Misuse of Plastic Essay

Human being plays a key role in environment as he has a capable mind and will power to do everything by the skill and technology he has developed so far. But most of his activities done for his development and welfare have been causing seriously negative impacts on the virgin environment he has been blessed with. We can prepare a long list of human activities that have been disturbing, destabilising and degrading the natural environment. The explosion of human population has enhanced the negative impacts of human activities on environment. Man has adopted such a life style which has no room for conservation and preservation of environment as he has become just a consumer in the modern world. He has destroyed many terrestrial and aquatic habitats causing numerous species of plants and animals to go extinct. He has cleared forests and has killed numerous wild animals to disturb the balance of the nature. His activities leading to pollution have been causing a number of local and global environmental problems ranging from spread of epidemics, depletion of ozone layer, global warming and climate change. The fertile land degraded by human activities has been converted into vast desert and his activities of misuse and overuse of water and reclamation of water bodies has been leading to the crisis of water in many parts of the world. Most of the fossil fuels have so far been used up by him due to whom an energy crisis is overhead. Most of the human population of urban areas has been migrating towards cities leaving agriculture aside and this is causing urban congestion, encroachment to monuments and government land on one hand the a steep fall of agricultural production on the other. Lots of wastes created by humans have spoilt the landscape and urban areas are under immense stress due to over congestion. Civic bodies in urban areas are under hard pressure to manage civic amenities and improper management of civic facilities is sure to endanger the community life. The word civic relates to the life of city or town area and amenities are features of city or town area that make the place pleasant, comfortable and easy to live in. Thus,civic amenities are features of a city or town area that make the area pleasant, comfortable and easy to live for human beings.

Chattel Slavery Essay

Indentureship was supposed to differ from slavery, however, the servants were treated as harshly as the slaves Chattel- African slaves were treated as commodities System of slavery whereby an individual and their offspring are recognised by the law as being the property of another person for life. This system was established by Europeans and formed the basis of transatlantic slavery With due respect to the I’s good intentions, from all that I have read and studied it would be a mockery to compare Indian indentureship to African chattel slavery in the Caribbean. Firstly, Indians were allowed to retain: their family (Africans had theirs split up); their language (Africans had the use of theirs forbidden); their religion (Africans had theirs banned); their music (Africans had the drum – representing the voice of their gods – banned by laws, some of which remain on the statute book in Barbados to this day). This highlights the all-important difference between indentureship and slavery: The heart of slavery was not the horrible labour conditions. If that were so, slavery and indentureship might be comparable. The heart of slavery was the stealing of the African’s soul – his language (the eyes through which one sees the world), his gods, his family, his musical sounds. That is why some 169 years after Emancipation, many Africans in the Caribbean remain enslaved. Some say enslaved mentally (in distinction to physical slavery), but this is misleading. SLAVERY IS MENTAL. Captivity is physical. Why the Africans have taken longer to restore their race – as opposed to Indians, Jews and other ethnic groups that suffered at the hands of White Supremacy – is because no other people were ever subjected to what the Africans suffered. If you capture a people and reduce them to harsh, brutal conditions of exploitation, once they survive, when that is brought to an end the people will soon rehabilitate themselves. But when you take away a people’s tongue, their connection to the ancestors, their gods; when you smash their family life so that the male loses respect for the female and vice versa; when you teach them to hate their skin, their lips, their hair, so that they hate anyone that looks like them – then you will have destroyed the culture and soul of that people and recovery will be almost like a resurrection. That is why it has taken Rastafari, Vodun, Orisha and the other spiritual potencies to awaken and heal the descendants of the African slaves. Secondly, millions of Africans died on the dreadful crossing from Africa. How many Indians perished on their way here? The Trans-Atlantic trade in captive Africans and African chattel slavery lasted roughly from 1473 to the 1880s – some four centuries. Indian indentureship lasted from the 1840s until when – the end of the 19th century? Thirdly, the trade in African captives depleted the African homeland tremendously. Consequently, up to this day, in contrast to the huge populations of India and China, the African continent is badly underpopulated. In fact, it has been estimated that even if all the Black people returned tomorrow to Africa, it still would not be fully populated. Walter Rodney in   provides some Statistics to give an idea of the devastating effect that the trade in Africans had on Africa for four centuries. Whole towns and villages were wiped out. Ethnic groups disappeared. Others were driven to war on their neighbours or face the prospect of having their own group captured and shipped to the ‘New World’. The natural line and trajectory of material and spiritual development for millennia in Africa’s history up to the time of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in captive African was interrupted, disrupted and corrupted. While it is true that India suffered horribly as a result of the British penetration of India during the period of indentureship, history attests that neither the scale nor the time period of this penetration can match the reality of the impact of the Slave Trade and Slavery on Africans and their Motherland. But while the enslaved Africans – unlike the indentured Indians – had their ancestral cloak ripped from them, the White man could not take the living nucleus of their culture and its memory from them. So (as they say ‘whoever loses his life shall gain it’) they took this breath of their culture and created the living soul of Africa in the Caribbean – they recreated their musical forms, they reconceived their ancient gods through new prisms (likje Judedo-Christianity, for example in Haitian Vodun and Rastafari), they revived their sense of an organic connection to the earth, they rediscovered the taste of their traditional cuisine, and so on. And that is why we find that almost all that is distinctive about indigenous Caribbean culture owes its inspiration, its image and likeness, to Africa. It is also probably why there is no enduring large-scale mass Back to India or Back to China movements coming out of the Caribbean. In a sense, Mother India and Mother China were not taken away from their indentured children in the Caribbean since they continued to wear their traditional dress, listen to their traditional music, speak their traditional language and worship ther traditional gods. When the true history of the last 5 centuries of the recently past millennium is finally placed in proper perspective, the incomparable tragedy of the African people during the era of the slave trade and slavery will come fully to light. It is without precedent in human history. I close by suggesting that the Indian people – who are essentially of African origin as Rashidi has documented – have a secure place in Rastafari, and as the Mansinghs have shown in their research, they have made a valuable contribution to the development of the Rastafari way of life. Indentured servants were working â€Å"on contract† to repay a debt, usually for transportation to America. â€Å"Chattel† means personal property, so â€Å"chattel slaves† were legally considered property, the same as a mule or a goat. An indentured servant worked for his/her master without pay until the debt was paid off. Typically, for repayment of the cost of being taken from England to America, the time of service was seven years, although it ranged from four to ten. At the end of that time, the indentured servant was free to leave and find other, gainful employment. There were cases of abuse by masters in which additional time was added by charging the servant for things like rent, food, lost or broken tools or products, etc. , because indentured servants were usually not well-educated and could be taken advantage of. The only ways a chattel slave could be released from a lifetime of unpaid service were manumission (being legally given freedom by his/her owner) or purchase, either by himself/herself – rare, but possible – or by a third party, such as societies of abolitionists who purchased slaves’ freedom for them. The best-known of these groups bought land in west Africa and founded there the nation of Liberia, for the purpose of resettling freed American slaves. Interesting sidelight: the term â€Å"indentured† is related to words like â€Å"dentist† and â€Å"dental. † An indentured servant had a written contract with his master. At the time the contract was signed, it was torn in two. The master kept one half and the servant kept one half. To ensure that these halves were part of the original document, the tear-lines were deliberately made irregular and jagged so that no other piece of paper would match. The jagged tearing was â€Å"indented† – it looked like teeth

What Went Wrong for eastman Kodak Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

What Went Wrong for eastman Kodak - Essay Example Thirdly, Kodak was unable to make the new digital technology to fit coherently with its other capabilities as a core competency. In the subsequent paragraphs in this discussion, Kodak’s approach in these three strategies is compared with IBM’s in order to highlight the ultimate failure of the former and the success of the latter. Kodak rise to dominance in the imaging industry was characterised by it use of a razor-edged strategy. This strategy was implemented by selling cameras at a very low cost, and earning profits from the sale of expensive films. The high margins on film fuelled the company’s profitability and growth to the extent that the company became too dependent on its film business. The problem with this is that the company concentrated on acquiring core competencies on film technologies while it continued to pay less attention to equipment. In spite of pioneering in the field of digital cameras, the company discarded the idea of pursuing future compe titive advantages in that field because of the fear that this would cannibalise its film business (Nate, 2012). According to the resource-based view of strategy, firms that have superior systems and structures are profitable not because they engage in strategic investments that may deter entry and raise prices above long-run costs, but because they have markedly lower costs, or offer markedly higher quality or product performance. However, this strategy is often not enough to sustain significant competitive advantage for long. According to Teece, Pisano and Shuen (1997), winners in the global marketplace have been firms that can demonstrate timely responsiveness and rapid and flexible product innovation, coupled with the management capability to effectively coordinate and redeploy internal and external competences. Kodak’s failure arose from its management’s comfort with its present huge resources and core competencies which prevented them from developing dynamic c apabilities. In 2011 IBM marked its 100 year milestone. As two centenarians, it would be appropriate to compare IBM’s continued success against Kodak’s demise. IBM, like Kodak, has faced the full force of disruptive change on its core business as faster, cheaper and nimbler competitors rapidly ate away its market leadership. In the early 80s IBM introduced the IBM PC that created the first truly mass market for the personal computer (Koehn, 2011). However, within a decade IBM had fallen behind in this market that it had created so much that in the 1992 financial year the company recorded a US$8.10 billion loss (Denning, 2011). Knowing customers intimately In the early 90s when IBM was performing its worst the financial analysts believed the company’s best bet for survival was to break it up and sell it. However, the newly appointed CEO Lou Gerstner overcame that pressure and instead focused on interacting with customers and industry experts in order to under stand IBM’s value-proposition from the customer/market perspective. This exercise enabled the new CEO to identify IBM’s greatest strength to be its ability to provide customer with integrated solutions. As such the organization dropped the earlier desire to split the company. Splitting IBM would have destroyed its unique competitive advantage. Armed with this knowledge Lou Gestner changed IBM strategy to be an enterprise that could understand and provide its customers wide-ranging IT needs. Today, IBM’s Global Services provides the largest share of the company’s revenue (Koehn, 2011). On the other hand, Kodak acted as if it were not affected when Sony introduced the Mavica digital camera.

Occupy Wall Street Movement Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Occupy Wall Street Movement - Assignment Example As the discussion outlines  the main motto behind this movement was to invoke change in today’s crony capitalism by raising worldwide awareness and calling themselves as 99%. They claimed to use the tactics of Arab Spring that was to peacefully protest against the unjust. An admirer of the OWS released a video calling the youth to join the protest by gathering at lower Manhattan and occupying the Wall Street for some moths. From there other groups including the governing body, General Assembly of NYC also started joining the protest. The word of protest soon got out through the social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The movement soon started gaining momentum and pick up steam within a month.This paper discusses that  the protest that started on the Wall Street did not put forward any demand or grievances instead it brought some agendas to be viewed. The common agenda was the gap of 1% and 99% where 1% was considered to be the â€Å"wealthy traders and bankers at the top of the financial services sector† and the 99% was regarded to be everyone else leaving the 1% including the demonstrators or the protesters. The 1% was regarded to have a lump sum amount of money, power and wealth and was interested in conflicting with â€Å"the economic well-being of the rest of the country†.  The excessive compensation paid to the Wall Street traders aggravated income inequality and promoted excessive risk-taking. On the other hand this penalized the taxpayers whose money has gone into bailing out the failed banks.

Statistics 401 Mod 4 Case - Regression Analysis Coursework

Statistics 401 Mod 4 Case - Regression Analysis - Coursework Example In some cases, the scattered plotted points do form a pattern that resembles a straight line. These points all scatter around single straight line which is termed as the line of best fit. On drawing the line of best fit, it has a linear equation of the form y= mx + c. The equation can be used to predict the corresponding values of the X- variables or the Y- variable given the values of the Y- variables or the X- variables respectively. I inserted the data in the excel file in an effort to compute a scatter plot. By so doing, I made X to be the interest rate expressed as a decimal (e.g., 5% = 0.05). At the same time, I made Y to be the Housing Starts. This led to a scatter plot as shown in the graph below. It The regression equation that I computed as shown in the graph is:- y = 13357x – 12607 This is a linear equation or an equation of the straight line. The equation does indeed have the form Y = m*X + B, were Y is the number of starts, and B is the regression constant.  B i s the hypothetical value of Y when X = 0.   In accordance to the nature of this problem, It sure does make a practical sense. The equation is very useful in making predictions of the corresponding values of the variables given the other corresponding piece. ... The fact that the scatter plot so formed has a line of best fit with a linear equation confirms that indeed there is a relationship between the Housing stats and the interest rates. Given one of the values, the corresponding value can be easily predicted using the shared relationship. I Used the regression equation found above to calculate  what the approximate number of housing starts would be at the following interest rates: 8.5%, 4.5%, 3.7%, 2.3%. This is sown in the computations below.  I understood perfectly that I would not simply "guess" values, based on the historical data that was given.   That is clearly wrong. I also understood that I ought not have used linear interpolation between the historical data values;  that's also wrong. I saw to it that I rounded off estimates of starts to the nearest whole number.   This is because a house-building project either starts in a given month, or it doesn't.   Therefore, it makes no sense to talk about fractions of a start . X= 8.5 = 0.0885 y = 13357x - 12607 =(13357*8.85) – 12607 = 105602.45 = 105602 X= 4.5 = 0.045 y = 13357x – 12607 =(13357*4.5) – 12607 = 47499.5 = 47499 X= 3.7 = 0.037 y = 13357x - 12607 =(13357*3.7) – 12607 = 36813.9= 36813 X= 2.3 = 0.023 y = 13357x - 12607 =(13357*2.3) – 12607 = 18114.1 = 18114 If I were the owner of a business in the housing construction sector and I knew how interest rates were likely to change, I would use this information very effectively to make better decisions. The housing construction sector is a business venture where the risks involved are rather very huge. It involves the investment of a lot of money and this puts the investor in a lot of danger of losing a large sum of money all at once. This calls for a proper

Communication paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Communication paper - Essay Example In the conversation, the sender was my friend who sent a message to me by directly asking me my plans for the weekend. The question was clearly transmitted to me by my friend to which I responded positively. It was apparent that I am the receiver of the message and transmission was immediately achieved since I answered my friend with choices of places that we can visit. I also suggested some things that we can do like watch a movie or just play games in my room. In a way, there was noise between the message since I was excited by the fact that my friend is back so anything is possible. My friend’s message was clearly transmitted because that is also what I had in mind. Using the linear communication model, the conversation was successful because both parties were very optimistic and looked forward to the topic. If I were to analyze the conversation using simultaneous transactional model, it can be said that I was able to give a positive feedback, the message was decoded very well. I know that my friend has the best intention why he invited me so I relied on that belief. Even before my friend my called me up, I was already anticipating some invitation from this person. The conversation seemed very simple indeed but there lies many important lessons in communication. First of all, messages are can be easily decoded by the receiver when the person receiving the message feels positive about the sender. Since the message was transmitted by a close friend whom I trust, it was not hard to send a good feedback. Of course, this is not applicable in all times since noise can also be an obstacle in decoding the message. I could be experiencing some problems that my friend doesn’t know which can elicit a cold response. Probably, I could be feeling ill at that time and would not want to displeas e my friend so I just accepted the idea. No matter what the case maybe, there is another important lesson in communication

Movie review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Movie Review Example The video further explains that the three groups; the Jews, Muslims and the Christians revere Jerusalem as a very holy city and they seek to protect this land and in doing this, they are likely to be at loggerheads with each other. This explains the strife in the region as the Jews and the other groups tussle for a claim to the possession of the city of Jerusalem (Israelis and Palestinians). The video explains that Judaism is the religious culture of the Jews as they have been practicing this religion in the city of Jerusalem for several centuries now and their religious affiliation with the city could be explained by their sacred temple in Jerusalem and this makes the city highly significant to the Jews. The Jews claim that Jerusalem has always been the central city of Israel, hence they lay their claim to the ownership of the city as they believe that it is their sovereign city. The Christians on their own part claim that the city of Jerusalem is where the the Temple Mount (Hara mesh=Sharif) is a very important sanctuary to the religion of Islam as they believe that it was from a rock on the site of Temple Mount that Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven and this explains the reason the Muslims believe that Jerusalem is sacred to them as they go there year after year not only to honor the prophet, but also to pray to Allah (God) as they are of the opinion that their prayers would easily get to heaven from the spot the holy prophet ascended to heaven, as some Muslims claim that it is the gateway to heaven. (b) It would be really difficult to make a decision on whether Jerusalem should be divided between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians have a bulk of their population in the city of Jerusalem, while the Israelis equally have a large amount of their citizens in their city. The Israelis live in most parts of West Jerusalem, while the Palestinians live in most