Friday, December 27, 2019

Sample Resume Employability Skills - 3701 Words

Unit No: 47 Unit Title: Employability Skills Assignment Cover Sheet Assignement N: 1 and 2 I hereby confirm that this assignment is my own work. I have identified and acknowledged all sources used in this assignment and have referenced according to the Harvard referencing system. I have read and understood the Plagiarism and Collusion section provided with the assignment brief and understood the consequences of plagiarising. Name: Krasimira Stefanova Registration number: ET 91934 Signature ........................................... Date: 12.06.2015 Table of Contents Introduction 1.1 Own responsibilities and performance objectives 1.2 Evaluation of own effectiveness against defined objectives 1.3 Recommendation for improvement 1.4 Motivational techniques 2.1 Solutions to work based problems 2.2 Communication styles at various levels 2.3 Time management strategies 3.1 Team roles 3.2 Analyze team dynamics 3.3 Alternative ways to complete tasks and achieve team goals 4.1 Tools and methods for developing solutions to problem 4.2 Appropriate strategy to resolve a particular problem 4.3 Evaluate the potential impact on the business of implementing the strategy Conclusion Introduction To meet organization’s goals is important for the team and individuals to be clear in their responsibilities and aims. Timbacourt is now opening a new store and needs fromShow MoreRelatedEmployer Perceptions Of The Employability Of Workers Essay934 Words   |  4 PagesEmployer Perceptions of the Employability of Workers in a Social Business Reference Krupa, T., Moneta, H, A., Lysaght, R., Kirsh, B. (2016). Employer Perceptions of the Employability of Workers in a Social Business. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, Vol.39, No.2 120-128. The authors collected data through Online Survey. The critical analysis of this article is as follow: 1. Problem and Purpose The purpose of the study is to identify corporation view of employability of career aspirant employedRead MoreUsing The Mixed Method For College Graduates Of Sports Administration Programs Face While Searching For A Job1855 Words   |  8 Pagesopportunities in the field but, those are limited, females has to be aware of the nature of sport management in order to avoid being mistreated (Bower, Hums 2013). Understanding the nature of sport management allows a recent graduate to increase their â€Å"employability† (Forsyth, Minten 2014). The intended purpose of the study is to present facts, new and old to allow the reader to piece it all together and discover the common roadblocks that exist while searching for a job, allowing each individual interestedRead MoreThe Impact Of Service Learning On Residency Interviews1547 Words   |  7 Pagesstudy. RESULTS Service learning narratives were included in 56% of personal statements. An interest in working with indigent patient population was the most frequently included service learning narrative, followed by cultural competency and leadership skills. During residency interviews, 67% of students reported discussing their service learning experience. Medical students who included a service learning narrative in their personal statements were more likely to report that service learning positivelyRead MoreA New Framework For Training And Placement Services Using Mobile1405 Words   |  6 Pagespreparation seminars, interview schedule, etc. Keywords: Automation, Online authentication, Smart phone, Placement and Training (PAT). 1. Introduction Modern technologies have given numerous ways in which for creating advances in numerous fields. Recent samples of these are computers, laptops and smart phones which may do any advanced work simply. The overall use of internet and applications in Smartphone has enhanced enormously. Smart phones can run on variety of platforms like iOS of Apple, Android ofRead MoreEvaluation Of A Research Study1527 Words   |  7 PagesMethod Participants The total number of participants in which the survey was conducted was a sample size of 1126 Psyc 1F90 students. In the study it included 267 male participants, 849 female participants, 4 transgender participants, and 6 participants who did not specify their sex. Out of the 1126 students who participated in the study, the students had a mean age of 19.59 years. Measures Surveys were distributed to the psyc 1F90 students to collect the data this was done by including a questionRead MoreEmployability of Marketing Graduates5004 Words   |  21 Pagesthe decades, the massification of higher education has been matched by an increasingly demanding global labor-force and work-environment. Thus, the requirement for graduates to possess high quality, transferable â€Å"employability† skills is becoming increasingly important. The employability of graduates is very essential to an institution especially that there are more graduates who are continuously looking for employment. Furthermore, it is through education and proper training that a graduate willRead MoreRevamping of Recruitment Center of Tata Motors9981 Words   |  40 Pages24 REVAMPING OF RECRUITMENT CENTER OF TATA MOTORS 29 INTERVIEWING PROCESS USED BY TATA MOTORS:- 29 BEHAVIORAL BASED INTERVIEWING: 32 How to Conduct an Effective Behavioral Interview: 33 Behavioral Interview Questions 34 QUESTIONING SKILLS: - PAMPHLET 51 POSTERS ON BEHAVIORAL INTERVIEWING:- 59 SUGGESTIONS: 69 BIBLOGRAPHY: 70 Executive summary: The TATA Group is a multinational conglomerate based in Mumbai, India. The TATA name has been respected in India for 140 yearsRead MoreProject on Employee Retention9019 Words   |  37 Pagestools and techniques to reach the findings of the study 1.4 Limitations of the study The limitations of the study are the following * The data was collected through questionnaire. The responds from the respondents may not be accurate. * The sample taken for the study was only 50 and the results drawn may not be accurate. * Since the organization has strict control, it acts as another barrier for getting data. * Another difficulty was very limited time-span of the project. * Lack ofRead MoreDownsizing7053 Words   |  29 Pages | |Business Importance | |Sample Policies | | | |RecentRead MoreHuman Resources Management150900 Words   |  604 Pagesmanufacturing jobs will represent only 12% to 15% of all U.S. jobs by that date. Workforce Availability and Quality In many parts of the United States today, significant workforce shortages exist due to an inadequate supply of workers with the skills needed to perform the jobs being added. In the last several years news reports have regularly described tight labor markets with unemployment rates in some locales below 3%. Also, continuously there are reports by industries and companies facing shortages

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Insurance Contracts Essay Example

Essays on Insurance Contracts Essay The paper "Insurance Contracts" is a worthy example of a business essay.  The IASB published an exposure draft on insurance contracts and expected comments from various shareholders in the insurance sector by 25 October 2013. The exposure draft makes its proposals supersede the IFRS 4 insurance contracts since the IFRS lacks a comprehensive standard for accounting in insurance (IASB, 2013).   This paper seeks to analyze two comment letters that followed the publication of the exposure draft. The comment letters include one from Sandler O’Neill and partners and another one from the APEC business advisory council.The Sandler O’Neill and partner letter is lengthy and raised a number of concerns. The letter vehemently opposes various proposals pointing out that the preparers and investors will be short-changed if the proposals are to be taken as they are. In this letter, the writer points out some of the concerns they raised in the past with regard to the previous IASB proposals. The concerns included increased volatility in insurers’ equity and earnings and increasing the cost and reducing the insurers’ capital (Longino, 2013). Sandler O’Neill and partners point out various issues in the current proposal that include the redefinition of an insurance contract which they claim ignores the identity of the issuer and uses the character of the instrument in its definition. In addition to that, they raise an issue with respect to the fair value measurement of the contracts.The APEC business advisory council letter, on the other hand, is quite short. Just like the Sandler O’Neill and partners letter, concerns that were previously raised in the past exposure draft are pointed out. The APEC letter appreciates some of the proposed changes which include the use of OCI in discount rates and volume information presentation in the statement of comprehensive income (Wardhana, 2013). However, a number of concerns are raised. They incl ude the scope of the contracts, complexity of the measurement model and consistency of the measurement model. The council is of the view that the scope of the contract is limited by the â€Å"mirroring approach† and that the measurement model is complex and would present the insurers with excess costs and practical burdens. Unlike the Sandler O’Neill and partners letter, the APEC letter gives a number of proposals.ReferencesIASB (2013). Exposure Draft- Insurance Contract. IFRS FoundationLongino. J (2013, September 19). Letter to the FASB and IASB. Sandler O’Neill and partnersWardhana, W (2013, October 10). Letter to the FASB and IASB. The APEC business advisory council

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Evidence Based Nursing Research Hospitalisation

Question: Discuss about theEvidence Based Nursing Researchfor Hospitalisation. Answer: Introduction In Australia around 96,300 elders belonging to the age group of 65 and above were hospitalised due to fall during 2011-12. (AIHW 2016). The fall percentage in women is higher than the men. With increasing fall incidences every year in the elderly, the concern to develop methods to control has risen. Around 40% of injury-related death in the elderly population is due to fall. The common injuries due to fall include bruises, cuts and sprains. Hospitalisation is needed in case of fractures. Fracture in hip is one of the major reasons of mortality and morbidity due to slow recovery from the surgery. This is also affecting the quality of life of the elderly people as they have a fear of falling. (Aus New Z: Falls prevention society 2016). Many studies to find effective techniques and method in order to prevent the fall related injuries in the elderly population have been conducted. The given article presents the review of one such randomised and controlled trial conducted by Elley et al. (2008) on the effectiveness of a falls- and-fracture nurse coordinator to reduce falls in older adults. Discussion The study emphasizes on the multifactorial and single factor intervention to be effective in reducing fall in the trial group of participants. The cost incurred due to the fall prevention methods on the community has encouraged people to invest in the effective to reduce fall. Method The researcher has selected a multifactorial intervention using a falls and fracture nurse coordinator who is working with the family physician of the participant. They aim to reduce the fractures by improving the bone strength by the family physician. The trial format was randomised and controlled method conducted in Hutt Valley, Wellington, New Zealand. The duration of the trial was around two years, from March 2005 to February 2007. A randomised controlled trial consists of participants who are assigned to treatment condition at random using controlled procedures. This method helps in comparing the interventions with the control and examining the affecting factors which can help reducing the risk. Randomised control trail is mainly used for the observational and quasi-experimental designs as there is possibility of potential bias and confounding. This could be due to the lack of comparability, observer bias and secular trends. In this case randomised control trial gives the gold s tandard for the determination of the study. (Koch, A.U. 1999). The participants selected included men and women from age group of 75 years and above having a fall history in 12 months periods. A baseline assessment was done by the nurses recruited for the care intervention. A computer based schedule generated for the intervention or control group was given to the participants from the researcher at random. This approach is effective as the chances of bias are low. All the participants received the standard methods of intervention which will help in the analysis. The comparison between the groups can be easy using the control trial method. The researcher excluded the participants having problems in understanding the guidelines, those with serious medical conditions and those who were physically disable. This would help in getting the expected outcome. Although the overall technique was ineffective considering the fact that in old age it is difficult to follow guidelines and act accordingly. Besides since the measures were based on the references to other professionals who follow their clinical practises. This can create the chances of internal contamination. The effective methods could be to incorporate more exercise interventions along with the dietary supplement and medicinal factors. Exercises have been proved to be one of the most effective methods to control fall in elderly population. The exercises which focus on balancing and strengthening of muscles have shown positive results in this regard. (Li et al 2005). Ethical Consideration The method was approved by The Wellington Ethics Committee and was registered with the Australia New Zealand Clinical Trial Register. The study met the ethical requirement as the selection was done considering the age factor and related issues. The willingness of the participants was considered while selection. The ethical requirements of the study were to determine the effect of fall prevention technique in the elderly, the problems which can be faced by the participants and the implication of measures that require physical restraints. The method was well explained so the ethical determination of the study was well established. Fall prevention is an issue which is now catching the eye of researchers to develop effective control measures. There is less research or literature available on the issue. (Glasziou 2008). Measures are published in many countries like USA, UK and Canada to reduce the fall in the old age people. (Guidelines 2001; Feder 2000; Scott 2001). Strategy based research study involves the factors which can be effective to reduce the fall rate and community based study involves the implication of the strategies and measures to a large mass group. It is different from the randomised control trial studies which focus on a particular group of individuals within a community. They are set in different environmental backgrounds. (McClure et al 2008). The measurement technique used by the researchers included recording of the number of falls on daily and monthly basis and there was a follow up call by the researcher who is blind to the group allocation. They recorded the injuries and hospitals interventions. A single follow up visit were made in 1 year assessment to the participants to check the muscle strength and body balance. The measurement of daily activity and the fear to fall was also assessed. The interventions were measured by a trained nurse who visited the participants and analysed the various associated factors for the intervention. The number of participants at various stages was presented by researcher in a flow chart. They conducted a session for the family physicians top explain the guidelines related to the fall prevention. The JBI Level of Evidence Considering the JBI level of evidence the study failed to acknowledge the main components. The approach of the study is weak to analyse the effects. The multifactorial intervention techniques have proved to be ineffective in the fall reduction in older people. The community based studies have been an effective method to analyse the measures to reduce fall. Nine trials conducted to check the efficiency of multifactorial studies in order to reduce fall in older people showed negative results. The lack of empirical data in the multifactorial studies done on older people in their home environment was also responsible for the failure of such trials. (Balzer 2012). Only 1 visit for assessment in a year trial is inefficient to determine the effectiveness and outcomes of the interventions. Out of 3434 people only 312 fulfilled the requirement and were willing to participate. The randomisation was almost equal in the study. The primary outcome related to fall reduction showed only 0.95% incid ent rate ratio in the intervention group on comparison with the control group. The secondary outcome was also showing a higher difference. The proved that guidelines for the exercises to increase the strength and body balancing old age people along with the routine activity were not effective. The factors associated with the failure of study could be mainly the fault in the study design. The insufficient visits for the analysis, the lack of support from the physicians proved to be a factor which decreased the efficacy of the study. The study method was also ineffective to analyse the result. There were several trials conducted by Gillespie et al (2012) to determine the effective techniques to reduce fall in elderly. The effective measures to reduce fall include many factors including exercises, vitamin D supplement, education related to the issue, treatment methods, safety measures and proper care etc. the efforts made in the direction of improving of the older people and to reduce the fall needs to observe on a broader prospect and worked accordingly. (Marks, R 2008). Data Collection Method The data collection used in the study was through the post card calendars which the candidates filled in each day and on the monthly basis to record the fall rate. The researcher had the records on the telephone after 4 weeks in the primary outcome but during the secondary outcome they limited it to one visit after 12 months. They should have taken the records in less time interval for more effective outcome. Rigour of the Study The researcher considered the probable questions which could have led to the ineffectiveness of the study. The researcher claims that the study was robust considering the previous studies related to the issue. The problems that affected the study as per the researcher was the involvement of the family physician and their referred interventions. The researcher has established that the physicians were made to attend the session on the measures of the study and the required outcomes. Techniques to Analyse Data The researcher used STATA 9.1 with negative binomial regression model to compare the falls in the intervention and the control group. The secondary outcome was transformed into log for the analysis. To compare the changes in the secondary outcomes, the method used was linear and ordinal logistic regression models for baseline values. The method was used to compare the data between the group. It is effective for the randomised control study Personal Reflection Fall is considered as one of the major factor leading to the morbidity and causing disability in the older people. Nearly one third older people of age above 65 years are victim of fall and in around half cases this case is frequent and recurring. (Tinetti and Kumar 2010). To reduce the fall more number of studies need to be conducted. A proper lay out is required which covers all the factors including exercises and medicinal interventions. As a physician I would not select this method mentioned by Elley et al. (2008) as it failed to prove the efficiency of multifactorial intervention in community based trial method. My approach would be to use plans and method which are more efficient in improving the health of the old people. Exercise related to strengthening the muscles and balancing have proved to be effective to reduce fall. I would prefer using methods which can reduce the fear of falling in the patients. A method suggested reducing fall in elder people by Aama T. A (2011) repr esents all the essential elements which are must to be considered. In future such approach will prove effective in dealing with this issue. Conclusion The literature review presents the study trial to reduce fall in elderly. Although the approach followed a robust trial method yet due to lack of proper analysis technique and data collection methods, the study failed to be effective in this regard. Lack of research in this matter is evident in many studies. It is time to look for an effective method to reduce the fall in elderly people. Cost effective methods and government approved guidelines are needed. All the possible threats to the trial should be considered including the bias, confounding and regression should be analysed. Trial on mass basis with the use of strategic rigour to combat the several hindrances and errors related to the study should be applied and used. References Aama, T. A. (2011). Falls in the elderly: spectrum and prevention. Canadian family physician, 57; 771-776. American geriatrics society, British geriatrics society and American academy of orthopaedic surgeons panel on falls prevention. Guidelines for the prevention of falls in older persons. Journal of the American geriatric society 2001; 49: 664-672. Australia New Zealand: fall prevention society. (2016). Info about falls. Australia. Australian institute of health and welfare. (2016). Fall in older people. Australia: Australian government, AIHW. Balzer et al. (2012). Fall prevention for the elderly. GMS health technol assess,8. Doi: 10.3205/hta000099. Elley et al. (2008). Effectiveness of a falls-and-fracture nurse coordinator to reduce falls: a randomised, controlled trial of at- risk older adults. The American geriatrics society,56: 1383-1389. Feder et al. (2000). Guidelines for the prevention of falls in people over 65. BMJ 2000; 321: 1007-1011. Gillespie et al . (2012). Interventions for preventing falls in older people living in the community. Cochrane database syst rev. Glaszious et al. (2008). What is missing from descriptions of treatment in trials and reviews? BMJ, 336(7659): 1472-1474. Koch A.U. (1999). The role of randomisation in clinical studies: myths and beliefs. J clin epidemiol, 52:487-497. Li et al. (2005). Tai chi and fall reductions in older adults: a randomised controlled trial. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci, 60(2): 187-194. Marks, R. (2014). Falls among elderly: multifactoria; community-based fall prevention programs. Aging sci 2,109. Doi: 10.4172/2329-8847. McClure et al. (2008). Population- based interventions for the prevention of fall-related injuries in older people. The Cochrane collaboration, 4. Australia: John Wiley Sons, ltd. Scott et al. (2001). A best practices guide for the prevention of falls among seniors living in the community. Ottawa: federal/provincial/territorial committee of official (seniors) for the ministers responsible for seniors. Tinetti, M. E. and Kumar, C. (2010). The patient who falls: its always a trade-off. JAMA, 303(3):258-266.

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Search Engine Results Page Where Are Your Customers Looking

by Sienna Luard A recent Google eye-tracking study released in September 2014 by digital marketing company Mediative has shown how much search behavior has changed in the past decade. The study, â€Å"The Evolution of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages and Their Effects on User Behaviour† shows several significant changes in how Internet users look at and interact with search engine results pages (SERPs). The participants in the study were given numerous search tasks to complete on a desktop computer and the results were compared with a similar survey done in 2005. The Golden Triangle of 2005 The 2005 study by Enquiro, entitled â€Å"Google Eye Tracking Report: How Searchers See and Click on Google Search Results† showed how people typically searched in a â€Å"triangle† pattern, starting at the top left of the search results page, scanning across horizontally, and then moving down to the second organic listing and reading horizontally, but not quite as far. The area was coined as Google’s â€Å"Golden Triangle.† The golden triangle heat map image showing how people looked at an Internet page had a major impact on website design and search engine marketing for years to come. Most marketers would position their most valuable content in the golden triangle on their own websites, and aim to get their content featured in SERPs within this prime location. The Results of the 2014 Study – There is more vertical scanning. As searchers use mobile devices more than ever before to search the Internet, their scanning behavior has changed. It’s now more common for searchers to scan vertically, as they look for the quickest route to find information. In the 2014 study, this tendency to scan vertically in an â€Å"I† pattern on mobile devices is so ingrained in users, they still scan the SERPs in this way, even on desktops. – The top organic search results still get the most clicks. Despite the increased amount of marked-up content at the top of Google’s search results page, 32.8 percent of users still click on the first organic listing, getting more clicks than any other page element. The Knowledge Graph, carousel, and paid ads still get attention, but organic results still triumph. – SERP positions two through four get more clicks than in 2005. This is good news for businesses that are fighting for attention under position number one. You should still aim to get onto page one in the SERPS; the Mediative study found that only around one percent of all clicks occurred on page two. – The right rail sponsored ads are doing a lot worse. While the top three ads at the top of the page are still doing well, clicks on ads on the right of the page have fallen from 3.16 to 0.7 percent. This supports the fact that people are looking at SERPs in a more vertical fashion. – People are viewing more search results listings, but spending less time looking at each one. In 2005, searchers looked at each listing for two seconds. That figure is now 1.17 seconds, so your listing may get less attention in terms of time, but at least it is more likely to be seen. How Can You Respond to These Changes? The fundamentals of SEO are as important as ever. Creating unique content that caters to the needs of your audience should still be your number one priority. A diverse mix of relevant keywords positioned throughout your web pages and within page titles, headlines, and meta descriptions is still key to boosting your search rankings for your prime content. Getting involved with authoritative directories, review sites, and social media is also crucial. Using schema markup is still one of the most effective ways to get noticed in SERPs. It helps search engines understand your website’s content, and will help your content stand out in search results, as rich snippets such as product reviews, prices, and images can appear alongside each listing. Rich snippets have been shown to dramatically increase click-through rates, and may also increase your search rankings. The Bottom Line The best way forward is still to focus on delivering content that your target audience is searching for online. Through a combination of SEO and paid search, you can maximize your visibility in SERPs. While paid listings may not necessarily have higher click-through rates, people still see your listing and this boosts brand visibility in the long run, which can increase the credibility of your organic listings. Making each listing stand out on the search results page has never been more important, with only half the time to convince users to click on your link. Titles and meta descriptions, Google Local Listings, and rich snippets will improve the visibility and perceived relevance of your content. Keep these factors in mind and you can make sure your customers see you before anyone else.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

buy custom Digital Camera essay

buy custom Digital Camera essay Today, the evolutions of the digital camera have become significant. There are a lot of specifications for different types of digital cameras. Some operate on segments of storage on which it records video and takes pictures of high quality, which can be seen, because of magnificence and beauty, clarity and high fidelity. Furthermore, there are other details for cameras, such as lenses which enable every snapshot have the specially suited lens. Examples of the different lens are outlined below; Macro lens, for small objects or organisms like insects. Normal Angel Lens characterized bydeliriouslensprovide awide-angleviewand depth of fieldhence used to shoot very large places. Wide Angel Lenseshavemany advantages. It capturesa wide area of the scene using its widedepth of field. Fish-eye Lens specially designedto give thefield of viewup to180 . Telephoto Lens used to getgreat picturesofthe subject far from thecamera. It also givesalengthgreater than 50mm hence its common use insportsphotographyandfilminganimals, birds andremotetarget (Camera Lenses Types of lenses). When taking pictures for any one or on a landscape, it is important make it have effects that pleases the viewer. For purposes of editing such softwares like Photoshop, Light room and Photo Instrument can be used. Each of these programs has distinguishing characteristics. The Photoshop helps a photographer make some changes on the taken picture. These changes involve color change, addition of shadow, mixing of picture layers and manipulation of the image to add different effects. There are three key things for good photography: the camera, lighting and Photoshop (Banks, Tyra). Adobe Photoshop is a product of Adobe Sytems who edited and developed it. Photoshop uses color models, which include Red, Green and Blue (RGB) and grayscale. Photoshop also reads and writes faster and change image formats into forms such as EPS, PNG, GIF, and JPEG. Photoshop links with other Adobe softwares for media editing, animation, and authoring. Significantly, Photoshop saves time because it can process many raw images at once without destroying the image through editing which involves, including color settings, cropping, straightening and more. It is possible to process images while continuing with editing (Adobe Photoshop cs2, P5). Some people could not understand how to use Photoshop for a reason of not understanding the tools and their significance. However, today the adobe company tries to support most languages in the world. Therefore, people can learn how to use Photoshop with their own laguage. Currently, Photoshop is now obtainable in Brazilian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, among other languages. Adobe Photoshop helps tutors prepare students to succeed through the provision of digital communication tools and skills required in todays workforce. There are many online lessons for learning that Photoshop provides. The second program named Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to manipulate colors and light; hence its name Lightroom. The program can be used to give different effects of lights to satisfy viewer of the picture. It can also make a picture appear old by not only using black-and-white colors, but also using gray and brown colors. There are three editions of this program. The publishing of the first version was in 2007, the second edition on 2008, and the last and the best called Light room 3.0 published in 2009. The latest program has noise reduction feature, improved sharpening tool, new import pseudo module, watermarking, new luminance noise reduction and point curve for the coolers. The quality and nature of image matters most, even before editing. Thereafter, using different tools, one can manipulate the image using such programs as light room to change color, reduce noise if it is a video, as well as sharpening of picture. Virtually, every tool that makes photos stunning is available. As a beginner in photography, it is advisable to use another program before coming back to Lightroom for light effects changes and shadowing. An example of this simpler program is Photoinstrument which has some sample tools that can be used for color change, sharpening and other changes. Photoinstrument has tools so powerful and easy to learn graphics for an editor of digital photographs. Most problems in a digital photo can be solved by few clicks. This makes any photo look professional. The resulting picture enables an editor distinguish the quality before and after use of Photoinstrument. Photo Instrumentis a recommendable easy to learn tool for editing and correcting photos. Photos send messages in daily life. Images can be used in different areas of life for different purposes. It educates, advertises or even expresses feelings. Images were used as a language in the ancient times. There is heritage in the preservations of language in the simple nature of pyramids in Egypt. Today, images can be used to learn another language. For example, an international student in USA uses pictures to learn vocabulary such as pen, umbrella and more. Oxford Picture Dictionary remains an excellent book that comes in handy while learning English. Police have many cameras in a street not only to keep the citizens safe, but also to control and help them in investigations to find and arrest criminals. If, for example, a person is walking late at night in the streets and he or she gets robbed, it is easier for police to check the criminal using cameras. In this case processing and capturing, images helps in identifying the offender, and deliver the truth. The use of three dimensional (3D) facial recognition can be used to take a picture in the dark since there is a possibility to distinguish a criminal at various angles of view reaching potential of up to 90 degrees (a face in profile). Police have a series of gadgets they use in this identification. Most company use advertisement to show out goods and sell it to people through the promotion of propaganda image like what is in television, magazines and the internet every day. Photography can also be used to show the talent in designing by expressing the collections using images. It is crucial to consider the effects of pictures or images to the viewers. Images give persuasion if exposed to somebody for a long time. This concept applies to marketing and even in the political campaigns. Images played a significant role in President Bushs soliciting for support on issues regarding to terrorism; he used images of aircraft attack on World Trade Center. Images can also be used to pass a warning message in health matters. The best example is the packaging of tobacco products. Despite, the reduction in profitability of tobacco companies, World Health Organization emphasizes the use of imagery for warning against tobacco abuse. Warnings appear in the form of pictures. The former CEO of British-American Tobacco commented that there is a debatable balance between business and health of tobacco abusers. The questions elicited by photos in the tobacco packages are important since it discourages abusers of the drug. Imagery has different effects on the viewer. The impacts of the photos or images can be negative or positive. This explains the use of photos as a message in support of ideas or opinions to the public. As a recommendation for people who want to use images to give impact, it is essentially significant to embrace technology and design programs for high-quality photography. Summary In acknowledgement of the advancement in technology, the usage of digital cameras helps a great deal. The development of lenses which vary and give different workability comes in handy in the presentation of high-quality pictures. The Adobe Company has also been involved through the consistent production of quality programs which enables photographers deliver satisfactory service. The insurmountable significance of quality of images and pictures is open, and highly dependent on the users themselves. There is no doubt that the future of photography is bliss. Buy custom Digital Camera essay

Saturday, November 23, 2019

The Dangers of Relying on Spell Check and Grammar Check

The Dangers of Relying on Spell Check and Grammar Check Almost all word processing programs come equipped with a tool for checking both spelling and grammar. However, writers should be wary of the dangers of relying too heavily on these tools. For example:Spell check will not fined words witch are miss used butt spelled rite!An ordinary spell checker will find few or no errors in the above sentence. This is because spell checkers can only detect if words are spelled correctly, not if they are used correctly.That being said, a spell checker is a handy tool and, therefore, should not be completely abandoned. However, writers should be cautioned from relying on it to catch every error. Spell check should be your first step in editing your document, not the only step!The problems with trusting spell checkBelow are just some of the dangers of relying on spell check:Spell check cannot help you with some proper names, such as Heston or Jolie.Spell check will not detect the improper use of homonyms, such as their and there.Spell check may flag wo rds as errors which are indeed correct.Spell check does not always offer useful spelling suggestions for severely misspelled words.For example, the following are some commonly misused words that standard spellcheckers will not catch:advise/adviceloose/losepassed/pastdessert/desertweather/whetherthen/thansite/sight/citeThe limitation of traditional spell checkers is epitomized by the often quoted poem, Ode to the Spell Checker.Eye halve a spelling checkerIt came with my pea sea.It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to sayWeather eye yam wrong oar write.It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid.It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite.Its rare lea ever wrong.Eye have run this poem threw it,I am shore your pleased to no.Its letter perfect awl the way.My checker told me sew.Jerrold H. ZarThe lawyer and the sea spongeAlong these same lines, there is an amusing story that has circulat ed in the legal community regarding the dangers of spell check. According to the story, an attorney inadvertently replaced the words sua sponte (a Latin phrase for on its motion) with the words sea sponge throughout his brief. This lead to some very embarrassing sentences, such as:An appropriate instruction limiting the judges criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction.It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense.As one would expect, the attorneys error, while certainly entertaining to the rest of us, drastically weakened his credibility in the eyes of the court and made him the butt of many of his colleagues jokes.Although spell checkers are fairly straight forward and user-friendly, they are only as good as the writers ability to use them. For example, most spell checkers include options to c ustomize the dictionary to include proper nouns and acronyms. Other features include setting the spell checker to auto correct which automatically corrects the spelling of frequently misspelled words. These features can all improve the tools effectiveness.The limitations of grammar checkersUnfortunately, grammar checkers are similarly limited. They are, in fact, more limited than spell checkers. The limitations have nothing to do with technology or software, but rather are caused by the nature of grammar itself.For example, a traditional grammar checker will detect no problems with the following passage.Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. ... McDonalds and Coca Cola are good brand. ... Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft.This is truly frightening considering that each of the sentences in the passage contains numerous grammatical errors!Also, consider the f ollowing sentence:Thinking it was open, the door was really closed.Grammar check will alert the writer that the main clause may contain a verb in the passive voice. But there is no passive voice here, just a thinking door.Grammar check also frequently flags perfectly good grammar as bad. Type the following sentence into a document:How was your sons wedding?When you run grammar check, was your sons is flagged as incorrect and the phrase your son wass is suggested. In this case, your grammar check has turned a perfectly fine sentence into a garbled mess! Therefore, it is wise to think about the change suggested, rather than simply accept it as correct.Great grammar resourcesLooking up the correct spelling of a word is as easy as using an online dictionary; looking up proper grammar, however, can be more difficult. Most of us do not remember the finer points of grammar that we learned in the sixth grade, such as gerunds and dangling modifiers. Therefore, it is helpful to have a referen ce book on grammar handy. Strunk and Whites The Elements of Style is the classic book on the subject, but professional writers are also fond of Working with Words and When Words Collide.The bottom line is that technology, while useful and time saving, is still not advanced enough to substitute for old-fashioned human proofreading. Therefore, writers should always allow ample time for proofreading and learn tools to improve their proofreading skills. One of the best ideas I have learned is to make a list of spelling and grammar errors that you make frequently so that you can proofread every document with special attention to these problem areas. Remember, you need to pick up where your spell checker and grammar checker leave off!

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Disabled People and the Rights to Social Citizenship Essay

Disabled People and the Rights to Social Citizenship - Essay Example The British government has proffered different definitions of a citizen as components of the various solutions proposed in respect of the extant social, economic and political problems and these solutions have affected the rights of individuals (Young, 1985). The Conservative government under John Major introduced a Citizen's Charter in order to subject public services to market forces. Accordingly, citizens obtained the right to choose. This development in conjunction with privatization was considered to be the panacea for the ills of the inefficient public services. Citizenship can be perceived either by the individualist approach in which the nature of citizenship is determined by individual choice or the structuralist approach in which the determining factors are social and economic in nature. Further, "Choice based theories are exemplified in their purest form by economics. In this world, individuals seek to maximize their utility by obtaining the highest return at the minimum cost from any course of action which they undertake" (Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley, 2004, pp 138-139). Consequently, "Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. [and who] are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed" (Marshall, 1950, p. 28). These rights are of three kinds civil, political or social. The Civil rights are, "liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice" (Marshall, 1950, p. 10). Political rights comprise of "the right to participate in the exercise of political power" and social rights are "the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society" (Marshall, 1950, p. 11). The absence of the disabled person's perspective in discussions involving citizenship is ubiquitous (Meekosha and Dowse, 1997, pp. 49-72). To achieve equality, disabled citizens need to possess freewill and involvement. Societal impediments rather than the disabling impairment, play havoc with the disabled person's endeavour to be full and equal citizen. Hence, civil society has been defined as "an arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values" (Centre for Civil Society, 2004). In order to provide disabled persons with equal access a modicum of restriction has to be enjoined on the freedom of the non-disabled people. The enactment of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) on the 8th of November 1995 was the culmination of a protracted battle to enforce the rights of the disabled. This enactment led to several measures being adopted in order to prevent discrimination against disabled people and to grant them additional rights Vis - a - Vis employment, purchase and lease of real estate and access to goods, facilities and services. The DDA has empowered

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Youth Work in Schools Research Methodology Essay

Youth Work in Schools Research Methodology - Essay Example al, 2008, 63). Much more specifically, however, the authors attempt to better understand how and to what degree youth work can affect learning outcomes of margenalized and disengaged students, including the so-called â€Å"quietly disengaged† that may not frequently the central topic of educational research (Morgan et. al, 2008, 2), because of the lack of their obvious need when compared to other similarly marginalized students. In particular, this work attempts to dissect many of the ‘soft’ educational outcomes that may be improved or affected by youth work, such as â€Å"raising self-esteem, increasing young people’s confidence, building relationships, challenging values and beliefs etc† (Morgan et. al, 2008, 46). These outcomes, though obviously incredibly important for the healthy development of young people in any educational environment, can be a difficult target to track or put political will into because of the lack of measureable objectives. This research attempts to uncover the degree to which youth work can be effective in achieving these soft outcomes, while simultaneously understanding how youth work, an informal educational tool, can be integrated into the formal educational environment of schools. ... Furthermore, qualitative analysis gives the researchers the ability to use the findings of educational professionals in their own words, which obviously helps generate increased validity and a more thorough understanding of the subtleties and complexities involved in the research (Cohen, et. al., 2000, 31). The researchers used a soft form of coding, whereby they would group similar types of responses together and attempt to give their reader a good idea of majority or frequently cited opinions, often to be immediately followed by a few specifics either paraphrased or given in full quotation. When describing the first question of interviews, for instance, the researchers said that â€Å"while the youth workers launched into a straightforward response by outlining their work the schools perceived ‘informal’ education in quite a different light while those from Youthreach understood it in the context of a programme that was, in the first instance, divorced from schoolâ₠¬  – giving a characterization of frequent responses, followed by analysis, and finally specific examples which are not quoted here (Morgan et. al., 2008, 70). Obviously one significant issue with this type of qualitative analysis is that it grants the researcher incredible amounts of leeway in characterizing results, and deciding where to put emphasis: this can be either beneficial, focusing on small ideas of great importance, or detrimental, such as possibly ignoring or under-representing important trends or frequent responses. This research piece used a wide variety of different qualitative research methods: â€Å"In-depth interviews with key informants from youth work, schools and Youthreach; A worksheet/questionnaire for young people with experience of informal practices in formal settings; Focus

Sunday, November 17, 2019

The Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato Essay Example for Free

The Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato Essay Plato believed in an ‘ideal state,’ the Republic, which is ruled and sustained by an ‘ideal’ group of people whose main objective should be to seek their highest good for the benefit of both the state and the society. â€Å"Only those who know what the good is are fit to rule†(Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995).   To know what is good, one has to â€Å"undergo long and rigorous intellectual training that will yield this knowledge† (p. 1541). Plato believed that the function of education is to help people embody their true nature of good because they will become the fuel that will keep the Republic running. Here, higher education is meant to pave the way for the development of the individual because it is crucial to the Republic’s existence. The failure of an individual to reach his highest good, albeit in theory of a secondary importance, would be the failure of the state as a whole.   In Plato’s view, it is the development of the individual, supported by education, which serves as the groundwork of the Republic and ensures that the latter does not collapse.   One can say that it is truly education which holds the state’s future in its hands. The true purpose of Higher Education is best depicted in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The Allegory of the Cave represents the different levels of knowledge that man must go through in order to achieve enlightenment.   Men were depicted as cave-dwellers in the depths of nothingness where there is a total absence of knowledge. â€Å"Most mankind dwell in the darkness of the cave. It is the function of education to lead men out of the cave into the world of the shadow† (Tulio, 2005).   Those who are able to escape the confinements of the cave would able Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato to acquire the knowledge that will lead to their evolution and form the ruling elite who will sustain the Republic. According to Kemerling (n.d.): â€Å"The highest goal in all of education, Plato believed, is knowledge of the Good; that is, not merely an awareness of particular benefits and pleasures, but acquaintance with the Form itself. Just as the sun provides illumination by means of which we are able to perceive everything in the visual world, he argued, so the Form of the Good provides the ultimate standard by means of which we can apprehend the reality of everything that has value† (Kemerling, n.d). Plato believed that education is a right given to a few. He saw society as a conglomeration of individuals organized into different classes â€Å"according to the value of their role in providing some component part of the common good† (Kemerling, n.d.). In this set-up, it is the person’s social class which determines whether he should be educated or not. Plato thought that the philosopher-class should have the right to receive education because â€Å"it is the philosopher above all others who excels at investigating serious questions about human life and at judging what is true and best† (n.d.). Dillon (2004 as cited in Plato’s Republic) also added:   Ã¢â‚¬Å"†¦those fit for a guardians education must by nature be philosophic, spirited, swift, and strong.† The guardians must be lovers of learning like noble puppies who determine what is familiar and foreign by knowledge and ignorance† (Dillon, 2004). The problem with this kind of set-up is that only a few are permitted to improve themselves while the rest of the world is forced to fulfill the roles that society has imposed upon them. Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato Kemerling (n.d.) explained the importance of the future role of philosophers: â€Å"Thus, despite prevalent public skepticism about philosophers, it is to them that an ideal society must turn for the wisdom to conduct its affairs properly. But philosophers are made, not born. So we need to examine the program of education by means of which Plato supposed that the future philosopher-kings can acquire the knowledge necessary for their function as decision-makers for the society as a whole† (Kemerling, n.d.) Plato viewed the development of the individual as serving an autocratic social usefulness as far as education is concerned (although most believe that Plato advocated democratic principles in his theory of education). Education for the popular mass was never Plato’s ideology. He advocated educational reforms intended only for the philosopher and the warrior class. â€Å"Plato believed that the interests of the state are best preserved if children are raised and educated by the society as a whole, rather than by their biological parents† (Kemerling, n.d). The true essence of self-actualization, therefore, was just a privilege given to this ruling class because of their access to education.   It did not have any self-serving interests even if self-development was an initial pre-requisite for the success Plato’s ideal state. Education is solely for the purpose of the good of the Republic. Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) stated:   Ã¢â‚¬Å"They will govern with a view to maximizing the happiness of the state as a whole, but Plato thinks that the way to achieve this is to impose a strict censorship to prevent wrong ideas being expressed, to ensure that each person sticks to his Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato own allotted job, so that he does not meddle with affairs that are not his concern, and so on. Plato was firmly against democracy, and seems to have seen no connection between happiness and individual liberty† (Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995). But as much as education serves a state function, it cannot completely detach itself from its secondary aims of self-development. According to Scolnicov (n.d) in his paper Plato on Education as the Development of Reason, â€Å"the ultimate educational objective, then, is to bring about a revolution in the educands perception of the role of reason† (Scolnicov, n.d).   He continued, â€Å"Platos theory of education aims at specifying the conditions of the growth of the socratic man, whose soul is free from contradictions and whose excellence is justified knowledge† (n.d). For Plato, man’s rationality can be shaped through an educational curriculum that teaches these specific subjects: music, story-telling and gymnastics. Musical education should be started in childhood because it is an age where children are still ‘pliable.’ There should be censorship in the telling of tales because children still do not possess the quality to discern what is good and bad.   It is Plato’s view that children have no moral nature when they are born, but education will instill in them virtues of courage, moderation and justice that will help them seek the nature of good. â€Å"Through the telling of carefully crafted tales, mothers and nurses will shape their childrens souls (Dillon, 2004 as cited in Plato’s Republic). Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato The narrative style of tales is the second part of the ‘philosophical education.’   Imitation or Mimetic poetry is only acceptable if the individual will imitate virtues that were taught to them in childhood. Crafting of tales are important â€Å"because they are the most effective method of educating guardian’ souls† (Dillon, 2004). Here, one can see that rationality does not only pertain to reason (of the mind) but also of the soul. Gymnastic education, on the other hand, affirms the symbiotic relationship between the mind, the body and the soul: all the components that lead to the total development of the individual. For Plato, â€Å"that a good soul produces a good body, and that a healthy intellect ensures a healthy body† (Dillon, 2004 as cited in Plato’s Republic). One component missing will ultimately result in the demise of the other. Dillon   (2004) stated: â€Å"Although music is the most important component in the guardians education, equilibrium between music and gymnastics is important for the production of moral guardians. Because a solely gymnastic education causes savagery and a purely musical education causes softness, the two must be balanced† (Dillon, 2004). The educational requirements of learning music, story-telling and gymnastics would determine who will ultimately become the guardians of society. Those who are able to possess the nature of good throughout the educational process will win over those who â€Å"will rebel against the city’s ideology† (Dillon, 2004). Meaning, Purpose and Function of Higher Education for Plato References Cornford, F. (translator) (1945). The Republic of Plato. London: Oxford University Press. Dillon, A. (2004). Education in Plato’s Republic. Retrieved December 25, 2007 from http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/dillon/education_plato_republic.html Honderich, T (ed.) (1995). Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  University Press. Kemerling, G. (n.d.). Plato: Education and the Value of Justice: Plato Life and Works. Retrieved December, 25, 2007 from http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2h.htm. Tulio, D. (2005). Historical, Philosophical, Legal and Technological Foundations of Education II. Manila: National Bookstore Publication. Scolnicov, S. (n.d.). Plato on Education as the Development of Reason. Retrieved December 25, 2007 from http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciScol.htm

Friday, November 15, 2019

My Personal Philosophy of Education Essay -- Philosophy of Teaching St

Philosophy of Education Relating my reasons for becoming a teacher was not a very difficult task for me; to accomplish this task I simply needed to reflect upon and describe some of my own personal experiences. I relied basically upon my memories and thoughts about my own educational experiences. However, describing my philosophy of education was much more difficult task for me to accomplish. First of all, before I could properly describe my philosophy, I realized I needed a working definition of the concept of philosophy. My search for this working definition of the term philosophy led to further research which provided further insight into viewpoints of various well-known philosophers; some of whom we discussed in class. Therefore, the purpose of my research became twofold, the first purpose was to obtain a working definition of the concept of philosophy. The second purpose was to become more familiar with some of the ideas of a few well known philosophers which would help me compare my own lines of thinking with some of their viewpoints and help me conceptualize my own philosophy of teaching. As I stated before, my reasons for becoming a teacher were easy to identify and describe. First of all, I have always very much enjoyed being around children of all ages and view teaching as the profession that will allow me to do something I truly enjoy. Secondly, I also strongly feel that in order to successfully teach in any discipline, one must be interested in, and be proficient in, the content of the discipline. Therefore, I chose the field of physical education primarily because of my lifelong interest in physical activities of all kinds and also because of my personal successes in the sport o... ...h development of strategies that will allow students to overcome their weaknesses to the fullest extent they can be. I feel that development of their strengths and strategies for overcoming their weaknesses will allow my students to develop self-knowledge and confidence in their own abilities, which in turn, will encourage them to make good choices throughout their lives. I will strive to practice this above stated philosophy throughout my teaching career, and create risk reduced environments and also assignments such as this one. This assignment encouraged me to think deeper and connect with the thoughts of others and I always found that assignments that encourage deeper thought help me to develop further self-knowledge. Finally, I will always emphasize the importance of education and encourage its pursuit as a valuable lifelong mission for all.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Operations Management Essay

Introduction A conventional â€Å"bricks and mortar† grocery does not have an online presence, only a physical one. It is built on a face-to-face customer service, and usually always has a building for their operations. A â€Å"brick and mortar† grocery has advantages and disadvantages compared to an online operation, like Theorganicgrocer.com. First of all, their major disadvantage is the overhead. The cost of property, insurance, taxes and staff is much higher for a â€Å"brick and mortar† operation than an online operation. The biggest advantage for a â€Å"brick and mortar† operation is customer security. To a customer, if a company has physical presence, it is seen as more reliable as the company is far less likely to fold overnight and disappear. Online operations on the other hand seem to have maximum exposure and increased profits. Most people however, seem to be under the impression that running an online operation will be an easy task but it can be somewhat challenging. Online operations require less investment and more decision making. Decisions are practically the biggest investments made in the online world. Decisions on what the website should look like, how the products are going to be listed, in which way should the products be marketed would have to be made. Theorganicgrocer.com is based on market research and they focus on dependability, reliability, timeliness, quality, and price. They offer delivery, organic produce and customer specified date and time of delivery. Apart from that, they make sure that their website is constantly updated to reflect the current price. They believe that the key to their success is the simplicity of use of their website. Question 1 What are the comparative operational differences of a conventional â€Å"bricks and mortar† grocery to an online operation? What are the comparative value chains for each system? Comparative Operations| Bricks and Mortar Operation| Online Operation| Display | Customers are able to physically touch and handle items that they are interested in buying.| Customers can only see pictures, graphics and texts that describe the product that they are interested in buying.| Expense| Usually require a bigger budget to lease space, rent property and to pay for other location expenses. | Smaller budget as they do not have to worry about building leases or property expense.| Location| Has a physical business location which limits the amount of customer traffic and foot traffic from shoppers, especially if they are not in a bigger city or metro area| They are not limited to one location and have no geographical boundaries.They can service local, national, and international customers.| Communication| There is face to face interaction with customers. | It is hard to communicate with customers through an online store.Online retailers may have a hard time getting information acr oss to the customer and must be sure to answer all possible questions by the customers through text and graphics on the site so there is no confusion during the purchase. | Technology | Uses the same technology that has been around for years and rarely changes.| Technology is constantly changing and there is a need to keep up and adjust accordingly. | Inventory| Has a large amount of Inventory on hand. Re-orders before the inventory runs out and there is a shortage of stock.| Has a lesser amount of Inventory on hand.Only re-orders when customers request for it.| Work Hours| Have traditional or at least set hours. This helps local customers know when the business is open.| Has varying or non-traditional hours. This is helpful when dealing with an international customer as it accommodates with their time zone. | Reliability| There is a sense of trust and reliability that comes with having your own brick and mortar store.Customers still feel safer buying from a store.| Customers do not feel safe as there are shady websites everywhere.| In a â€Å"brick and mortar† operation, there are primary activities and support activities Primary activities are directly concerned with the creation or delivery of a product or service and can be grouped into five main areas: inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and service. Each of these primary activities is linked to support activities, which help to improve their effectiveness or efficiency. There are four main areas of support activities: procurement, technology development (including R&D), human resource management, and infrastructure (systems for planning, finance, quality, information management etc.). The chain consists of a series of activities that create and build value. They conclude in the total value delivered by an organisation. The ‘margin’ depicted in the diagram is the same as added value which expresses the way a business differentiates itself through configuration of its value chain. The drivers for product differentiation and value creation are policy choices (what activities to perform and how), linkages (within the value chain or with suppliers and channels), timing (of activities), location, sharing of activities amongst business units’ learning, integration, scale and institutional factors. Eg: – Inbound Logistics (receiving and storing materials for distribution for production) Registration * Provide information Eg.: -Categories Product -Build Database -Paypal Operations (transforms inputs into finished products) Eg.: Advertisement Value Chain Model of E-bay Sales and Marketing (promoting and selling the product) Outbound Logistics (entails storing and distributing finished products) Eg: -Removed Product Eg: -Before Sale Service Service (maintenance and repair of the firm’s goods and services) -Shipment -After Sale Service The ‘Virtual Value Chain’ However in an online operation, value chain goes through three phases. The first phase is Visibility, where businesses co-ordinate, measure and at times control business processes. The second phase is Mirroring Capability, where physical steps in the value chain are substituted with virtual ones to make a parallel value chain in the marketplace with methods that are better, faster, more flexible, and lower at cost. The third stage happens when companies use the flow of information in their virtual value chain to create new customer relationships by delivering value to customers in new ways. There are different approaches to changing the value chain and it is not necessarily shorter. This is called Intermediation. In some cases however, one or two links have been removed in the value chain. For example, a business that had previously sold to retailers via distributors might make a decision to sell direct automatically. This approach is called Disintermediation. In shortening the value chain, it reduces costs and there is a more responsive and efficient service. Online businesses also at times, introduce new steps to the value chain as new players find fresh ways to add value to the process. This is known as Reintermediation. Examples of online operations that take this approach are shopping portals and electronic insurance brokers. The creation of new intermediaries that could not have existed before the arrival of the online business and the Internet is called Cybermediation. Cybermediation comes in categories, including Searching, Price Discovery, Logistics, Settlement and Trust. Examples of online operations that use cybermediation are comparison-shopping sites such as Kelkoo and bank account aggregation services like Citibank. Theorganicgrocer.com bases their business on market research. The payments made by the customers are made online using a protected encrypted facility administered by a national bank. Apart from that, they have a vehicle route that makes sure that deliveries are maximized, and aggregated ordering of stock that only produces products that are ordered and purchased by customers. Theorganicgrocer.com also has a financial system which is a computer application that calculates all the generated profits and all its other needs. There is also another separate computer package that generates advertising material and mail-outs. Question 2 What are the key processes in the online operation? Providing Efficient Services Online operations basically simplifies life for those who do not enjoy shopping, those who are too stressed from work to shop in supermarkets and stores by combining technology with business strategy. Online businesses provide efficient service that eradicates most of the steps in traditional shopping. Online shoppers go on websites while being able to view pictures and descriptions of the product. Customers also have the option of selecting specific items by name, to work from established personal shopping profiles or lists, and to browse through electronic aisles. Apart from that, online operations make it easier for customers by accepting payment in more than one method such as, credit cards, bank debit cards, electronic funds transfers, personal cheques, and money orders. For example, eBay is a company operating on the Internet that allows for vendors of any kind to auction or sell merchandise of a variety of types. People and companies from across the world use eBay to sell items on the website. This allows people shopping for items to search through the various offerings, make bids, or opt to make direct purchases. It has become a great location for looking for hard to locate items, like collectibles. Many people also use the site to search for bargains on used items such as electronics, small household appliances and others. With the exception of a few illegal to sell things, at any given time eBay has a huge selection. Customers can shop by category and by specific item, or they can simply browse listings. Assembling Online Orders Apart from that, online operations will also assemble orders from online shoppers. There are mainly two common models for assembling the online orders, which are the warehouse and store model. A business usually uses a company-owned and operated central distribution warehouse to store, pick up and pack orders for delivery using the warehouse model. The warehouse model is popular among online operations as it reduces overhead costs, generates the lowest-fees possible to customers, and is very efficient. With the store model, orders are picked off the shelves of local retail stores or supermarkets. Grocery Gateway, an online grocery operation uses a direct-to-consumer online shopping model, which is the warehouse model as it uses a market centre to store, pick, and pack the ordered groceries for delivery. The model has a supply chain management system that lets groceries be delivered directly from Grocery Gateway’s market centre to consumers’ doors. The company’s Customer Fulfilment Centre that provides an extensive selection of food, grocery products, and household goods, which improves the company’s inventory and delivery management. The centre also helps manage the company’s growth by allowing more space capacity and helping to improve the company’s accuracies by using technologically advanced radio frequency picking tools, conveyors, and scanners to make sure the processing of orders is fast and accurate. Delivery Lastly, online operations offer delivery. Some online businesses have a delivery computer program that provides time management information and point-to-point directions throughout delivery. The program takes traffic conditions, rush-hour volume, road construction, and other uncertainties that can be predicted into account. Some companies require customers to be at home to wait for the delivery. Not many can be able to stay at home; therefore, other companies offer the option of unattended delivery.

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine

Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine and Telos of Cultural Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road maggie bortz So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. (McCarthy, 1999b, 143) It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all. (McCarthy 1999a, 284)Although many critics consider Cormac McCarthy to be the greatest living novelist in America, his dark, compelling vision did not reach a mass audience until the film adaptation of his novel No Country for Old Men (2005) was released in 2007. The film, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen (2007), won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A film adaptation of his latest novel, The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize, was released in la te 2009. McCarthy now has the public’s rapt attention. McCarthy’s visionary works can be read as dreams of our contemporary culture.Great works of art, like dreams, perform a compensatory function to the conscious attitudes of a society and may carry teleological implications. Jung viewed great art as an aperture to the collective unconscious, through which the role of the archetypes in shaping the psychological development of individuals and societies might be discerned (1930/1966, CW 15,  ¶Ã‚ ¶157, 161). McCarthy’s later novels, speaking in image and myth, the language of the unconscious, frame the collective psychic dissociation that prevents us, individually and collectively, from growing up.The final, transcendent image in No Country for Old Men, which appears in an old man’s dream, and the father-son imagery in The Road suggest that a reunion and recalibration of the inner Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 28–42, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047.  © 2011 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www. ucpressjournals. com/reprintinfo/asp.DOI: 10. 1525/jung. 2011. 5. 4. 28. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 29 father and son, representing a â€Å"union of sames† in the split masculine archetype, constitute the requisite path of healing and maturation. This imagery may prefigure the emergence of a new cultural myth. Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson identified specific thresholds of initiation or psychological rites of passage â€Å"which make possible the transition from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to early maturity, and from maturity to the experience of individuation† (2005, 11).Our culture, however, remains dominated by male adolescent energy, seemingly arrested in anachronistic identification with the uninitiated hero, still living out a negative mother complex: a myth of male regeneration through escalating violence inflicted on a feminine earth and on humanity. This entrenched cultural complex manifests in and is reinforced by social constructs of what it means to be male in modern America, including the myth of the self-made man and the ethic of individualism. This complex also bears â€Å"a revolutionary unattached shadow that would smash all fetters† (Hillman 2005, 56–57).To give a clinical example, some of my clients, on parole from the Oregon Youth Authority, are very likable boys for the most part who, at 14 or 15, have already spent a year behind bars in the state’s â€Å"baby† prison system. Their yearnings for identity are shaped by a culture of outer action devoid of inner meaning. The lack of connection to an inner life also appears in adult male populations in presenting symptoms like workaholism, anger issues, substance abuse, relationship problems, and sexual obsession. In older men, the dissociative phenomenon is related to the common tragedy of suicidal depression.Women, of course, are not immune to any of these things. It is axiomatic that masculine cultural dominants affect women’s lives and impact their relationships with men. On a deeper level, masculine psychological energy is present and problematic in the female psyche as well. Jung personified the unconscious masculine energy in a woman as an interior male image, the animus. â€Å"Her unconsciousness has, so to speak, a masculine imprint† (1951/1968, CW 9ii,  ¶29). James Hillman personified â€Å"the psychological foundation of the problem of history† in the archetypal magery of the senex (old man) and puer (young man) (2005, 35). Old men and young men are ubiquitous images in McCarthy’s work. No Country for Old Men and The Road appear to validate Hillman’s theory that a split in the masculine senex-puer archetype underlies the psychic malaise of our time and that work toward a â€Å"union of sames† must begin at the senex pole of that archetype. Although the reticent McCarthy seems to write from a Jungian-informed perspective, I was unable to discover any biographical data linking him to an interest in Jungian psychology.However, he frequently associates with physicists at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, a think tank located at the former site of the Manhattan Project, a collaboration McCarthy has tersely attributed to his enduring interest â€Å"in the way things work† (Voice of America 2008). C. G. Jung collaborated with Nobel 30 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and was struck by the cogent parallels between quantum physics and his psychological theory (Pauli and Jung 1992/2001).Beyond the shared observer effect and the subject-object bond , quantum physics and Jungian psychology both venture into depths where the distinctions between energy and matter collapse. Following the development of nuclear weapons, Jung and Pauli also shared a deep concern about the future: they feared that in the absence of a greater understanding of man’s potential for evil, humanity would â€Å"destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science† (1957/1970, CW 10,  ¶585). Although McCarthy’s canon garners critical acclaim, his work also provokes controversy.Yale literary critic Harold Bloom admits to a â€Å"fierce† passion for Blood Meridian (1985), which he considers a masterpiece of American literature. Bloom also confesses that he had a hard time finishing the book because he â€Å"flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays† (2009, 1). Literary critic Morris Philipson has written: â€Å"For culture, just as for therapy, symbols are not intuitions by themselves; th ey are only brute facts that must be interpreted† (1992, 226–227). There are brute facts aplenty inMcCarthy’s canon: scalping, massacres, executions, necrophilia, cannibalism, every imaginable kind of human evil, but his artistic vision reflects the ultimate mystery of the unconscious and does not lend itself to facile reduction. Symbolic images, whether interpreted or not, affect us. They represent living psychological dynamics that we experience as feelings, emotions, ideas, and impulses toward action. McCarthy’s earlier work is often celebrated for its lyrical style and long, commafree sentences.Critic Steven Frye wrote that, â€Å"for many of us that artistry, his mastery of beauty in language, is the only compensating factor for the bleak and uncompromising world he forces us to confront† (2005, 16). But in No Country for Old Men, the prose is clipped and minimalistic. The unconscious tends to turn up the music as required to equilibrate the co nscious attitude. Compensatory dreams may become repetitious or disturbing; symptoms may become more severe.Perhaps McCarthy’s style has changed because we have missed the subtler messages of the collective unconscious, and it is getting more obviously archetypal in its self-regulatory attempts. As if mirroring a quaternity, the pattern of psychic wholeness, No Country for Old Men contains four major characters. The landscape, as character, presents the energy of the dark, chthonic feminine. Llewelyn Moss, the hunter who becomes prey, embodies the immature masculine energy of the hero, a puer spirit contaminated by a negative mother complex. Anton Chigurh, the psychopathic killer, personifies evil in its human and god-like dimensions.The psychological protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, is a senex figure with positive and negative attributes who struggles against his own nature to assimilate his shadow and to individuate toward the mature masculine. Each represents an autonomou s complex at work inside the collective psyche. Complexes are split-off parts of the personality or culture that â€Å" behave like independent Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 31 beings† ( Jung 1937/1969, CW 8,  ¶253). The ultimate meaning of the quaternity in this cultural dream remains ambiguous. Jung thought that the automatic eneration of quaternary images, â€Å"whether consciously or in dreams and fantasies, can indicate the ego’s capacity to assimilate unconscious material. But they may also be essentially apotropaic, an attempt by the psyche to prevent itself from disintegrating† (Sharp 1991, 111). Both possibilities, further evolution and collective psychosis, must be entertained in reading the work. The interpretation of a dream often begins with a careful consideration of the setting. No Country for Old Men unfolds in 1980 in the wild, scrubby borderlands of South Texas and Mexico.The landscape is a raw, barren land of spr awling desert plain, lava scree, red dirt, and creosote, sparsely inhabited by Mojave rattlesnakes, scorpions, and birds of prey. The image of the border itself suggests an unstable and volatile place between two worlds where the usual rules do not apply, a sort of psychological no-man’s-land where consciousness and unconscious meet. Borders are the domain of the archetypal Trickster, who incites psychic change through creative and destructive interventions that disturb the established psychological order.The archetypal feminine is always a silent, powerful, brooding presence in McCarthy’s work. In his novels, anima or soul is sometimes represented by animals, feral creatures who need human protection, like the pregnant wolf that Billy finds trapped at the beginning of The Crossing (1999b). Sometimes, and usually briefly, followed by tragic consequences, the anima is projected onto young women in McCarthy’s novels. But the chthonic feminine, as landscape, is alw ays present in his novels, both as a primitive force of nature and as a deeply unconscious psychological dynamic in the characters’ psyches.Anima figures fare pretty poorly in McCarthy’s work. Billy must kill the beloved wolf in The Crossing to save her from a slow, agonizing death in a dog pit, where she has become the main act in a blood sport that entertains older men. In The Road, anima as landscape has been killed off entirely: the chthonic feminine is a fading memory, a charred and ruined relic. In No Country for Old Men, anima appears as landscape in foreboding form: High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons.The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. (McCarthy 2005, 45) The dark fem inine landscape in No Country for Old Men mirrors the alchemical process of calcinatio and its products: salt, a metaphor for bitterness or wisdom, and soot and ash, the residue of fire. â€Å"The calcinatio is performed on the primitive shadow side, which harbors hungry, instinctual desirousness and is contaminated with the unconscious.The fire for the process comes from the frustration of these instinctual desires† (Edinger 1994, 21–22). 32 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 The characters in No Country for Old Men are ambivalent about the landscape. Uncle Ellis tells the sheriff: This country was hard on people. But they never seem to hold it to account. In a way that seems peculiar. That they didnt . . . How come people dont feel like this country has got a lot to answer for? They dont. You can say that the country is just the country, it dont actively do nothing, but that dont mean much . . This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people lov e it. (McCarthy 2005, 271) On one hand, the landscape represents a terrible archetypal mother, the surrealistic backdrop of a burgeoning drug war, which is itself the continuation of many barbaric historical slaughters. In other respects, the characters identify positively with the landscape. She still nurtures according to her increasingly limited abilities. Moss can still find antelope in her deep interior space and a river saves him from certain death early in the book.All of the novel’s central male characters are veterans: they have gone to war and risked their lives to protect â€Å"the country. † The power of the landscape, however, is muted in No Country for Old Men as opposed to McCarthy’s earlier Western novels. Even the moon, the symbol of feminine consciousness, is disfigured. It is as though man’s relentless dominance, his continual conquests, savagery, and ever forward â€Å"progress† have effectively depotentiated the chthonic femini ne, and she has regressed more deeply into the unconscious.Behind the mask of our technological society lurks a negative mother complex, a dissociation from and opposition to the feminine principle. Complexes are not ours to eliminate. On the contrary, they commonly persist beyond the life of the individual and perpetuate themselves across generations. According to Jung, â€Å"A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full . . . If we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what . . . we have held at a distance† (1954/1968, CW 9i,  ¶184).Unconsciously living out this collective negative mother complex is a dangerous and precarious proposition: it means consuming the natural world and each other in the process. The second major character, Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Viet Nam veteran, is hunting antelope in the desert when he stumbles across the surreal, slaughterhouse scene of a failed drug deal. Moss finds a case o f money, a load of heroin, and one dying Hispanic man pleading for water. He takes the money, but his conscience nags him and he comes back to the scene that night with a jug of water for the dying man.His belated act of compassion commences the novel’s ostensible journey: Moss runs with the money, pursued by Anton Chigurh, a rival hoard of drug dealers, and Sheriff Bell. Classical Jungian theory links both the puer and the hero to the Great Mother: the puer via regressive attachment, the hero via opposition. James Hillman argued, however, that whereas the hero is always bound up in a battle with the mother, the puer spirit is defined in relationship to the father and is not heroic in the classical sense. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 33Puer consciousness is a masculine psychological energy representing, in alchemical terms, â€Å"a new spirit born of an old spirit† (2005, 117). Hillman contended that whereas the emergent masculine ego migh t pattern itself in association with either archetype, an alchemical â€Å"union of sames† in the puer-senex archetype represents the requisite path of individuation toward the mature masculine. Moss initially seems to reflect qualities of the archetypal puer-like opportunist. Like other mythological puer figures, such as Icarus or Bellerophon,1 he does not recognize his limitations and is more vulnerable than he realizes.During his first encounter with the drug dealers, Moss injures his feet by walking barefoot in the river gravel and then traversing the country in wet boots. A gunshot wound suffered during his first encounter with Chigurh further lames him for the abbreviated duration of his life. The classic puer injury to the foot suggests a fatal weakness where this immature consciousness meets the world. Once Moss takes the money, however, his thoughts, feelings, and behaviors clearly pattern boy or uninitiated hero psychological energy.His heroic quest is about cashâ⠂¬â€his spirit is literalized in currency. Moss is skillful with weapons, which are described in elaborate detail. Literary critic Jay Ellis astutely observed the technological fetishism with which McCarthy describes Moss’ preoccupation with weapons and tools: To pre-adolescent (and increasingly, adolescent and older) male readers still uncertain about their vulnerability and power in the world . . . the minutiae surrounding objects that afford their user power in the world become all-important . . .Anything that can be added on to an already desirable object that will afford greater lethality, great speed, greater vision, or more information, fills in for what young men fear they lack. (2009, 138) Ellis noted that these powerful weapons and tools ultimately do little for Moss: he misses his opening shot at an antelope and is ultimately gunned down by drug dealers at a cheap hotel. Sheriff Bell, in contrast, is dubious of sophisticated weaponry. â€Å"Tools that comes into our hands comes into theirs too . . . Some of the old time sheriffs wouldnt even carry a firearm† (McCarthy 2005, 62–63).Moss’ interactions with women betray an oblique hostility and adolescent insecurity. He uses sarcasm to dismiss and deflect his young wife. Moss mentions â€Å"mother† specifically twice in the book, both times in relation to death, and appears to dialogue with her elsewhere. Shortly before he is murdered, Moss picks up a teenage girl who is hitchhiking. The mother complex speaking through Moss tells the girl: â€Å"Most people’ll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They can’t wait to see him† (McCarthy 2005, 234).Moss’ unconsciousness of his own limitations, of any transpersonal ideals, and of the insurmountable evil he both confronts and secretly carries within him, costs him his own life; the collateral damage includes the deaths of his wife and the young hitchhiker. 34 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 At this point in the senescence of our culture, McCarthy seems to say, the hero is as good as dead. Although Moss’ heroic tale entices the reader into the novel, as critic Jay Ellis (2009) has noted, this part of the story collapses midway through with Moss’ death when Sheriff Bell’s process emerges to dominate.This apparent literary dismissal of the heroic neurosis may reflect its psychological status as a secondary pathology, as a symptom of failed initiation that masks a religious problem: the missing God â€Å"who offered a focus for spiritual things† (Hillman 2005, 121). The third major character, Anton Chigurh, psychopath and assassin, represents the most potent force in the collective psyche at this time. He is a complex, quasiarchetypal shadow figure, a paradoxical psychic presence who acts as the dynamist or catalyst in the larger psychological process of the novel.When the reader meets Chigurh, he is a prisoner i n a small, rural county jail. While the arresting deputy chats on the phone, Chigurh, in one fluid move, gets his manacled hands in front of his body and around the jailor’s neck. After the grisly murder, Chigurh nonchalantly uses the bathroom, binds his injured wrists with tape and paper towels, and sits at the desk â€Å"studying the dead man gaping up from the floor† (McCarthy 2005, 6). There is no emotion in the scene beyond the horror it evokes in the reader. The motif of the murdered jailor has appeared elsewhere in McCarthy’s work.Here, Chigurh represents an archetypal impulse or tendency that has been banished, repressed, â€Å"locked up,† but has now freed itself to act. Chigurh, unlike Moss, is not motivated by money. When he eventually recovers the satchel of stolen cash, he returns it. Killing people is Chigurh’s job. The world is his abattoir. He is the quintessential bounty hunter, a contemporary iteration of the scalp hunters in Bloo d Meridian. He prefers to dispatch his victims (and to open doors) with a cattlegun. Other people become objects or livestock to him, and in this way, he prefigures the cannibals in The Road.Anton Chigurh seems to embody shadow qualities properly belonging to the personal unconscious of the other characters, as though the archetypal split between the contaminated puer and ineffectual senex created a psychological void that he is obligated, through some inscrutable psychological rule, to fill. In some respects, he is like a photographic negative of Moss. He even mirrors Moss’ limp, sustaining a leg injury while inflicting one. When Chigurh is injured in a car crash late in the book, he buys a boy’s shirt to make a sling for his broken arm, mirroring Moss’ earlier purchase of a boy’s coat on the Mexican border.Chigurh certainly needs no help from anyone. Women who spend too much time around Chigurh, like those who become involved with Moss, wind up dead. An aura of the negative hero seems to radiate around him. At the same time, Chigurh seems to carry some qualities of the negative senex that seem related to Sheriff Bell. As a senex figure, Bell represents, among other things, Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 35 justice, law, and the process whereby these concepts are enforced in human affairs through the sometimes arbitrary power of an established order.Within an individual psyche, these ordering and moral functions are often associated with the senex archetype, and, inevitably, a murky shadow accompanies them. â€Å"A morality based on senexconsciousness will always be dubious. No matter what strict code of ethical purity it asserts, in the execution of its lofty principles there will be a balancing loathsome horror not far away† (Hillman 2005, 260). (The first line of the book suggests as much: â€Å"I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville† [McCarthy 2005, 3]. Like a dark reflection of the senex compulsion for law, order, and measurement, Chigurh is a man of exacting principles: â€Å"principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that† (153). As Moss’ wife begs for her life, Chigurh shakes his head. â€Å"You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live and it doesn’t allow for special cases† (259). Anton Chigurh serves as a vehicle of unconscious projection for the reader. His sadistic acts and complete emotional detachment inspire terror. This character, so indefinably foreign, o marginally human, does not seem like one of us, but he is an irrefutable psychological truth that belongs to our culture. He represents something we should know about ourselves that remains unconscious, like a not yet understood dream. While Chigurh’s vulnerability to physical injury suggests a human shadow figure, his disappearing acts, miraculous escapes, and his association with fat e lend him a supernatural aura that suggests the archetypal shadow. By the end of the novel, Bell comes to believe that Satan â€Å"explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation† (McCarthy 2005, 218).Chigurh himself confesses that he has found â€Å"it useful to model himself after God† (257). For our culture at this time, we might say Chigurh is God, the dark God grown more human, closer to consciousness. Chigurh resembles the God-image Jung discovered in the Book of Job. Jung found that Yahweh, egged on by Satan, possessed, in part, â€Å"an animal nature† (1952/1969, CW 11,  ¶600) and, in this way, was â€Å"less than human† ( ¶599). Like Yahweh, Chigurh is guilty of â€Å"murder, bodily injury with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial† ( ¶581).For Jung, Yahweh’s cruelty to Job is â€Å"further exacerbated by the fact that Yahweh displays no compunction, remorse, or compassion, but only ruthlessness and brut ality† ( ¶581); we find the same divine heartlessness, fed by the unconscious, in Chigurh. Chigurh shares another trait with Yahweh: â€Å"Nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself † ( ¶579). In Jung’s view, the Christ symbol represents only an intermediate stage in a process of divine development in which God effectively dissociated from his own dark side.Identification with the exclusively â€Å"good,† loving aspects of the divinity â€Å"is bound 36 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 to lead to a dangerous accumulation of evil† (1952/1969, CW 11,  ¶653). Anton Chigurh symbolizes that magnetic, irrational pull to incarnate God’s darkness, â€Å"the ultimate source of evil, its absolute home† (Stein 1995, 144). Chigurh slays the cultural hero and provokes Bell’s psychological development: he is the dynamic agent, the terrorist , and instigator of Bell’s emergent connection to the unconscious. The realization of the self as an autonomous psychic factor is often stimulated by the irruption of contents over which the ego has no control† (Sharp 1991, 120). The irruption of contents like this can destroy the ego. In his Trickster role, Chigurh is not unlike Satan in the Book of Job or the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Evil serves a psychological function. â€Å"The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light† ( Jung 1954/1968, CW 9i,  ¶179).The conscious attitude determines whether the conflict is ultimately illuminating or destructive: we either evolve from our mistakes or we unconsciously dig deeper into our accustomed defenses. Sheriff Bell, a country lawman approaching sixty, is the novel’s psyc hological protagonist. As a senex figure, Bell seems to represent, at least in part, the conservative function of the archetype, â€Å"the fastness of our habits† (Hillman 2005, 48), â€Å"the principle of long-lasting survival through order† (284). Psychological movement, once incited by Chigurh, depends entirely on Bell’s interior process.Paradoxically, the path of psychic evolution begins with the senex in a process of disintegration. The novel takes its title from the first line of W. B. Yeats’ most celebrated poem, â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium,† which contrasts the material world with the transcendent world of art from the viewpoint of an aged man. It urges a belated attention to one’s soul. To the extent that art is an aperture to the collective unconscious, the journey to Byzantium implies an intrapsychic movement from the ego toward the Self.Critic John Vanderheide has observed that the renunciation of the physical world expressed in à ¢â‚¬Å"Sailing to Byzantium† and No Country for Old Men is forced on the narrator by old age and approaching death, conditions he is powerless to change (2005). Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity (Yeats 1926/1952, 490, stanza III, ll. 21–24) This felt sense of mortality, hopelessness, and limitation is often the cue that ignites the process of individuation.The collective unconscious calls aged men; whether they will respond and how is another matter entirely, but this painful territory is no country for young men. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 37 As senex figure, Bell is the ostensible boundary keeper of the cultural psyche, but he is flooded with content that he cannot repress. Bafflement pervades his monologues. He longs for times past when the world made more sense to him, but Bell’s nostalgia is more than a regressive symptom, it implies â€Å"a separation of halves, a missing conjunction† (Hillman 2005, 182).Bell carries notable qualities of the positive senex. His most authentic self is related to others. He sees himself as a shepherd to the people assigned to his care. â€Å"I’ve thought about why it was that I wanted to be a lawman. There was always some part of me that wanted people to listen to what I had to say. But there was a part of me too that just wanted to pull everybody in the boat† (McCarthy 2005, 296). His psyche is anchored in an imago of the positive feminine in the form of his anima figure, his wife of thirtyone years, Loretta.The escalating violence, his inability to contain it, and the imperatives of his own interior process force Bell to examine the psychological orientation that has guided his life. Bell confronts his own provisional life, an adulthood founded on a lie. As a young soldier in France during World War II, he fought bravely, but in the face of overw helming odds and certain death, fled the battlefield and his dead companions. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service, an honor he tried to refuse. His election as county sheriff followed from this heroic misidentification.Bell confesses this history to his Uncle Ellis, an elderly lawman disabled in the line of duty, late in the book. â€Å"I didn’t know you could steal your own life,† he says (McCarthy 2005, 278). Bell concludes that his history resurfaces because â€Å"sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all† (282). Bell endures the part of the alchemical process associated with the death and decay of the old substance, the old way of being in the world. He experiences his growing edge of consciousness as a defeat.Bell makes a final break with the inauthentic hero and our culture’s idea of what it means to be a man: he quits in the middle of the hunt. His decision to retire reflects an understanding of his own limitations and is guided by a deeper psychic injunction. I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. . . . If you aint they’ll know it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think that a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would. (McCarthy 2005, 4)Bell begins to acquiesce to and participate in his interior process, going back through his memories, paying attention to his dreams, engaging in active imagination. He ponders the memory of an image he encountered on the battlefield in France, â€Å"a stone water trough† carved â€Å"to last ten thousand years† (307). A trough contains water, a symbol of the unconscious, perhaps the personal unconscious, but perhaps the collective one. The trough symbolizes a way of understanding content arising from the unconscious and resonates as a religious symbol. For Jung, 38 jung jou rnal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 an had the need for a felt connection to something larger than his ego deeply embedded into the fabric of his being, but man lost his sense of larger meaning and purpose somewhere amid the horrors and upheavals of the twentieth century. Jung believed that the modern collective failure to channel this instinct, to carve another indestructible stone trough, was both symptom and root cause of our collective dissociation. Bell rejects the notion of carving a trough himself; it must be a collective enterprise, and no new myth has yet emerged to replace the dying God-image of our culture.Bell’s only child, a daughter, died as an infant thirty years before the story begins. Childlessness is associated with the negative senex. â€Å"When the senex has lost its child . . . A dying complex infects all psychic life† (Hillman 2005, 263). Late in the book, Bell confides to the reader that for many years he has dialogued with this dead infant d aughter (McCarthy 2005, 285). In Jungian theory, that imaginary child would be considered a psychic reality. The novel’s ultimate meaning resides in two dreams about his dead father.In the first dream, â€Å"he give me some money and I think I lost it† (McCarthy 2005, 309). His father imparted something of great value to him for safekeeping, but he misplaced it, perhaps irretrievably. The second dream is a powerful reiteration of the first and evokes Jung’s famous dream of carrying a small light in the fog (Jung 1961/1965, 88). The setting is a cold, snowy night in a remote mountain pass. Bell and his father ride horseback. It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through this pass in the mountains.It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. (McCarthy 2005, 309)Although the dream can be viewed as regressive, in that it invokes Bell’s childhood relationship and a longing to live out an old, honorable myth that has become irrelevant in the modern world, it clearly carries teleological implications. Bell goes forward into the dark night, into the unknown, toward death. He and his father ride horses, numinous animals in McCarthy’s work that suggest connection to anima or soul. Horses also represent an older and an arguably more connected way of moving through the world. Bell’s father carries fire, a symbol for the light of consciousness or spirit, in a horn, a Gnostic symbol of maturity. The hor n is a dual symbol: from one point of view it is penetrating in shape and therefore active and masculine in significance; and from the other it is shaped like a receptacle, which is feminine in meaning† (Cirlot 1962/1971, 151). While the image of the horn may suggest a new hieros gamos, a union of masculine and feminine energy, the dead father carries it, not the dream ego Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 39 itself. Bell’s passivity in the dream seems problematic. On the other hand, it is conceivable that Bell’s lack of agency is an auspicious sign. In the absence of ego and into its emptiness an imaginal stream can flow, providing mythical solutions between the senexpuer contradictions† (Hillman 2005, 66). Bell’s own father aspects are deeply unconscious: he has no living children and, in this respect, has lost his father’s â€Å"inheritance,† a future presence in the chain of life. Paradoxically, behind Bellà ¢â‚¬â„¢s senex mask we find a son looking for the father within. As in most of McCarthy’s books, the missing psychic presence is the father: there is never a shortage of symbolically fatherless boys in his work.However, in this novel, the puer appears in the form of Bell as an old man. Bell’s unconscious frames its message in terms of a reunion and recalibration of the father and the son, as though directly addressing the split masculine archetype that appears to block the evolution of our culture. â€Å"This split gives us . . . the search of the son for his father and the longing of the father for his son, which is the search and longing for one’s own meaning† (Hillman 2005, 61). The dream image suggests a path of potential healing, a â€Å"union of sames† in this split archetype, and might represent the nascent emergence of a new myth.In the end, the dream’s telos remains hauntingly ambiguous. We are only at the beginning of a process. In the face of such pervasive and unbridled evil and unconsciousness, one man’s individuation seems like a very small thing, a very small thing that requires much effort, attention, devotion, and suffering. The last line of the book immediately follows the second dream: â€Å"Then I woke up† (McCarthy 2005, 309). â€Å"Waking up,† increasing consciousness, is the entire point. And thus the novel ends on a slender strand of hope.We must dream this dream on, in the Jungian tradition, and look toward the next dream for further clarification. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is properly understood as a psychological progression of No Country for Old Men. In The Road, McCarthy resolves the ambiguity of the quaternity image presented in No Country for Old Men. It becomes clear that the imagery portends a collective psychosis and, at the same time, the possibility that some individuals may be ready to assimilate unconscious content. In The Road, the ch thonic feminine as landscape has een killed off entirely in an unnamed catastrophe marked only by â€Å"a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions† (McCarthy 2006, 45). Given McCarthy’s long preoccupation with man’s proclivity toward evil, the apocalypse was likely manmade: perhaps an all-out nuclear war. There are few survivors. Civilization itself is a fading memory. A nameless father and son wander the scorched landscape, â€Å"the cauterized terrain,† hoping to scavenge enough canned food to survive while evading roving bands of cannibals (12). The boy’s mother has committed suicide in despair. 40 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011McCarthy seems to suggest that the feminine will be eradicated from the picture entirely, the negative mother complex played out to its inevitable conclusion in man’s escalating shadow enactments before work on the fundamental problem can begin in what is left of humanity. As Anton C higurh says, â€Å"one’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly† (McCarthy 2005, 259). Despite the horrors, a new symbol, the image of a divine child, an elaboration of the dream imagery of No Country for Old Men, does emerge out of the ruin and ashes of The Road.This symbol arises from the ground of catastrophic loss. The end of the via longissima is the child. But the child begins in the realm of Saturn, in lead or rock, ashes or blackness, and it is there the child is realized. It is warmed to life in a bath of cinders, for only when a problem is finally worn to nothing, wasted and dry can it reveal a wholly unexpected essence. Out of the darkest, coldest, most remote burnt out state of the complex the phoenix rises. Petra genetrix: out of the stone a child is born. (Hillman 2005, 64)In The Road, the father and son are â€Å"each other’s world entire† (McCarthy 2006, 5), representing a â€Å"union of samesâ €  in the masculine archetype and, possibly, the beginning of a new cultural myth. The nameless father in The Road struggles to â€Å"evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them† (63). He views his son as a sacred being. As he is dying, the father sees his son â€Å"standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle† (230). Unlike Jesus, this son is not sacrificed back to the father. In the puer is a father drive—not to find him, reconcile with him, be loved and receive a blessing, but rather to transcend the father which act redeems the father’s limitations† (Hillman 2005, 161). The father’s job is to initiate the son before he dies: to provide a sense of meaning that makes existence tolerable. In The Road, individual meaning is symbolized in the son’s sacred responsibility to carry the light of conscio usness, the only thing of value in a post-apocalyptic world, into the overwhelming darkness that confronts him. This fragile possibility, however, resides in the individual, not within a culture or group.Critic Kenneth Lincoln saw McCarthy’s novels as â€Å"lamentational canticles of warning, not directives† (2009, 2). Part of Bell’s function is prophetic: he hints at â€Å"where we’re headed† (McCarthy 2005, 303). â€Å"I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train† (159). McCarthy is first and foremost a storyteller. He is not an activist and does not make prescriptive statements, and it is a mistake to read him that way. The blind man in The Crossing explains the function of storytellers. â€Å"He said that they had no desire to entertain him nor yet even to instruct him.He said that it was their whole bent only to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose a t all† (McCarthy 1999b, 284). I imagine that McCarthy shares the blind man’s views and also those of Jung, who in writing about art Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 41 underscored the fundamental depth psychological tenet that â€Å"a dream never says ‘you ought’ or ‘this is the truth. ’ It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions† (1930/1966, CW 15,  ¶161).Those of us who are conscious enough to draw conclusions from this work must do so now and prepare ourselves as best we can for the dark new world to come. endnote 1. Bellerophon, son of the King of Corinth, was the hero of Greek mythology who killed the Chimera. Bellerophon, inflated by his triumph, felt entitled to join the gods on Mount Olympus and attempted to fly there on the winged horse, Pegasus. His presumption offended Zeus, who orchestrated the hero’s dismount. Belleroph on plummeted to earth, crippled in the fall. note References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number.The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA). bibliography Bloom, Harold. 2009. Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy. New York: Infobase Publishing. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 1962/1971. A dictionary of symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. New York: Philosophical Library. Edinger, Edward F. 1994. Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Chicago: Open Court. Ellis, Jay. 2009. Fetish and collapse in No country for old men. In Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy, ed. Harold Bloom, 133–170. New York: Infobase Publishing. Frye, Steven. 2005.Yeats’ â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium† and McCarthy’s No country for old men: Art and artifice in the new novel. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1: 14–20. Henderson, Joseph. 2005. Thresholds of initiation. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications. Hillman, James. 2005. Senex and puer. Putnam, CT: Spring. Jung, C. G. 1930/1966. Psychology and literature. The spirit in man, art, and literature. CW 15. ———. 1937/1969. Psychological factors determining human behavior. The structure and dynamics of the psyche. CW 8. ———. 1951/1968. The syzygy: Anima and animus. Aion. CW 9ii. ———. 1952/1969. Answer to Job. Psychology and religion: West and East.CW 11. ———. 1954/1968. Psychological aspects of the mother archetype. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. ———. 1957/1970. The undiscovered self (present and future). Civilization in transition. CW 10. ———. 1961/1965. Memories, dreams, reflections. Recorded and ed. by Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books. Lincoln, Kenneth. 2009. Cormac McCart hy: American canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood meridian: Or the evening redness in the west. New York: Random House. 42 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 McCarthy, Cormac. 1999a.All the pretty horses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1999b. The crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2005. No country for old men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2006. The road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. No country for old men. 2007. Screenplay by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No country for old men, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Pauli, Wolfgang, and C. G. Jung. 1992/2001. Atom and archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932– 1958. Eds. Carl Alfred Meier, Charles Paul Enz, and Markus Fierz. Trans. David Roscoe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Philipson, Morris. 1992. Outline of Jungian aesthetics. In Jungian literary criticism, ed. Richard Sugg, 214–227. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sharp, Daryl. 1991. C. G. Jung lexicon: A primer of terms and concepts. Toronto: Inner City Books. Stein, Murray. 1995. Jung on evil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vanderheide, John. 2005. Varieties of renunciation in the works of Cormac McCarthy. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1: 30–35. Voice of America. 2008. Cormac McCarthy and Thomas McGuane write stories set in the American west. Interviewed by B. Klein and S. Ember. Radio broadcast (February 11), voanews. om (accessed October 27, 2009). Yeats, William Butler. 1926/1952. Sailing to Byzantium. In Immortal poems of the English language, ed. Oscar Williams, 490. New York: Washington Square Press. maggie bortz earned an M. A. in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California, and an M. J. in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She is a Qualified Mental Health Professional (QMHP) working toward licensure as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) at the Center for Family Development in Eugene, Oregon.She plans to open a private counseling practice in Portland in 2012. Correspondence: 5873 SW Terwilliger Blvd. , Portland, OR 97239. abstract This alchemical hermeneutical study analyzes Cormac McCarthy’s novels No Country for Old Men and The Road as cultural dreams using Jungian and post-Jungian theory. McCarthy’s work elucidates the archetypal process of individuation toward the mature masculine in our time. Following McCarthy’s imagery and James Hillman’s work, I focus on the split in the senex-puer archetype that structures the masculine psyche as the ultimate psychological site of our cultural dissociation.I also examine the teleological implications in the novel regarding the evolution of the God-image, which reflects manâ€℠¢s understanding of the objective psyche, as well as the nature and psychological function of human evil. key words alchemy, archetypal psychology, chthonic feminine, Coen brothers, cultural psychology, dream interpretation, Jungian interpretation of literature, landscape, literature as cultural dreaming, masculine archetypes, Cormac McCarthy, mechanization, No Country for Old Men, puer, The Road, senex, symbol Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.