial results of business operations, and some of the information provided in it may be based on past business costs (Kalsyte and Verikas, 2013). This makes the balance sheet report less instructive or informative. However, the balance sheet is considered to have importance when compared with the profit/loss statement, since this sheet provides the amount of investment requirement to maintain the sales and profits shown on the profit/loss statement (Buffett and Clark, 2008). The third most important component of financial statement is cash flow, because it mainly focuses on recording cash inflows and outflows (Parker, 2009). This financial report provides a clearer analysis of a company’s cash flows than the profit/loss statement, which can sometimes present unbiased results, particularly when accruals are authorised under the growth basis of accounting (Palea, 2014). It is essential to understand the concept of the balance sheet, as it provides a company’s financial situation at any period of time, while a profit/loss statement provides a company’s overall financial performance within a set period of time. The profit/loss statement normally shows a company’s financial performance over a period, such as being released every year or after six months (Parker, 2009). On the other hand, the balance sheet gives a snap shot of the financial position accurately at the year-end or month-end. Finance managers rely on the balance sheet statements to examine whether purchasing certain equipment on debt is the right choice for a company at that time (Palea, 2014). The balance sheet also provides the owner’s equity; for instance, it indicates the total value of the inventory and the number of a company’s shares identified as outstanding. The profit/loss statement is one of the most important documents because it plays a significant role in a company’s decision making process. The profit/loss statement is an end result of the financial information that is provided in the journals and ledgers, and then changed into brief, summarised, compiled revenue and expense structures (Bao, Li, Wu, Zhu et al., 2014). This statement shows the overall revenues and expenses of a company for a set period of time. Senior managers and shareholders can find prosperity of valuable information on the profit/loss statement including the company’s overall sales, profits, retained earnings, net profits, and operating earnings. From this information, finance experts can determine and distinguish vital information about a company’s performance. Profit/loss statements usually give information for more than one period, for example two successive years (Buffett and Clark, 2008). It is simple to compare the financial results fr om one period to the next and conclude trends in earnings and expenditures. Whereas, cash flow statement is considered to be the most crucial element for any enterprise’s financial performance. It calculates the amount of capital that enters into a company and out of it over a specified time period. In this way, an enterprise is able to analyse and control how much capital it has in inflow to pay expenses and purchase assets. There is a difference existing in the structure of financial statements (profit/loss statement and balance sheet) for different types of business, such as sole trader, partnership and private/public limited company. Each company has different financial and economical positions so they use different financial statements with different structures that satisfy their financial positions (Bao et al., 2014). The financial statements gather the financial information from the sales and services provided and include the net taxable profit or loss for each month. Different types of business use different structures. For a sole proprietor, the financial statement is easy and simple because the financial report is just provided for the proprietor of the company. This means that it does not have to provide any balance sheet and profit/loss statement (Parker, 2009). The report just needs to provide or to show profit and loss financial information, whereas a private limited and public limited comp any, which has to organise its’ report based on accounting standards. There are two types mostly used by companies: international financial reporting standard (IFRS) and generally accepted accounting principle (GAAP). If financial statements are not structured based on standards it is complicated to evaluate and compare performance with that of other companies. For a partnership, the financial structure is focused on providing the profit/dividend and total contribution by partners in the investment capital of a company (Ronen, 2006). The objective of the financial statement is revealed in the balance sheet, profit/loss, cash flow and loss statement. When creating financial statements, the profit/loss statement would typically be structured first because the net profit or loss becomes a part of the statement in the balance sheet, or in a partners’ capital. Moreover, the end of a partner’s capital statement becomes a part of the balance sheet (Parker, 2009). The financial statement is focused on examining the total capital and profits of a company that are distributed inside its structure. For a public and private limited company, the financial statement must provide the following components: current assets, non-current assets, current liabilities, total sales, total profits, payable, dividends, and share prices (Ronen, 2006). References Adams, B. L., Cain, H. R. and Giraud, V. (2012). ‘Leadership, Motivation, and Teamwork Behaviors of Principal Investigator’s in Interdisciplinary Teams: A Synthesis of Research’. Journal of Leadership Education, vol. 11(2), pp. 176-191.Bao, C., Li, J., Wu, D., Zhu, X., Liang, C. and Liu, C. (2014). ‘Optimization of Integrated Risk in Commercial Banking Based on Financial Statements’. Procedia Computer Science, vol. 31, pp. 501-510.Buffett, M. and Clark, D. (2008). Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements: The Search for the Company with a Durable Competitive Advantage. New York: Scribner. Kalsyte, Z. And Verikas, A. (2013). ‘A Novel Approach to Exploring Company’s Financial Soundness: Investor’s Perspective’. Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 40(13), pp. 5085-5092. Pacios, A. R. and de la Fuente, G. (2013). ‘Teamwork and Leadership in a Virtual Learning Environment’. RUSC: Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento, vol. 10(2), pp. 358-374. Palea, V. (2014). ‘Are IFRS Value-Relevant for Separate Financial StatementsEvidence from the Italian Stock Market’. Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, vol. 23(1), pp. 1-17. Parker, R. H. (2009). Understanding Company Financial Statements. New York: Penguin Books. Reevy, G. M., Chamberlain, C. J. and Stein, J. (2013). ‘Identifying Collaboration, Teamwork, and Leadership Practices on Campus’. Currents in Teaching & Learning, vol. 6(1), pp. 4-17. Ronen, J. (2006). ‘A Proposed Corporate Governance Reform: Financial Statements Insurance’. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, vol. 23, pp. 130-146. Sohmen, V. S. (2013). ‘Leadership and Teamwork: Two Sides of the Same Coin’. Journal of Information Technology & Economic Development, vol. 4(2), pp. 1-18. Stupans, I. (2013). ‘Development of Contemporary Leadership Capacity through Teamwork in an Online Environment: A Pilot Study’. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, vol. 25(2), pp. 262-268. Tiffan, B. (2014). ‘The Art of Team Leadership’. Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, vol. 15, pp. 799-801.

“Hedda Gabler” by Henrik Ibsen and the 19th Century Marriage Essay

Marriage in the 19th century was a social and economic matter, rather than a matter of personal relationship. The morals of the era, including family morals, are often associated with the Victorian England, where they revealed themselves in the most ultimate and form, yet especially this kind of attitude towards marriage dominated throughout Europe. The hypocrisy of the 19th century marriage, which caused countless lives to be broken and countless people to be unhappy, inspired many prominent writers like Oscar Wild, Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to refer to the motifs of protest against such state of things. Yet Henrik Ibsen is unique even in this society, he concentrates on the named subject in virtually every of his famous plays. One of those plays is â€Å"Hedda Gabler† first published in 1890. In this paper I will attempt to analyze Ibsen’s play in the context of the XIX century marriage, as well as the effect the play itself had on the social perception of family ties. I will argue that Ibsen managed to demonstrate how frustrating a hypocritical marriage can be and what a disastrous consequences it can cause not only for the married women, but for every person involved in the relation. I will further argue that the play can be viewed as Ibsen’s contribution to change of the entire social idea of the place of a woman in a family. Ibsen himself wrote that â€Å"The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. I intended to indicate thereby that as a personality she is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife. † Here Ibsen refers to the key problem of marriage in the 19th century. A woman has not played any independent role in it. She has always been viewed as â€Å"belonging to some man†, whether it is her father, brother or husband. Correspondingly, she had no opportunity to develop her own life and turned out to be a toy in the hands of men, being entirely dependent on them in social and economic aspects . In Hedda’s case she is either a daughter of a general, or a wife of an academic. But what is worse, she is dependent not only socially, but even mentally. She does not seem to be very clever, yet this does not mean that she lacks character. At her first approach Ibsen stresses her â€Å"pale and opaque† face and that â€Å"her steel-grey eyes express a cold, unruffled repose† . She is no way a foolish maiden dreaming only of lavish and careless life, throughout the play she often acts as a person of firm will, yet of a bad, or rather undeveloped character. This personal underdevelopment includes both narrow outlook and lack of moral principles. Perhaps she has been taught everything possible about morals, but a person of her type would rather act in contrary to imposed principles. Hedda really â€Å"belongs† to her husband and she is constantly reminded of that. This makes her desire for power even stronger, as she demonstrates more and more masculine features as the play develops. Unwilling to accept the feminine stereotypes of behavior Hedda plays with her father’s pistols perhaps more to shock and confuse her family, because handling arms is surely not a proper thing for a young lady. Yet the play with the pistols is still comparatively innocent. It appears that Hedda plays her own game with the society. Her relatives treat her as an obedient toy, so Hedda starts using them as toys in turn. This is a game of arrogance and indifference. Hedda makes snobbish remarks to the surrounding people, insults Aunt Julie’s new hat. The game gradually becomes more and more dangerous, and ends with two suicides. It seems that in this game Hedda makes little difference between a hat and Lovborg’s life. What the world has given to Hedda that Hedda returns to the world, and in case her dreams of luxurious existence are ruined, she can ruin the world in turn. The dependent position of a woman in marriage is naturally followed by another aspect of 19th century marriage – restriction of a woman. Ibsen embodied this social barrier in the repeated image of a glass door. The barrier is easy to be removed or broken, which she â€Å"nervously† walks to, but which she never opens, dying inside the claustrophobic space of the house. A question might arise here why Hedda at all married Jorgen Tesman whom she never loved and whom she openly neglected? The most obvious answer is that Hedda was in need of money, since her fathers only heritage was a good name. Tesman was an acceptable choice to her. He is considerably prosperous, his scientific prospects look perfectly, his name is noble, and, what is most important, his character is not very strong, so Hedda can easily control him. What is less obvious is Hedda’s desire to revenge Lovborg who failed to meet her hopes. Whether consciously or not, Hedda is making her way towards actual murder and suicide from the very beginning of the play. Although even in the 19th century the declared ground of marriage was love, Hedda cries to the Judge not to â€Å"use this sickening word† . She has crossed out her dreams of love and she does not want even to remember them. However, Hedda at least has an idea of love and passions, while her husband has none. As Hedda married Tesman of convenience, so Tesman did to Hedda. He is attracted both by her origin and by her beauty, while her death impresses him in a strange way: â€Å"Shot herself! Shot herself in the temple! Fancy that! †. This last phrase shows his real attitude. He never loved Hedda, and his primary concern was his own social position which he hoped to improve with a good marriage and an image of a beautiful wife. In fact there are no good or bad characters in the play, no victims and no executioners. Hedda is often blamed as a â€Å"snobbish, mean-spirited, small-minded, conservative, cold, bored, vicious. She’s sexually eager but terrified of sex; ambitious to be bohemian but frightened of scandal; a desperate romantic fantasist but unable to sustain any loving relationship with anyone, including herself† . This all can be true, but other characters are not better. The basic defect of the situation is that men and women surrounding Hedda are completely unable to see her as a personality outside of her social position. To the last they believe that Hedda would act in the â€Å"accepted way†, whether it is Tesman who views his wife as a pretty doll or Judge Brack who blackmails Hedda to enter into the family and probably force Hedda to a love affair believing that Hedda would act as a women in hopelessness, in other words obey . Brack is surprised with Hedda’s rebelliousness against the rule and asks: â€Å"Are you so unlike the generality of women as to have no turn for duties? † . But what Hedda does not want to hear about are duties. In this company even Lovborg causes little compassion. An miserable alcoholic who almost ruined his talent saved not due to his own effort, but due to a woman, he is unable even to die in the way Hedda has determined, and his suicide looks ridiculous. Being finally cornered by the circumstances Hedda decides to commit suicide herself. All of her dreams are ruined, she is now convinced that nobody loves her, her dreams of freedom, luxury and passions appeared to be mirages. She is unable to dominate even in the situation she has herself created. Hedda realizes that she is not a romantic hero but a simple wife of an academic, she is imprisoned and powerless. Her possible motherhood can only aggravate her despair, for a child shall be born from a man she does not love, and childbirth will make her even more helpless and dependent. Thus suicide looks as a natural resort for her. There is an another strong social allusion in the play. Lovborg and Mrs. Elvsted use to label Loveborg’s manuscript as a child, so burning a manuscript is a similar to child murder. When Hedda kills herself she kills her prospective children, as well as ruins her husband’s reputation thus doing two things he is afraid of. She commits suicide out of escapist intents but it is also a revenge to her husband, Brack, relatives and the whole world where such hypocritical marriage is possible. â€Å"Hedda Gabler† caused an ambiguous reaction of the public ever since premiere. The responses differed from calling it â€Å"Ibsen’s greatest play and the most interesting woman that he has created† to the devastating characteristic by George Bernard Show who emotionally observed: â€Å"What a marvel of stupidity and nonsense the author did produce in this play! It is incredible to think that only a score of years ago the audience sat seriously before its precious dullness†. American newspapers added oil to the flame of critique. The Philadelphian Ledger wrote after the American premiere â€Å"What a hopeless specimen of degeneracy is Hedda Gabler! A vicious, heartless, cowardly, unmoral, mischief-making vixen†. Yet I would emphasize a characteristic that remains actual until now. It has been provided by Justin Huntly McCarthy who wrote of the â€Å"he most interesting woman that he has created – she is compact with all the vices, she is instinct with all the virtues of womanhood† . The debate has not ceased over the years. Hedda became a favored character in the feminist movement, the play has been staged in numerous interpretations, including even lesbian one. However such public interest is the best proof of the fact that Ibsen hit the nail. â€Å"Hedda Gabler† is a play about fatal marriage. It starts with return of Hedda from her wedding journey and ends with the beginning of her final journey. However, Ibsen managed to generalize his subject and make his play a story of woman place in the society. 19th century marriage did left little space for female existence in the world dominated by males. That what the play is actually about. The motif of domination is revealed throughout the play and it is not always possible to say who, except for faulty customs dominates the situation. After all Tesman is unable to control even himself, and Hedda can not take the leading positions in the family due to social restrictions. Death is her protest. Perhaps it would not be too general to say that Ibsen wrote not only of physical death of his character but of a spiritual death of womanhood in the 19th century marriage. Works Cited: 1. Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. Digireads. com, 2005. 2. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 3. Templeton, Joan. Ibsen’s Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 4. Eyre, Richard. â€Å"Femme fatale. Richard Eyre would like to apologise to Ibsen for doubting the greatness of Hedda Gabler†. The Guardian. 5 Mar. 2005. 21 April 2009 http://www. guardian. co. uk/stage/2005/mar/05/theatre 5. Sanders, Tracy. â€Å"Lecture Notes: Hedda Gabler – Fiend or Heroine†. Australian Catholic University, 2006. 21 April 2009 http://dlibrary. acu. edu. au/staffhome/trsanders/units/modern_drama/hedda_gabler. html