Compare and Contrast “To Room Nineteen” and “Death by Landscape” Essay

In the short stories â€Å"To Room Nineteen† by Doris Lessing and â€Å"Death By Landscape† by Margaret Atwood, two women find themselves isolated from the world and the people around them. This paper will compare and contrast each story to show that although both female protagonists are isolated by their circumstances, their individual responses to their circumstances are very different. In â€Å"To Room Nineteen† Susan’s isolation is caused by a number of factors: society and the time she lives in, an unfaithful husband in a broken marriage, and her own inability to deal with her unhappy life. â€Å"†¦She knew he had been unfaithful because of his sullen air, and his glances at her, similar to hers at him: What is that I share with this person that shields all delight from me?† (p. 871) Susan feels trapped by her life and her family, and plagued by her husband’s infidelity and the knowledge that this social norm which she must learn to accept. In â€Å"Death by Landscape† Lois’ isolation is from the fact she is left with no family. Her sons have grown up and left home and she is a widow. This leaves her with no one to support or care for her. â€Å"While Rob was alive, while the boys were growing up, she could pretend she didn’t hear it, this empty space in sound. But now there is nothing much left to distract her.† (p. 35) Lois is tormented by her past rather than her present, the traumatic experience of a childhood friend disappearing has remained with her for a years. In both stories the protagonists share the conflict of the circumstances they live in -oppression from external power. For Lois, she is never able to quite move on from her friend’s disappearance. â€Å"She would never go up North, to Rob’s family cottage or to any place with wild lakes and wild trees and the calls of loons.† (p.35) One of the major factors of her conflict is the result of her childhood camp leader Cappie, trying to unfairly blame her for the death or disappearance of her friend Lucy: â€Å"Didn’t what? Says Cappie softly. Didn’t what, Lois? Lois does the worst thing she begins to cry. Cappie gives her a look like a pounce. She’s got what she wanted.† (p.34) Susan is isolated by her own unhappiness and growing mental instability. She struggles to maintain appearances and live up to societal expectations. â€Å"She said to Matthew in their bedroom: I think there must be something wrong with me.† (p.875) Her husband is no support to her and as he continues to carry on an affair, the distance between them increases, as well as her feelings of isolation. Susan hires a nanny to avoid the responsibilities of her family in order to try and escape them. She finds a room at an anonymous inn, which she uses as reprieve but this only amplifies her feelings of isolation and loneliness. The key difference between the two protagonists is that over time, Lois is able to come to terms with her conflict and learn to accept it. She realizes that her friend’s disappearance is not her fault; the camp leader simply needed someone to blame. For Cappie, the idea of having no explanation for Lucy’s disappearance is simply too much to comprehend. Though the experience still haunts her, Lois tries to move on with her life. Susan, however, falls victim to her conflict. She is unable to cope, when her husband confronts her asking if she is having an affair, she cannot face the prospect of coming to terms with the truth and reality of her life. Seeing no end to her struggles, Susan decides to commit suicide in room 19. Both women are isolated from the world and the people around them due in part to the circumstances of their lives. Although both sets of circumstances are very different, they are the root cause of the conflict of the worlds in which both women seek to remove themselves from. Each character takes a different path that leads ultimately to the difference between life and death.

Amazon Case Analysis

The case Analysis Outline Introduction- Brief summary of the firm, officers, industry and location Problem identification: major problems to be resolved-use the 4ps model Swot Analysis: strengths: weakness: opportunities: threats Alternatives: strategic choices-solutions to the problems identified Analysis of alternatives: cost/benefit analysis of the solutions. Recommendation: best/optimal solution based on the cost/benefit analysis 1. Introduction Amazon began in 1994 created by Jeffrey Bezos a computer science and electrical engineering graduate from Princeton University.Amazon was created to be an online bookstore that would be customer friendly, be easy to navigate, provide buying advice, and offer the broadcast possible selection of books at low prices and submit product reviews. Bezo operated from his garage in Seattle. Bezo launched his online venture in 1995 with 7 million in borrowed capital. Because Amazon was one of the first major Internet or dot com retailers, it receiv ed a huge amount of free national publicity, and the new venture quickly attracted more and more book buyers. Amazon has a 200,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution center.Amazon employed a relatively small number of workers about 2500 worldwide. Amzon employees own over 10% of their company, a factor behind Amazon. com’s rapid growth. Amazon has pizza teams that are given considerable autonomy to develop their ideas and experiment without interference from managers. Those pizza teams come up with most of the innovation. 2. Problem identification Product- Amazon has a customer review section on its website so that a customer may display any problems that he or she has sustain with the Amazon product purchased. However maintaining the physical infrastructure to to obtain supplies of books from book publishers and then to stock, package and ship the books to customers were much higher than anticipated. Price- Amazon was at a competitive advantage with their low prices * Ma intaining the physical side of amazon’s value chain was the source of the greatest proportion of its operating cost, which were draining profitability even though Amazon was at a competitive advantage with their low prices. *Price competition was also heating up due to the other companies such as Barnes and Noble and Borders who were also selling books online. Place- Amazon place in the book selling market changed the industry forever since it was the first online book selling company. * People can purchase books from anywhere as long as they can use the internet. Promotion-Since Amazon was the first online book seller it received a lot of free publicity. * Amazon was able to capture customer’s attention and establish a first mover advantage. 3. SWOT Analysis Strengths- -First online Book selling website. -low pricing -purchase from anywhere -offers 1. 5 million books -product reviews * Weaknesses -operating costs * Oppurtunities -Global expansion -retailer -aquiring s mall companies -New software -Branching in new market segments * Threats -opposing companies -price wars Pressure on profit margins 4. Alternatives * Forging allies with other companies so that when customers wanted a purchase immediately they could pick it up from one of the alliance retailers such as office depot or circuit city. Continue being innovative with prices such as having buy one get one half off sales or reducing prices by certain percentages on particular days. 5. Analysis of Alternatives * Buy sharing profit with allies the high product stocking and distribution costs were avoided. * Profit sharing also turned the company from book seller to â€Å"leading internet product provider. 6. Recommendation Allow any small business that operate a website to become affiliated to amazon by putting a official Amazon hyperlink to Amazon’s website on its own website.

Oppression And Exile Of The Israelites Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Oppression And Exile Of The Israelites - Essay Example The Promised Land was first made to Abraham and was renewed to his son Isaac and later to Jacob. It was to be given to the Israelites after Moses had led them from the bondage of Egypt. Moses was the son of an Israelite but was adopted by Pharaoh's daughter and raised as a royal child in the palace. He was educated about God and his promises to the children of Israelites. By his real mother who asked to take care of him. When Moses was an adult, he found two people fighting, an Egyptian and an Israelite. He killed the Israelite to prove his loyalty to the Egyptians and due to this immoral act; he went into hiding but had his faith in God. He was later called by God to deliver the Israelites from slavery. Moses rejected the call giving a reason that he was not a good orator, but God insisted1. When he finally went to see the pharaoh, he refused to let go of the slaves as the Egyptians had provided all the services to their masters. Pharaoh was adamant about his decision of letting the Israelites go, and God punished him with the ten calamities that softened his heart and let them leave. The Israelites were difficult to persuade to leave Egypt as they had lived all their lives there. Moreover, Moses had a hard time leading them out. It was a difficult mission for Moses to lead the rowdy ex-slaves into the wilderness as they had no rules to guide them. God saw this and gave Moses the Ten Commandments after fasting for forty days at Mt Sinai. However, as Moses was climbing down the mountain, he found the Israelites doing all sorts of immoral things and worshipping idols that made him angry and dropped and broke the commandments that were written on stone pillars. Moses was very angry and destroyed the idol. He went back to the mountain to repent on behalf of the children of Israelites and after forty days, God allowed him to engrave the commandments on rock tablets.

Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 4

Management - Essay Example Thus, small manufacturing plants can offer the same manufacturing capability and flexibility previously available only to large plants. Just as many researchers in strategic management emphasize that the formulation of an effective corporate strategy can only lead to the realization of a successful corporate strategy if the implementation is successful, the managers agree that venture success is critically dependent on implementation: a poor venture concept can sometimes be rescued by good management but a good venture concept will not rescue poor management. Management teams that can work in a complementary fashion toward achieving the overall objective are more likely to succeed than those composed of individuals with different objectives and/or only a limited ability to work together. Management teams with a uniform orientation toward opportunity rather than resource control are more likely to be successful than management teams oriented toward control and/or management of acquire d resources (Ashley Home Page 2008). IF a company has no financial resources to invest in new subsidy, it can use banking services to expend internationally. The bank can grand the company a loan or invest in its international expansion. .A prospective company approaches a bank with an idea for expanding a business. The lending institution evaluates it, and should the proposed idea be deemed viable, two practical questions are addressed: how to set up the business so that it will function well in a particular environment; how to make the business successful within a very short time span, of perhaps months, or even weeks (Ashley Home Page 2008). In UK, before agreeing to a loan, creditors would expect to see credit references; perhaps draw a report, or get a bank referral. Starting even the simplest manufacturing operation requires realistic evaluations of both the potential market and the kinds and amounts of support that are necessary. Market niches can usually be identified readily in both geographic and need terms, because villages or barrios have natural geographic boundaries, basic unmet needs, and lack of suppliers (Kotler and Keller 2005). As for support, the needs of the total operation must be evaluated clearly and realistically, which potential entrepreneurs often fail to do. Ventures with long planned periods until positive cash flow are found to be too risky investments to be made with a new management team. The company and banks associate a prior degree of understanding and a common set of objectives with regard to the business as the most important prior predictors of whether a management team will cooperate. Question 3 Laura Ashley is a global company with vertical integration and centralized management. Global retailers address consumer groups who, independent of their home country, have similar lifestyles and expectations. Technology has fostered increasingly interlinked customer cultures and lifestyles. Ashley now owns 540 stores in 28 countries. More than 50% of its sales are generated outside of the United Kingdom. The main barriers to trade were in Chili, south America. The main barriers were caused by inadequate legal framework and corruption, cultural differences and low income. The quality of administrators becomes vital here, as in the rest of the development process, especially since the Latin American

XML-Based Project Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

XML-Based Project - Assignment Example Thereafter, using the transformation language XSLT, the information from within the XML document was to be extracted and presented differently depicting different scenarios. Oxygen XML Editor was used for the project. 3. Discussion A total of 7 webpages were taken from the Internet for the project. This section presents the reasons that motivated the various decisions that were taken during each stage of the project. 4. The Material Chosen The site is an informational site that lists down the companies falling in different application areas and where jobs can be hunted. The material chosen for the project were taken from the same site so there is a hierarchy in between the different web pages. Furthermore, the content on each page also follows a hierarchal structure that can be translated into relations. This would facilitate the markup language. The selected webpages covered the most commonly used elements of informational sites (i.e. headings, text, links, paragraphs, lists, etc.). This presented an opportunity of learning to encode the different elements into XML. Besides possessing a hierarchal structure of the selected pages, a repeating structure is also present in each page. This facilitates the marking up process. 5. The Document Analysis The first task was to analyze the documents and identify the manner and relation in which the data was presented in them. It was found that one page pre sented a list of companies categorized into their respective application areas. While the remaining 6 pages presented detail of 6 of these companies. So the relationship between the 7 documents was identified as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 Tree Structure of Pages Within each of these pages, a pattern was found in the way the information was presented. Within the home page, there were categories, and list of companies in each category. Figure 2 Structure of Home Page In the remaining 6 pages, information regarding a company was presented under the related headings which exhibited a pattern. Some headings were common in all the 6 companies. Figure 3 Common Structure of About Pages Thus, the information from all the 7 pages was united and a tree structure was formed that represented the way portions of information were related to one another by the relationship of root, parent, child and siblings. Figure 4 Unified Tree Structure Once the document tree was identified, the document was m arked up accordingly into an XML file (guide.xml) where the leaves of the tree were presented as child elements with no children. Figure shows the tree structure of the XML formed. Figure 5 XML Tree Structure Once the skeleton XML was formed, the data was filled in. 6. Encoding Scheme The next task was to validate the XML against an encoding scheme. This is important as it defines the rulings for the structure of XML that all inputs must adhere to. Any entry made that is not in accordance to the scheme set, makes the XML invalid and it will not remain well-formed. Two options were present to validate the defined XML document against; XML DTD or XML Schema. Although both are standardized (so developers can understand them equally easily) and both the options deliver the same functionality yet there is a difference in their definition. DTD has the lowest definition of data as CDATA

Institutional Investments Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Institutional Investments - Essay Example Last part of this article would highlight some of the tactics devised in order to control discount trading of investment trust. Summary at the end of this article would conclude this article. Investment Trusts Investment trusts are those types of companies, which are provided the domicile of United Kingdom such that they are listed in the London Stock Exchange. They mainly invest in the equities and securities of the companies across the world, which are listed in different stock exchanges (Redhead, 2008). These investment trusts are run by the panel of the independent directors who take care of the affairs of the investment trusts. Investment trusts are somehow different with the investment companies such that investment companies are domiciled outside the jurisdiction of UK such as Jersey or Guernsey (Redhead, 2008). Pricing of Investment Trusts The pricing of investment trusts are made based on a conceptual term named as Net Asset Value or NAV. Net asset value is the market value of all the investments held by the investment companies. Therefore, the market value of any investment trust is actually the NAV of the investments (Levy and Post, 2005). In case if the market value of the shares issued by the investment trust exceeds NAV, then this concept refers as the shares of the investment trusts are trading at a premium. ... This means that the shares of the investment trust are trading at discount. Very occasionally, it appears that the investment trust share is trading at a premium. The following discussion entails the factors that cause the investment trust shares trading at a discount. Investment shares trading at a discount can be regarded as one of the integral aspects that operate behind the performance of the investment trust. The measurement of the shares of the investment trusts can be made in two ways. Firstly, the share price of the investment trusts quoted at the stock exchange. Secondly, market value per share of the assets of those companies, which are held by the investment trusts. In this way, discount can be calculated by simply taking the difference between the price per share of investment trusts and net assets value divided by the net assets value. Principally, the discount is regarded as the function of demand and supply mechanism for the shares of the investment trust. However, the discounts, and specifically the fluctuations in discounts are more important and follow some basis rules, which help understand the problem of investment trust shares trading at a discount more consistently. In case if the discount rate increases, this indicates that there are more chances that the discounted shares will be priced higher in future. This suggests that the investment trust shares are quite attractive especially against those investment trust shares, which are currently trading at a premium (Baums and Buxbaum, 1994). However, this mechanism is not as easy and simpler as it appears, had there been such a potential in the discounted investment shares for a possible price increase, the whole market

Strategic Planning and Control Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

Strategic Planning and Control - Coursework Example arefully meted plan that makes it possible to forecast their strategic position in the industry within the short to long term basis (Utterback, 2004). In this business report, the planning and control cycle is used to strategically plan and control the future of Mobile Inc for the next five years. As part of the planning and control cycle, there will be the analysis of opportunities, identification of aim, exploration of option, selection of best option, detailed planning, planning of evaluation, planning of implementation, and closure of plan. The report is presented by Huang tianchi, Ma sichao and Lang liang, who are senior research officer, head of marketing, and head of corporate affairs of Mobile Inc respectively. Mobile Inc is a global communication giant with empowered spirit to reinvent the way in which the world connects and communicates. The company offers communication solutions that put individuals, businesses, organisations and governments on the go with just a click of a mobile icon. As far as the external business environment is concerned, the company can be said to have its toughest competition. These competitions are better highlighted with Porter’s five forces. The first force that Mobile Inc faces is the threat of new entrants. The mobile phone industry is one that operates a fair market structure, which means that new firms can easily enter the market with very little restrictions (Mallon, 2008). Meanwhile, studying the trend of entry into the mobile phone industry, Nielsen, Nykodym and Brown, (2011) noted that most new entrants come in as existing giants who are very successful in other industries, particularly software development and computer manufacturing. As a result of this, these new entrants come in with very formidable operating capital, posing much competitive threat to existing companies. Given Mobile Inc long years of service to customers however, it is expected that the company will be able to overcome this threat of new

Writing a Prospectus Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Writing a Prospectus - Essay Example nt presents a short and snappy statement, which is backed up with literature and whose aim is to make clear the problem that makes the study worth to be conducted. The problem statement is followed by research questions, which are designed to express what the researcher is intending to achieve. The significance of the study provides back up on why the problem statement as well as the aim of the study is important. The conceptual framework is simply the theoretical foundation upon which the topic resolves - this further provides support for the topic. The researcher also formulates limitations and assumptions. Limitations define the factors that the researcher has no control over, such as resources and time. The assumptions are those issues that the researcher assumes so the research can be conducted within the relevant context. Towards the end of this chapter, it is important for the researcher to provide a definition of key terms, which are used in the rest of paper so the reader can understand them well (Cone & Foster, 2006). Review of the literature is usually the second chapter of the dissertation. It is in this chapter that the author writes what other theories, experts and researchers, among others; have written regarding the subject in question. Among the issues that should be covered in this chapter include the dependent and independent variables of the study, issues of measurement as well as a variety of alternative viewpoints. What is covered in this chapter must be congruent with the research questions and the aims of the study (Cone & Foster, 2006). This chapter in concerned with the methods of the study, which are used to help the researcher address the problem being investigated and answer the research questions raised in chapter one, as well as assist in testing of the hypothesis. In addition, the researcher is obliged to report on the population and sample of the study in this chapter. Specifically, the researcher must point out the technique

Detailed anaylsis of the main texts of these three thought systems Essay

Detailed anaylsis of the main texts of these three thought systems based on personal experience and knowing - Essay Example They are common in terms of theoretical deliberation and practical needs for communication, thereby paving a way for philosophical syncretism. This paper explores the greatest minds in traditional China through a close study of their most seminal teachings and texts specifically paying attention to Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese Buddhism (Chan). The paper will discuss the main understanding of each thought based on texts and personal understanding. Confucianism was introduced in China by one of the most important thinkers called Confucius. Confucius was born in 551 B.C.E when China was experiencing a difficult political turmoil1. In his twenties, he started tutoring in different disciplines but wished to hold public office at a certain point in his lifetime. Confucius began a thirteen-year journey at the age of fifty travelling from one province to another offering the rulers of those provinces his services. However, he never got offers other than the one that he was offered in his home province of Shantung, but was too old to take it. Therefore, he decided to spend his remaining years teaching and editing the great Chinese classics. He died at 73 years of age. Although he never realized his political aspirations, he is considered as one the world’s greatest teachers and thinkers because of the ideas he developed and taught during his lifetime. Confucianism is a Chinese philosophical and ethical system that began with Confucius, who explored deeply on the basic principles that were to become the most important teachings of Confucianism. Confucianism is a complex system of social, political, moral, quasi-religious and philosophical thought that influenced the history and culture of East Asia, particularly China and still does today. Confucianism holds the belief that human beings are trainable, perfectible and improvable though communal and personal effort especially through self-creation and cultivation. The main idea that Confucianism brings