ShantanuT01/DACTYL-Pretraining huggingface dataset:
The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) is one of the most influential regional organizations in the Middle East, comprising of six member states. These are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Like the EU, these states work incorporation in matters of international trade mostly because they have similar resources to export and similar import needs. However, this arrangement is primarily a trade rather than a political one, and, unlike the EU, each of the countries has full political autonomy. It has been suggested that the nations would best function if they were to operate as an economic and political entity like the EU, with members ceding some of their political freedom and sovereignty to the bloc. This would inevitably make them a more dominant force in both global politics and trade, just like the EU. However, this would not be an easy process, and there are numerous factors that need to be taken into account before such a move is attempted. With a powerful political block in the Middle East region, it is easier to come up with home-grown solutions because resources can be mobilized within the block to deal with regional security issues rather than wait for the US and NATO to take action. However, this advantage is overshadowed by a series of potential weaknesses that would emerge were the nations to cede their sovereignty. For example, despite the allure of a stronger regional economy, it is worth noting that all EU members were forced to bear disastrous consequences of the actions of a few nations in the recent economic crisis that crashed their economies. Ergo, the nations in GCC, as a political, economic entity, will be more vulnerable to economic crises because mismanagement in one economy could have far-reaching regional implications on the others. In addition, such an economic block would require a monetary union. While a common currency may appear to be a good idea on the face of it, there are several challenges that are bound to arise. For example, countries with strong economies will be disadvantaged by their neighbors with weaker economies. In addition, individual currencies may be weakened by a regional currency, which may result in compromising local economies for the sake of the bloc. Finally, many of these countries have established individual trading relationships with international trading partners, and the bloc may hamper such connections. Most of the nations are members of other trading organizations such as OPEC. Therefore, should GCC become an alliance, there may be a conflict of interest, and the economies of individual states may be negatively affected if they have to choose between old trading partnerships and the new union. At the end of the day, it must be admitted that there are distinct advantages to having a union like the EU. Nevertheless, in view of the aforementioned evidence, it is in the best interest of all stakeholders for the status to be maintained.
Introduction This essay will discuss the life of Urie Bronfenbrenner who was a psychologist. The essay will bring to light some of the important accomplishments he made in the field of psychology. Biography of Urie Bronfenbrenner Urie Bronfebrenner is considered one of the leading scholars who made many contributions in the fields of developmental psychology, child rearing and human ecology (Lang 1). Records show that he was born to Dr. Alexander Bronfenbrenner and Eugenie Kamenetski Bronfenbrenner on April 29, 1917 in Moscow (Russo 1). He lived for eighty eight years and died on September 25, 2005. He was an American psychologist who specialized in child development and co-founded a head start program that dealt with unfortunate pre-school children. At the age of six, Urie and his family moved to Pittsburg in the United States where they stayed for a short while. They later on settled in Letchworth Village, in a state institution for Mentally Challenged people where his father worked as a neuro pathologist and a clinical director or a physician (Russo 1). Bronfenbrenner attained his high school education from Haverstraw high school in New York after which he won a scholarship to Cornell University to study psychology and music. He is reported to have proceeded to pursue development al psychology after his first degree. By 1942, Bronfebrenner had completed his master degree in developmental psychology at Harvard University and a PhD at the University of Michigan (Russo 1). Bronfebrenner began his work as a graduate worker in developmental psychology after attaining his first degree. He started working for the US army immediately he attained his doctorate until 1946, where he served as their psychologist as well as in the office of strategic services. He later joined the US Army Medical Corps after he had gone through army training for the officers. Bronfebrenner as a psychologi
This paper is a summary of the article on whether affirmative action advances racial equality. The article was written by Glenn, C and Williams, W, with Glenn supporting the contention that affirmative action advances racial equality while Williams is against this view. According to Glenn, the prudent use of “race-sighted” policies is essential to reducing the harmful effects that are brought about by race stigmatization, with particular emphasis on the sense of “racial otherness” which is still in existence in the United States. Williams on other hand argues that using race as a preference leads to a reversal of the gains that have been made as a result of the civil rights movement; since it penalizes people and ends up causing more harm to those it is intended to help. Those who support affirmative action say that there should be a continuation of debate on the issue of racial justice even though there is no formal discrimination anymore. Glenn adds that the use of race–based instruments is characteristically the result, and not the cause, of the widespread racial awareness in the society. Therefore, saying that people should be blind to race is essentially a superficial moral idea. By not recognizing race because we fear others will start thinking in racial terms is living in denial. It is therefore impossible to understand the social orientation that defines the country without referring to race because these categories are embedded in the people’s consciousness and cannot be wished away. It is therefore important for people to be mindful of the race issue as they conduct their public affairs since race is more of a matter of cognition than normative. The opponents of affirmative action, on the other hand, argue that affirmative action penalizes innocent people simply because they are white, and in most cases, the result is that it leads to people who are not qualified being employed which results in more harm than good to blacks. Williams argues that the civil rights agitation for blacks is over and won. According to Williams the same rights that are enjoyed by whites, are also provided to the African Americans. They are treated equally within the law, can make contracts, sue and be sued, vote and associate, and travel freely. These were rights they did not enjoy previously. They further argue that previously, civil rights activists were against making race a basis for hiring, access to public facilities, and private organizations. Presently, they are fighting for restricted access. To Williams, civil rights groups have stopped focusing on the true meaning of justice and freedoms, especially those related to the association. Racial preferences in resource allocation often result in a zero-sum game, in that while the blacks end up gaining, the loss is transferred to innocent and deserving whites. For instance, affirmative action in university admissions often leads t
The External Environment and Strategy A business operates in an open system. It does not operate in a vacuum. The business has to consider all the dimensions of the external environment such as the regulatory/legal, economic and social environment. The company has to carry out a SWOT analysis. This is where the company looks at all the threats and opportunities in the external environment. It also analyses its strengths and weaknesses so as to know whether it is equipped to face the threats and take advantage of the opportunities in the external environment 1 . A strategy refers to the action plan in the company operations. It relates to how the company will conduct its business in order to earn higher profits 2 . It entails the kind of products that the company will produce and the markets that it hopes to penetrate. The external environment may adversely or favorably affect the business. The company however should ensure it is not caught unawares. It should be conversant with the trends in the legal/political, social and competitive markets. The strategic leader understands that the external environment is dynamic and highly turbulent 3 . He has to be flexible, having contingency plans dependent on what happens in the external environment. The Legal and Political environment This is an area that can be quite a threat to the company as it carries out its business activities. New laws can be enacted that can adversely or favorably affect the sales of the business. Research studies especially in the health sectors may reveal the dangers of certain components such as metal packaging for food. The companies may have to change its packaging and use glass packaging. Over time, the operations of a company may become unacceptable and the company may have to stop the operations. The country may also change its laws on protectionist laws and tariffs in the country. The company may find itself faced with intense competition as the rate of globalization increases. The company will have to change its strategy and be innovative in order to survive 4 . It may work well for the company that had been trying to enter certain markets but there were great barriers. Once the barriers are lifted the company finds it has great untapped market to sell their products. Companies that had ventured into certain countries through joint ventures had to leave when the governments decide to nationalize companies in differen
Introduction Different companies evaluate workers differently. Some organizations base the evaluation on the quality of the tasks that the employees are assigned against job description. Others use the behavior of employees at the workplace and towards the customers. Furthermore, some organizations use traits such as attitude of employees in evaluating employee performance. The company’s main points of concern in regard to the company’s current evaluation form are friendliness, workspace neatness, and attitude. Friendliness, as performance evaluation criteria, assesses performance of employee in respect to the relationships among the company employees. The company evaluates its workers by analyzing how friendly an employee is to other employees at the workplace. Workers who are unfriendly to other workers are graded low on the friendship scale. The workspace neatness of the employees is also considered during the performance evaluation. The company assesses the general neatness of employees’ workspace. Workers who have neat and well-organized workspaces are rated highly on the neatness scale and those with cluttered, disorganized, and un-neat workspace are rated low on the neatness scale. Finally, the company uses worker traits; such as attitude in the performance evaluation. The evaluating managers consider employee personality and attitude towards co-workers and the supervisors. Positive attitude to co-workers and supervisor coupled with respect for the supervisor attracts high performance rating. On the other hand, poor attitude towards co-workers and supervisors or managers is rated low during the performance evaluation of the company of employee. Employee performance evaluation is a complex thing that should not be ignored. There are circumstances under which performance evaluations are thought to be unfair and biased by employees. Employees are more concerned by with the quality of the evaluation in consideration than the process affects their promotion and increases in salaries. Therefore, companies today have placed emphasis on performance evaluation criteria that are fair and unbiased at the same time (Robbins, 2009). Performance evaluation uses criteria such as trait, behavior, and job results. Traits that are related to job performance are evaluated. According to Robbins (2009), such traits include employee aggressiveness, attitude, reliability, initiative, and personality. Employee behavior can be rated as being effective or ineffective. Organizations rate behavior as either being effective or ineffective depending on results that the behavior produces. Finally, job results are evaluated by ascertaining the quality of job results performed by an employee (Robbins, 2009). Traits criteria have a relative value in the determination of performance based on the traits of employees. On the other hand, behavior evaluation values the dimensions that are specific to certain behavior of individual. The behavior and task criteria have the value of clearly bringing out the actual importance of job success to the managers. The common value of the criteria is
Review your fieldwork experience thus far. What have been the challenges? What have been the rewards? What has surprised you about fieldwork? Currently, I do practicum training on Christopher Columbus at an elementary school in Elizabeth, NJ. It is possible to say that, thus far, my experience is positive as I have an excellent relationship with my site supervisor, who is an experienced teacher and counselor. She has been working in the field for the past ten years and always finds time to share her knowledge about counseling with me. My practicum site allowed me to attend parent-teacher conferences and professional development meetings, as well as gain skills in conflict resolution and classroom guidance. Moreover, I work with a diverse population, which is important to me because I am bilingual too. One of the challenges I have encountered is assisting children abused by their family members. With one such student, I had to organize a meeting between the representative of the Department of Child Protection & Permanency (DCP&P) and the boy’s father. Although it helped to solve the issue, it was hard for me to realize that the child’s mother was not present in his life and he lacked her support. The rewards of my experience have been acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for my professional development, meeting other professionals, and attending meetings and workshops. Besides, I have been happy to work with diverse students and feel appreciated as their school counselor. The primary issue that has surprised me about fieldwork is the high number of tasks related to students’ behavior, attendance rates, and performance. I had not realized that counseling would be a highly emotionally demanding job, implementing rating scale (IRS), individualized education programs (IEPs), and response to intervention (RTI). As you enter the final stage of your program, you will be balancing more with the internship, family, and academic assignments. Discuss your strategy to accomplish this and how you are practicing self-care Balancing between internships, family, and academic assignments may be challenging but I have developed a strategy to manage these parts of my life. First, I use time management techniques, such as writing down the things I am planning to do and assigning due dates for each of them. Second, I have a calendar in which all of my activities are listed, including meetings with family and friends. Also, while working on my assignments, I avoid procrastination because working under pressure is difficult for me. Postponing academic tasks can lead to poor performance and low grades; thus, I try to complete all papers in time (Kim, Fernandez, & Terrier, 2017). Self-care is a significant issue for me because it allows me to manage stress better and eliminate physical and emotional exhaustion. A school counselor is a highly demanding profession that requires dedication and discipline; counselors may experience b
Introduction Dairy queen is in Minneapolis. It develops licenses and services. Dairy queen introduced blizzard in 1985. Blizzard is used during summer due to its coldness. It includes flavors such as Oreo cookies, mint Oreo, chocolate chip cookie dough, and seasonal flavors such as pompkin pie. It has been facing challenges such as customer dissatisfaction of their products and services, unavailability of their products whenever the customers need them and inability to match the price and the quality. Daily queen has to analyze and change its pricing and distribution strategy to suit customer needs and expectations (Measured up, 2011). Effective pricing as a marketing strategy can be combined by other strategies in order to create a competitive advantage in marketing (West, 2010). Pricing strategy is a process of finding optimum price levels by considering the overall objectives, consumer demand, product attributes, competitors’ price, and macroeconomic trends while distribution strategy is the coordination of products to the target market. It is the structures for distribution channels, patterns for the design, choices of distributors, and the factors affecting the choice and management of the channels of distribution (Kaminsky, 2003). Dairy Queen Blizzard concerning pricing strategy Dairy queen pricing strategy is a seasonal discount. Price reduction is during a given time of the year, for example, they will give seasonal discounts only from April 19 -25th to celebrate their 25 th birthday with 25 different flavors. This motivates and rewards customers. The satisfaction derived from the product attracts more customers. They use promotional pricing: this makes use of technical price reductions discounts, pay later, special offers, and vouchers. Pricing based on the product purchase quantities. For instance, the organization could provide quantity discounts for large-scale purchase of the product. The strategy encourages large-scale purchase of the products of the company hence an increase in the revenue realized (Ferrel, 2008). Dairy Queen Blizzard concerning distribution strategy The owner of the Waren Burett asked court of California to change sales frozen desserts markets under a name similar to his, for example, in location analysis of their costs of examination of competitor pricing alternate by positioning. It uses e-distribution, and a variety of stores for example, Chicago store and other urban areas, and has a regional distribution manager at the international dairy queen. Break-even analysis is a basic tool, used to calculate the minimum quantity of a product, sold in order to cover the costs of producing and delivering the product (Ferrel, 2008). The price range for the product is$3.2 (Measured up, 2011) Appropriate pricing strategy Value pricing: this sets the pric
Introduction The social impact theory is the theory that is applied to individual and inter-group relations as well as tendencies that may be viewed in the course of human communication. In general, the theory investigates the influence of society on individuals and the opposite influence an individual may produce on society. it has been long ago proved that the interrelations of two individuals and influence they may produce on each other highly differ from the distribution of power that occurs between a group and an individual. Together with this, it is a fact that the more the size of the group is, the more effective the influence produced by it on a individual is. The opposite influence is also reducing with the extent of increasing the number of the group on which influence is produced. Scientifically speaking, it is “a model that conceives of influence from other people… acting on individuals, much as physical forces can affect an object” (Leslie). Main body There are two types of the social impact theories – first of all, it is the general theory that claims that all forms of social influence, whatever the specific social process, will be proportional to a multiplicative function of the strength, immediacy, and number of people who are the sources of influence, and inversely proportional to the strength, immediacy, and number of people being influenced (Latane and Drigotas). In contrast to the general theory, or as its consequence, there appeared a dynamic social impact theory that explores the relations between people within and between groups, juxtaposing the influence that may be produced by an individual on a group and vice versa. According to the opinion of Mabry and Sudweeks, the dynamic social impact theory has a disadvantage of not considering the relationd of space, time and communication modality, which makes it limited to a certain extent (Mabry and Sudweeks, p. 2). The social impact theory has found much support and became very interesting for research as its functionality has been proved in many spheres. There is even a method of utilizing the theory in order to manipu
Organizational structure refers to a way in which an organization or a company arranges its employees and duties. It establishes hierarchy and line of authority. An organization should adopt a structure that is in agreement with its objectives and goals. Matrix organizational structure employs a multi-dimensional approach (Amaral and Uzzi, 2007). It combines one or two of the other organizational structures. For example, it may combine bureaucratic organizational structure with functional organizational structure. This creates a dual reporting system in which people work together as a team while retaining a recognizable reporting system. Matrix structure creates teams of workers in an organization based on both the product and department or function. This enables the organization to maximize on the strengths of each employee while making up for their weaknesses. The teams work independently towards achieving a common goal. If a company produces two products for example, the practice is to departmentalize the production process of each product. All departments of each team would then work together to produce a high quality product (Braha and Bar-Yam, 2007). Managers have in the recent past restructured their organizations to accommodate matrix organizational structure. It is suited for large multinational organizations with several products and distribution channels. The operations in each country or market segment are consolidated into business units. Each unit has a manager who reports to the headquarters. Each of these managers acts with equal authority. The unit managers may in some instances report to the vice president who in turn reports to the president or the chief executive officer. Teams collaborate in formulating joint goals in order to project a one-company image. Matrix organizational structure has been subdivided into three sub-groups. Weak/Functional Matrix: this structure is found in large companies that use centralized structure as well. In this case, a project manager is given limited authority. The project manager often oversees certain aspects of the project but cannot make major decisions affecting the project. The functional managers exercise control over their units. The project managers make decisions in consultation with the functional managers. The traditional hierarchy is maintained. Each individual has a superior to whom he is answerable. Therefore, there is a clear command system. Each superior gives orders to the subordinates and leaves room for the subordinates to make some decisions. Balanced/Functional