Mental illness Essay

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† relays to the reader something more than a simple story of a woman at the mercy of the limited medical knowledge in the late 1800’s. Gilman creates a character that expresses real emotions and a psyche that can be examined in the context of modern understanding. â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper,† written in first person and first published in 1892 in the January edition of the New England Magazine, depicts the downward spiral of depression, loss of control and competence, and feelings of worthlessness that lead to greater depression and the possibility of schizophrenia. The beginning emphasis will be on the interaction and roles of the husband and wife in â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper†, which are based on the male dominated times of the late 1800’s. The main character, a woman whose name is never revealed, tells us of the mental state of mind she is under and how her husband and his brother, both physicians, dismiss it. â€Å"You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency — what is one to do?† The doctors seem completely unable to admit that there might be more to her condition than just stress and a slight nervous disorder even when a summer in the country and weeks of bed-rest have not helped. It might be thought that it is a simple matter of a loving husband being overprotective of his ill wife, but this assumption is quickly washed away by his arrogant attitudes, combined with his callous treatment of her that only serve to compound the problem. â€Å"At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies†. John treats his wife in a manner that gives her reason to doubt herself and her capabilities. Her husband John has explicitly forbidden her to do certain things, although we are never told why; but it can be assumed that it is because of her frailty that some of these activities have been taken away from her. As such being prohibited to work and not being able to contribute to the household as a proper wife and new  mother she begins to feel helpless. â€Å"So I†¦ am absolutely forbidden to â€Å"work† until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas.† Additionally, she has been told not to write: â€Å"There comes John, and I must put this away — he hates to have me write a word.† With no creative outlet her mind starts to find things upon which to dwell, things that only she can see. Virtually imprisoned in her bedroom, supposedly to allow her to rest and recover, she slowly starts to go insane. Without compassion or an outlet for her creativity, her mind turns inward and focuses on her now increasingly shrinking universe. She has no say in the location or the decor of her room. â€Å"I don’t like our room a bit. . . But John would [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7t0TuAnKU] not hear of it.† She is not allowed visitors, â€Å"It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship . . . but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.† In large part because of this oppression, she continues to decline. â€Å"I don’t feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything and I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.† However by keeping her a prisoner in a room with offensive wallpaper and very little to occupy her mind, John almost forces her to dwell on her psyche. Prison is supposed to be depressing, and she is pretty close to being a prisoner. The story does hint to the fact that John knows he could have done more but simply does not seem to want to be bothered with the effort of such an endeavour for his wife. He never acknowledges that she has a real problem until the end of the story, at which time he fainted. John could have obtained council from someone less personally involved in her case, but the only help he sought was for the condition of the house and the baby. He obtained a nanny to watch over the children while he was away at work each day: â€Å"It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby.† He also had his sister Jennie take care of the house. â€Å"She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper.† There is one instance, however, when he does talk of taking her to an expert for assistance, â€Å"John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.† Nevertheless she took that as a  threat since Dr. Mitchell was even more domineering than her husband and his brother. Perhaps, if she had been allowed to come and go and do as she pleased her depression might have lifted, â€Å"I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.† It seems to her that just being able to tell someone how she really feels would have eased her depression, but her husband would not hear of it because of the embarrassing consequences it could bring to the family name. Thus, John has made her a prisoner in their marriage where her opinions are pushed aside, and her self-worthiness questioned. She does have a rebellious spirit in her and the fact that this spirit is being crushed is the final nail towards her insanity. Her desperation is almost like someone being buried alive and screaming knowing that there are people just above but who seem not to hear or care. Her reaction is to seek to prove her husband wrong, â€Å"John is a physician, and perhaps . . . perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster . . .† While putting on an appearance of submission, in actuality she was frequently rebelling against her husband’s orders. She writes when there is nobody around to see her, and she tries to move her bed, but always keeps an eye open for someone coming. As her breakdown approaches she actually locks her husband out of her room, â€Å"I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him.† This forces him to see that he has been wrong, and, since she knew he could not tolerate hysteria, to eventually drive him away. While there is supporting evidence that her husband’s treatment of her was a major contributing factor to her madness, the possibility also exists that her madness was caused by an internal illness which, given the level of medical knowledge, her husband was unable to deal with appropriately. As mentioned in the beginning of this essay, Gilman creates a character that has real emotions and a real psyche that impresses upon the reader that she is slowly deteriorating into a mental illness known as schizophrenia (a disintegration of the personality). This illness, however it manifests itself within the personality of someone is usually highlighted through a variety of symptoms. The leading character exhibits these symptoms spo radically throughout the story. To begin with, one of the more obvious of her symptoms is her irrational obsession, displayed by relentless thoughts of and about, the yellow wallpaper that wraps the walls in her room. It is a room that she feels captured by and her obsessions start from the beginning of the story. â€Å"I never saw a worse paper in my life,† she says. â€Å"It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study† Taken in isolation, this kind of observation might appear to be harmless to the uninformed observer, but as her obsession with the wallpaper grows, so does her dementia. At one point she describes lying on her bed and â€Å"follow[ing] that pattern about by the hour . . . I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion†. Interconnected with the first symptom of irrational obsession is that of thought processing disorder. This disorder can range in severity from a vague muddiness of thinking to a complete breakdown of one’s mental processes. The first real clues that she is having trouble controlling her mental state of being comes into focus when she states, â€Å"I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes . . . I take pains to control myself — before him, at least, and that makes me very tired† She tries to discuss her feelings rationally, but this only brings a â€Å"stern reproachful look† at which she gives up and returns to her room. Again her condition is revealed a few pages later when remarking that, â€Å"It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight†. Soon, other noticeable changes in her mental state start to take shape. She slowly begins to show symptoms of paranoia, yet another unfortunate schizophrenic trait. She speaks of how happy she is that her baby is not exposed to the same torturous existence that she has to endure in her room with the yellow wallpaper. â€Å"Of course I never mention it to them any more — I am too wise, — but I keep watch of it all the same† Even the mistrust of her â€Å"caretakers† is further evidenced when she says, â€Å"The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look† When catching Jennie looking at the yellow wallpaper, she thinks to herself, â€Å"But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself?† This type of  paranoia is a firm indication that her psychological state is continuing to deteriorate towards complete schizophreni a. Another in the list of common symptoms of schizophrenia that the protagonist exhibits is hallucination. Of these hallucinations, one is when she â€Å"sees† people walking in the paths that she views from her bedroom window. As her condition worsens, she begins to have other hallucinations, this time focused on the yellow wallpaper itself. This is noticed when she exclaims, â€Å"At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it [the wallpaper] becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be†. In addition to her mental hallucinations, she starts to also have ones where she can smell things as well, â€Å"the only thing I can think of that it is like is the colour of the paper! A yellow smell†. The climactic stage of her hallucinations comes when she realizes, â€Å"that woman gets out in the daytime!† It is at this point that her deranged thought processes become a coping mechanism to help her deal with her mental state of being. She passes into a full schizophrenic state and transforms from a helpless, self-pitying woman, to one who feels, in her mind at least, that she has broken free of her shackles. She feels that she has gained a sense of control, no matter how false that sense may be, as she says, â€Å"I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him†. Much has changed by the end of the story, so much in fact that in the end it is she who is metaphorically and literally creeping over John, who has fainted after seeing her in a deranged state of being. This is in contrast to their interactions up to this point when it was John who usually dictated and condescended her. The fact that the protagonist in this story is schizophrenic is supported by various bits of evidence. However, the question that remains to be answered is why a diagnosis of schizophrenia is important to interpreting â€Å"The Yellow Wall-Paper.† Schizophrenia is a logical choice in that it explains why the protagonist behaved in the way that she did. For her to overcome her submission to an environment that has sought to oppress her, she had to discard the personality within her that was meek and mild. This is a common defence mechanism of the mind in order to deal with situations it perceives to be uncontrollable. It is quite  possible within the realm of psychological study that the combination of the stress of childbirth, post-natal depression and the mental strain of having to repress her emotions triggered the schizophrenia. This terrible condition may have resulted from the bonds she felt would not allow her to express herself as a human being, mother and wife, a freedom that she so desperately needed. Her slide into madness, as a way to deal with her entrapment, is similar to a caged animal that, when backed into a corner, will fight for its life.

Consumer Behavior

What does the purchase of a product like Nike mean to Sunder Singh? Sunder Sing, just escaping homelessness is clearly proud that he was able to save and buy a pair of Nikes. He could undoubtedly have purchase a different brand that would have met his physical needs as well for much less money which he does not say why he bought the more expensive Nikes, a reasonable interpretation is that they serve as a visible symbol that Sunder Singh is back as a successful. Sunder Singh is not Unique among low-income consumer in wanting and buying items such as Nike shoes.As one expert says. â€Å"The low income consumer wants the same product and services other consumer want†. He suggests that marketing efforts reflect those desires. Another expert state. There’s this stereotype that they don’t have enough money for toothpaste and that’s just not true. There has been some significance to them being called lower income, but they do buy things. The working poor are for ced to spend a disproportionate present of theirs income on housing, utilities and medical care due to lack of insurance.They generally relay on public transportation, they spend a smaller portion of their relatively small income on meals away from home and all forms of entertainment such as admission, pets and toys; they spend very little on their own financial security. However Sunder Singh illustrated they spend the same percent of their income though a smaller amount on apparel and accessories. 2. What does the story say about our society and the impact of marketing on consumer behavior? â€Å"Society can exist without Marketing, but Marketing cannot exist without Society†Marketing is the management process of anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer’s requirements. The various conventional marketing tools- advertising, branding, direct marketing, sales promotion, publicity & public relations. Effect of marketing on society, in particular on Vulnerable Gro ups Marketing and society, the commensuration of the two words raises a few eyebrows, as it is highly debatable. On the one hand, Society thrives on the marketing efforts of the Companies, while another school of thought argues that marketing makes the society more materialistic.Today, striking a balance between the two is the challenge faced by the Marketers. The society expects the business to be ethical and desires corporate executives, at all levels to apply ethical principles in other words, guidelines as to what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, and morally correct, when they make business decisions. Advertisers are traditionally use techniques to which children and adolescents are more susceptible, such as product placement in TV shows, tie in between movies and fast food restaurants, to mention a few.Therefore there exist many marketing evils that lure people to buy even when not required. Case III Star Airways 1. What is likely to be the decision process in case of choos ing an airline? Buyer decision processes are the decesion making processes undertaken by consumers in regard to a potential market transaction before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service. More generally, decision making is the cognitive process of selecting a course of action from among multiple alternatives. Decision making is said to be a psychological construct.This means that although we can never â€Å"see† a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore we conclude that a psychological event that we call â€Å"decision making† has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to effect the action. In general there are three ways of analysing consumer buying decisions. They are: * Economic models – These models are largely quantitative and are based on the assumptions of rationality and near pe rfect knowledge.The consumer is seen to maximize their utility * Psychological models – These models concentrate on psychological and cognitive processes such as motivation and need recognition. They are qualitative rather than quantitative and build on sociological factors like cultural influences and family influences. * Consumer behaviour models – These are practical models used by marketers. They typically blend both economic and psychological models. Consumer decision making is best summarised in the following diagramProblem recognition: The need for new airlines Consumers of India received a problem with the product that is offered by other similar airlines. The consumer choose product because of their quality and service. Information Search: Surfs the internet to learn about airlines. View TV ad, hear from family members or friends. May read certain magazine when at home or outside Evaluation of Alternative and selection compares several airlines in terms of rep utation and available features, Price point and discount offered free gifts.Purchase decision: Choose on airline it has a feature that really appeals to him and buys it Purchase Behavior dissonance and complex evaluation. 2. Would this plan suggested by the vice president help in convincing the customers to use Star Airways? Give your reasons. Consumer decision making process is a list of steps that are carried out by consumers concerning to a potential market transaction, before, during and after the purchase of a product or service. The process includes identifying the problem, collecting information, evaluating the alternatives, making the purchase decision and evaluating post purchase.Information search when a consumer discovers a problem or a need, he or she is likely to search for more information on how to solve it. The information search stage involves gathering information from various sources in order to make a better-informed decision, it helps clarifies the options open to the consumer which may involve internal search Understanding customer needs is the keystone to Star Airways success. The most successful companies understand the value of their customers as they measure success through the amount of customers they serve each year.Increasing customer base is a goal and a challenge that every company must face. Listening to customers and researching the market will provide a company with opportunities to become an industry leader. Finding cost effective ways to meet customer demands are at the root of the challenge. Star Airways must face this challenge head-on while keeping the customer in the forefront of any action the company takes. They must develop products that will appeal to customers and draw in new business. This problem solution will discuss opportunities and well as analyze an optimal solution.That will assist Star Airways in achieving their goals. The variety of successful strategies in use today was in full display at the ATW Winning Strategies conference in Washington, where some of the airline industry's keenest minds shared their wisdom. Dr. Adam Pilarski, senior VP at consultancy Avitas, opened the conference with a controversial statement, â€Å"the myth of overcapacity is an urban legend,† pointing out that historically high load factors should push fares up. â€Å"If airlines don't make money when they have the highest load factors ever, there is something wrong with their business model. He implied that airline managers over think their strategies and fail to follow what he called â€Å"Adam's Rule: Revenue greater than cost equals good. † The first thing to do is â€Å"Don't be stupid,† he said, adding a list of â€Å"stupid† strategies: Don't insult customers. No extreme yield management. No bad airline names. No adversary relations with employees. Do not have stupid business plans. â€Å"Please remember you are in a service industry,† he said, and try to avoid what former Continental CEO Gordon Bethune referred to as â€Å"sky nazi† cabin service.He criticized â€Å"nickel-and-dime† attitudes toward cutting amenities, scoffing at airlines' publicized moves to remove olives and pillows. You must cut costs in ways that make sense, related to productivity. † Cost control â€Å"has to fit the business model, and must be related to productivity. † The plan suggested by the VP Marketing, Anil Saxena, felt that the company needed to advertise its dedication to quality and rebuild an image of being discussions with the advertising agency to launch a campaign in the near future.Advertising: Convincing the Consumer when a company wants their product to sell to consumers, they give them a reason why their product is better than others. Advertising sells to consumers wants not just to their needs. People need a car but want a Cadillac. They need clothes, but they want Ralph-Lauren. When most people flip though ads the go fairly fast, therefore it must grab their attention. A good ad allows the reader to instantly recognize the concept being communicated. It sends a simple and easy message to the reader of the benefits they will get if they use their product.Cigar, cigarette, and alcohol ads in the mid 1900's persuade the reader that their products provide a beneficial and pleasurable experience. Case IV Mouse-Rid 1. Has Shobha identified the best target market for Mouse-Rid? Why or why not? Shobha has targeted women for the product. She feels that women are the best group to target because they don’t like the mess or the risks created by traditional mouse traps. This is a good marketing segment to start off with but there are a couple of things that Shobha could have improved on.First off, she should have probably segmented women into a couple different groups. In today’s world all women don’t’ stay at home and take care of kids. In fact the population of women that do that is r apidly shrinking and being replaced by independent professionals. In effect, by targeting women that stay at home, Shobha is targeting a shrinking market. She could probably segment women into a couple different categories. For example: working women, single women, house wives, etc. There are also other markets which Shobha could target.Some other market segments that hold large potential for the Trap-Ease are market like environmentalist, animal lovers, corporate business and families. The Trap-Ease mouse trap is re-useable and therefore creates less of a strain on the environment which would make it very attractive things for environmentalists and people who care about the earth. The environmentalist market is also growing as people became more aware of global warming and other problems such as deforestation. Animal lovers would love the Trap-Ease mouse trap because it doesn’t require poison or pose the risk of snapping closed on a paw or tongue of a pet.Corporate Business would probably like the Trap-Ease mouse trap because of its high qualitymore futuristic image and the fact that it would create as much of a mess. They wouldprobably be less hesitant to have them sitting around the office. Families with kidsshould be the primary market segment of Trap-Ease seeing as it will probably be their largest. Mouse traps and poison pose a very large risk to infants and toddlers and caringmothers and fathers would probably happily buy a product which would better protecttheir children.It seems that the Trap-Ease mouse trap has positioned itself in the market as being a veryinnovative and well engineered product. It has done this by winning awards from tradeshows and magazines. If it is better able to connect these features of the mouse traps withthe needs and wants of their target consumers then they should be able to generate alarger demand. They could also try to change it’s position a little bit. Trap-Ease could also position the product as causing less waist because it is re-useable o rthey could lower it’s cost and make it more affordable.By making it â€Å"the mostaffordable, innovative mouse trap† on the market they could probably gain some moredemand. Another way in which they could position their product would be by having an incredibly good customer service team that could deliver services to their customers thatwere having problems using the product. By having a good customer service team theycould build better relationships with their customers and increase their customer equity The marketing mix of a company consists of the four P’s: Product, Price, Place andPromotion.Currently Trap-Ease only has one product, their mouse trap. They probably could create a couple different versions of their mouse trap in order to offer more variety. The higher price of their mouse trap seems to be consistent with a quality differentiationstrategy but they probably could offer a wider range of prices on the differe nt models oftheir trap if they chose to widen their product range. Right now they are trying todistribute their product through stores like Kmart and Safeway. A really good market tohit would probably be the internet.People on in the internet are often times into quality,ease of use, and innovativeness and don’t mind spending a little more money to get whatthey want. It is also a high profit market because it reduces transportation costs and thereare no middle man costs. The promotion of the Trap-Ease mouse trap seems to be one oftheir largest problems. They should promote over the internet for certain on sites thatthey think their target market will be visiting and they should also think about putting outads on TV. In this changing high tech environment magazine ads aren’t enough anymore.Trap-Ease America’s competition is any company that creates mouse traps. They face amarket in which large volume of low quality low cost mouse traps are sold. There arealso poi sons that are sold which are a danger to pets and animals as well as the mice theyare supposed to kill. There are also other versions of live catch mouse traps out there. An example of one of Trap-Ease’s competition is d-CON who offers both baits and traps. They actually also offer a version of a no touch mouse trap in which you don’t have totouch the mouse after you have trapped it.They are selling this for 150 which is higher then the suggested retail price for the Trap-Ease mouse trap which is 1:0 six times more expensive. This would suggest that Trap-Ease has priced lower then some of its competitors which will give it apricing advantage. Companies such as Havahart offer traps which humanely catcheverything from mice to voles and shrews and are competition for the humane factors ofthe Trap-Ease trap. Other competitors include: Victor, JT Eaton and Riddex. The first thing I would do to change Trap-Ease’s marketing strategy would be to increasethe amount of pe ople in their marketing team.Although Martha was probably trying tokeep down costs by not hiring anyone for her marketing team she made one importantmistake. One of the most important things when coming out with a new product is themarketing because until you’ve communicated the benefits of your product to the consumer there will not be sufficient demand for it. Her entry into the market was toosmall scale and chances are that with such an innovative product that the company willdo better in the long run with a larger scale entry. She should have asked for a largerbudget and hired more people for the marketing team.She should have then put muchmore work into the Analysis of her target markets and perhaps expanded her scope oftarget markets while increasing the segmentation. This would allow her to betterdifferentiate her product. I would put in operating controls and strategic controls in order to monitor the marketingteam’s progress and make sure that what they are do ing is consistent with the company’sgoals and strategy. These controls would very important for gathering the informationthat would form the strategies in the coming years.It would also probably help to do amarket audit at some point during the first year just to make sure that things are runningsmoothly and it shouldn’t cost that much to do one at such an early stage in thecompanies development because of the smaller volume of papers to audit. Summary Targeting: The targeting should have been done within a broader demographic area. Slums, warehouses, go downs, docks, kirana shops, retail stores, restaurant, canteens and cold storages must be targeted for potential customers. The segmenting must avail wholesalers and the intermediaries too part from the retailers. Marketing channels like Toll-free numbers, newspaper, television, radio and mobile marketing must be used effectively to target MEN. Pest control companies must be primarily targeted and a joint venture can b e planned if necessary. We should target to environmentalists, animal lovers and corporate business. 2. Does Shobha have enough needed data on consumer behavior? What type of consumer research should Shobha conduct? Shobha have no enough needed data on consumer behaviour. She should adopt the following data collection methods †¢ DATA COLLECTION METHODS DESK RESEARCH OR SECONDARY DATA â€Å"Secondary data consists of information that already exists somewhere, having been collected for another purpose†. In other words, secondary data are those which have been collected by someone else and which have already been passed through statistical process, there are two sources of this data: Internal sources – this is data which is available within the company, although companies do not make full enough use of the information that is routinely collected. External sources – this is data which has been published for commercial reasons.A key source of secondary data is t he library service and most good libraries have a wide range of sources. Some government data is available free, other secondary data can be very expensive. It is important in a research project to know what data is available since this will guide the structure and format of the fieldwork in the primary data collection stage. It is possible that secondary data sources can provide the complete answer to the problem under scrutiny. The least it will do is save time and money in directing the scope of the field work. It can also influence the choice of data collection methods used in the field ork. Primary Data – Kotler and Armstrong say that â€Å"primary data consists of information collected for the specific purpose at hand†. In other words, primary data are those, which are collected afresh and for first time and thus happen to be original in character. Once the desk research is complete the researcher will have a much clearer idea of: †¢ The up-to-date and relev ant data †¢ What data still needs to be collected to find a solution to the problem under scrutiny. †¢ To achieve the data and information the research teams need to answer certain questions: What is it necessary to know?Who will have the information which is sought? What is the best method (quick and efficient) to use to collect this data? †¢ It is important to streamline the answers to these questions to avoid collecting a mass of irrelevant data by inappropriate or inefficient methods. The two types of data are: Quantitative Data – As the term implies this is data which is expressed in numbers. Quantitative data is quite easy to collect, and a large amount of reliable and valid data can be collected largely by questionnaire in quite a short period of time. It is a fairly formal approach.This data arises from what is termed â€Å"closed questions† because the respondent is restricted in the choice of answer the respondent can give. Qualitative data â⠂¬â€œ Qualitative data is obtained from group discussions or in-depth interviews and its findings are based on content rather than numeric analysis. Qualitative data is said to be much more subjective than its counterpart. Questions are open-ended and can lead to a free ranging and in-depth discussion on a specific point which provides a variety of rich data. There are no numbers or digits in this data and it is not subject to statistical interpretation.TYPES OF PRIMARY DATA COLLECTION 1) OBSERVATION : Observation becomes a scientific tool and the method of data collection for the researcher when it serves a formulated research purpose is systematically planned and recorded and is subjected to checks and controls on validity and reliability. Under the observation method the information is sought by way of investigators own direct observation without asking from respondent. 2) SURVEYS: Surveys are concerned with describing, recording, analyzing and interpreting conditions that exist or existed.The researcher does not manipulate the variable or arrange for events to happen Surveys are only concerned with conditions or relationships that exist, opinions that are held, processes that are going on, effects that are evident or trends that are developing. They are primarily concerned with present but at times do consider past events and influences as they relate to current conditions. 3) Experiment: Experiment may be conducted in lab or in the field. The researcher can test the relative sales appeals for package, designs, price, promotional offers and copy themes etc. , by designing suitable experiments to identify cause and effect.The first thing I would do to change is marketing strategy would be to increasethe amount of people in their marketing team. Although Shobha was probably trying to keep down costs by not hiring anyone for her marketing team she made one important mistake. One of the most important things when coming out with a new product is the marketing because until you’ve communicated the benefits of your product to the consumer there will not be sufficient demand for it. Her entry into the market was too small scale and chances are that with such an innovative product that the company will do better in the long run with a larger scale entry.She should have asked for a larger budget and hired more people for the marketing team. She should have then put much more work into the Analysis of her target markets and perhaps expanded her scope of target markets while increasing the segmentation. This would allow her to better differentiate her product. I would put in operating controls and strategic controls in order to monitor the marketing team’s progress and make sure that what they are doing is consistent with the company’s goals and strategy. These controls would very important for gathering the information that would form the strategies in the coming years.It would also probably help to do amarket audit at som e point during the first year just to make sure that things are runningsmoothly and it shouldn’t cost that much to do one at such an early stage in thecompanies development because of the smaller volume of papers to audit. 3. What type of advertising can influence consumers for this type of product? . The low cost of posters and handbills encouraged a numberof publishers to experiment with other methods. Method were useful fo rinforming and reminding and reminding, they could not do the whole promotional job.Theywere used only to reach each consumer personally. The merchant still used personal persuasiononce the customers were attracted to his store. The invention of hand press increased the potentialities of advertising. times, posters had made their appearance, and assumed the function of fostering demand for the product. CASE VI Impact of Retail Promotions on Consumers 1 Why would some consumers have high-involvement levels in learning about this sales promotion? A good de finition of sales promotion would be as follows: â€Å"An activity designed to boost the sales of a product or service.It may include an advertising campaign, increased PR activity, a free-sample campaign, offering free gifts or trading stamps, arranging demonstrations or exhibitions, setting up competitions with attractive prizes, temporary price reductions, door-to-door calling, telemarketing, personal letters on other methods†. More than any other element of the promotional mix, sales promotion is about â€Å"action†. It is about stimulating customers to buy a product. It is not designed to be informative – a role which advertising is much better suited to. Sales promotion is commonly referred to as â€Å"Below the Line† promotion.Sales promotion can be directed at: †¢ The ultimate consumer (a â€Å"pull strategy† encouraging purchase) †¢ The distribution channel (a â€Å"push strategy† encouraging the channels to stock the prod uct). This is usually known as â€Å"selling into the trade† Some customers show high level of involvement in sales promotion is to know about the features product, competitor’s product which replace the same product, price and discount offered for the product. Additional kit or benefit for the product, and to know what the new arrivals in the market are. Customers will also learn about he stores and its goodwill by such type of sales promotions. Is a level of 75 per cent comprehension realistic among those who become aware of an ad? Why or why not? Results of the study showed that ad exposure was 75 per cent and ad awareness level was 68 per cent and was considered as high. Only 43 percent respondents exposed to and aware of the ad copy could accurately recall important details, such as the name of the store promoting the retail sale. Just 43 per cent correct interpretation was considered as low. Of those who could accurately interpret the ad copy, 32 per cent said th ey intended to respond by purchasing the advertised · products ‘ and 68per cent sad they had no intention to buy.This yields an overall intention to buy of 7 per cent. The largest area of lost opportunity was due to those who did not accurately interpret the ad copy. The post-promotion survey indicated that only 4. 2 per cent of the target market customers made purchases of the promoted products during the promotion period. In terms of how the buyers learned of the promotion, 46 per cent mentioned newspaper A (Hindi), 27 per cent newspaper B (Hindi), 8 per cent newspaper (English), and 15 per cent learned about sale through word-of mouth communication. Do you think such promotions are likely to influence the quality image of the retail store? Explain. Basically, promotion is first introduced in the 4Ps of marketing. The four Ps represents the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place ; Promotion) and the promotional mix is the important term used to explain the set of tools of th e business. This is applied to achieve benefit of its products and services from its consumer and the followings are (Advertising, Public relation, Direct Marketing, Personal selling and Sales promotion) On the other hand consumer behaviour is another important aspect in the retail business sector.Consumers are not always normal/simple buyer. There are many aspects involved in buying decision process. They hold strategic shopping manner at the time of buying a product or services from a company. The main aim and objective of this research is such promotions are likey to influence the qulity immage of the retials store. Such Sales promotion has a great impact and influence on consumer buying behaviour in the retails stores – based on Tesco retail store. Such sales promotion role has a great impact on consumer buying behaviour.It has a great and strong significance role on retail industry sector. Basically sales promotions strategies used as a short-term technique tool which pr incipal objective is to influence the ultimate buyers to try a brand or change their mind to another brand. Sales promotion represent to discount a brand, it can be directly or indirectly, directly price reduction or indirectly through coupons ; premiums. But when the retail stores withdraw the sales promotion, then the normal price should have had a inferior value and the result of this should have had a negative impact on consumer buying behavior.The study focuses the significant attitude, perception of the consumer behaviour and it reflects the consumer loyalty on the basis of customer relationship management. Here the findings and analysis have discovered the vital reason that impacts positively on consumer buying behaviour and in the sales volume. ———————– Need and Problem recognition Information Search Evaluation and Selection Decision Implementation Post Purchase Processes Consumer Behavior 2. What is the basic difference between a fad, a fashion, a classic, and a trend? Provide example of each. A fashion refers to a style that is accepted by a large group of people at a given time such as skinny jeans. Some styles become classics, which are styles that become acceptable and in good taste anytime and place such as the classic black dress. A fad is a short lived fashion that suddenly becomes popular and quickly disappears; generally it only affects a specific group of the population such as low rise jeans wore by juniors. A trend is a general direction or movement as a style begins to be accepted such as the revival of high-waist jeans made from a light denim which also were worn in the 60-70s. 11. State some differences between the positivist and interpretivist approaches to consumer research. For each type of inquiry give examples of product dimensions what would be more usefully explored using that type of research over the other. Positivist assume the nature of reality is objective, tangible, and single, while the interprevisit believe that nature of reality is socially constructed and multiple, this should be used with products that are socially minded and include interactions based on technology such as social networking. Positivist have a goal of prediction which is good when trying to create trend reports and in the process of product development, while interpretivist goal is of understanding, this would be most useful when analyzing behavior toward products already on the market. . What is the difference between an enacted norm and a crescive norm? Identify the set of crescive norms operating when a man and a woman in your culture go out for dinner on a first date. What would they wear? An enacted norm are explicitly decided upon while crescive norms are embedded in a culture and are only discovered through interaction with other members’ of the culture. When a young man and woman go out on a first date, if they are both from the same culture then they are following crescive norms, because they are both following the norms which are accepted within their given culture. If they are both from completely different cultures, then they would be operating on enacted norms. What they would wear would be determined based upon what is accepted in their culture as appropriate wear for the occasion. 3. Read the Article â€Å" Body Ritual Among the Nacirema† and discuss what is going on. Consumer Behavior 2. What is the basic difference between a fad, a fashion, a classic, and a trend? Provide example of each. A fashion refers to a style that is accepted by a large group of people at a given time such as skinny jeans. Some styles become classics, which are styles that become acceptable and in good taste anytime and place such as the classic black dress. A fad is a short lived fashion that suddenly becomes popular and quickly disappears; generally it only affects a specific group of the population such as low rise jeans wore by juniors. A trend is a general direction or movement as a style begins to be accepted such as the revival of high-waist jeans made from a light denim which also were worn in the 60-70s. 11. State some differences between the positivist and interpretivist approaches to consumer research. For each type of inquiry give examples of product dimensions what would be more usefully explored using that type of research over the other. Positivist assume the nature of reality is objective, tangible, and single, while the interprevisit believe that nature of reality is socially constructed and multiple, this should be used with products that are socially minded and include interactions based on technology such as social networking. Positivist have a goal of prediction which is good when trying to create trend reports and in the process of product development, while interpretivist goal is of understanding, this would be most useful when analyzing behavior toward products already on the market. . What is the difference between an enacted norm and a crescive norm? Identify the set of crescive norms operating when a man and a woman in your culture go out for dinner on a first date. What would they wear? An enacted norm are explicitly decided upon while crescive norms are embedded in a culture and are only discovered through interaction with other members’ of the culture. When a young man and woman go out on a first date, if they are both from the same culture then they are following crescive norms, because they are both following the norms which are accepted within their given culture. If they are both from completely different cultures, then they would be operating on enacted norms. What they would wear would be determined based upon what is accepted in their culture as appropriate wear for the occasion. 3. Read the Article â€Å" Body Ritual Among the Nacirema† and discuss what is going on. Consumer Behavior 2. What is the basic difference between a fad, a fashion, a classic, and a trend? Provide example of each. A fashion refers to a style that is accepted by a large group of people at a given time such as skinny jeans. Some styles become classics, which are styles that become acceptable and in good taste anytime and place such as the classic black dress. A fad is a short lived fashion that suddenly becomes popular and quickly disappears; generally it only affects a specific group of the population such as low rise jeans wore by juniors. A trend is a general direction or movement as a style begins to be accepted such as the revival of high-waist jeans made from a light denim which also were worn in the 60-70s. 11. State some differences between the positivist and interpretivist approaches to consumer research. For each type of inquiry give examples of product dimensions what would be more usefully explored using that type of research over the other. Positivist assume the nature of reality is objective, tangible, and single, while the interprevisit believe that nature of reality is socially constructed and multiple, this should be used with products that are socially minded and include interactions based on technology such as social networking. Positivist have a goal of prediction which is good when trying to create trend reports and in the process of product development, while interpretivist goal is of understanding, this would be most useful when analyzing behavior toward products already on the market. . What is the difference between an enacted norm and a crescive norm? Identify the set of crescive norms operating when a man and a woman in your culture go out for dinner on a first date. What would they wear? An enacted norm are explicitly decided upon while crescive norms are embedded in a culture and are only discovered through interaction with other members’ of the culture. When a young man and woman go out on a first date, if they are both from the same culture then they are following crescive norms, because they are both following the norms which are accepted within their given culture. If they are both from completely different cultures, then they would be operating on enacted norms. What they would wear would be determined based upon what is accepted in their culture as appropriate wear for the occasion. 3. Read the Article â€Å" Body Ritual Among the Nacirema† and discuss what is going on.

Universal Soldier

As a college student in the early 1960s Buffy Sainte-Marie became known as a writer of protest songs and love songs. But unknown to most of the mainstream public, she was even then spending as much time around the drum at a small Indian reserve in Canada as she was in front of a microphone on the concert stages of the world. Having written â€Å"Universal Soldier†, one of the anthems of the 60s peace movement, she was nonetheless absent from the big mass protest marches, in favor of shedding her light on Indian rights and environmental issues, which she still does today. Analysis of the song Universal Soldier Five foot two and six foot four were the height parameters for soldiers in 1961. Fighting with missiles and with spears symbolize the future and the past, soldiers are soldiers: only the equipment is different. The ages 17 to 31 were age parameters to be a soldier during the 1960s and soldiers have been around for centuries. Soldiers are also religious people and not confined to just one religion and though religion forbids it, he chooses to be a killer. No matter what side he’s on, it’s still absurd. Soldiers are not just from some far away enemy country but from â€Å"our† country too thinking that fighting will end all fighting. Soldiers are on all sides using violence as an act of peace having a responsibility overlooked for humanity. Soldiers learn nothing from history so do not see obvious outcomes of repeating it. We can't blame just the leaders and each individual has a choice. We are all responsible – civilians, voters and soldiers.

Applewood auto group Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Applewood auto group - Coursework Example The range for profits was calculated as a difference between the maximum and the minimum profit for each location. The results are presented in the table below. The last row presents the results for all sold vehicles (Black, 2012:52). 2. a. To construct the histogram for the profits, the Data Analysis toolkit is used. The option â€Å"Histogram† permits to create the table and the graph for the distribution of profits (Anderson, Sweeney and Williams, 2014:106-180). b. The results show that the data is normally distributed with the small sqewness. The most frequently obtained profit is between $ 1,800 and $ 2,000. The rarest profits are within the range between $ 294 and $ 900. The profits of more than $ 3,100 are also very rare. More than 70 % of profits are within the range of $ 1,200 and $ 2,800. 3. a. To build the boxplot for variable age, the option â€Å"Histogram† in the Excel Data Analysis Toolkit can be used (Anderson, Sweeney and Williams, 2014:106-180). The results are given in the table and in the graph below. The boxplot shows that the variable age is normally distributed. The mean and the median are almost equal. The average age of the buyer is 46 years. The most of the buyers are in the age between 33 and 60 years. The youngest buyer has 21 year and the oldest buyer is 73 years old. b. The data on the graph does not support the idea that the older buyers purchase cars on which the higher profits can be earned. It is seen from the scatterplot that buyers purchasing vehicles on which the high profits can be earned are in every age group. The scatterplot does not show the presence of the relationship between the age of the buyer and the earned profit. c. The option â€Å"Add Trend Line† in Excel can be used to get the trend line and the coefficient of determination. The coefficient of determination R2 is equal 0.0684. The correlation coefficient is the square root of the coefficient of determination R = 0.2615. The results

Current Events in Public Health Leadership and the Fiedler Contingency Assignment

Current Events in Public Health Leadership and the Fiedler Contingency Theory - Assignment Example gs forth to two factors in leadership referred to as leadership style and situational favorableness as outlined in fielder contingency model (Ornstein, & Lunenburg, 2007). This paper seeks to analyze a recent activity in relation to Fielder Contingency Model. Alzheimer disease is a disease that affects the human brain and if not treated at an advanced stage may have lethal consequences. As such, it has been necessary to carry out research on the disease in order to look into the problem and propose solutions that might eliminate it, or provide medicine effective in avowing adverse effects on the victims. Research entails looking into a specified problem and using relevant literature and results obtained, bring out a solution. In this regard, research might include different parties and the success of the entire project is determined by the coordination of each and every party. Therefore, good leadership is essential to ensure smooth undertaking of the research. The research on Alzheimer disease was executed using rats as specimen, as Terrence believed argued , â€Å"We believe the rats will be an excellent, stringent pre-clinical model for testing experimental Alzheimer’s disease therapeutics† (Thomas para 2). From the research, it emerged that high level of beta-amyloid in the brain leads to the occurrences of the health disorder, Alzheimer. The disease affects a substantive percentage of American population, about five million, making it an important aspect of research, which would ensure that citizens live happy lives, free from diseases. The research on Alzheimer disease was carried out by a team of experts headed by Professor Terrence Town. Each person acted at different capacity and the joined effort led to the success realized. In concluding presenting the results, Professor Neil argued that presenting the results to interested researchers with results obtained would be of great help in the future. This is an aspect of good leadership as in recognizes

Hormonal Disorders Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Hormonal Disorders - Essay Example Also, patients with inherited defects of the body structures that produce steroid hormones, for example, hereditary adrenal hyperplasia and in particular those whose condition falls as inadequately controlled may have a high risk of adenomas. However, most adenomas do not link with an inherited sickness (Neil & Isaac, 2006). Even if adenoma stands as harmless, it has the potential to create severe health complications by compressing other structures through mass effect and by producing prodigious amounts of hormones in an unregulated, nonresponsive dependent behavior. This is referred to as paraneoplastic syndrome (Schwartz, 2002). The changes that occur in humans and cause adenoma are as follows: abnormality which comes as a result of excess production of hydrocortisone, a steroid hormone involved in reaction to stressing and energy steadiness. Adenomas that produce vast amounts of steroid hormones will cause clear symptoms. Huge amounts of hydrocortisone will cause Cushings conditions where too much mineral corticoid causes Conns conditions, and a surplus of male sex steroids creates unhealthy skin plus hair growth. Hardly ever hemorrhage can arise into adenomas and bring the pain in the flanks or back (Schwartz, 2002). Acromegaly refers to a condition that arises from the frontal pituitary gland when it produces excess growth hormones mostly at puberty (Neil & Isaac, 2006). A variety of disorders may increase the pituitarys hormone growth output, though most commonly it includes a hormone producing tumor referred to as pituitary adenoma, derived from a distinctive cell. It is true to say that the patient had acromegaly because of the symptoms the doctors found. The teenager at the age of 20 portrayed same symptoms of a person suffering from acromegaly. These symptoms stand as: enlarged hands and feet, severe headache, vision problem and

Analysis of Stone Henge Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Analysis of Stone Henge - Essay Example The meanings behind the large circles of stone can only be guessed at. As has been noted, earlier grave sites were normally aligned with the winter solstice, allowing a shaft of sunlight to enter the chamber only on that day and that hour. However, once the circle was removed from such a close association with death, it is argued that the larger standing stones became aligned instead with sunrise at the summer solstice. While the stones of Stonehenge are aligned to various astronomical times (Souden, 1997), there are several indications that the circles may have served a deeper purpose than providing a necessary solar calendar for people who survived on cultivating the land. One theory holds that the circles are indeed aligned with the summer solstice as a means of reflecting the joining of the Earth Goddess, symbolized by the womb-like shape of the monument and the supine, glittering surface of the Altar Stone, with the Sky Father, symbolized by the open air structure and the entran ce of light. Others, such as Christopher Chippendale (1994) suggest that the alignment is more closely aligned with the midwinter sunset. About the only thing sure about Stonehenge is that its meaning was complex and immensely important to the generations of Neolithic farmers who lived in the area. With the origins of the structure lost to time, archaeological evidence remains the only means by which today’s culture might discover the people who built the structure.

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC GROWTH PAPER Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC GROWTH PAPER - Essay Example Free trade was also established and its target was to prevent currency competition. For the next 30 years, it managed to be successful for the attainment of common goals but collapsed in 1971. United Kingdom's economy is currently the fourth largest in the world. Over the first half of the twentieth century, it had a peace making and policing role in the world economy. The world wars had brought about a contraction in the world international trade and investment and UK held a prominent position. But over the years, as globalization occurred, the prominence of UK saw a decline as the foothold of US in the world economy grew stronger after the world wars. In the years of 1920 and 1930s, UK maintained a fluctuating exchange rate regime but it created economic instability and created friction between countries. So at the end of the first half of the twentieth century, a fixed exchange rate system was followed to resolve balance of trade problems. However, in the agreement between US and UK in 1942, UK played a key role assisting US attain the aims of free trade and payments. In 1950, however, other European countries became stronger than the UK economy through economic integr ation. The Breton Woods agreement was also made on the outline plan proposed by the UK and US. In 1945, the world economy faced a challenge when a shortage for the American currency occurred. The US gave loan to the UK in exchange for the lifting of exchange rate controls from sterling. However, this did not turn out well as others started to save UK's currency and cashed it in US dollars. 8. Critically examine the view that the years 1948-73 represented a 'golden age' for the international economy. In 1948, Ludwig Erhard, a German politician, eliminated price fixing and controls on productions that had been enacted by the military rulers and advocated trade liberalization which recovered Germany from the after effects of the Second World War. The International Trade Charter was also agreed in the UN Conference but was not approved in the US. In 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community attempted to establish free trade for certain materials in European countries. In 1960, European Free Trade Association was formed and it also aimed at the liberalization of trade between member countries. In 1973, OPEC, an oil cartel restricted the supply of oil to the world market and raised the crude oil price. As a result of this restriction, exporters in Saudi Arab became rich overnight. The years of 1948-73 were certainly the Golden Age for international economy as the years were characterized by increased trading, due to reduced barriers and abandonment of protectionist policies. This be ttered the relationships between countries, increased the emphasis on specialization, raised productivity and thus, brought about economic growth in many countries 9. Why did the Asian 'Tigers' achieve such

Employee Engagement and Employee Voice Paper Essay

Employee Engagement and Employee Voice Paper - Essay Example It is however, not that very much different from employee voice (Kinnie, 2005:40). They both talk about employee involvement and influence towards increasing an organization’s productivity and retention. Employee engagement incorporates attitude and commitment (Edwards, 2009:91). This paper will seek to explore and discuss the various debates surrounding the concepts of employee engagement and employee voice basing its arguments on their definitions and nature in relation to managing employee relationship. The nature of ‘employee engagement’ and ‘employee voice’ in relation to managing the employee relationship As stated, employee engagement is all about behavior and attitude. In this case, attitude refers to employee commitment towards his job while behavior is merely the action to corporate. In other words, behavior in employee engagement can be what people commonly refer to as the extra mile taken by employees to ensure that the organizationâ€℠¢s decision-making process involves them (Buchanan, Fitzgerald, and Ketley, 2007:27). Analytical response to management consultants who happen to partake ‘employee engagement surveys’ it is true to say that engagement is mainly involves engagement with the organization an employee works for and engagement with the employer (Golan, 2007:29). Usually, those who measure employee engagement consider things like the time an employee wishes to stay with an employer, pride that he or she has for the firm that he works for, and their preparedness to exert extra pressure or effort on behalf of the firm (Redman and Snape, 2005:301). With reference to employee engagement and its definition, it is seeable that an employee’s commitment to a supervisor or a manager is more productive and a stronger link to recital compared to commitment towards an organization. This shows that it is not surprising to establish that some employees have multiple loyalties towards different thing s. In a number of situations some employees, in most cases professional workers such as lawyers or nurses, may appear ambivalent towards their boss but prove to be very passionate about their profession, team leader, customer, or co-workers (Kaufman, Beaumont, and Helfgott, 2003:48). One of the reliable cases that captures well this multi-faceted nature and behavior of employees in employee engagement practices is the Employee Engagement Consortium at Kingston University. The researchers stated that; the idea that every employee can make a substantial contribution towards the continuous improvement and successful functioning of all firm’s processes is the fundamental or rather primary concept of employee engagement (Purcell, 2009:44). Engagement is ideally about the creation of opportunities for workers in order to connect with their managers, co-workers, and the overall organization. It is also about creating an environment that motivates employees in view of wanting to buil d a relationship with what they do and care for doing a great job (Kinnie, 2005:61). This study notes the way in which it is evident that employee engagement enables workers to perform better compared to others, become less likely to leave their employer,

History of Tests & Measurements Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

History of Tests & Measurements - Essay Example This essay will highlight five themes in the work of Kubiszyn and Borich (2010). Highlight on implications on the educational sector as well as teacher ability in relation to these tests will be focused on. It is evident that controversies have been witnessed in this filed. According to Kubiszyn and Borich (2010), educators need comprehensive and practical approaches for conducting assessments on their learners’ achievements and progress in the classroom setting. Their work is, therefore, one of the most comprehensive one, that teachers can incorporate in their classrooms to focus on the changes required in the classrooms. 2.0. Effects of tests on the Classroom Teacher Tests play a crucial role in the teaching and learning of concepts in the classroom setting. It is through tests that Shepard (2000) argues that teachers are able to keep track of the progress of his or her learners. Through tests, teachers are able to identify the weak points of their learners as well as their strengths. For instance, standardized tests are well known for the identification of learners’ strengths’ and weaknesses. ... Tests, according to McMillan (2000) are useful for determination of the best content to be covered by the learners. 3.0. Tests as Tools Analysts give varying views on the utility of tests, as a contributor of positive impacts in learning. Kubiszyn and Borich’s (2010), work indicates that tests are mere tools that are simply set to as a formality and no evidence can proof their validity. Not all students are in a position to understand the mechanics of all tests that are provided in the classroom. For instance, a well informed student may miss out a few particulars, in a particular test, and fail the entire exam. Does this mean that the student is a failure in that particular test or not? In this context, therefore, tests may not be regarded as useful means of assessments in the society. Tests, according to Burger & Krueger (2003) have an off-putting effect on the teaching and learning process. Tests administered during the learning process consume a lot of time that would have been used in covering the contents of the syllabus. Learners have acquired the skills of cramming certain tests used in learning process especially if they are aware that there is likelihood that those tests may be repeated at the end of the course. In short, tests overemphasize on the ability to learn fundamental skills by the learners instead of inculcating skills that will enable learners think critically and analyze situations in the society. In fact, statistics indicate that once tutors emphasize on teaching with the use of tests, there is likelihood, that learning records no change, though the scores of learning may escalate as a result of rote learning. In light to this argument, therefore, it is evident that tests cannot be indicated to be the best ways of

Outline current policies and legislation relating to children and how these affect your practice Essay Example for Free

Outline current policies and legislation relating to children and how these affect your practice Essay First of all what is the difference between â€Å"policy and legislation†. â€Å"A policy is a document that outlines what a government is going to do and what it can achieve for the society as a whole. It also outlines any and all methods and principles that the government or any entity, for that matter, will use to achieve its directive. Legislation is another term meaning statutory law. These laws have been enacted by a legislature or the governing body of a country. Legislation can also mean the process of making the law.† Before being able to take a position held in a school I would have to be DBS Disclosure and Barring Services which are replaced the CRB check**. This is a regulation within the law which will be looking at an individuals criminal history ranging from convictions, cautions down to warnings. In the Protection of Children Act 1999 it states that all adults working with children must be DBS checked. Any person who is found to have their name on this list with a criminal offense regarding children will not be allowed to work within this area. I would have to work under the law of the Children Act 2004 which is there to make sure the welfare and health of the child is protected, this also includes the Every Child Matters in which all children deserve and should expect the levels of care and adhere to this. This also includes in this green paper allowing all services to share information on children that they have concerns over, this is to help all the services have a better understanding and have the knowledge of that particular childs risk history so to evaluate what the next appropriate step is to take for this particular child.

State of the Union Address Essay Example for Free

State of the Union Address Essay State Of the Union Address 2013 While President Obama will primarily focus on discussing the economy and jobs for Americans, here are five hot topics you can expect President Obama to address in his annual State of the Union address. 1. Immigration: With immigration reform picking up major traction, Obama will likely encourage continued bipartisan action to move towards comprehensive immigration reform. Current proposals by the Gang of Eight would bring about tough and fair reform for over 11 million undocumented immigrants to move towards citizenship. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office rated the plan as generating $48 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, while costing about $23 billion in additional welfare and health care payments. 2. Foreign policy: From the security of U.S. diplomatic posts to the U.S. policy towards Syria, Obama should have lot to say about the countrys foreign policy agenda. It will be interesting to see if Obamaa speechwriters will address the recent breaking news out of North Korea, where a successful third nuclear test was reported. President Obama called the action a highly provocative act that demands swift and credible action by the international community against North Korea. Of note are quick condemnations from Russia, Britain, South Korea and the United Nations. Will Obama use primetime to address the recent actions? Is the Iranian nuclear program of greater concern than North Korea? 3. Drones: Obamas drone program came under fire since last weeks Senate hearing regarding counterterrorism adviser John Brennans nomination to become director of the CIA. Will Obama use tme to justify the administrations policy of deploying unmanned drones to kill Americans suspected of being Al-Qaeda allies? 4. Gun violence: Background checks have picked up significant momentum across party lines and Obama is well on his way to pushing for comprehensive gun control and gun violence prevention. The NRA has been very vocal about Second Amendment rights, and recent events have pushed gun violence into national spotlight. Is this issue big enough to address in his primetime address? Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, mother of slain Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, and a young girl from Newtown, Connecticut will be present inside the Chamber when Obama delivers his address. 5. Climate Change: Obama came out strong during his January inaugural speech on addresssing climate change. He expressed the need to deal with the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. However, his address tonight will likely cover climate change as it relates to energy technology, new industries, and economic growth. With all these issues that need to be addressed, you can expect some mention of the above. Count his words and see how many times Obama addresses the above topics. But expect it all to be overshadowed by the big issue that has carried through Obamas tenure as president the economy, jobs and economic recovery.

The Reasons For Human Resource Planning In Organisations Business Essay

The Reasons For Human Resource Planning In Organisations Business Essay HR planning is a systematic analysis of HR needs in order to ensure that correct number of employees with the necessary skills are available when they are required (What is Human Resource, 2012). An organisations HR department complete several tasks relevant to its workers, include recruiting, training, career development and retirement services. HR planning is one of HRs most important aims because it deals with recruiting and the employment advertises. HR Planning includes collecting of information; creating objectives, goals, and making conclusion to let the organisation achieves its goals. The reasons of using HR planning is to find out how many employees do the company have; what kind of workers does the organisation have; how a organisation should use their available resources and how can the company stay and maintain its workers. HR planning makes the organisation to progress and be successful and it shapes an important part of management information system. HR planning is that it compensates uncertainty and alters. It provides extent for improvement and growth of workers through training. It assists to satisfy each need of the employees for the promotions, salary and improvement. However it helps to improve and develop human resource assistance in the structure of increased productivity, sales and income. Outline the stages involved in planning human resource requirements There some steps in HR planning where it used by organisations. One of the step is, collect data on the organisational aims and goals to find out where the organisation wants to go and how it wants to obtain to that position. The next step is to take stock of the current workers in the organisation. The HR record involved to data relating to numbers, ages, locations and analysis of individuals and skills. The next stage is auditing, this stage involves the analysis of the strategic environment in the light of the organisations strategic objectives. The audit looks at what had happened in the past and at current in terms of work turn over, training costs and lack. By identifying these information they can be able to forecast what will happen to HR in the future in the organisation. The anticipate step investigate the demand for, and supply of, work in terms of number, kind and quality of persons that the organisation should employ to suit their requirements and cover accepted turnover. The next step is HR resource plan, where organisations look at career planning and HR plans. The main reason of this is that the organisations goals may associate as close to as possible, or organise, in order to provide good possibilities for the growth of its employees. Monitoring and control is the final stage of HR planning, when the plan accepts then it has to be control. HR department has responsibility to follow up to view what is occurrence in terms and conditions of the available resources and they use this idea to make sure that they use all the available talents. Evaluate the recruitment and selection process in two contrasting organisations Recruitment is the process of finding out about someone who wants to work for an organisation, where the applicant fill the job application and sent to chosen organisation. Selection is the process of choosing suitable candidate to fill a post, where the organisation point out for which applicant they provide work on their organisation. Recruitment and selection is regularly offered as a programmed based on reason activity. See (Appendix 2) There are two types of recruitment internal and external. Internal recruitment is when the business seems to fill the available job from inside its existing employees. Internal sources of recruitment are available to an organisation where they use sources for transfers, promotions and re-employment of their employees. It also saves time and is cheaper. External recruitment is when businesses look to fill the available job position from appropriate applicant outside the business. It takes lots of time and it is expansive. The external sources of recruitment include Job centres, where they are responsible for helping the unemployed people and find jobs for them and it is free to use. A Job advertisement is another external source, where will found in local and national newspapers, notice boards, recruitment fairs. Recruitment agency is also an external source, where it offers employers with information of appropriate applicants for a job. See recruitment process in (Appendix 3) Tesco and McDonalds recruitment: Recruitment takes the attention of the right standard of applicants to apply for vacancies. Tesco advertises vacancies in different ways. Tesco first look at it is internal employees to fill a vacancy, which means that they look at their current employees for a move, either at the same level or on promotion. If there are no appropriate persons to fill the vacancy, then Tesco advertises the post within on its intranet websites. For external recruitment, Tesco advertises vacancies through the Tesco website, also through vacancy boards in stores, through offline media, television, radio, magazines and newspapers. Tesco look at the most affordable way of attracting the correct applicants. It is very expansive to promote on telly and radio and magazines, but occasionally this is important to inform the right people to get learn about the vacancies. Tesco makes it simple for people to find out about available jobs and has a simple application process. By using the Tesco website, applicants can find out about available jobs. They have online application where it fill by applicants and submit directly. Applicants can apply in Tescos stores with their CV or register though Jobcentre Plus. The store arranges a waiting list of applicants who apply in this way and calls them in as jobs become available. In other hand, in McDonalds recruitment plan, each restaurant has responsible to fill the vacancy. For recruiting employees, McDonalds use some possibilities. Vacancies are normally advertised in the restaurant. They use local job centres, career fair and other local facilities. It is very important to use effectual employ stuff with an understandable message targeted at the right audience. A recruitment exercise often generates more applications than there are positions available. McDonalds directs applicants to applying online at their website. People who cannot access the web then they can call the recruitment line, or pick up a pre-paid Business Reply Card from a McDonalds restaurant. Tesco and McDonalds selection: Tesco selection includes choosing the most appropriate applicant from those that apply for a vacancy, whereas maintenance to employment rules and regulations. Screening applicants is a very important part of Tescos selection process. This ensures that those selected for interview have the best fit with the job requirements. In the first stages of screening, Tesco selectors will look at each applicants CV. A well-written CV helps Tesco to consider whether an applicant suits the requirement for the job. An applicant who passes screening participate an assessment centre, where it take place in store and are run by managers. Applicants are given a variety of exercises, including team-working activities or problem-solving exercises. Applicants who are accepting by the internal assessment centres then have an interview. Line managers for the job on offer take part in the interview to make sure that the applicant fits the position requirements. See the process of Tesco selection in (appendix 4) McDonald selection is a bit different where the manager will select the applicants to be interviewed and will conduct the interviews. Their selection process starts with online psychometric test. This test creates a first achieve. The applicant then attends a first stage interview and is presented On Job Experience (OJE). This is a two days assessment in a restaurant, then a successful applicant goes to a final interview, after which the manager decides whether or not to employ the applicant. McDonald provides a welcome meeting for their new staffs. The welcome meeting gives an indication of the company, including: job role food, hygiene and safety training, policies and procedures, training and development. The effectiveness of the recruitment and selection techniques in two organisations This process attracting and recruiting the most qualified applicant, through system and personal invitations. Recruitment and selection can play an important role in determining an organisations effectiveness and performance, if organisations are able to obtain employees who already possess appropriate knowledge, skills and talents and are also able to make a correct guess about their future abilities. The recruitment and selection of employees is basic to the performance of an organisation, and there are convincing reasons for getting it right. Inappropriate selection decisions decrease organisational effectiveness, cancels reward and development strategies, are often unfair on the individual recruit and can be difficult for managers who have to deal with unsuitable employees. (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2006) In order to stay competitive, companies need to have the best talent possible. Tesco and McDonalds recruitment process usually start when employee in the organisation leaves and this opens up an opportunity to another applicant to fill their position. The major effectiveness of recruitment and selection for Tesco and McDonalds is that it help the decision making of the higher management to fill a gap; it helps them find the right applicant with the accurate qualifications and skills to be able to do the job not taking in to thought their race, age, gender, colour or nationality. The recruitment and selection process is important to both organisation but the process can be expensive. It is very time consuming as well and a lot of thought will need to be taken by the managers in order to choose the right applicant. Also Tesco and McDonalds transfers their employees work or place if the management wishes to transfer them to the place of their choice. However, advertising is an extensively accepted technique of recruitment and both Tesco and McDonalds use technique to provides different sources, information about the job and company for applicant and attract them to apply for job. Conclusion: Employees planning is very important if a business is to get together it is future demands for workers. It lets a business time to teach active staff to obtain on new responsibilities and to recruit new employees to fill up vacancies. Tesco wants to have employees with the accurate skills and behaviours to maintain it is growth and development and they provide different ways of applying for jobs and a reliable approach to recruitment and selection. McDonalds considers that the achievement of the restaurants and the company is attaining through the staffs it employs. The company aims to employ the greatest people, to maintain them by presenting continuing training related to their position and to promote them when they are ready. It is recruitment strategies; procedures and exercise reveal the companys strength of mind to complete it is aim.

The Edmund Fitzgerald :: essays papers

The Edmund Fitzgerald Since commercial shipping began on the five Great Lakes, there have Been six thousand shipwrecks. Half have never been found. There are three storms The sailors still talk about: The great storm of 1913 claimed 250 lives and 12 ships. The storm of 1940 claimed 100 lives and two ships. The storm of 1975 claimed only one ship and 29 lives. The wreck of 1975 remains the most mysterious and controversial of all shipwreck tales heard around the Great Lakes. The legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald is surpassed in books, and film and media only by that of the Titanic. Its mystery even led Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot to write a ballad about the vessel, â€Å"the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,† which in turn inspired popular interest in the story and the ship. Here I think would be a good place to look at some background regarding the ship. The S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was conceived as a business enterprise of the Northern Mutual Insurance Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Northern Mutual contracted with Great Lakes Engineering Works of Ecorse, Michigan to construct a â€Å"maximum sized† Great Lakes bulk carrier. The keel was laid on August 7, 1957 as hull no. 301. The ship was named after the President and Chairman of the board of Northern Mutual, and the Fitzgerald was launched June 8, 1958 at River Rouge, Michigan. Northern Mutual placed the ship under permanent charter to the Columbia Transportation Division of Oglebay Norton Company, Cleveland, Ohio. At 729 feet long, 75 feet wide and 13,632 gross tons, the ship was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, for thirteen years, until 1971. The Fitzgerald's normal coarse during its productive life took it between Silver Bay, Minnesota, where she loaded taconite, to steel mills on the lower lakes in the Detroit And Toledo area. It was usually empty on its return trip to Silver Bay. (Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum—www.shipwreckmuseum.com/about.html) On November 9, 1975 Fitzgerald was to transport a load of taconite from Superior, Wisconsin, to Zug Island, Detroit, Michigan. Not Cleveland, as referenced to in the song by Gordon Lightfoot. The final voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald began at the Burlington Northern Railroad Dock No. 1, Superior, Wisconsin. Captain Ernest M McSorly had loaded it with 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets, made of processed iron ore, heated and rolled into marble-size balls.

Weimar, Germany Essay example -- Germany German History Culture Essays

Weimar, Germany In examining great social and cultural changes in the modern West, many specific events come to mind: the Renaissance and the Reformation, the â€Å"discovery† of the Americas, industrialization, and World War Two. One such event, often overlooked, is the â€Å"Great War†, 1914-1918. Like every people affected by the expanse of this war, Germans were deeply affected and forever changed. As a social, cultural, and psychological reaction to World War I, the German people created the Weimar Republic, leading to a drastic change in German society and culture. To best understand these changes, a comprehensive analysis of World War I, before, during, and after, is necessary.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  What was Germany before World War I? Before World War I, Germany was a Great Power on the cusp of social revolution, like many other European nations. The relatively new empire was struggling with the new working class and the increasing movement for labor rights (Gilbert and Large, 15-19). Wilhelm II, the Emperor of Germany when World War I began, was moving his empire toward expansive imperialism and militarism. The political, social, and cultural structure of Germany before World War I was relatively new, but almost instantly powerful and potent.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The political structure of Germany, bred of Germany’s attempt at solid unification, was rapidly becoming outdated in the face of labor and the precarious balance of power in Europe, and would soon be put under by World War I. The Bundesrat, like the contemporary House of Lords in the British parliament, was manipulated by the landowning class. The Reichstag, created to balance the weight of the Bundesrat, was extremely limited: it could in no way interfere with individual states’ armies, being limited to legislation in the areas of foreign and naval affairs, as well as other relative trivialities like customs and mail (Gilbert and Large, 71).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In spite of Germany’s authoritarian governmental system, some indicators of social progressiveness were apparent. Members of the Reichstag were voted in, and eligible voters included all men over the age of 25. Germany was also ahead of her time in terms of workers’ rights (albeit no nation was timely enough to satisfy the rapidly-growing working class.)   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  For the most part, however, Germany was the symbol of authoritarianism. The Kaiser himself was an important symbol of this go... ... continued to show, what suffering in the trenches had meant. They had not turned themselves into heroes. They were not even capable of functioning in the society at the end of the war...many of the population did not like to have to face these war cripples. They did not wish to be reminded continuously of what war was really like.† (Gay, 90; italics mine)   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   From such devastation came Weimar. The Germans embraced their new freedom as a republic, feeling freed from those old constraints which, they felt, driven their country to ruin. The culture or Weimar symbolized the German disdain for the â€Å"old ways† of authoritarianism and monarchy. Weimar was modern, new, and as far as the Germans knew, not doomed to fall victim in another total war.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Weimar was the hope of the people. The Germans, who felt their whole way of live had been made evil by the world, and had been annihilated in the war, reinvented themselves—and like the Germans they are, did the job all the way. World War I bred this new republic. It was, if nothing else, a cultural and psychological reaction, leading to a drastic change that would shape the German future, and forever color its gaze upon the past.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place Essay -- Literary Analysis

Ernest Hemingway developed his own style of writing and follows it in â€Å"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place†. Hemingway’s elegance in writing is such that he indirectly gives all of the information to the reader without making any judgment; thus allowing one to create an opinion about every minute detail of the story. Hemingway illustrates his foundations of writing in â€Å"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place† by providing small clues that provide an indirect view of the larger meaning. Hemingway illustrates one of his elements of writing, omission, by providing two waiters and their exchange of speech and actions with each other and their customer, the old man. By doing so, he provides all of the information for readers to create an assumption about the individual’s traits; the saintly and even wicked. In the story we are given a scene with the old drunken man and the younger waiter. The old man asks for another brandy while pointing to his empty glass. The younger of the two waiters brashly began his dialogue with â€Å"Finished,† he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners. â€Å"No more tonight. Close now.† â€Å"Another,† said the old man. â€Å"No. Finished.† The waiter wiped the edge of the table with a towel and shook his head. The old man stands to leave, counts his tab, pays for his brandy, even leaves a tip for the waiters, and then begins to walk awa y with dignity even for his drunken stupor. (153-154) In this passage the reader is provided with several concepts that help to create the depictions of the old man and the younger waiter. Foremost, the reader is struck with the incivility of the old man; but, before he leaves the cafà © one is forced to become a sympathizer for the fact that ... ...ith him, probably would drink all night with him too. This is very typical of Hemingway in the fact that he cannot help but to create a story where the reader must not only have background knowledge; but also, be completely immersed into the story and become an omnipotent reader. With all of Hemingway’s elements of writing these are the most becoming of his typical writing style. They create a very broad sense for the reader and make it very imperative for one to become a central part of the story. Though he is a very exemplary writer Hemingway employs very artistic and almost novel forms of writing to his works of literature. Works Cited Cover Page Hemingway, Ernest. â€Å"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place†. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th ed. New York: Longman. 2010 152-155. Print.

Islam Is the Way of Life Essay

Thank yuo Mrs. Chairman. Well, good morning everyone. I would like to utter my very first salam to the honourable judges, respected teachers and fellow friends. My name is Noor Husna Bt. Ahmad Toha and I’m from the red team. The reason why am I standing here today is to give a speech entitled â€Å"Islam is the Way of Life†. First and foremost, I believed that each one of us had already heard the phrase â€Å"Islam is the Way of Life† quite often but what does it really means? So today, let’s make ourselves clear with it. Teachers and students, Islam guides from the cradle to the grave. It guides us in all aspects of life rather than just prayer and worship. The way of life of Prophet Muhammad P.B.U.H is the way of life of Islam. His 24 hours of life is the perfect model for the people to follow until the Dooms Day. His way of speech, dresiing, his dealing with the wives, children and people in general, his sitiing, walking, sleeping, eating and even his way in the lavatory are model to us. His dealing as the ruler of the Islamic nation, as the judge, as the commander in chief of army, as the head of the family are examples to follow. Prophet Muhammad had once said, â€Å"I have left two things with you which if you hold onto, you shall not misguided; The Book of God and my example. Humans are made to obey The Creator. Following the Sunnah are one of the many ways to show our devotion to Allah, and the most important is surely to be gracious and respectful to Allah’s Messenger as stated in the Holy Quran in the first sentence of Surat Al-Hujurat which means, â€Å"O you who believe, do not put yourselves forward before Allah and His Messenger, but fear Allah: for Allahis He Who hears and knows all things. We can see a lot of scams in the business nowadays which is very contrary to what has been taught to us by the Prophet. It is a compulsary to us to be fair and honest in trading. Deceiving is completely forbidden. Cheating in business does not benefits anything but it is more likely to gives bad effect to our own life.

363 Word on Being Disrespectful to Teachers

My 363 word on why I was being Disrespectful I’m sorry for my behavior that day. I knew that I was wrong when I left the room without your permission. I should have stayed in my seat. I should have left when you called my row or my name. I know that I was wrong. That will never happen again. The reason why I had left was because I was trying to beat miracle to the locker because she take too long. And she takes up all the space. I know that, that was childish.I know I need to be more respectful because I have been really disrespectful to you. And I promise that it will never happen again. Will I get those same grades bake that you didn’t get put in because I really need that? I have been working on my behavior. And the bad behavior I have been given will change. Sometimes when I have a bad mood I will be very disrespectful. Sometimes when I am disrespectful is when somebody has done something wrong to me.Or when another teacher or adult blame me for something that I do wrong. But what I did wrong doesn’t concern a bad day. I don’t remember if my attitude was a good attitude, but I know that my behavior was on point until at the end of the class period. We should respect our teachers because if we don’t respect people that are more complex and more experienced than us it will reflect on us earlier down in our lives.Teacher Cadet EssayAlthough sometimes our teachers may make a fool of us and humiliate us and sometimes embarrass us in the cruelest ways we should not retaliate in a bad way. If we know all the rules in the school we should report it to the principal or someone that is a part of the school and is able to tell the teacher that he/she is doing something very, very, very, very, very wrong. Instead we should always ask the teacher if you can please leave the room to go to my locker. I should have just waited until you called my row.

Simon Decision Making

Home [pic]http://jayhanson. us/america. htm [pic] Decision Making and Problem Solving by Herbert A. Simon and Associates Associates: George B. Dantzig, Robin Hogarth, Charles R. Piott, Howard Raiffa, Thomas C. Schelling, Kennth A. Shepsle, Richard Thaier, Amos Tversky, and Sidney Winter. Simon was educated in political science at the University of Chicago (B. A. , 1936, Ph. D. , 1943).He has held research and faculty positions at the University of California (Berkeley), Illinois Institute of Technology and since 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and in 1986 the National Medal of Science. Reprinted with permission from Research Briefings 1986: Report of the Research Briefing Panel on Decision Making and Problem Solving  © 1986 by the National Academy of Sciences. Published by National Academy Press, Washington, DC.Intr oduction The work of managers, of scientists, of engineers, of lawyers–the work that steers the course of society and its economic and governmental organizations–is largely work of making decisions and solving problems. It is work of choosing issues that require attention, setting goals, finding or designing suitable courses of action, and evaluating and choosing among alternative actions. The first three of these activities–fixing agendas, setting goals, and designing actions–are usually called problem solving; the last, evaluating and choosing, is usually called decision making.Nothing is more important for the well-being of society than that this work be performed effectively, that we address successfully the many problems requiring attention at the national level (the budget and trade deficits, AIDS, national security, the mitigation of earthquake damage), at the level of business organizations (product improvement, efficiency of production, choice of investments), and at the level of our individual lives (choosing a career or a school, buying a house).The abilities and skills that determine the quality of our decisions and problem solutions are stored not only in more than 200 million human heads, but also in tools and machines, and especially today in those machines we call computers. This fund of brains and its attendant machines form the basis of our American ingenuity, an ingenuity that has permitted U.S. society to reach remarkable levels of economic productivity. There are no more promising or important targets for basic scientific research than understanding how human minds, with and without the help of computers, solve problems and make decisions effectively, and improving our problem-solving and decision-making capabilities.In psychology, economics, mathematical statistics, operations research, political science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, major research gains have been made during the past half ce ntury in understanding problem solving and decision making. The progress already achieved holds forth the promise of exciting new advances that will contribute substantially to our nation's capacity for dealing intelligently with the range of issues, large and small, that confront us.Much of our existing knowledge about decision making and problem solving, derived from this research, has already been put to use in a wide variety of applications, including procedures used to assess drug safety, inventory control methods for industry, the new expert systems that embody artificial intelligence techniques, procedures for modeling energy and environmental systems, and analyses of the stabilizing or destabilizing effects of alternative defense strategies. Application of the new inventory control techniques, for example, has enabled American corporations to reduce their inventories by hundreds of millions of dollars since World War II without increasing the incidence of stockouts. ) Some o f the knowledge gained through the research describes the ways in which people actually go about making decisions and solving problems; some of it prescribes better methods, offering advice for the improvement of the process.Central to the body of prescriptive knowledge about decision making has been the theory of subjective expected utility (SEU), a sophisticated mathematical model of choice that lies at the foundation of most contemporary economics, theoretical statistics, and operations research. SEU theory defines the conditions of perfect utility-maximizing rationality in a world of certainty or in a world in which the probability distributions of all relevant variables can be provided by the decision makers. In spirit, it might be compared with a theory of ideal gases or of frictionless bodies sliding down inclined planes in a vacuum. ) SEU theory deals only with decision making; it has nothing to say about how to frame problems, set goals, or develop new alternatives. Prescri ptive theories of choice such as SEU are complemented by empirical research that shows how people actually make decisions (purchasing insurance, voting for political candidates, or investing in securities), and research on the processes people use to solve problems (designing switchgear or finding chemical reaction pathways).This research demonstrates that people solve problems by selective, heuristic search through large problem spaces and large data bases, using means-ends analysis as a principal technique for guiding the search. The expert systems that are now being produced by research on artificial intelligence and applied to such tasks as interpreting oil-well drilling logs or making medical diagnoses are outgrowths of these research findings on human problem solving.What chiefly distinguishes the empirical research on decision making and problem solving from the prescriptive approaches derived from SEU theory is the attention that the former gives to the limits on human ratio nality. These limits are imposed by the complexity of the world in which we live, the incompleteness and inadequacy of human knowledge, the inconsistencies of individual preference and belief, the conflicts of value among people and groups of people, and the inadequacy of the computations we can carry out, even with the aid of the most powerful computers.The real world of human decisions is not a world of ideal gases, frictionless planes, or vacuums. To bring it within the scope of human thinking powers, we must simplify our problem formulations drastically, even leaving out much or most of what is potentially relevant. The descriptive theory of problem solving and decision making is centrally concerned with how people cut problems down to size: how they apply approximate, heuristic techniques to handle complexity that cannot be handled exactly.Out of this descriptive theory is emerging an augmented and amended prescriptive theory, one that takes account of the gaps and elements of unrealism in SEU theory by encompassing problem solving as well as choice and demanding only the kinds of knowledge, consistency, and computational power that are attainable in the real world. The growing realization that coping with complexity is central to human decision making strongly influences the directions of research in this domain.Operations research and artificial intelligence are forging powerful new computational tools; at the same time, a new body of mathematical theory is evolving around the topic of computational complexity. Economics, which has traditionally derived both its descriptive and prescriptive approaches from SEU theory, is now paying a great deal of attention to uncertainty and incomplete information; to so-called â€Å"agency theory,† which takes account of the institutional framework within which decisions are made; and to game theory, which seeks to deal with interindividual and intergroup processes in which there is partial conflict of interest .Economists and political scientists are also increasingly buttressing the empirical foundations of their field by studying individual choice behavior directly and by studying behavior in experimentally constructed markets and simulated political structures. The following pages contain a fuller outline of current knowledge about decision making and problem solving and a brief review of current research directions in these fields as well as some of the principal research opportunities. Decision Making SEU THEORY The development of SEU theory was a major intellectual achievement of the first half of this century.It gave for the first time a formally axiomatized statement of what it would mean for an agent to behave in a consistent, rational matter. It assumed that a decision maker possessed a utility function (an ordering by preference among all the possible outcomes of choice), that all the alternatives among which choice could be made were known, and that the consequences of choosin g each alternative could be ascertained (or, in the version of the theory that treats of choice under uncertainty, it assumed that a subjective or objective probability distribution of consequences was associated with each alternative).By admitting subjectively assigned probabilities, SEU theory opened the way to fusing subjective opinions with objective data, an approach that can also be used in man-machine decision-making systems. In the probabilistic version of the theory, Bayes's rule prescribes how people should take account of new information and how they should respond to incomplete information. The assumptions of SEU theory are very strong, permitting correspondingly strong inferences to be made from them.Although the assumptions cannot be satisfied even remotely for most complex situations in the real world, they may be satisfied approximately in some microcosms–problem situations that can be isolated from the world's complexity and dealt with independently. For exam ple, the manager of a commercial cattle-feeding operation might isolate the problem of finding the least expensive mix of feeds available in the market that would meet all the nutritional requirements of his cattle.The computational tool of linear programming, which is a powerful method for maximizing goal achievement or minimizing costs while satisfying all kinds of side conditions (in this case, the nutritional requirements), can provide the manager with an optimal feed mix–optimal within the limits of approximation of his model to real world conditions. Linear programming and related operations research techniques are now used widely to make decisions whenever a situation that reasonably fits their assumptions can be carved out of its complex surround.These techniques have been especially valuable aids to middle management in dealing with relatively well-structured decision problems. Most of the tools of modern operations research–not only linear programming, but al so integer programming, queuing theory, decision trees, and other widely used techniques–use the assumptions of SEU theory. They assume that what is desired is to maximize the achievement of some goal, under specified constraints and assuming that all alternatives and consequences (or their probability distributions) are known.These tools have proven their usefulness in a wide variety of applications. THE LIMITS OF RATIONALITY Operations research tools have also underscored dramatically the limits of SEU theory in dealing with complexity. For example, present and prospective computers are not even powerful enough to provide exact solutions for the problems of optimal scheduling and routing of jobs through a typical factory that manufactures a variety of products using many different tools and machines.And the mere thought of using these computational techniques to determine an optimal national policy for energy production or an optimal economic policy reveals their limits. Co mputational complexity is not the only factor that limits the literal application of SEU theory. The theory also makes enormous demands on information. For the utility function, the range of available alternatives and the consequences following from each alternative must all be known.Increasingly, research is being directed at decision making that takes realistic account of the compromises and approximations that must be made in order to fit real-world problems to the informational and computational limits of people and computers, as well as to the inconsistencies in their values and perceptions. The study of actual decision processes (for example, the strategies used by corporations to make their investments) reveals massive and unavoidable departures from the framework of SEU theory.The sections that follow describe some of the things that have been learned about choice under various conditions of incomplete information, limited computing power, inconsistency, and institutional co nstraints on alternatives. Game theory, agency theory, choice under uncertainty, and the theory of markets are a few of the directions of this research, with the aims both of constructing prescriptive theories of broader application and of providing more realistic descriptions and explanations of actual decision making within U. S. economic and political institutions.LIMITED RATIONALITY IN ECONOMIC THEORY Although the limits of human rationality were stressed by some researchers in the 1950s, only recently has there been extensive activity in the field of economics aimed at developing theories that assume less than fully rational choice on the part of business firm managers and other economic agents. The newer theoretical research undertakes to answer such questions as the following: †¢ Are market equilibria altered by the departures of actual choice behavior from the behavior of fully rational agents predicted by SEU theory? Under what circumstances do the processes of competi tion â€Å"police† markets in such a way as to cancel out the effects of the departures from full rationality? †¢ In what ways are the choices made by boundedly rational agents different from those made by fully rational agents? Theories of the firm that assume managers are aiming at â€Å"satisfactory† profits or that their concern is to maintain the firm's share of market in the industry make quite different predictions about economic equilibrium than those derived from the assumption of profit maximization.Moreover, the classical theory of the firm cannot explain why economic activity is sometimes organized around large business firms and sometimes around contractual networks of individuals or smaller organizations. New theories that take account of differential access of economic agents to information, combined with differences in self-interest, are able to account for these important phenomena, as well as provide explanations for the many forms of contracts t hat are used in business.Incompleteness and asymmetry of information have been shown to be essential for explaining how individuals and business firms decide when to face uncertainty by insuring, when by hedging, and when by assuming the risk. Most current work in this domain still assumes that economic agents seek to maximize utility, but within limits posed by the incompleteness and uncertainty of the information available to them.An important potential area of research is to discover how choices will be changed if there are other departures from the axioms of rational choice–for example, substituting goals of reaching specified aspiration levels (satisficing) for goals of maximizing. Applying the new assumptions about choice to economics leads to new empirically supported theories about decision making over time. The classical theory of perfect rationality leaves no room for regrets, second thoughts, or â€Å"weakness of will. It cannot explain why many individuals enroll in Christmas savings plans, which earn interest well below the market rate. More generally, it does not lead to correct conclusions about the important social issues of saving and conservation. The effect of pensions and social security on personal saving has been a controversial issue in economics. The standard economic model predicts that an increase in required pension saving will reduce other saving dollar for dollar; behavioral theories, on the other hand, predict a much smaller offset. The empirical evidence indicates that the offset is indeed very small.Another empirical finding is that the method of payment of wages and salaries affects the saving rate. For example, annual bonuses produce a higher saving rate than the same amount of income paid in monthly salaries. This finding implies that saving rates can be influenced by the way compensation is framed. If individuals fail to discount properly for the passage of time, their decisions will not be optimal. For example, air conditioners vary greatly in their energy efficiency; the more efficient models cost more initially but save money over the long run through lower energy consumption.It has been found that consumers, on average, choose air conditioners that imply a discount rate of 25 percent or more per year, much higher than the rates of interest that prevailed at the time of the study. As recently as five years ago, the evidence was thought to be unassailable that markets like the New York Stock Exchange work efficiently–that prices reflect all available information at any given moment in time, so that stock price movements resemble a random walk and contain no systematic information that could be exploited for profit.Recently, however, substantial departures from the behavior predicted by the efficient-market hypothesis have been detected. For example, small firms appear to earn inexplicably high returns on the market prices of their stock, while firms that have very low price-earnings ra tios and firms that have lost much of their market value in the recent past also earn abnormally high returns. All of these results are consistent with the empirical finding that decision makers often overreact to new information, in violation of Bayes's rule.In the same way, it has been found that stock prices are excessively volatile–that they fluctuate up and down more rapidly and violently than they would if the marke t were efficient. There has also been a long-standing puzzle as to why firms pay dividends. Considering that dividends are taxed at a higher rate than capital gains, taxpaying investors should prefer, under the assumptions of perfect rationality, that their firms reinvest earnings or repurchase shares instead of paying dividends. (The investors could simply sell some of their appreciated shares to obtain the income they require. The solution to this puzzle also requires models of investors that take account of limits on rationality. THE THEORY OF GAMES In ec onomic, political, and other social situations in which there is actual or potential conflict of interest, especially if it is combined with incomplete information, SEU theory faces special difficulties. In markets in which there are many competitors (e. g. , the wheat market), each buyer or seller can accept the market price as a â€Å"given† that will not be affected materially by the actions of any single individual.Under these conditions, SEU theory makes unambiguous predictions of behavior. However, when a market has only a few suppliers –say, for example, two–matters are quite different. In this case, what it is rational to do depends on what one's competitor is going to do, and vice versa. Each supplier may try to outwit the other. What then is the rational decision? The most ambitious attempt to answer questions of this kind was the theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern and published in its full form in 1944. But the answers provided by the theory of games are sometimes very puzzling and ambiguous.In many situations, no single course of action dominates all the others; instead, a whole set of possible solutions are all equally consistent with the postulates of rationality. One game that has been studied extensively, both theoretically and empirically, is the Prisoner's Dilemma. In this game between two players, each has a choice between two actions, one trustful of the other player, the other mistrustful or exploitative. If both players choose the trustful alternative, both receive small rewards. If both choose the exploitative alternative, both are punished.If one chooses the trustful alternative and the other the exploitative alternative, the former is punished much more severely than in the previous case, while the latter receives a substantial reward. If the other player's choice is fixed but unknown, it is advantageous for a player to choose the exploitative alternative, for this will give him the best outc ome in either case. But if both adopt this reasoning, they will both be punished, whereas they could both receive rewards if they agreed upon the trustful choice (and did not welch on the agreement).The terms of the game have an unsettling resemblance to certain situations in the relations between nations or between a company and the employees' union. The resemblance becomes stronger if one imagines the game as being played repeatedly. Analyses of â€Å"rational† behavior under assumptions of intended utility maximization support the conclusion that the players will (ought to? ) always make the mistrustful choice. Nevertheless, in laboratory experiments with the game, it is often found that players (even those who are expert in game theory) adopt a â€Å"tit-for-tat† strategy.That is, each plays the trustful, cooperative strategy as long as his or her partner does the same. If the partner exploits the player on a particular trial, the player then plays the exploitative strategy on the next trial and continues to do so until the partner switches back to the trustful strategy. Under these conditions, the game frequently stabilizes with the players pursuing the mutually trustful strategy and receiving the rewards. With these empirical findings in hand, theorists have recently sought and found some of the conditions for attaining this kind of benign stability.It occurs, for example, if the players set aspirations for a satisfactory reward rather than seeking the maximum reward. This result is consistent with the finding that in many situations, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, people appear to satisfice rather than attempting to optimize. The Prisoner's Dilemma game illustrates an important point that is beginning to be appreciated by those who do research on decision making. There are so many ways in which actual human behavior can depart from the SEU assumptions that theorists seeking to account for behavior are confronted with an embarrassment o f riches.To choose among the many alternative models that could account for the anomalies of choice, extensive empirical research is called for–to see how people do make their choices, what beliefs guide them, what information they have available, and what part of that information they take into account and what part they ignore. In a world of limited rationality, economics and the other decision sciences must closely examine the actual limits on rationality in order to make accurate predictions and to provide sound advice on public policy.EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF CHOICE UNDER UNCERTAINTY During the past ten years, empirical studies of human choices in which uncertainty, inconsistency, and incomplete information are present have produced a rich collection of findings which only now are beginning to be organized under broad generalizations. Here are a few examples. When people are given information about the probabilities of certain events (e. g. , how many lawyers and how many en gineers are in a population that is being sampled), and then are given some additional information as to which of the vents has occurred (which person has been sampled from the population), they tend to ignore the prior probabilities in favor of incomplete or even quite irrelevant information about the individual event. Thus, if they are told that 70 percent of the population are lawyers, and if they are then given a noncommittal description of a person (one that could equally well fit a lawyer or an engineer), half the time they will predict that the person is a lawyer and half the time that he is an engineer–even though the laws of probability dictate that the best forecast is always to predict that the person is a lawyer.People commonly misjudge probabilities in many other ways. Asked to estimate the probability that 60 percent or more of the babies born in a hospital during a given week are male, they ignore information about the total number of births, although it is evi dent that the probability of a departure of this magnitude from the expected value of 50 percent is smaller if the total number of births is larger (the standard error of a percentage varies inversely with the square root of the population size). There are situations in which people assess the frequency of a class by the ease with which instances can be brought to mind.In one experiment, subjects heard a list of names of persons of both sexes and were later asked to judge whether there were more names of men or women on the list. In lists presented to some subjects, the men were more famous than the women; in other lists, the women were more famous than the men. For all lists, subjects judged that the sex that had the more famous personalities was the more numerous. The way in which an uncertain possibility is presented may have a substantial effect on how people respond to it.When asked whether they would choose surgery in a hypothetical medical emergency, many more people said tha t they would when the chance of survival was given as 80 percent than when the chance of death was given as 20 percent. On the basis of these studies, some of the general heuristics, or rules of thumb, that people use in making judgments have been compiled—heuristics that produce biases toward classifying situations according to their representativeness, or toward judging frequencies according to the availability of examples in memory, or toward interpretations warped by the way in which a problem has been framed.These findings have important implications for public policy. A recent example is the lobbying effort of the credit card industry to have differentials between cash and credit prices labeled â€Å"cash discounts† rather than â€Å"credit surcharges. † The research findings raise questions about how to phrase cigarette warning labels or frame truth-in-lending laws and informed consent laws. METHODS OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH Finding the underlying bases of hu man choice behavior is difficult.People cannot always, or perhaps even usually, provide veridical accounts of how they make up their minds, especially when there is uncertainty. In many cases, they can predict how they will behave (pre-election polls of voting intentions have been reasonably accurate when carefully taken), but the reasons people give for their choices can often be shown to be rationalizations and not closely related to their real motives. Students of choice behavior have steadily improved their research methods. They question respondents about specific situations, rather than asking for generalizations.They are sensitive to the dependence of answers on the exact forms of the questions. They are aware that behavior in an experimental situation may be different from behavior in real life, and they attempt to provide experimental settings and motivations that are as realistic as possible. Using thinking-aloud protocols and other approaches, they try to track the choice behavior step by step, instead of relying just on information about outcomes or querying respondents retrospectively about their choice processes.Perhaps the most common method of empirical research in this field is still to ask people to respond to a series of questions. But data obtained by this method are being supplemented by data obtained from carefully designed laboratory experiments and from observations of actual choice behavior (for example, the behavior of customers in supermarkets). In an experimental study of choice, subjects may trade in an actual market with real (if modest) monetary rewards and penalties.Research experience has also demonstrated the feasibility of making direct observations, over substantial periods of time, of the decision-making processes in business and governmental organizations–for example, observations of the procedures that corporations use in making new investments in plant and equipment. Confidence in the empirical findings that have been accumulating over the past several decades is enhanced by the general consistency that is observed among the data obtained from quite different settings using different research methods.There still remains the enormous and challenging task of putting together these findings into an empirically founded theory of decision making. With the growing availability of data, the theory-building enterprise is receiving much better guidance from the facts than it did in the past. As a result, we can expect it to become correspondingly more effective in arriving at realistic models of behavior. Problem Solving The theory of choice has its roots mainly in economics, statistics, and operations research and only recently has received much attention from psychologists; the theory of problem solving has a very different history.Problem solving was initially studied principally by psychologists, and more recently by researchers in artificial intelligence. It has received rather scant attention f rom economists. CONTEMPORARY PROBLEM-SOLVING THEORY Human problem solving is usually studied in laboratory settings, using problems that can be solved in relatively short periods of time (seldom more than an hour), and often seeking a maximum density of data about the solution process by asking subjects to think aloud while they work.The thinking-aloud technique, at first viewed with suspicion by behaviorists as subjective and â€Å"introspective,† has received such careful methodological attention in recent years that it can now be used dependably to obtain data about subjects' behaviors in a wide range of settings. The laboratory study of problem solving has been supplemented by field studies of professionals solving real-world problems–for example, physicians making diagnoses and chess grandmasters analyzing game positions, and, as noted earlier, even business corporations making investment decisions.Currently, historical records, including laboratory notebooks of s cientists, are also being used to study problem-solving processes in scientific discovery. Although such records are far less â€Å"dense† than laboratory protocols, they sometimes permit the course of discovery to be traced in considerable detail. Laboratory notebooks of scientists as distinguished as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, and Hans Krebs have been used successfully in such research. From empirical studies, a description can now be given of the problem-solving process that holds for a rather wide range of activities.First, problem solving generally proceeds by selective search through large sets of possibilities, using rules of thumb (heuristics) to guide the search. Because the possibilities in realistic problem situations are generally multitudinous, trial-and-error search would simply not work; the search must be highly selective. Chess grandmasters seldom examine more than a hundred of the vast number of possible scenarios that confro nt them, and similar small numbers of searches are observed in other kinds of problem-solving search.One of the procedures often used to guide search is â€Å"hill climbing,† using some measure of approach to the goal to determine where it is most profitable to look next. Another, and more powerful, common procedure is means-ends analysis. In means-ends analysis, the problem solver compares the present situation with the goal, detects a difference between them, and then searches memory for actions that are likely to reduce the difference.Thus, if the difference is a fifty-mile distance from the goal, the problem solver will retrieve from memory knowledge about autos, carts, bicycles, and other means of transport; walking and flying will probably be discarded as inappropriate for that distance. The third thing that has been learned about problem solving–especially when the solver is an expert–is that it relies on large amounts of information that are stored in me mory and that are retrievable whenever the solver recognizes cues signaling its relevance.Thus, the expert knowledge of a diagnostician is evoked by the symptoms presented by the patient; this knowledge leads to the recollection of what additional information is needed to discriminate among alternative diseases and, finally, to the diagnosis. In a few cases, it has been possible to estimate how many patterns an expert must be able to recognize in order to gain access to the relevant knowledge stored in memory. A chess master must be able to recognize about 50,000 different configurations of chess pieces that occur frequently in the course of chess games.A medical diagnostician must be able to recognize tens of thousands of configurations of symptoms; a botanist or zoologist specializing in taxonomy, tens or hundreds of thousands of features of specimens that define their species. For comparison, college graduates typically have vocabularies in their native languages of 50,000 to 200 ,000 words. (However, these numbers are very small in comparison with the real-world situations the expert faces: there are perhaps 10120 branches in the game tree of chess, a game played with only six kinds of pieces on an 8 x 8 board. One of the accomplishments of the contemporary theory of problem solving has been to provide an explanation for the phenomena of intuition and judgment frequently seen in experts' behavior. The store of expert knowledge, â€Å"indexed† by the recognition cues that make it accessible and combined with some basic inferential capabilities (perhaps in the form of means-ends analysis), accounts for the ability of experts to find satisfactory solutions for difficult problems, and sometimes to find them almost instantaneously.The expert's â€Å"intuition† and â€Å"judgment† derive from this capability for rapid recognition linked to a large store of knowledge. When immediate intuition fails to yield a problem solution or when a prospec tive solution needs to be evaluated, the expert falls back on the slower processes of analysis and inference. EXPERT SYSTEMS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Over the past thirty years, there has been close teamwork between research in psychology and research in computer science aimed at developing intelligent programs. Artificial intelligence (AI) research has both borrowed from and contributed to research on human problem solving.Today, artificial intelligence is beginning to produce systems, applied to a variety of tasks, that can solve difficult problems at the level of professionally trained humans. These AI programs are usually called expert systems. A description of a typical expert system would resemble closely the description given above of typical human problem solving; the differences between the two would be differences in degree, not in kind. An AI expert system, relying on the speed of computers and their ability to retain large bodies of transient information in memory, wil l generally use â€Å"brute force†Ã¢â‚¬â€œsheer omputational speed and power–more freely than a human expert can. A human expert, in compensation, will generally have a richer set of heuristics to guide search and a larger vocabulary of recognizable patterns. To the observer, the computer's process will appear the more systematic and even compulsive, the human's the more intuitive. But these are quantitative, not qualitative, differences. The number of tasks for which expert systems have been built is increasing rapidly. One is medical diagnosis (two examples are the CADUCEUS and MYCIN programs).Others are automatic design of electric motors, generators, and transformers (which predates by a decade the invention of the term expert systems), the configuration of computer systems from customer specifications, and the automatic generation of reaction paths for the synthesis of organic molecules. All of these (and others) are either being used currently in professional or industrial practice or at least have reached a level at which they can produce a professionally acceptable product. Expert systems are generally constructed in close consultation with the people who are experts in the task domain.Using standard techniques of observation and interrogation, the heuristics that the human expert uses, implicitly and often unconsciously, to perform the task are gradually educed, made explicit, and incorporated in program structures. Although a great deal has been learned about how to do this, improving techniques for designing expert systems is an important current direction of research. It is especially important because expert systems, once built, cannot remain static but must be modifiable to incorporate new knowledge as it becomes available.DEALING WITH ILL-STRUCTURED PROBLEMS In the 1950s and 1960s, research on problem solving focused on clearly structured puzzle-like problems that were easily brought into the psychological laboratory and that were within the range of computer programming sophistication at that time. Computer programs were written to discover proofs for theorems in Euclidean geometry or to solve the puzzle of transporting missionaries and cannibals across a river. Choosing chess moves was perhaps the most complex task that received attention in the early years of cognitive science and AI.As understanding grew of the methods needed to handle these relatively simple tasks, research aspirations rose. The next main target, in the 1960s and 1970s, was to find methods for solving problems that involved large bodies of semantic information. Medical diagnosis and interpreting mass spectrogram data are examples of the kinds of tasks that were investigated during this period and for which a good level of understanding was achieved. They are tasks that, for all of the knowledge they call upon, are still well structured, with clear-cut goals and constraints.The current research target is to gain an understanding of proble m-solving tasks when the goals themselves are complex and sometimes ill defined, and when the very nature of the problem is successively transformed in the course of exploration. To the extent that a problem has these characteristics, it is usually called ill structured. Because ambiguous goals and shifting problem formulations are typical characteristics of problems of design, the work of architects offers a good example of what is involved in solving ill-structured problems.An architect begins with some very general specifications of what is wanted by a client. The initial goals are modified and substantially elaborated as the architect proceeds with the task. Initial design ideas, recorded in drawings and diagrams, themselves suggest new criteria, new possibilities, and new requirements. Throughout the whole process of design, the emerging conception provides continual feedback that reminds the architect of additional considerations that need to be taken into account.With the cur rent state of the art, it is just beginning to be possible to construct programs that simulate this kind of flexible problem-solving process. What is called for is an expert system whose expertise includes substantial knowledge about design criteria as well as knowledge about the means for satisfying those criteria. Both kinds of knowledge are evoked in the course of the design activity by the usual recognition processes, and the evocation of design criteria and constraints continually modifies and remolds the problem that the design system is addressing.The large data bases that can now be constructed to aid in the management of architectural and construction projects provide a framework into which AI tools, fashioned along these lines, can be incorporated. Most corporate strategy problems and governmental policy problems are at least as ill structured as problems of architectural or engineering design. The tools now being forged for aiding architectural design will provide a basis for building tools that can aid in formulating, assessing, and monitoring public energy or environmental policies, or in guiding corporate product and investment strategies.SETTING THE AGENDA AND REPRESENTING A PROBLEM The very first steps in the problem-solving process are the least understood. What brings (and should bring) problems to the head of the agenda? And when a problem is identified, how can it be represented in a way that facilitates its solution? The task of setting an agenda is of utmost importance because both individual human beings and human institutions have limited capacities for dealing with many tasks simultaneously. While some problems are receiving full attention, others are neglected.Where new problems come thick and fast, â€Å"fire fighting† replaces planning and deliberation. The facts of limited attention span, both for individuals and for institutions like the Congress, are well known. However, relatively little has been accomplished toward analy zing or designing effective agenda-setting systems. A beginning could be made by the study of â€Å"alerting† organizations like the Office of Technology Assessment or military and foreign affairs intelligence agencies.Because the research and development function in industry is also in considerable part a task of monitoring current and prospective technological advances, it could also be studied profitably from this standpoint. The way in which problems are represented has much to do with the quality of the solutions that are found. The task of designing highways or dams takes on an entirely new aspect if human responses to a changed environment are taken into account. (New transportation routes cause people to move their homes, and people show a considerable propensity to move into zones that are subject to flooding when partial protections are erected. Very different social welfare policies are usually proposed in response to the problem of providing incentives for economi c independence than are proposed in response to the problem of taking care of the needy. Early management information systems were designed on the assumption that information was the scarce resource; today, because designers recognize that the scarce resource is managerial attention, a new framework produces quite different designs. The representation or â€Å"framing† of problems is even less well understood than agenda setting.Today's expert systems make use of problem representations that already exist. But major advances in human knowledge frequently derive from new ways of thinking about problems. A large part of the history of physics in nineteenth-century England can be written in terms of the shift from action-at-a-distance representations to the field representations that were developed by the applied mathematicians at Cambridge. Today, developments in computer-aided design (CAD) present new opportunities to provide human designers with computer-generated representat ions of their problems.Effective use of these capabilities requires us to understand better how people extract information from diagrams and other displays and how displays can enhance human performance in design tasks. Research on representations is fundamental to the progress of CAD. COMPUTATION AS PROBLEM SOLVING Nothing has been said so far about the radical changes that have been brought about in problem solving over most of the domains of science and engineering by the standard uses of computers as computational devices.Although a few examples come to mind in which artificial intelligence has contributed to these developments, they have mainly been brought about by research in the individual sciences themselves, combined with work in numerical analysis. Whatever their origins, the massive computational applications of computers are changing the conduct of science in numerous ways. There are new specialties emerging such as â€Å"computational physics† and â€Å"computa tional chemistry. Computation–that is to say, problem solving–becomes an object of explicit concern to scientists, side by side with the substance of the science itself. Out of this new awareness of the computational component of scientific inquiry is arising an increasing interaction among computational specialists in the various sciences and scientists concerned with cognition and AI. This interaction extends well beyond the traditional area of numerical analysis, or even the newer subject of computational complexity, into the heart of the theory of problem solving.Physicists seeking to handle the great mass of bubble-chamber data produced by their instruments began, as early as the 1960s, to look to AI for pattern recognition methods as a basis for automating the analysis of their data. The construction of expert systems to interpret mass spectrogram data and of other systems to design synthesis paths for chemical reactions are other examples of problem solving in s cience, as are programs to aid in matching sequences of nucleic acids in DNA and RNA and amino acid sequences in proteins.Theories of human problem solving and learning are also beginning to attract new attention within the scientific community as a basis for improving science teaching. Each advance in the understanding of problem solving and learning processes provides new insights about the ways in which a learner must store and index new knowledge and procedures if they are to be useful for solving problems. Research on these topics is also generating new ideas about how effective learning takes place–for example, how students can learn by examining and analyzing worked-out examples. Extensions of TheoryOpportunities for advancing our understanding of decision making and problem solving are not limited to the topics dealt with above, and in this section, just a few indications of additional promising directions for research are presented. DECISION MAKING OVER TIME The time dimension is especially troublesome in decision making. Economics has long used the notion of time discounting and interest rates to compare present with future consequences of decisions, but as noted above, research on actual decision making shows that people frequently are inconsistent in their choices between present and future.Although time discounting is a powerful idea, it requires fixing appropriate discount rates for individual, and especially social, decisions. Additional problems arise because human tastes and priorities change over time. Classical SEU theory assumes a fixed, consistent utility function, which does not easily accommodate changes in taste. At the other extreme, theories postulating a limited attention span do not have ready ways of ensuring consistency of choice over time. AGGREGATIONIn applying our knowledge of decision making and problem solving to society-wide, or even organization-wide, phenomena, the problem of aggregation must be solved; that is, way s must be found to extrapolate from theories of individual decision processes to the net effects on the whole economy, polity, and society. Because of the wide variety of ways in which any given decision task can be approached, it is unrealistic to postulate a â€Å"representative firm† or an â€Å"economic man,† and to simply lump together the behaviors of large numbers of supposedly identical individuals.Solving the aggregation problem becomes more important as more of the empirical research effort is directed toward studying behavior at a detailed, microscopic level. ORGANIZATIONS Related to aggregation is the question of how decision making and problem solving change when attention turns from the behavior of isolated individuals to the behavior of these same individuals operating as members of organizations or other groups.When people assume organizational positions, they adapt their goals and values to their responsibilities. Moreover, their decisions are influenc ed substantially by the patterns of information flow and other communications among the various organization units. Organizations sometimes display sophisticated capabilities far beyond the understanding of single individuals. They sometimes make enormous blunders or find themselves incapable of acting.Organizational performance is highly sensitive to the quality of the routines or â€Å"performance programs† that govern behavior and to the adaptability of these routines in the face of a changing environment. In particular, the â€Å"peripheral vision† of a complex organization is limited, so that responses to novelty in the environment may be made in inappropriate and quasi-automatic ways that cause major failure. Theory development, formal modeling, laboratory experiments, and analysis of historical cases are all going forward in this important area of inquiry.Although the decision-making processes of organizations have been studied in the field on a limited scale, a great many more such intensive studies will be needed before the full range of techniques used by organizations to make their decisions is understood, and before the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques are grasped. LEARNING Until quite recently, most research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence had been aimed at understanding how intelligent systems perform their work.Only in the past five years has attention begun to turn to the question of how systems become intelligent–how they learn. A number of promising hypotheses about learning mechanisms are currently being explored. One is the so-called connexionist hypothesis, which postulates networks that learn by changing the strengths of their interconnections in response to feedback. Another learning mechanism that is being investigated is the adaptive production system, a computer program that learns by generating new instructions that are simply annexed to the existing program.Some success has been achi eved in constructing adaptive production systems that can learn to solve equations in algebra and to do other tasks at comparable levels of difficulty. Learning is of particular importance for successful adaptation to an environment that is changing rapidly. Because that is exactly the environment of the 1980s, the trend toward broadening research on decision making to include learning and adaptation is welcome. This section has by no means exhausted the areas in which exciting and important research can be launched to deepen understanding of decision making and problem solving.But perhaps the examples that have been provided are sufficient to convey the promise and significance of this field of inquiry today. Current Research Programs Most of the current research on decision making and problem solving is carried on in universities, frequently with the support of government funding agencies and private foundations. Some research is done by consulting firms in connection with their d evelopment and application of the tools of operations research, artificial intelligence, and systems modeling.In some cases, government agencies and corporations have supported the development of planning models to aid them in their policy planning–for example, corporate strategic planning for investments and markets and government planning of environmental and energy policies. There is an increasing number of cases in which research scientists are devoting substantial attention to improving the problem-solving and decision-making tools in their disciplines, as we noted in the examples of automation of the processing of bubble-chamber tracks and of the interpretation of mass spectrogram data.To use a generous estimate, support for basic research in the areas described in this document is probably at the level of tens of millions of dollars per year, and almost certainly, it is not as much as $100 million. The principal costs are for research personnel and computing equipment, the former being considerably larger. Because of the interdisciplinary character of the research domain, federal research support comes from a number of different agencies, and it is not easy to assess the total picture.Within the National Science Foundation (NSF), the grants of the decision and management sciences, political science and the economics programs in the Social Sciences Division are to a considerable extent devoted to projects in this domain. Smaller amounts of support come from the memory and cognitive processes program in the Division of Behavioral and Neural Sciences, and perhaps from other programs. The â€Å"software† component of the new NSF Directorate of Computer Science and Engineering contains programs that have also provided important support to the study of decision making and problem solving.The Office of Naval Research has, over the years, supported a wide range of studies of decision making, including important early support for operations researc h. The main source of funding for research in AI has been the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Department of Defense; important support for research on applications of A1 to medicine has been provided by the National Institutes of Health. Relevant economics research is also funded by other federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve Board.In recent years, basic studies of decision making have received only relatively minor support from these sources, but because of the relevance of the research to their missions, they could become major sponsors. Although a number of projects have been and are funded by private foundations, there appears to be at present no foundation for which decision making and problem solving are a major focus of interest. In sum, the pattern of support for research in this field shows a healthy diversity but no agency with a clear lead responsibility, unless it be the rathe r modestly funded program in decision and management sciences at NSF.Perhaps the largest scale of support has been provided by DARPA, where decision making and problem solving are only components within the larger area of artificial intelligence and certainly not highly visible research targets. The character of the funding requirements in this domain is much the same as in other fields of research. A rather intensive use of computational facilities is typical of most, but not all, of the research. And because the field is gaining new recognition and growing rapidly, there are special needs for the support of graduate students and postdoctoral training.In the computing-intensive part of the domain, desirable research funding per principal investigator might average $250,000 per year; in empirical research involving field studies and large-scale experiments, a similar amount; and in other areas of theory and laboratory experimentation, somewhat less. Research Opportunities: Summary T he study of decision making and problem solving has attracted much attention through most of this century. By the end of World War II, a powerful prescriptive theory of rationality, the theory of subjective expected utility (SEU), had taken form; it was followed by the theory of games.The past forty years have seen widespread applications of these theories in economics, operations research, and statistics, and, through these disciplines, to decision making in business and government. The main limitations of SEU theory and the developments based on it are its relative neglect of the limits of human (and computer) problem-solving capabilities in the face of real-world complexity. Recognition of these limitations has produced an increasing volume of empirical research aimed at discovering how humans cope with complexity and reconcile it with their bounded computational powers.Recognition that human rationality is limited occasions no surprise. What is surprising are some of the forms t hese limits take and the kinds of departures from the behavior predicted by the SEU model that have been observed. Extending empirical knowledge of actual human cognitive processes and of techniques for dealing with complexity continues to be a research goal of very high priority. Such empirical knowledge is needed both to build valid theories of how the U. S. society and economy operate and to build prescriptive tools for decision making that are compatible with existing computational capabilities.The complementary fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have produced in the past thirty years a fairly well-developed theory of problem solving that lends itself well to computer simulation, both for purposes of testing its empirical validity and for augmenting human problem-solving capacities by the construction of expert systems. Problem-solving research today is being extended into the domain of ill-structured problems and applied to the task of formulating proble m representations.The processes for setting the problem agenda, which are still very little explored, deserve more research attention. The growing importance of computational techniques in all of the sciences has attracted new attention to numerical analysis and to the topic of computational complexity. The need to use heuristic as well as rigorous methods for analyzing very complex domains is beginning to bring about a wide interest, in various sciences, in the possible application of problem-solving theories to computation.Opportunities abound for productive research in decision making and problem solving. A few of the directions of research that look especially promising and significant follow: †¢ A substantially enlarged program of empirical studies, involving direct observation of behavior at the level of the individual and the organization, and including both laboratory and field experiments, will be essential in sifting the wheat from the chaff in the large body of theor y that now exists and in giving direction to the development of new theory. Expanded research on expert systems will require extensive empirical study of expert behavior and will provide a setting for basic research on how ill-structured problems are, and can be, solved. †¢ Decision making in organizational settings, which is much less well understood than individual decision making and problem solving, can be studied with great profit using already established methods of inquiry, especially through intensive long-range studies within individual organizations. The resolution of conflicts of values (individual and group) and of inconsistencies in belief will continue to be highly productive directions of inquiry, addressed to issues of great importance to society. †¢ Setting agendas and framing problems are two related but poorly understood processes that require special research attention and that now seem open to attack. These five areas are examples of especially promisi ng research opportunities drawn from the much larger set that are described or hinted at in this report.The tools for decision making developed by previous research have already found extensive application in business and government organizations. A number of such applications have been mentioned in this report, but they so pervade organizations, especially at the middle management and professional levels, that people are often unaware of their origins. Although the research domain of decision making and problem solving is alive and well today, the resources devoted to that research are modest in scale (of the order of tens of millions rather than hundreds of millions of dollars).They are not commensurate with either the identified research opportunities or the human resources available for exploiting them. The prospect of throwing new light on the ancient problem of mind and the prospect of enhancing the powers of mind with new computational tools are attracting substantial numbers of first-rate young scientists. Research progress is not limited either by lack of excellent research problems or by lack of human talent eager to get on with the job. Gaining a better understanding of how problems can be solved and decisions made is essential to our national goal of increasing productivity.The first industrial revolution showed us how to do most of the world's heavy work with the energy of machines instead of human muscle. The new industrial revolution is showing us how much of the work of human thinking can be done by and in cooperation with intelligent machines. Human minds with computers to aid them are our principal productive resource. Understanding how that resource operates is the main road open to us for becoming a more productive society and a society able to deal with the many complex problems in the world today. [pic]