The Glass Menagerie (Critical Article #1)

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association http://apa. sagepub. com Tennessee Williams: The Uses of Declarative Memory in the Glass Menagerie Daniel Jacobs J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2001; 50; 1259 DOI: 10. 1177/00030651020500040901 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa. sagepub. com/cgi/content/abstract/50/4/1259 Published by: http://www. sagepublications. com On behalf of: American Psychoanalytic Association Additional services and information for Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association can be found at: Email Alerts: http://apa. agepub. com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://apa. sagepub. com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www. sagepub. com/journalsReprints. nav Permissions: http://www. sagepub. com/journalsPermissions. nav Citations http://apa. sagepub. com/cgi/content/refs/50/4/1259 Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 jap a Daniel Jacobs 50/4 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: THE USES OF DECLARATIVE ME MORY IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE Tennessee Williams called his first great work, The Glass Menagerie, his â€Å"memory play. The situation in which Williams found himself when he began writing the play is explored, as are the ways in which he used the declarative memory of his protagonist, Tom Wingfield, to express and deal with his own painful conflicts. Williams’s use of stage directions, lighting, and music to evoke memory and render it three-dimensional is described. Through a close study of The Glass Menagerie, the many uses of memory for the purposes of wish fulfillment, conflict resolution, and resilience are examined. T he place: St. Louis, Missouri.The year: 1943. Thomas Lanier Williams, age thirty-two, known as Tennessee, has returned to his parents’ home. He has had a few minor successes. Several of his shorter plays have been produced by the Mummers in St. Louis. For another, staged by the Webster Grove Theater Guild, he was awarded an engraved silver cake plat e. He has retained Audrey Wood as his literary agent and with her help had several years earlier won a Rockefeller fellowship to support his writing. But Williams’s Fallen Angels bombed in Boston the previous summer.Its sponsor, the Theater Guild, decided not to bring the play to New York. Since obtaining a B. A. from the University of Iowa in l938, Williams has been broke more often than not. He has no home of his own. He’s led an itinerant existence, living in New Orleans, New York, Provincetown, and Mexico, as well as Macon, Georgia, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; faculty, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.Submitted for publication October 12, 2001. Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 Daniel Jacobs 1260 Culver City, California. He has subsisted on menial jobs—waiting tables, op erating an elevator, ushering at movie theaters—tasks for which he is not f itted and from which he is often f ired. His vision in one eye is compromised by a cataract that has already necessitated surgery. And just before moving back home from New York, he was beaten up by sailors he took to the Claridge Hotel for a sexual liaison.Arriving home in 1943, Tennessee f inds many things unchanged: his parents, Cornelius and Edwina, remain unhappily married and their bitter quarrels f ill the house. Williams must again deal with the father he despises. Tennessee is pressured by Cornelius, who opposed his return home, to f ind a job. If Tennessee will not return to work at the International Shoe Company, as Cornelius advises, then he must earn his keep by performing endless domestic chores. But it is the changes in the family that are even more troubling. Williams’s younger brother Dacon is in the army and may be sent into combat after basic training.His maternal grandparent s have moved in because Grandma Rose, now conf ined to an upstairs bedroom, is slowly dying. Most important of all, Tennessee’s beloved sister, also named Rose and two years older than he, is no longer at home. She has in fact been at the State Asylum in Farmington since l937. Diagnosed schizophrenic, she has recently undergone a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy to control her aggressive behavior and overtly sexual preoccupations. During this stay at home, Williams visits Rose for the f irst time since her surgery.He f inds her behavior more ladylike, but she remains clearly delusional. The lobotomy, Williams realizes, was â€Å"a tragically mistaken procedure† that deprived her of any possibility of returning to â€Å"normal life† (Williams 1972, p. 251). â€Å"The poor children,† he will write of his St. Louis childhood, â€Å"used to run all over town, but my sister and I played in our own back yard. . . . We were so close to each other, we had no need o f others† (Nelson 1961. p. 4). Now, for Tennessee, Rose is irretrievably lost except as a memory, alternately recalled in pain and shut out in self-defense.Williams cannot abide his situation, thrown amid his parents’ bitter quarrels, the slow death of his grandmother, and the terrible absence of his sister. His only escape: the hours of writing he does every day in the basement of the family home. Here, between washing garage windows and repairing the gutters on the back porch, he writes the â€Å"memory play† that he f irst calls The Gentlemen Caller and then Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 DECLARATIVE MEMORY IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE The Glass Menagerie.The play is a brilliant, profound, and intricate study of declarative memory and its psychological uses. DECLARATIVE MEMORY Declarative memory is the system that provides the basis for conscious recollection of facts and events. But this system, we know, is not just a warehouse of information, of veridical memories of actual happenings that can be retrieved at will. Rather, like an autobiographical play, declarative memory is a creative construction forged from past events and from the fears, wishes, and conf licts of the one who is remembering.As Schacter (1995) notes, â€Å"The way you remember depends on the purposes and goals at the time you attempt to recall it. You help paint the picture during the act of recalling† (p. 23). It was just this complex and creative aspect of memory formation that led Freud (l899) to write that â€Å"our childhood memories show us our earliest years but as they appeared in later periods when memory was aroused† (p. 322). The stories we tell of our lives are as much about meanings as they are about facts. In the subjective and selective telling of the past, our histories are not just recalled, but reconstructed.History is not recounted, but remade. Williams understood this when he wro te, in the stage directions of The Glass Menagerie, that â€Å"memory takes a lot of license, it omits some details, others are exaggerated to the emotional value of the article it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart† (p. 21). Williams has Tom Wingf ield, the play’s protagonist, tell us this. In his opening speech, Tom is both creative artist and unreliable rememberer: â€Å"I have tricks in my pockets. I have things up my sleeve. . . . I give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion† (p. 2). In this way, Williams warns us from the play’s beginning that memory is a tricky business—f ickle, changeable, susceptible to distortion and embellishment, but always true to the current emotional needs of the rememberer. This paper is an exploration of the emotional needs of the rememberer—of Tom Wingfield, the rememberer in the play, and Tom Williams, the rememberer as writer. Williams could have chosen any f irst name for his protagonist. He chose his own to emphasize the loosening of boundaries between fact and f iction.It is as though he is telling us that autobiography—which is, after all, organized declarative memory—is Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 1261 Daniel Jacobs 1262 an elaborate f iction based on facts. And that f iction (the creative use of memory) is at its heart emotional autobiography. Both Tom Wingf ield and Tom Williams carry a burden of guilt for leaving the family, especially a disabled sister, and have a need to justify their behavior through the use of recollection.Both Toms live with deep sorrow alongside a wish to retaliate against loved ones who have disappointed them. Remembering is for both Toms, as for all of us, a coat of many colors, worn to set us apart from others as well as link us to them, to justify our choices, to take revenge on others, to compete with them, to kill them once again, or to resur rect them from the grave. The distortions and selective uses of memory are as manifold as the needs of the rememberer. Williams endows each character in his play with his or her own dynamic uses of memory.Amanda can escape the harshness of her current situation by evoking memories of a triumphant past. She is like a patient Kris (l956b) describes who â€Å"while the tensions of the present were threatening . . . was master of those conjured up in recollection† (p. 305). Amanda’s use of memories is aggressive as well, used as a weapon against her husband and children. In constantly contrasting the memories of a happy youth with the unhappiness of her marriage and the bleakness of her children’s lives, her anger and competitiveness take a brutal form. Unlike Amanda, her daughter Laura, who is crippled, has relatively few memories.But the memory of Jim, the gentleman caller, provides her a modicum of comfort. In a pale and pathetic imitation of her mother’s recollections of a house f illed with jonquils, she recalls that Jim gives her a single bouquet of sorts, the sobriquet â€Å"blue roses. † It is a nickname derived from his psychologically intuitive misunderstanding of the illness â€Å"pleurosis,† which had kept Laura out of school. She cannot compete with her mother in the fond memory department and retreats to the concrete but fragile satisfactions of her glass menagerie, where memory and imagination are safely stored—until Jim arrives.The gentleman caller is a man who lives in the present and seems to have little use for the past. It is the future to which he looks. In fact, one feels that memory of his high school greatness are both a satisfaction and a threat to him. For he, like John Updike’s Harry Angstrom (1960) will never experience the glory days of the past. He says as much to Laura: â€Å"But just look around you and you will see lots of people disappointed as you are. For instance, I had h oped when I was going to high school that I would be further along at this time, six years later, Downloaded from http://apa. agepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 DECLARATIVE MEMORY IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE than I am now. You remember that wonderful write-up I had in ‘The Torch’ † (p. 94). While Amanda revels in her triumphant past as a way of dealing with the present, Jim runs from his into the future. Seeing in the crippled Laura some aspect of his own feared limitations, he tries to help her overcome hers through encouragement and f inally a kiss. His inability to help her in the end may be a harbinger of his own failures.MEMORY AND LOSS Williams was aware also that declarative memory is paradoxical in that it resurrects and keeps alive in the present what is dead and gone forever. Referring to this paradoxical aspect of memory, he wrote that â€Å"when Wordsworth speaks of daffodils or Shelley of the skylark or Hart Crane of the delica te and inspiring structure of the Brooklyn Bridge, the screen imagism is not so opaque that one cannot surmise behind it the ineluctable form of Ophelia† (Leverich 1995, p. 536). The very presence of memory implies loss.Memory, if you will, is the exquisite lifelike corpse that both denies and acknowledges what has passed away. There is for all of us that double vision that memory imparts, one that at once has the capacity to help and to hurt. Declarative memory provides coherence and direction to our lives, but also reminds us that our path inevitably leads to disintegration and death. The daffodils recollected in tranquility are, at the same time, Ophelia’s garland. Amanda Wingf ield’s recollection of her past social triumphs only reminds us of how much time has passed and how many hopes have been dashed.Laura’s attachment to the happy memories of childhood innocence represented by her glass menagerie only makes harsher the realities of her adult life an d the bleakness of her future. Laura and Amanda are represented as having a choice between the infantile omnipotence of their past or a feeling of victimization in the present. When Amanda stirs up old memories as a hedge against the painful present and uncertain future, they are only partially effective. For the contrast between past and present, and the knowledge that what is past will never come again, lead only to further depression and anxiety (Schneiderman 1986).Similarly, behind Tom the protagonist’s memory of Laura at home lies, for Tom the author, the real Rose in a current state of institutionalized madness. Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 1263 Daniel Jacobs MEMORY AND RESILIENCE 1264 Davis (2001) points out the contribution declarative memory can make to resilience â€Å"through soothing af fects that are evoked in recalling a declarative memory of a loving relationship with a parent or other important pe rson† (p. 459).Such memories can grow directly out of warm relationships or â€Å"they can be achieved through retrieving and modifying memory of more problematic attachments† (p. 466). Davis illustrates his point with the example of Mr. Byrne, a subject in a longitudinal study of adult development. Davis focuses on the fact that in interviews at different times in adult life, Mr. Byrne’s memories of his father changed. At age forty-six, surrounded by a supportive community and family, Mr. Byrne had no memories of his alcoholic and neglectful father and did not think his father’s being a f ireman had inf luenced his own decision to become one.At sixty-six, retired and with his children grown, Mr. Byrne â€Å"had succeeded in ‘f inding’ his father inside as a sustaining inner object in declarative memory (p. 465). He did so through creating or retrieving warm memories of their times together in the f irehouse and by ‘misrememberingâ€⠄¢ the humiliating events of his father’s death so as to have a more positive image of him. Mr. Byrne’s father had committed suicide, alone and away from the family. But late in life, Mr. Byrne spoke frequently of his father’s having taken him to the f ire station when he was a youngster.He was now sure these happy times with his father had inf luenced his decision to become a f ireman himself. He placed his father’s death in a family setting and claimed to have been the one who found him. Davis points out that we often create the memories we need in order to maintain psychological resilience and mental health. Whatever good experiences Mr. Byrne did have with a diff icult and neglectful father seem to have been magnif ied through the lens of memory aided by imagination in the service of wish fulf illment.It is an example of what Kris (1956a) meant by describing autobiographical memory as telescopic, dynamic, and lacking in autonomy: â€Å"our autobiogra phical memory is in a constant state of f lux, is constantly being reorganized, and is constantly being subject to the changes which the tensions of the present tend to impose† (p. 299). In a way, Williams does the same thing by creating a memory play. Lonely, guilty over his sister’s fate, f inding St. Louis and his family unbearable, Williams begins writing a play that both ref lects his current Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. om at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 DECLARATIVE MEMORY IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE suffering and at the same time assuages it. In writing The Glass Menagerie, he creates for himself one of those delicate glass animals— a small tender bit of illusion that relieves him of the austere pattern of life as it is lived in the present and makes it more bearable. He does so not by setting his play in the harsh realities of the present, too painful to write about, but in creatively altered memory. Sitting at his writing table, Wil liams reclaims his sister (Laura in the play) from the State Asylum and places her at home again.She is not frankly delusional and lobotomized. She is not even in Rose’s presurgical state of illness—a state of aggressiveness and talkativeness made worse by utter and unending vulgarity. Instead, she is portrayed as painfully shy, weak, and schizoid. And Cornelius, the real-life father he must face daily, is gone. Gone from the play for dramatic purposes to be sure: the play would lose a certain edge were there another breadwinner in the house. But in the play, Williams expresses his wish to reconstruct reality and, in this play of memory and desire, rid himself of the old man.Yet he is not entirely gone, for the father’s picture hangs on the wall, like Hamlet’s ghost, reminding us of a son’s ambivalent longing for a father. For in 1943 and throughout his life, Williams longed for some man to comfort and help him. In the play, his own wish for a supp ortive, loving father is transformed into the wish for the gentleman caller—someone who, unlike his father, will help Laura, satisfy Amanda, and, by his assuring presence, bless Tom’s own departure. He is not only the person Williams longs for, but also the one he longs to be, though he knows it is a role he can never play.It is no accident then that Jim, the gentleman caller, conveys an uncomfortable uncertainty about his future. He is, in a sense, the failed high school â€Å"hero,† with perhaps unrealizable dreams for the future. Jim already hints that the realities of life may not meet his expectations. He expresses resentment at having to work at two jobs: his work and his marriage, in which he has to â€Å"punch the clock† every night with Betty. He is f lirtatious with Laura, even going so far as to kiss her, showing a clear sympathy and attraction to women other than his f iancee.Tennessee’s father, a bitter man from a prominent Southern fa mily, a heavy drinker and a womanizer, while banned from the play, haunts it through his portrait and is resurrected in the f lesh in Jim, who is likewise disappointing and cannot be counted on and who, in the future, may come to resemble Cornelius. In his own life, Williams found and lost gentlemen callers hundreds of times over. And when he was Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 1265 Daniel Jacobs ot looking for the gentleman caller, he was being one, abandoning and disappointing those who loved him. The only one he was truly faithful to was Rose. Memories are like dreams or fantasies in that all the characters remembered at a particular moment may represent aspects of the rememberer’s own personality. Amanda’s steely will to survive is ref lected in Tom’s stubborn insistence on leaving. Laura’s fragility and submissiveness are what he must try to get away from in himself. Jim is the artist manque , the average joe Tom fears he will become if he doesn’t leave. THE STAGING OF MEMORY 1266Through the very structure of his play and the physical placement of its characters, Williams shows us that we cannot have a past without a present or a present uninf luenced by the past. He takes us back and forth in time as Tom Wingf ield literally steps in and out of the railroad f lat of his memory. He both ref lects on his past and participates in it, as his memories come alive. All the play’s characters slip in and out of memory, from present to past and back again, as they interact with one another, forging their current identity and present relationship in the anvil of a past they selectively remember.The stage set that Williams proposed concretizes the alternating forward and backward movement of time that takes place in the characters’ and in all of our minds. Tom’s opening soliloquy is stage front in the present and is often played outside the apartment. T he scene that follows is from the past, set in a dining room at the back of the stage, as if to emphasize the remoteness of memory. The f igures move backward and forward on stage, like memories themselves, coming into consciousness and then receding. Lighting is used in a similar way: to emphasize through spotlighting the highly selective and highly cathected aspects of memory.Lightness and darkness, dimness and clarity, play an important role in the ambience of the play, heightening the shifting play of memory. Williams is specif ic about the use of lighting in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie: â€Å"The lighting in the play is not realistic. In keeping with the atmosphere of memory, the stage is dim. Shafts of light are focused on selected areas or actors, sometimes in contradistinction to what is the apparent center. . . . A free and imaginative use Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. om at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 DECLARATIVE MEMORY IN THE G LASS MENAGERIE of light can be of enormous value in giving mobile, plastic quality to plays of more or less static nature† (Williams 1945, p. 10). By commissioning an original musical score, Williams makes a deliberate attempt to evoke memory in members of the audience— memories of their own youthful stirrings, with all the fears and pleasures that attend them. Schacter (1996) notes that it is the memories of adolescence and early adulthood that are most often retained as we grow older.In asking Paul Bowles to write a new piece of music for his play, Williams, I think, is playing with the notion that memory is a new creation, similar to Bowles’s new music, Williams counts on the fact that while the score has never been heard before by the audience, it nevertheless feels familiar and seems a part of one’s previous experience. While the music may stimulate declarative memories of young adulthood in the audience, by its wordlessness it is designed to evoke no ndeclarative memory experienced as a feeling state (Davis 2001).By using a new score rather than relying on familiar tunes, Williams insists that memory is an invention of the present rather than a reproduction of the past. CONCLUSION 1267 So we have Tom Williams in his basement room writing about Tom Wingf ield. His protagonist is thrust both forward and backward in time: Tom Wingf ield in 1945 is ref lecting on a time before World War II began. Tom Wingf ield is Tennessee and not him at the same time. The memories Williams calls forth from his own experiences are transformed in ways that are not only dramatically but psychologically necessary for the author.Rendering the truth through selective and transformed memory, Williams creates his own glass menagerie to which he could each day retreat from the harsh realities of his life in St. Louis in l943. He creates fragile f igures he can control, moving them around the imagined setting of creative memory. In creating the play, he can always be near Rose. On the page and on the stage, the two are bound forever, like f igures on a Grecian urn. At the same time, the play is a justif ication for Tennessee’s departure from the family, a plea for understanding as to why he must leave the altered Rose (his castrated self) behind and pursue his own path.Freud (1908) pointed out how both in creative writing and fantasy â€Å"past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 Daniel Jacobs 1268 them† (p. 141). In the process of writing The Glass Menagerie, the infantile wish to reunite with Rose, to rid himself of a hateful father, and to overcome the threats of castration that Rose’s situation and his own imply, f inds a solution to his torments.He does what Tom Wingf ield does in the play. He leaves. By May of l943, Tennessee is on his way to Hollywood to b ecome, for a short time, a screenwriter. But like Tom Wingf ield, Tennessee cannot leave his past behind. He will be as faithful to Rose as Tom Wingf ield is to Laura when at the play’s end he says, â€Å"I tried to leave you behind me, but I am much more faithful than I intended to be† (p. 115). Of their relationship, Rasky (l986) wrote, â€Å"Just as Siamese twins may be joined at the hip or breastbone, Tennessee was joined to his sister, Rose, by the heart. . . In the history of love, there has seldom been such devotion as that which Tennessee showed his lobotomized sister† (p. 51). Peter Altman, former director of Boston’s Huntington Theater, points out how with the writing of The Glass Menagerie Williams blows out the candles on an overtly autobiographical form of writing and moves on to create full-length plays less obviously reliant on the concrete details of his own history (private communication, 1997). While he could never psychologically free h imself from the traumatic events of his upbringing, artistically he was able to move ahead.By creating within and through the play his own glass menagerie, where the characters are f ixed and can live forever in troubled togetherness, he grants himself permission to leave St. Louis once again. Such a creation is akin to Kris’s description of the personal myth (1956a): â€Å"A coherent set of autobiographical memories, a picture of one’s course of life as part of the self-representation [that] has attracted a particular investment, it is defensive inasmuch as it prevents certain experiences and groups of impulses from reaching consciousness. At the same time, the autobiographical self-image has taken the place of a repressed fantasy . . † (p. 294). But in the patients Kris described, sections of personal history had been repressed and the autobiographical myth created to maintain that repression. In Williams’s case, he is quite conscious of the distortions in his â€Å"memory play,† but creativity serves a function for the artist similar to that served by personal myth in Kris’s patients. Williams is able to separate further from his family by keeping himself, through his memory play, attached to them forever, selectively remembered and frozen in time in a way painful, yet acceptable, to him.By writing the play, a visual representation of memory and Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 DECLARATIVE MEMORY IN THE GLASS MENAGERIE wish, Williams creates a permanent wish-fulf illing hallucination providing gratif ication and psychic survival (see Freud 1908). Of his sister Rose’s collection of glass animals, which was transformed into Laura’s glass menagerie, Williams wrote that â€Å"they stood for all the small tender things (including, I think, happy memories) that relieve the austere pattern of life and make it endurable to the sensitive.The areaway [t he alley behind his family’s f lat in St. Louis, where cats were torn to pieces by dogs] was one thing—my sister’s white curtains and tiny menagerie of glass were another. Somewhere between them was the world we lived in† (Nelson 1961, p. 8). What enables Williams to survive psychically and adds to his resilience in St. Louis in l943 is, I believe, his ability to create a space between the bitter realities of family life and his impulse to f lee and forget it all—to blow out the candles of memory.That space was his memory play, a space he inhabited daily through his writing, a space of some resilience where psychologically needed memories are created amid the pain and sorrow of the present. And in so doing, he reminds us all of the role memory plays in our survival. Our memories are like glass menageries, precious, delicate, and chameleonlike. We can become trapped by them like Laura and Amanda. Or, as in the case of Tennessee and Mr. Byrne, we can gain resilience from their plasticity that allows us to move forward psychologically.Williams wrote, in his essay â€Å"The Catastrophe of Success† (1975), that â€Å"the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition† (p. 17). Tennessee felt that for him the heart’s opposition could best be expressed through writing. He felt that the artist, his adventures, travels, loves, and humiliations are resolved in the creative product that becomes his indestructible life. (Leverich 1995, p. 268) I think he might have agreed that while creative work plays that role for the artist, memory and fantasy are its equivalent for all of us.Williams knew that it is through the creative transformation of experience, sometimes in verse, sometimes in memory, that we draw nearer to that â€Å"long delayed but always expected something we live for† (1945, p. 23). REFERENCES 1269 DAVIS, J. (2001). Gone but not forgotten: Declarative and non-declarative memory processes and their contribution to resilience. Bulletin of the Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009 Daniel Jacobs 1270 Menninger Clinic 65:451–470. FREUD, S. (1899). Screen memories. Standard Edition 3:301–322. ——— (1908). Creative writers and day-dreaming.Standard Edition 9:143–153. K RIS , E. (1956a). The personal myth. In The Selected Papers of Ernst Kris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 272–300. ——— (1956b). The recovery of childhood memories in psychoanalysis. In The Selected Papers of Ernst Kris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 301–340. LEVERICH, L. (1995). Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Norton. NELSON, B. (1961). Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work. New York: Obolensky. RASKY, H. (1986). Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation. Niagara Falls: Mosaic Press . SCHACTER, D. (1995).In Search of Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. SCHNEIDERMAN, L. (1986). Tennessee Williams: The incest motif and f ictional love relationships. Psychoanalytic Review 73:97–110. UPDIKE, J. (l960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf. WILLIAMS, T. (1945). The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Direc-tions, l975. ——— (l972). Memoirs. New York: Doubleday. ——— (l975). The catastrophe of success. In The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions, 1975, pp. 11–17. 64 Williston Road Brookline, MA 02146 E-mail: [email  protected] com Downloaded from http://apa. sagepub. com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on September 9, 2009

Bestbuy’s Strategy Essay

According to the case, BestBuy is trying to create a competitive advantage in three areas: customer-centricity, employment policies, and exclusive branding. After studying the VRIO framework, I have found that BestBuy’s three areas of strategy do fit into the VRIO framework. BestBuy believes that an effective strategy is a commitment to customer-centricity. A business that implements customer-centricity caters to specific customer needs and behaviors. According to the book, BestBuy wants to steer away from a product-centered marketing approach to a more customer-oriented marketing approach which will have them asking what problems its customers are facing, and then providing solutions. Furthermore, BestBuy wants to segment its customers into four different profiles: Upscale Suburban, Urban Trendsetter, Empty Nesters, and Middle America. In different regions around the U. S. you will find these diverse groups. BestBuy has been able to utilize the rare attribute of the VRIO framework with its ability to serve the needs of the predominant customer segment in a given region. BestBuy is unlike any company in the consumer electronic industry because as the book mentions, â€Å"Nearly all companies claim to be customer oriented, but being customer centric required a radical reorganization and shift in employee mindset. † BestBuy has reformatted the physical space in its stores and related products have been bundled together to meet the needs of certain segments. Store teams have also been trying to answer the following questions: What kind of traffic do we have coming in our stores today, how effectively are we selling to the people in the stores, what does our customer information look like, what segments do we have coming in, and what kind of market share do we have for those segments? To answer those questions BestBuy has been investing in the right tools so that the field knows what to focus on. BestBuy has taken customer interest a step further, and so far it has given them a rare advantage. BestBuy has also done a good job of organizing its employment policies to capture value. According to the book, BestBuy has set up an employee listening program that uses open communication to better understand the needs of its workers. This program has done a great job of exploiting the company’s capabilities because it is implementing tools such as annual company-wide surveys, a virtual discussion board, and one-on-one dialogue sessions. BestBuy is capturing value because they are listening to their employees and discerning information that was previously unknown to management. The final area that BestBuy is focusing its strategy on is exclusive brands. This last area is very important to BestBuy because it is valuable, rare, and costly to imitate. BestBuy currently owns these private labels: Insignia, Dynex, Init, Rocketfish, and Geek Squad. As far as background goes, Insignia produces TVs, monitors, home-theater systems, and portable video/ audio players. Dynex produces storage media, data and power cables, webcams, and office supplies. Init produces media storage, equipment bags, totes and furniture for home theaters. Rocketfish is a top notch producer of cables that are mostly used for TVs. And most famously, Geek Squad provides computer repair and installation services. BestBuy realizes that they cannot solely rely on these small private labels to create, on their own, enough revenue to stay in business. But nevertheless, these private labels are valuable because they add attractive features to the company. Most of the products offered by these small labels are accessories that add value to the more expensive products which in turn increase the profitability of BestBuy. In particular, I think Geek Squad is valuable because a lot of older people do not know how to set up the more complex electronics and often run into problems. Easy-to-setup installation and troubleshooting is a very attractive feature to most consumers. Along those same lines, these small labels are rare because their products are only being sold in BestBuy stores. If you’re a huge fan of Rocketfish cables or really appreciate the helpfulness of Geek Squad then you have to come to BestBuy to get you want. These private labels are also costly to imitate I imagine because it could be costly to implement and staff a repair and installation service in all of your stores like BestBuy has done with Geek Squad. Also, these private labels have a few unique products that could be hard to replicate. I know that Init has created some nice, high quality equipment bags and furniture for home theaters. I believe that after weighing the benefits of all three of these areas that BestBuy has indeed created a competitive advantage. In one way or another they have valuable, rare, costly to imitate, or are organized to capture value with their products and services. BestBuy’s business level strategy is to focus on its people through customer centricity and employment policies. The managers in both areas want to listen to the people and discern how to best appeal to them. Managers have planned to become customer centric by profiling its customers and then design the stores and provide products according to the profiles in the region. The cost driver associated is the cost of input factors because it requires a radical reorganization and shift in employee mindset. Stores need to be reformatted and related products need to be bundled. The main value driver for this focus has been customer service. BestBuy has excelled at customer service because they are able to identify customer needs and appeal to their wants because of the unique profiles that have been created. The main cost driver for employment policies has also been cost of input factors because I imagine it has been costly to implement the new annual company-wide surveys, a virtual discussion board, and one-on-one dialogue sessions. The main value driver for the employment policies is customer service. BestBuy has created distinctive techniques for company-wide communication that in turn provide better customer support. Managers now know what the consumers are thinking because the employees are able to share information with their superiors in an efficient way. The competition between BestBuy, Amazon, Apple, and Wal-Mart has been fierce over the last several years. BestBuy has found itself to still be at the top of consumer electronics in the minds of its customers with 40% of the votes. However, BestBuy comes in 11th place in the Top 15 most valuable retail brands. Furthermore, Apple has recently made a large push in the race by reaching $2. 8 billion in sales in 2010 which puts them in third place behind BestBuy and Amazon. However, BestBuy is in last place according to share performance in 2010 and 2011. After looking at all of the different results and surveys I would say that BestBuy is right in the thick of things and battling for the top spot. Amazon may be more a valuable company but the consumers still view BestBuy as the leading consumer electronic company. One of the critical problems facing BestBuy is people coming into the store and testing the products and then leaving and buying the product elsewhere. I think that BestBuy’s strategy to become customer centered is a good strategy. Many of the same products are sold by multiple companies, but if BestBuy can appeal to the segments and profiles of people coming into their stores then they can get people to buy the products in their stores. Identifying the profiles of people coming in is the first step and then being able to bundle products and arrange displays in an appealing way is a good strategy. If BestBuy continues to value its consumers I think they will find a way to sustain a competitive. After all, people want to feel important and be given what they need and desire.

The Legacy of the Canadian Residential School System

We all have an identity in this world. When we were born as human beings, we were all given an identity based on our gender, ethnicity, and the society we were born in. This identity is further strengthened by our experience throughout the journey to adulthood, creating a bond and belongingness to one’s own culture. When a language is eventually learned during childhood, it becomes one of the major factors in determining our identity. Cultural customs are also integrated into our minds as we grow up.As we approach adulthood, our basic cultural identity is shaped; we maintain our cultural identity as we enter the local society, as it is the label that sticks with us for the rest of our lives. Along the way, we have the freedom to choose which of the religions to believe in, but our choices will most likely be affected by our identities as well. The First Nations people in Canada are suffering from a loss of language, religion, and identity due to the horrible past they had suff ered in the past century.In the 1880s, the residential school system was established by the government of Canada (Miller 2011). From then on, First Nations children were forced to attend these Catholic schools instituted based on European standards and regulations. Injustice went on for almost another century, in which many First Nation cultures were diminished and obliterated. Steven Harper may have apologized to the First Nations for the rest of the Canadians, but the damage is already done (Dorrell 2009). The Residential School System extinguished the hopes of Canadian First Nations in maintaining their own cultures.In this article we will use St. Mary’s, a residential school located in Mission, BC, as a case study to investigate the severity of the impact the RSS had on First Nations cultures. Language is the mean of communication of a society and a significant factor in cultural and social development. It is also the distinct identifier of a specific culture. By analyzin g the complex systems of the languages of different cultures, sociolinguists can relate the languages’ properties to aspects of the culture.Language is also tightly intertwined with the culture of a civilization: the Chinese and Japanese consider calligraphy—the act of writing in an unique but artistic way with ink brushes—a major art along with music, painting, and the chess game of Go; the Medieval Romans were inefficient and limited in their mathematics due to their numeral system until the Arabic system was introduced. In short, languages can be considered as the backbone of a culture. It is also the backbone that the First Nations began to lose as soon as the Residential School System was initiated.In residential schools, any languages other than English were forbidden; the violators of this rule were severely punished. In Terry Glavin’s Amongst God’s Own, one of his interviewee Meredith Hourie (2002: 61) commented that the nuns at St. Maryâ⠂¬â„¢s referred to the native tongues as â€Å"devil’s language†; in their eyes, speaking another language in a Catholic residential school is blasphemous. Benjamin Paul Millar (Glavin 2002: 66) felt that he was beginning to improve in his native language until he was discouraged by slaps in the face and on the backside for breaking the rules; now he could only recall a few words of his native tongue.Genevieve Douglas (Glavin 2002: 62) admitted that she cannot understand her own native language due to the policies at St. Mary’s; students were not allowed to answer to questions unless they can fully interpret what was asked and know how to respond in English, hence the students had to focus their limit in language acquisition on English. Children who were new to the residential schools (such as St. Mary’s) were not familiar with these rules. They felt alienated and were desperate to fit in.As a result, these new First Nations students had to resocializeâ⠂¬â€or â€Å"Westernize†Ã¢â‚¬â€themselves in order to survive. While these cases might seem trivial at first glance, consider this: there were 80 residential schools scattered across Canada at its peak, with over 11000 students being taught (Kirmayer, Simpson, and Cargo 2003). The magnitude is immense, and numerous dialects of the native tongues were lost. It is also worth noting that the majority of students who enrolled in St. Mary’s had Western first names and last names instead of native ones.Under these circumstances, a child would feel even more out of place when comparing one’s own name to the elders’ more native names. They might believe that they were not welcomed in their society and opt to blend into the Western society instead. For instance, a Scotland-born Chinese child would likely to grow up to be more attached to the Scottish culture if his last name was chosen by his parents to be McGregor instead of Lee. Traditions are also identifiers for the cultures they belong to. Each culture has their unique customs, beliefs, and mythologies.For example, the Gods with the most power in terms of mythologies are mostly male due to the fact that almost all cultures are male-dominant. In ancient Greek mythology, Zeus was regarded as the ruler of Mount Olympus and said to be the â€Å"Father of Gods and Men† by Hesiod, reflecting the differences in the status of genders in ancient Greece. In Chinese mythology the Gods were told and categorized as emperors, royal families, and government officials, ultimately referring to the hereditary monarchy political system that the dynasties of China followed for millennia.While First Nations traditions may not be as well known as the bigger cultures in other parts of the world, they have their unique and intriguing perspective in the world they live in. Their view on how all things ranging from animals to inanimate objects have spirit and soul is echoed by Plato’s world-soul idea. However, their inspirations cannot be further explored in the future since these First Nations beliefs are facing extinction. These traditional practices such as Shamanisms were discouraged, as they were viewed as witchcraft in the eyes of Catholicism.Due to the nature of residential schools, children could hardly see their family during their time as a student. Wayne Florence (Glavin 2002: 68) was severely injured by one of the nuns at St. Mary’s, and even then he could not gain the privilege to meet with his family, or even talk to them through the phone for that matter. This separation leads to the inability to learn of and be familiar to their customs. Not only were the children prohibited from learning of their own cultural religion and heritage, they were led and forced to believe that there is only one â€Å"correct† religion—Roman Catholicism.According to Catholic rules, all other religions are false and are blasphemous. First Nations students lear ned that they were not born with freedom, but with sins to be cleansed of; this idea induced fear in them and contempt in their traditions. Aside from a loss of culture, it was estimated by scholars that as many as half of the children died during their involvement in the residential schools, either from abuse or committing suicide (Robertson 2003). We are living in the generation of globalization. In Canada, it is not uncommon for one to have multiple cultural backgrounds.We can notice numerous people of Chinese descent who do not know a single word of Mandarin nor Cantonese; Scandinavians who do not feel the urge to assimilate into another culture’s customs, and even Indian-Canadian comedians who became successful amongst the public by showing observational humor with regards to racial dissimilarities. These people of the general public—whose voices can be heard through the media—are of a majority; whether they are currently living in their affiliated society they were born in or have their homes on the other side of the globe, they feel that they are a member of their culture.No matter which part of the world it is, dates with cultural significance like Christmas, the Lunar New Year, and the Ramadan are celebrated and practiced annually. The same cannot apply to the First Nations in Canada after the residential school system tragedies. Imagine that no one can understand your first language and cultural customs—while communication with others will still be possible through other means like secondary and body language, you can hardly feel the familiarity and ease in comparison to talking freely in your own first language. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?If you know a language but no one else can comprehend it, does it still exist? If no one in the world other than you knew the family gathering tradition on Thanksgiving, would this day still mean anything at all? While these question s may seem hypothetical to us, the First Nations in Canada are facing these issues today. Writings and symbolic arts in dying tribes may never see their original meaning comprehendible ever again. Canada may consider First Nation reserves and universities as national treasures, but the fact is that cultural maintenance in these smaller tribes is not encouraged and our treasure is continuously decreasing in depth.All cultures in the world are established by the contributions of their people over time; they are the condensation of knowledge, customs, heritage, and language. Each culture is unique in its own way, and should be preserved with the most effort. However, not only did settlers and colonizers took over the First Nations’ lands by force, they also nearly wiped out their culture with a weapon in the form of the Residential School System. These residential schools, such as St.Mary’s, denied the students of their chance to inherit their respective culture, and even took away some of their lives as a byproduct in resocialization. As a result, First Nations languages and traditions were lost; some First Nation survivor might even be the last remaining member of his or her tribe. These are losses that we simply cannot put ourselves into their perspective. I sincerely hope that the government of Canada will not only compensate, but also try their best to maintain the enduring First Nations cultures someday; an apology is simply not enough.

Terrorism Influence Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Terrorism Influence - Essay Example Terrorism is not a new term. It has been using since the time the human history is known. However, different organizations describe terrorism differently. The Department of Defense of US defines terrorism as any act which includes the use of violence or threat to use violence which is unlawful in order to cause fear or to coerce governments or societies to achieve their ideological, religious or political objectives.United Nations defined terrorism in 1992 as a method which inspires to perform the violent actions repeatedly by any organization, group or even by an individual for any personal political or criminal purposes. Another main aspect of terrorism identified in this definition is that the direct targets of the violence are not usually the main targets of such violence. But the main target is the government, organization or general public who got threatened by such acts. The definition describes all such violent acts as terrorism which causes a fear or threat in the society to achieve specific objectives. So in simple words, terrorism may be defined as the acts of inducing fear in public with the intention of achieving intended goals and objectives. CAUSES OF TERRORISM: There are many reasons for which terrorism occur. In order to devise anti-terrorism strategies, it is necessary to understand those reasons. 1. The main cause which induces the terrorists to execute terrorist activities is their dissatisfaction with social, political or government policies. The terrorist groups adopt the means which may cause violence and fear to the government and the society to change the existing position of the world and bring it into the position in which that group intended it to be. 2. Sometimes, the intended motive of the terrorists is to maximize the harshness and the time period of the fear and the psychological impact on the general public. In such a case, terrorist activities are done at public places such as busy roads, markets and public sites to affect huge population and cause great damages to the society which sometimes induces the government to accept terrorists’ demands. 3. Another reason of the terrorism is the oppression imposed upon such groups which actuated them to take steps for self-defense including armed struggle and using destructive weapons. In such a situation, a group that seems terrorist to a person may be a freedom fighter for some other person. Such groups do not think that they are performing evil acts. They believe that they are combatants fighting for their legitimate goal. AMERICAN REVOLUTION: American Revolution took place in the 18th century when thirteen colonies of North America united to get themselves free from the British Empire and named themselves as United States of America. However, the revolution was based on an ideological movement that highlighted the basic rights of Native Americans. These states rejected the authority of Great Britain Parliament and expelled royal officials. The British E mpire sent combat troops to impose their direct rule over these colonies but the states defended resulting in American Revolutionary War in 1775. The war ended in 1783 with the Peace Treaty of Paris. The British call the American Revolution a series of terrorism acts. Zalman, A (2012) explained that the event of Boston Tea Party which had roots in the American Revolution was considered by the British as terrorists act. The event took place in December 1773 when 150 men entered into the three ships which were ready to take tea to other British colonies. They dumped all the 342 boxes of tea in the harbor. On the other hand, the event is termed as a reaction against the unjustified British tax law imposed upon Americans. The Americans called the revolutionists such as George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson their heroes and freedom fighters who worked tirelessly for independence as mentioned on the official website of The American Revolution Organization. RUSSIAN REVOLUTION EFFECTS ON TERRORISM IN EUROPE: Russian Revolution took

Students Experiences of Social Media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Students Experiences of Social Media - Essay Example People believe that social media is a platform, where employees can get themselves recreated and enjoy their time (Billett, 2006, p.24). It can also increase the chances of distraction from work for a longer period of time. This would finally impact the completion of an assigned work within expected time (Button, 1992, p.12). It is clear that employers are concerned about the behavior of their employees and they want to keep track of employee actions in order to increase the efficiency of employees and generate output (Henry, 2008, p.42). Productivity and employee-efficiency are the two factors that are given special interest by the employers hence, the use of social media in workplaces are not preferred by employers and managers (Chandler, 1995, p.15). According to expert opinions, social media has many real-time uses that can-not be ignored by organizations (Kotler, 2001, p.81). There are many companies, who rely on social media information because the available information related to international updates helps the companies to perform better or make their strategies accordingly (Cockburn, 1992, p.15). It has also been observed that employees need time to recreate during office hours due to which they chat with each other and talk over phone to reduce their stress. Social media can be very useful during this period for employees and it can also be beneficial for employers because employees would be motivated to sit and work more in their computers (Coiera, 2000, p.19). During productivity both the working and non-working hours are essential from the employees perspective. Implication of social media can be helpful because it can increase the working hours of employees. Employees can work without losing their focus and they can c ommunicate with each other with the help of instant messaging systems available in computers (Coiera, 2004, p.39). The instant messaging system helps employees to discuss and about an issue or give their

Phosphoaspirin (MDC-43) a novel benzyl ester of aspirin, inhibits the Essay

Phosphoaspirin (MDC-43) a novel benzyl ester of aspirin, inhibits the growth of human cancer cells - Essay Example This study by Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas (2009) aims to observe the anticancer activity and mechanism of the new phosphoaspirin (MDC-43). For the purpose of this study, several reagents were purchased, or gifted, from different pharmacological companies. Cell cultures were grown in the laboratory in line with the American Type Culture Collection instructions. The trypan blue exclusion method was used to measure the cell viability and growth. Moreover, the cell cycles were analyzed following standard PI protocols (Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas 2009, p. 512). Human cancer cells derived from colon, pancreas, breast, liver and lung were used in this study; these are some of the major and most common forms of cancer and account for around â€Å"54% of all new cases of cancer in the USA† (Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas 2009, p. 517). All cell lines that were studied showed that Phosphoaspirin was more powerful than aspirin in preventing cancer cell growth (Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas 2009, p. 513). Moreover, phosphoaspirin was also shown to stimulate the creation of reactive oxygen species (Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas 2009, p. 514). The study also observed that phosphoaspirin had an inverse effect on thiol levels in the cells, and produced intrinsic apoptosis (Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas 2009, p. 514-516). Furthermore, the phosphoaspirin also increased cell signaling in some cells, however, the effect was limited to protein activation alone (Zhao, Mackenzie, Murray, Zhang, and Rigas 2009, p. 516). The data collected by the study clearly demonstrated that phosphoaspirin has a strong reduction effect on human cancer cells. Moreover, the effect is stronger than that of aspirin, as well as being more generalized. The strength of phosphoaspirin was found to be more uniformly superior to ordinary aspirin; however, no reason

Stress and Coping Mechanisms of First Year Principals Dissertation

Stress and Coping Mechanisms of First Year Principals - Dissertation Example Explaining the fundamental basis of stress as a reaction towards demands on the body, the Mountain State Centers for Independent Living (2010) expresses the view that stress involves the release of body chemicals that â€Å"give people more energy and strength, which can be a good thing if their stress is caused by physical danger.† However, it is alarming that in a particular group of people, the levels of stress recorded among them should be rated as high. This is because high levels of rising stress impacts the victims in several ways including the work they do and their health (Foxall et al, 1990: 580). This argument says a lot about why principals are stressed most of the time. Having noted that a person’s duties could determine the level of stress to be experienced by the person, it is just right to state that principals are often stressed because their work comes with a lot of mental demands that requires them to use their brains very often. Knowing that principa ls undertake a lot of academic responsibilities that strain their brain, stress is thus inevitable for them. In a typical educational institution, principals are expected to among other things supervise the activities of other teachers, initiate academic itinerary, organize school examinations and in some cases serve as examiners. They also go an extra mile to execute other duties including being in charge of every sector of the school development; ranging from meeting the educational needs of students to providing the necessary materials and supplies for the teachers to implement the curriculum. They do this under strict monitoring by the stakeholders, board members, the superintendent, and the state and national educational leaders. New mandates are frequently imposed on already high expectations. A mountain of meeting, queries and complaints from parents, playground and lunchtime duties are also the order of the day for most the principals. All these are roles that are expected t o be executed with perfection and accuracy. In a bid to do all these, principals; especially first year (inexperienced) principals who are mostly new on the job end up stressing themselves badly. The work of the principal is one that is associated with a lot of physical and mental pressure. This is even worse because most principals (both inexperienced and experienced) are involved in academic based professions and occupations that involve the strenuous use of the brain rather than physical strength. Examples of these professions include medicine, nursing, law, teaching, pharmacy, writing and the like. Among this group also, teachers, including lecturers have been found to be one of the worse hit (Lee, 2003). It is worth noting that the work of lecturers and educators, especially those on higher ranks like principals involves a lot of demanding tasks that include multi-complexities. For instance there is mental application of knowledge, physical application of strength and regular i nter-personal interactions. In a typical school environment or school situation, principals (inexperienced and experienced) take the role of academic overseers over student, as well as the administrative activities. The year principal are, therefore, almost all the time involved in one kind of engagement or the other. In most situations, the situation of principals is worsened when they have other responsibilities other than academic roles to play. Some of these

Leveraging IT and a Business Network by a Small Medical Practice Essay

Leveraging IT and a Business Network by a Small Medical Practice - Essay Example The case is about Eastern Cardiology Services (further - ESC), which has been founded by Dr. Jeff Curtin with the aim of providing high-quality medical services on the private grounds in the sphere of cardiology. His aim was to create a small enterprise, which will combine the service delivery with the use of advanced computer technologies. The key issues, existing in the company at the very beginning of its operation were the following: 1. The firm had to achieve high level of quality, through the understanding, that often the quality if information delivered to the patient could become a matter of his life-or-death. The issue in this relation was that the small firm like ESC could not afford implementation IT in combination with medical services through trial and effort, as it was usual for large companies. 2. The second issue was related with the fact that the newly opened enterprise had to prove the accuracy of the records given to the patients. As far as the information had to be easily retrievable the newly developed IT had to be connected with the medical equipment for medical investigation - this was a serious matter to resolve. Among the issues, which the enterprise had to face and resolve, were the issues related to the necessity of aligning corporate management with IT use. Thus, it is seen that the main issue, though described here through several separate key problems, are certainly connected with the necessity to implement IT technologies into all spheres of the ESC activity - both directly and indirectly connected with the medical service delivery. These issues are the result of understanding that for SME to survive in the area of medical service delivery, something new and unique should be invented, to distinguish them from the large medical establishments, which mainly display a kind of 'line production' service delivery. One more important issue here was making each consumer feel unique and exclusive, and receive the best service through the IT which the enterprise uses. 4. For the development of the IT necessary to be used in the enterprise, it was important to find the research opportunities, which would satisfy financial demands of stakeholders and result in general improvement of the ESC operation. 5. The management of the enterprise had also to understand that as soon as the IT system was developed, it would have to be constantly improved, as in the process of its implementation and operation new limitations were going to be displayed and thus eliminated. The problem there was that this process needed constant financing, which had also to be agreed with stakeholders. 6. Finally, it was of course necessary proving the benefits of IT implementation to the stakeholders. Thus, in identifying the key problems of the enterprise at that time, it is clearly seen, that the principal strategy developed by ESC was aimed at implementing IT, as the key to its success in delivering medical services. Though the enterprise understood the necessity for such actions, but many factors were simply forgotten

Freedom Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

Freedom - Essay Example Freedom of speech is important in media and press since it heals with public. In a democratic state, of which most states in the world are, the interest and the rights of the state take priority. Politics and freedom to speech is inseparable since politics is the main component of democracy. Some argue that democracy is an idea of peoples self governance. The electorate in such a system must be properly informed and with no constrains for ideas and information to flow. If constrained, the electorate can easily be manipulated to avoid criticisms which are healthy. Accountability process and freedom of speech significantly impacts on the governance quality of a country. The worldwide measure and indicator of the freedom of speech is the freedom of association, freedom of expression and freedom of media. Debating and open discussions in democratic nations is important in the achievement of a stable and more adaptive community. This brings about consensus rather than imposition of laws. Through social interactions, stakeholders of a particular institution are able to engage in discussions that bears development in the direction of the community. Thus, the freedom of speech and expression plays a major role in the world today and it is one of the main pillars of the democracy building. Freedom of worship also means the freedom of religion or freedom of belief. It protects individual and gives them the liberty to choose to believe in the teachings and faith of their choice. Nobody in any part of the world is compelled to follow any specific religion. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Right covers the fundamentals of the freedom of worship. There are different religions in the world ranging from Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and even Judaism. In pursuit of democracy, a nation should strive as much as possible to tolerate and respect the people’s choice that allows them to worship freely. This was a universal full fledge after the United Nations G eneral Assembly passed a declaration on elimination of all forms of intolerance and religion based discrimination on 25th November 1981. Religion freedom was recognized as a fundamental human right henceforth. (John Winthrop, 2009), the government should allow people to choose religion freely so that long run societal interest to prevail. He pointed out that laws that prevent the freedom of religion seek to preserve belief and power in a particular religion. In a given religion, the way of worship is almost similar but sharply differs between religions. Since there are no laws that prohibit religion choice, it definitely means that the freedom of worship is also guaranteed. This freedom allows people to worship God in their own way and style. In as much as freedom of worship is universal all over in the world, there are no specific and outright laws that dictate and govern on how people should worship. There is also a limit beyond which worship freedom should not go beyond. In pursu it of worship, it musts be within the limits as not to conflict with other laws. In as much as the holy books such as the bible and the Quran being one of the sources of most constitutions in the world, it does not give them prevalence over the constitution. The constitution is the supreme law of any country and any other law that is consistent with it is declared void to the extent of inconsistency. People are free to switch

AtlantiCare and the “Voice of the Customer” Essay Example for Free

AtlantiCare and the â€Å"Voice of the Customer† Essay Introduction Located in southeastern New Jersey, AtlantiCare is a nonprofit organization that provides acute and chronic health care services in the following areas: cancer, trauma, cardiac care, stroke, behavioral health, urgent care, hospice, home care, family medicine, occupational medicine, child care, early learning, and mission care for the homeless. Because of the nature of the services it provides quality is essential at AtlantiCare, and the organization delivers it. In fact, AtlantiCare applies the principles of total quality so comprehensively and consistently that the organization has received the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. At the core of AtlantiCare’s quality program is a process the organization calls the â€Å"Voice of the Customer.† This is a five-phase process used to make the organization’s patients partners in its continual-improvement efforts. Voice of the Customer identifies patient requirements and then makes sure that AtlantiCare’s services satisfy these requirements. The company’s customer focus does not stop with external customers. It also includes internal customers-employees (Goetsh Davis, 2011). Total quality is not a concept anymore in day to day operations at AtlantiCare. It is part of the management team work ethic and philosophy, and the rest of the nonprofit company staff. AtlantiCare applies the principles of total quality in such a way that not only takes care of its customers, but also its internal customers. By doing so, the company has achieved organizational excellence. The case that follows is about the steps taken by the administration at AtlantiCare and also the lessons learned by the executives and the staff to become a world-class health care provider. Questions AtlantiCare has learned how to apply the principles of effective communication in a Total Quality setting. If total quality is the engine, communication is the oil that keeps it running. Much of what total quality is all about depends on effective communication. Without it, total quality breaks down. Some of the key elements of the total quality concept are customer focus (internal and external), total employee involvement and empowerment, leadership, teamwork, decision making, problem prevention, problem solving, and conflict resolution (Goetsh Davis, 2011). The core of the AtlantiCare’s Total Quality system is a process called the â€Å"Voice of the Customer.† This is a five-phase process used to make the organization’s patients partners in its continual-improvement efforts. Voice of the Customer identifies patient requirements and then makes sure that AtlantiCare’s services satisfy these requirements. The part that AtlantiCare applies perfectly well is the focus in its internal and external customers. This approach has giving the nonprofit company the information necessary to fix its mistakes and to reengineer its process, so AtlantiCare keeps its customers satisfied. Basically, what AtlantiCare does is to listen to all the stakeholders, following the principles of effective communication: message received, message understood. To listen responsively, managers and employees must learn to simultaneously use their ears, eyes, brains, and hearts. Responsive listening can pay substantial dividends for managers in a total quality setting (Goetsh Davis, 2011). PepsiCo and IKEA are among the top companies were people wants to work at. It is not only because these companies have a recognized name or they are multinational companies. It is basically because these two companies also apply Total Quality programs where listening the suggestions and concerns of its employees and customers is a very big component. According to IKEA Welcome Inside 2012 report they in many markets we are the employer of choice, and latest results from our co-worker satisfaction survey, VOICE, show a very high level of satisfaction among our co-workers. The VOICE result also identifies areas where we can improve. IKEA is listening actively. They paid attention to their employees. They are sensitive to the information they receive, and also they act in consequence. They are being creative by developing programs to help their employees to grow and develop. In 2012, PepsiCo was listed among the Top 25 ‘World’s Best Multinational Workplaces’ by the Great Place to Work Institute  (PepsiCo, 2012). PepsiCo is always looking for talent and sustainability for them it means to invest in their associates to help them succeed; providing a safe and inclusive workplace globally; and respecting, supporting and investing in the local communities where they operate. In all of their markets, they are developing the talent of associates, preparing them to lead PepsiCo into the future. Through PepsiCo University and online courses offered by their global functions, more than 8,000 of their associates completed more than 11,500 courses in 2012. The professional development they offer to their associates enables them to develop the skills, capabilities and mindsets needed to drive sustainable financial performance and value creation. PepsiCo is combating the inhibitors of listening by providing to its employees with opportunities of professional development. Conclusion In order to have a Total Quality program that works effectively it is important to put at the core of the program the communication piece. Especially the information that is brought and communicated by the customers is the piece that has to have a mechanism that assures that it is inputted in to the Total Quality program. In the case of AtlantiCare, the nonprofit company has a system in place that voices the suggestions, complains, and demands of both customers: external and internal. The core of the AtlantiCare’s Total Quality system is a process called the â€Å"Voice of the Customer.† This is a five-phase process used to make the organization’s patients partners in its continual-improvement efforts. Voice of the Customer identifies patient requirements and then makes sure that AtlantiCare’s services satisfy these requirements. The part that AtlantiCare applies perfectly well is the focus in its internal and external customers. In the case of IKEA, the company has its own program called the â€Å"VOICE.† The VOICE result also identifies areas where we can improve. IKEA is listening actively. They paid attention to their employees. They are sensitive to the information they receive, and also they act in consequence. The area where this program could improve is in the external customer. According to this program they are only surveying the employees, but they are not taking in consideration the important information that the external customers have and can be used in the company’s advantage. On the other hand, in 2012, PepsiCo  was listed among the Top 25 ‘World’s Best Multinational Workplaces’ by the Great Place to Work Institute (PepsiCo, 2012), which means PepsiCo takes care of its internal customers. In all of their markets, they are developing the talent of associates, preparing them to lead PepsiCo into the future. Through PepsiCo University and online courses offered by their global functions, more than 8,000 of their associates completed more than 11,500 courses in 2012. PepsiCo provides for its employees professional developing opportunities and career growth, but they do not have a program in place that assures that its employees are providing information that could help the company. Less say they are not putting communication at the core of its Total Quality program. Finally, both companies could learn something from AtlantiCare by implementing Total Quality programs that included their external customers. Especially in the case of IKEA that sells directly to the final consumer. References David L. Goetsch, Stanley B. Davis. (2011) Quality Management for Organizational Excellence: Introduction to Total Quality, (7th Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education IKEA Group (2012). Welcome inside 2012. Retrieved from http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/yearly_summary/ys_welcome_inside_2012.pdf PepsiCo (2012). Annual Report. Retrieved from http://www.pepsico.com/download/PEP_Annual_Report_2012.pdf

How did Pterosaurs Move on the Ground?

How did Pterosaurs Move on the Ground? The locomotive manner of pterosaurs is a matter of intense dispute in the scientific community. The way that these prehistoric creatures traversed the ground is continually being contested. Did pterosaurs walk how we imagine them to have; on all fours in a semi erect posture, or did they only walk on their hind legs, or on all fours and completely prone? If, in fact, they did walk on all fours, would the feet have been in line with the hands, or would the hands be splayed out much farther than the feet? Because the method of pterosaur locomotion is widely disputed, scientists rely on footprint identification in order to determine if the tracks that they are studying do actually belong to a pterosaur. Unfortunately, even this is a contested issue, as some scientists cant even agree on which tracks belong to which prehistoric creatures. These are all issues that are disputed by scientists, but there does seem to be some common consensus when multiple seemingly conflicting scientific fi ndings are synthesized. The general perception of pterosaurs today is one that is possibly incredibly flawed because of theories about them from the early nineteenth century. Soemmerring confused a juvenile Pterodactylus with what he believed to be the skeleton of a deviant bat in 1817 and Cuviers identified pterosaurs as reptiles in 1812. These ideas have persisted until the modern day so that most people cannot shake the image of a pterosaur as a large, scaly, bat-like creature that walks around on all fours in a semi-erect fashion (Padian, 1983). While this is a possible form of locomotion, there are numerous arguments to the contrary. One of the first writings on pterosaur locomotion on land was Wm. Lee Stokes Pterodactyl Tracks from the Morrison Formation published in 1957. Stokes found a track of nine footprints that he attributed to a pterosaur that he named Pteraichnus Saltwashensis. Since pterodactyls are naturally found near bodies of whatever, its not out of the question that these tracks would belong to one. Stokes claims that the imprint of the manus shows the unique wrist and hand of a pterodactyl and that the imprint of the pes shows the unique V-shape and sharply pointed heel that corresponds unmistakably to that of a pterodactyl. He says that all of this is proof that at least one pterosaur was quadrupedal. Despite the evidence that Stoke says confirms that the creature that made these tracks was a pterosaur; this is one of the most disputed claims in the theory of the ground-level locomotion of pterosaurs. Many scientists believe that these tracks were not made by a pterosaur, but instead by a crocodilian creature. This is a distinct possibility because the tracks of pterosaurs and crocodilians are commonly confused for one another. In The Fossil Trackway Pteraichnus: Not Pterosaurian, but Crocodilian, Kevin Padian and Paul Olsen claim that the tracks that Stokes attributes to Pteraichnus Saltwashensis are more likely the product of one of the four species of crocodilian known to have inhabited that area. They say that the pes is not unique to pterodactyloids, as crocodiles also exhibit four toes and a V-shaped heel. Also, they claim that the manus does not consist of four digits, but five, even though the impression of all five is not clearly preserved. Another distinguishing feature is that crocodiles are plantigrade and therefore the heel print would be visible, as it is in these tracks. This is opposed to the digitigrade nature of pterosaurs, which would cause the heel print to be excluded from the footprint. Padian and Olsen claim that the manner of movement that the footprints represent is completely different than the kind that Stokes claims created them. Stokes suggested that the depth of the depression created by the manus was due to a large wing knuckle. Padian and Olsen argue that this is not the case, and that the depression was actually caused by the force of the step and the incompetence of the substrate that led to the creation of the fossilized track. One of Padian and Olsens points is refuted in Terrestrial Locomotion of the Pterosaurs: A Reconstruction Based on Pteraichnus Trackways, published in 1997 by S. Cristopher Bennett. Padian and Olsen claim that by using Bairds method, they were able to determine that the length of the body that made the tracks was too long to be that of a pterosaur, but long enough to be a short crocodile. Bennetts refutation of this point rests on the idea that Bairds method was intended to be used on tracks created simultaneously and that this was not the condition under which the tracks in contention were created. Whether this refutation is credible or not is of little importance. Padian and Olsens assertion that the Pteraichnus tracks were actually created by a crocodilian, and that they back it up with plausible scientific hypotheses, casts enough doubt on Stokes original claim to make these tracks inadmissible in determining how pterosaurs moved on land. The primary reason for the possible mistak e that these crocodilian tracks were created by a pterosaur, according to Padians 1983 paper, A Functional Analysis of Flying and Walking in Pterosaurs, is that Owen suspend[ed] the principles of comparative anatomy [and drew] spurious comparisons between pterosaur structures and those of lizards and crocodiles [as well as] misrepresenting the work of H. von Meyer, the German authority on pterosaurs. This paper offers an in depth analysis of the way a pterosaur would move on land based entirely on its bone structure. Padians primary subject of analysis is a Pteranodon, which he claims, among other things, was an active flyer, meaning that it flapped its wings. Padian claims that a pterosaur would walk upright on two legs as opposed to any form of quadripedal motion. He compares pterosaurs to both birds and bats throughout the paper. He attempts to show that the attributes that pterosaurs share with either birds or bats, or both of them, would prevent a pterosaur from being capable of quadrupedal locomotion. Padian says that the forelimb of the pterosaur was adapted entirely for flying and not for quadrupedal walking. The humerus bone of the forearm was adapted for the type of movement that facilitated a down-and-forward flapping motion, since Padian claims that pterosaurs were active flyers, and not for the rotation of the humerus that would protract the forearm to facilitate terrestrial walking. Moving down the arm, the elbow joint in birds, bats, and pterosaurs are what allow for rotation. In bats, this allows for quadrapedal walking but, in both birds and pterosaurs, it has hindered articulation to the extent of turning their limbs into pulley-like hinges with a wide arc of movement possible in only one plane (Padian 1983, 227). Padian claims that the differences in the shape of humeral heads in pterosaurs were even more restrictive in the pterosaurs range of motion than it is in birds. The delto-pectoral crest in pterosaurs was pronounced and twisted along the axis of the shaft, whi ch caused the deltoideus muscle to actually reverse the rotation of the humerus that was initiated by the pectoralis muscles as the pterosaur made a downward stroke while in flight. This reversal in rotation prohibited the forelimb from being moved into the proper position to facilitate its placement on the ground and therefore any form of quadrupedal locomotion. Ultimately, Padian asserts, the structure of the forelimbs of pterosaurs prevented them from walking quadrapedally. They were incapable of parasagittal movement over the ground because of restrictions imposed on them from their bone and muscular structures. The structure of the hind legs of pterosaurs that are included in Padians argument for a bipedal pterosaur is equally as important as the structure of the forelimbs. Padian bases his argument on a pterosaur thats wing was not attached to its hind legs and the idea that despite the relatively small size of the legs of a pterosaur when compared to the rest of its body and specifically its forelimbs, it would still have been able to, and in fact been solely capable of, bipedal locomotion on its hind limbs. Padian reconstructs the pelvis and hip joints of a pterosaur to show that certain elements of its anatomy would prevent it from bending forward in a way that would enable quadrupedal locomotion. He says that there are two girdles surrounding the point where the femur is inserted into the hip that restricts the degree of rotation of the leg so that it would be impossible to move in any way other than bipedally. Padian uses a Pteranodon as his case study for a pterosaur with an extremely large upper body and a relatively small lower body that is still able to walk on the ground. He says that the reason the forelimbs are so large is because the mass of the Pteranodon necessitated expansive wings to provide the appropriate amount of lift while airborne. The size of the wings, though, is not correlated to the size of the legs. The surface area of the wings needed to increase at a rate of L^3/L^2 when compared to the size of the body. The disproportionate lengthening of the wing afforded a greater relative area that allowed the Pteranodon to achieve flight. On the other hand, the Pteranodons legs are not restricted to the same ratio. The legs can be, and are, significantly smaller than the body that theyre supporting without compromising the Pteranodons terrestrial locomotive abilities. In fact, the size of the Pteranodons hind limbs in relation to the size of the rest of its body is comparable to the relationship between the hind limbs and bodies of all other pterosaurs. Padian compares the bone structure of the hind limbs of pterosaurs to the bone structure of the hind limbs in modern birds. He says that, like in birds, the tibia is the main load-bearing bone in the leg. He claims that the femur had a position that ranged between slightly above horizontal to about forty-five degrees below it and that this orientation allowed for the tibia to move on a parasagittal plane. This essentially means that pterosaurs moved on the ground like most other bipedal dinosaurs. Padians ultimate claim is that pterosaur hind limbs were designed for bipedal, digitigrade, locomotion when they were moving on the ground. He even suggests that it was possible for pterosaurs to achieve high rates of speed on the ground. S. Christopher Bennett is another proponent of the upright, bipedal form of terrestrial locomotion among pterosaurs, but only among the larger pterodactyloids. He exams the acetabulum of Anhanguera, Pteranodon, and Dsungaripterus in A Pterodectyloid Pterosaur Pelvis from the Santana Formation of Brazil: Implications for Terrestrial Locomotion, published in 1990, and determines that its strongest part is the anterior wall. He suggests that the strength of this anterior wall allows for upright bipedal locomotion because the acetabulum becomes a downward facing component of the anatomy. This downward orientation allows for a large area of contact for the head of the femur and, therefore, the weight of the body of the pterosaur can be supported in an upright position. Bennett refutes three arguments that are often leveled against bipedal locomotion in pterosaurs. He says that the femora bone could, in fact, have been brought underneath the body of the pterosaur, which is demonstrated by AMNH 22569. Secondly, that the hind limbs of the pterosaurs had straight femurs with distinct, inturned heads, mesotarsal ankles without a calcaneal tuber, and a foot with elongated metatarsals. Finally, he argues that the preservation of pterosaurs, in a position with their hind limbs splayed to the sides, a position that has caused many scientists to claim that theyre incapable of bipedal locomotion, is a false supposition. He notes five specimens that were preserved with their hind limbs on one side of the body, and argues that the splayed nature of the other specimens is due to greater hip flexibility in pterosaurs. Bennetts inclusion of the fossilized remains of pterosaurs in his argument for bipedal locomotion among the larger pterodactyloids is particularly convincing. He makes up for one of the key elements that Padians argument was missing, in that he actually gives concrete physical evidence to support his argument instead of supposed anatomical construction and the type of movement that that structure would or would not allow. One thing that Padians analysis of the terrestrial movement of pterosaurs lack is the actual fossilized track that a pterosaur made. While the supposed structure of the bones may lead one to believe that Padians claims are accurate, there are numerous pterosaur tracks that indicate a quadrupedal form of locomotion among pterosaurs. The majority of the studies included in this paper have focused on larger pterosaurs, and mostly on the Pteranodon. This particular pterosaur shares a large amount of its anatomy with modern birds and it makes sense that, from an analysis paying the majority of its attention to this pterosaur, they would all seem to be bipedal. There is evidence in other fossils, though, that would say otherwise. Pterosaurs, depending on the kind they were, were either bipedal or quadrupedal. Bennetts refutation of Padian and Olsens crocodilian diagnosis of the Pteraichnus tracks contains very valid points concerning the way that pterosaurs could have possibly walked in a quadrupedal manner. He says specifically that rhamphorhyncoids, the earlier variation of pterosaurs, as well as small pterodactyloids were quadrupeds with plantigrade pedes (Bennett, 1997). He says that the model he constructed of Pterydactylus and that, along with other detailed studies and manipulations of other three-dimensionally preserved pterosaur specimens, the limb and girdle joints would have easily allowed for the range of motion necessary for a pterosaur to achieve a quadrupedal walking motion. Bennett cites the Pteraichnus saltwashensis tracks as being representative of a quadrupedal pterosaur, which was disavowed earlier in this paper. He validly examines the tracks of Pteraichnus stokesi that were discovered in the Sundance Formation of Wyoming as well as pterosaur tracks from the Upper Jurassic of France. These trackways show manus and pes prints that are clearly pterosaurian. This indicates that there were certain species of pterosaur located in these areas that were quadrupedal. All of Bennetts are based on the principle of identifying the tracks as pterosaurian based on the structure of the manus and pes. Another piece of research that proves that quadrupedal locomotion was present in pterosaurs is First Record of a Pterosaur Landing Trackway, published in 2009 by Jean-Michel Mazin, Jean-Paul Billon-Bruyat, and Kevin Padian. The tracks that they are examining are clearly the landing pattern of a pterosaur because they originate with two pes prints and then continue on in a walking pattern. They claim that the stance of the pterosaur was erect because the pedes tracks are placed almost directly below the hip joints. After the first impression of the pedes, the second impression includes both pedes and manus impressions. The impressions of the manus are splayed out wider than pes, which is the generally accepted idea of how a pterosaur would ambulate. The tracks, not only created by a flying creature, are located in the Late Jurassic site known as Pterosaur Beach, which is a place universally agreed upon to contain unquestionable pterosaur tracks. Therefore, the landing pattern and subs equent tracks, that clearly show quadrupedal locomotion, prove that at least some pterosaurs moved in this way on the ground. The debate surrounding the terrestrial locomotion of pterosaurs can be broken down into many categories and subdivisions. Its clearly that one form of locomotion, whether it be bipedal, quadrupedal, plantigrade, digitigrade, erect, semi-erect, or any other distinction, cannot be used to define every single pterosaur that ever existed. This is similar to the idea that one form of locomotion cannot be used to describe every dinosaur that ever existed. There is variation between species of pterosaurs. The larger pterosaurs seem to be generally more bird-like and more inclined to quadrupedal locomotion. The Pteranodon, specifically, almost definitely was a biped. Its wing structure was the most similar to that of a bird (Padian, 1983), and its two hind limbs were more than sufficient for bothing locomotion and launching off from the ground in order to initiate flight. Smaller pterosaurs, on the other hand seem to be more similar in locomotive method to the general perception of how pterosaurs moved, in a kind of quadrupedal crawl. The tracks found at Pterosaur Beach, and if actually created by a pterosaur, those of Pteraichnus saltwashensis, prove that at least some smaller pterosaurs were quadrupedal. In conclusion, any attempt to define the entire order of Pterosauria as quadrupedal or bipedal is an exercise in futility. The larger pterosaurs, such as Pteranodon, were bipedal, which is apparent based on their wing and leg structures. They would have been unable to move their forelimbs into a position that would allow them to place them on the ground and the mobility of their hind limbs allowed only for bipedal locomotion. Smaller pterosaurs, such as Pteraichnus stokes, were definitely quadrupedal in terms of locomotion since there have been numerous tracks found confirming this idea. Works Cited Bennett, S. (1990). A Pterodactyloid Pterosaur Pelvis from the Santana Formation of Brazil: Implications for Terrestrial Locomotion. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 10(1), 80-85. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4523298 Bennett, S. (1997). Terrestrial Locomotion of Pterosaurs: A Reconstruction Base on Pteraichnus Trackways. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 17(1), 104-113. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4523790 Mazin, J., Billon-Bruyat, J., Padian, K. (2009). First Record of a Pterosaur Landing Trackway. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 276(1674), 3881-3886. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30245351 Padian, K. (1983). A Functional Analysis of Flying and Walking in Pterosaurs. Paleobiology, 9(3), 218-239. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2400656 Padian, K., Olsen, P. (1984). The Fossil Trackway Pteraichnus: Not Pterosaurian, but Crocodilian. Journal of Paleontology, 58(1), 178-184. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1304743 Sà ¡nchez-Hernà ¡ndez, B., Przewieslik, A., Benton, M. (2009). A Reassessment of the Pteraichnus Ichnospecies from the Early Cretaceous of Soria Province, Spain. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 29(2), 487-497. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20627057 Wm. Lee Stokes. (1957). Pterodactyl Tracks from the Morrison Formation. Journal of Paleontology, 31(5), 952-954. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1300563 Drug Abuse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | Research Proposal Drug Abuse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | Research Proposal BACKGROUND STUDY Drug abuse is a cause of concern to all nations around the world either in developing countries and undeveloped countries and in both cases the most affected are the youth,. Due to the rapid increase in drug related crime and drug abusers in Asian countries, the establishment of effective countermeasures for demand and supply reduction are a pressing issue. And if they are all left out to be addicted to dangerous narcotics, it can lead to all social ills like road accidents, high crime rates, unplanned pregnancies, school dropouts and many more which may result in fracturing the moral fibre of the country and eventually the nation will be without prominent future leaders. The abuse of drugs has an adverse impact, not only on the individual abuser, but also on the economy and society of a country as a whole. According to Scorzelli JF, (2009) despite the heavy punishment of death imposed by the Malaysian government for whoever is caught in drug possession, within the last five years, the Malaysian drug abuse problem has escalated. This has led to the increase in social ills like HIV/AIDS which is contracted by the use of IV-Heroin. He continued to state that 93.7% of people caught in drug possession are male aged between 20-29 years of age. This clearly shows that our youth are in dire need of thorough drug and peer education. The National Anti-Drug Agency has been on track to get rid of the drug problem in Malaysia by 2015. When interviewed by the New Straits Times (2010, February) the director-general Datuk Abdul Bakir Zin has pointed out that they have helped out around the country to bring addicts to their rehabilitation centre. He has said that the centre spends around RM 300 million which is their annual budget which is nearly spent on prevention, treatment, rehabilitation of addicts and enforcement operations. Addicts are kept for two years and they are released but some of them go back to their bad habits. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Drug abuse has led to an alarming increase of social ills in the society like HIV/AIDS contraction , road accidents and many more which have resulted in the collapse of the moral fibre of the nation. The medical and psychological effects are very obvious. Addicts cannot function as normal members of society. They neglect or abuse their families, and eventually require expensive treatment or hospitalization. Huge police resources are needed to fight smuggling and dealing. Criminal gangs and mafia underworlds develop with the money from drugs. However the main target should be the user. Families and counsellors need to talk to children and people at risk. The fact that the youth is the most affected especially in Malaysia poses a great concern because the youth are the future leaders of tomorrow. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY The specific study of the study is to find ways and methods to educate the people of Malaysia especially the youth about the dangers posed by the abuse of drugs. This initiative itself can lead to positive results such as reduced number of drug abusers therefore leading to a low numbers of social ills such as HIV contractions and crime. There should be a diversion programme for drug abusers which can be institutional or community based. RESEARCH QUESTIONS To justify this study, the researcher will investigate the following matters: How many cases of illicit drugs were registered from 2006 to 2011 in Malaysia How individuals are affected psychologically, physically and economically by the abuse of drugs Does the government play a role in reducing the problem of drug abuse? SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY Generally the study of drug abuse phenomenon that is widely occurring in Malaysia will be an endeavour in promoting a much healthy lifestyle that is a drug -free society. Drug-free society means a lot to a country of about 28,310,000 people. It means less crime such as road accidents, thefts and murders, less HIV AIDS positive, less people in the narcotics rehabilitations centre and more manpower in order to bring Malaysia towards becoming a fully developed country. By understanding the main source of the problems, we can all move together to cure as well as to prevent further advance of this spreading illness in our community. The Malaysian psychiatric association (July 6 2006) has cited that when pregnant women abuse drugs there may be foetal abnormalities especially when the pregnancy is early. These deformities may cause the mother to dump the baby, a crime which is currently on the rise in Malaysia. If the drug was used late in the pregnancy may become dependent on opiates, and may later show withdrawal symptoms after delivery. The United Nations Aids (2010) on their report have pointed out that an estimated 170,000 injecting drug users (IDUs). In those users most of them share the needles therefore there is increased spread of the diseases such as HIV/AIDS because likely they do not sterilise such needles. Moreover, this study will reveal most of things behind these drug abuse cases, therefore will significantly boost the awareness of the community about the cases of drug abuse in this country simultaneously contribute in reducing such cases in community. SCOPE OF THE REPORT We undertook the task of reviewing all studies describing the impact of drug abuse at Kuala Lumpur. The population of interest includes injection drug users, and non-injection drug users of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, because these groups of individuals have been identified as having a biological risk of exposure to addictive drug use, including deadly exposure (via injection drug use) to blood-borne via sharing of straws or pipes used to administer drugs (non-injection drug use). Data from questionnaires are analyzed separately, as they different substantially form interview data, and because their drug-related risk factors are quite different and not elaborated further. Another goal is to examine the influence of study methodology on study findings, particularly because the descriptive data may be strongly influenced by sampling methods, and because study design may affect associations between various characteristics and drug use. Since the brand data collection was carried out using information collected from various associations, access to each data was time consuming. We also do not have any compiled data of approved unregistered drug users making the task very complicated. Such database may be hard to acquire as most drug users choose to stay in the dark as they know there is a capital punishment for such a crime. OPERATIONAL DEFINITION Drugs A medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body Abuse To use something to bad effect or for a bad purpose Addict A person who is addicted to a particular substance Rehabilitation Restore to former privileges CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.0 Introduction In the literature review we compare and contrast studies done by other people and we note how different they are from ours. We have read journals, books and articles in Science Direct. In this chapter we are able to expand our knowledge on how other writers view the issue at hand. We have displayed various ways of the data we found, either by citing using the APA format, images and tables. 2.1 Literature Review By the year 1983, the problem of drugs was declared a national emergency by the Malaysian government. Everyone convicted of trafficking and those caught with the drugs depending on the amount of drugs they had in their possession were sentenced to death, those were some of the ways the government was trying to solve the problem but if someone was convicted of only for possession of drugs he/she was put in a rehabilitation centre for 2 years. Once realised from the centre, the individual has one year of probation were he or she has two urine tests a month. Drug, taken from Cambridge Dictionaries Online, falls into two categories which are medicine and illegal substance. In the medicine category, the word drug means any natural or artificially made chemical which is used as a medicine while in the category of illegal substance, drug means any natural or artificially made chemical which is taken for pleasure, to improve someones performance of an activity, or because a person cannot stop using it. The latter meanings actually portraying the main interest in this study which is the action of drug abuse, which by the same source, abuse means to use or treat someone or something wrongly or badly, especially in a way that is to your own advantage. This unhealthy phenomenon is actually a worldwide crisis and can bring along a great impact in ones life, consequently a community, and then will affect the growth of a country. Some said that this crisis is the same age as humankind. It is in our nature that we like to consume things that bring us pleasure and being in the state of euphoria. However, we must first consider the side effects of the consumption of such substances. There was enormous number of researches that had been carried out in order to suppress or banish this crisis all over the world. There are ups and downs for the trends of the drug abuse cases but it had never been ceased completely. Kuala Lumpur as a busy place, most of the inhabitants need drugs to cope with the fast life. These drugs can be addictive substances such as heroine, alcohol, and ecstasy pills. The research by the Malaysian Psychiatric Association (2006), showed that the brain is affected by the consumed drugs. The left part of the brain is affected is called the reward pathway. Continued use of drugs short-circuits the reward pathway and that how addiction starts. The brain will then need more and more large quantities of the substance taken over time. The brain chemistry is altered at this point, therefore behavioural patterns starts here. Drugs like cocaine can lead to permanent damage, death and even addition. From the article adapted from RECOVERY NOW website on cocaine effects, it is stated that there are two different categories of cocaine effect. These effects are said to be long termed and short termed .Regardless of how many times a person uses cocaine even once! heshe experiences short-term cocaine effects which includes increased blood pressure, mental alertness, increased heart rate, decreased appetite and increased body temperature .The long term effects appear after increased periods of use. Long term effects include irritability, mood disturbances and restlessness. Marijuana is also one of the most commonly abused drug and according to the American Council For Drug Education they describe it as a mild hallucinogen with some alcohols depressant which results in bronchitis, emphysema and bronchial asthma. They also continue to stress that marijuana leads to reduction of learning ability which is one of the reasons why most students who smoke marijuana end up performing badly at school as it limits the capability to absorb information as it is highly addictive. In an addiction state a person engages in a compulsive behaviour, even when faced with challenging life situations. Taking a look at the fast life in Kuala Lumpur a lot of challenges are faced by the youth there, these include unemployment, loss of a loved one or poverty. These situations can cause you to excessively use drugs to suppress such hurt felt within. The National Anti-Drug Agency (New Straits 12 February 2010) has used over RM 300 million annually to prevent, treat, and rehabilitate addicts. They are trying to achieve the goal for a drug-free Malaysia in 2015 and drug-free Malaysian schools in 2012. The director of the agency Datuk Abdul Bakir Zin has mentioned that there is an alarming rate of drug abusers on the increase. The agency successfully rehabilitated 11 395 addicts in 2009 but only 51% of the addicts are clean now. That shows that the drug addicts do not have enough out of rehab education. B.Vicknasigngam, M.Mazlan, K.S Schotchfield , M.C Chawaski(2009),stated that heroin and injection drug are the major public health risk cases recorded in Malaysia. Furthermore they continue to state from their findings, between the year 1998 and 2006 individuals close to 300 000 individuals were registered as persistent drug abusers in Malaysia. In between the years 1998-2006 heroin was the main primary drug abused around 62.6% of those were registered. And this caused a main concern for the Malaysian government as it lead to increase in social ills like road accidents and also the rise in HIV contraction as the drug abusers shared the same needle hence the spread of the virus was induced. Despite the Malaysian strict law on use of illegal drugs people still continue to use the illegal drugs and have even gone to an extent of making it into a business to finance their lifestyle. The law clearly states that any person found in possession of at least 15 grams of heroin, 200 grams of cannabis is presumed. The National Drug Agency, Malaysia in 2006 around 22,811 drugs users was recorded and 12,430 of whom were repeat offenders. They also stress that the total number of drug users recorded for the period of 1998-2006 is 300,241 people which constitutes to 1.1% of the Malaysians population. CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 3.1 Introduction The introduction highlights the data collection methods which were used to gather information which enabled us to reach our conclusion. One of the vital aspects we looked into was the validity and reliability of the data collection methods that we decided to use. In our research we found that the ideal data collection methods that we can use are the questionnaire and interview for analysis Questionnaires are very cost effective when compared to face-to-face interviews. This is especially true for studies involving large sample sizes and large geographic areas. Written questionnaires become even more cost effective as the number of research questions increases. Questionnaires are easy to analyze. Data entry and tabulation for nearly all surveys can be easily done with many computer software packages. Nearly everyone has had some experience completing questionnaires and they generally do not make people apprehensive and they reduce bias. The researchers own opinions will not influence the respondent to answer questions in a certain manner. There are no verbal or visual clues to influence the respondent. When a respondent receives a questionnaire in the mail, he is free to complete the questionnaire on his own time-table. Unlike other research methods, the respondent is not interrupted by the research instrument. Some of the reasons why questionnaires are widely used as data collection method in reports and projects in the fact that the responses are gathered in a standardised way so questions are more objective, certainly more so than interviews, generally it is relatively quick to collect information using questionnaires and information can be collected from a large portion of a group. For our research a questionnaire, written both in English and Malay consisting of A3 size pages was sent to different agencies/organizations which were requested to answer it. The main contents of the questionnaire included; Prevention of drug abuse Outline organizations handling drug abuse problem Institutional treatment programmes for drug abusers Outline drug control laws Interviews are also one of the most convenient ways of data collection for reports projects and investigations as they provide first hand information from the correspondent. The interview is also flexible in the since that follow up questions can be asked, also clarity of the question can be made if the respondent does not understand. Even though it has overwhelming advantages one of its major problems maybe that the correspondent may feel like shy to give out information and in that case the interviewer can solve the problem by assuring the correspondent that whatever he/she is being interviewed for will be considered confidential at all costs. For our research, interviews were conducted with the relevant agencies/organizations. Firstly we set an appointment with them and informing them of our objectives.