Developing Organisational Capacity (ALDI) Essay

Developing Organisational Capacity (ALDI) - Essay Example An efficient training and development program for a company involves systematic steps and procedures before, during, and after the training process, which must be adhered to, in order to achieve the objectives of the training and development process (Hameed & Waheed 2011). Before undertaking training, a company ought to ensure that it creates a conducive environment for training and that it is able to sustain the training process. During training, it is important that the mind of the trainee is transformed in order to ensure utilization of training knowledge. On the other hand, after training, a company ought to ensure that the trainees have gained the necessary knowledge and skills. In addition, it is important to evaluate the training strategies and tools to ensure their effectiveness in future (Hameed & Waheed 2011). Overall, the HRM of a company must ensure effectiveness in is practice and strategies, to achieve company goals. Analysis of the Training and Development Processes at Aldi Aldi is one of the companies that are committed to training and development of their employees. This company follows systematic process in training and developing its employees (Brandes & Brandes 2012). ... This ensures that a company has the appropriate number of employees, with the relevant skills for their job. Workforce planning is also important as it helps in the identification of gaps in the skills of employees, and addressing them in order to achieve goals (Brandes & Brandes 2012). Since Aldi plans to expand by opening more stores, it is important that the company perform an analysis of the skills that employees will need to have. In addition, the type of training to be undertaken by employees also will need to be decided. This will help Aldi to sustain its competitiveness in the market, since the company will have employees with the right skills, thus minimal knowledge and skills gap. In addition, this will help the company fill any gaps created within its workforce due to promotions of some employees in the company (Brandes & Brandes 2012). Aldi also ensures that it employs the right people by specifying the job requirements in their vacancy advertisements. Job descriptions fo r employees, which are well developed, serve as a tool for communication. These bear the responsibilities of the employee, the qualifications, and experience, as well as the relationships of the specified job with other job positions (Hameed & Waheed 2011). This therefore, helps to give the applicant a direction and determines to them whether they are relevant for the job or not. This also communicates the employer’s expectations of the potential employee. Nonetheless, this is important for both the company and the employees. For employees, it gives them directions about what is expected of them in the job. For the company, this ensures that the right candidates, with relevant skills are

Organization within its environment Essay Example for Free

Organization within its environment Essay Organization exist as part of a wider environment Or part of society and as such their influence by the environment in which their operate. It is usual to consider the environment through form of analysis known as pest analysis which has 4 main categories ; political this looks at the government involvement through legislation that they provide outlining the legal frame work within which every business must exist and taxation policy which are dependent on company success and therefore their profit ECONOMIC Factors affecting the financial functioning of the organization and value of money in the economy which will affect the ability to purchase as well as produce goods n services . It looks at the potential growth in a economy and how the value of money changes as well as trade SOCIAL This refers to factors affecting the population and supply of labour by looking at the influences on individuals whether their are employees or customers . It will look at the taste n preferences of plp in society, culture of plp the profile of the workin population nn the number of plp in the job market which influences expectations and behaviour at work TECHNOLOGICAL Factors affecting the processes of production such as changes in computer technology and communication and new manufacturing processes MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS Management involves creating and internal environment in a business which makes use of the inputs or factors of production to be transformed tp create outputs of goods and services .it is therefore the responsibility of management to create conditions that allows people to perform to their best ability to be efficient and effective. MANAGEMENT is able to do this through their basic functions of planning organising directing amd controlling the organizations resources in order to achieve the goals of the company MANAGEMENT THEORY Organisations considered to be employee oriented so they are likely to be  more productive and as a result become more profitable. Similarly employees who are mistreated are more likely to reject the policies of the organization. Based on this o.b helps to analyze how and why employees behave in a particular way and the schools of management thought provide different theory used for the of management. Each school of thought IS based on different assumptions about people and the organization for which they work and understanding of the developments of management thinking will help to understand the process of management that offer good employee benefits and have proper working conditions.

Occupational Health And Safety And Risk Management Construction Essay

Occupational Health And Safety And Risk Management Construction Essay The principles of the new framework are to reduce risk by requiring all stakeholders to eliminate or minimize the risks they created in workplace, Instilling greater ownership of Occupational Health and Safety standards, thus, the focus will be then be shifted from complying with prescriptive requirements to make employers suited to their particular situations in order to achieve desired safety outcomes and lastly, preventing accidents through higher penalties for poor safety and health management Duties of employers Every employers duty is to take necessary measures to ensure the safety and health of his employees and people who may be affected by his instructions even though they are not his employees in the workplace. The measures necessary to ensure the safety and health of persons at work include, providing and maintaining a safe environment, without risk to health, ensuring adequate safety measures are taken in respect of any machinery, equipment, plant, article or process used by his employees and employees are not exposed to hazards arising out of the arrangement, disposal, manipulation, organization, processing, storage, transport, working or use of thing under the control of the employer. Developing and implementing procedures dealing with emergencies that may arise while those persons are at work and ensuring that employees at work have adequate instruction, information, training and supervision as is necessary for them to perform their work. Every employer is required by the regulations, giving to people whom are not his employees the prescribed information about details in which he conducts his undertaking as this might affect their safety or health while those employees are at his workp lace. Duty of Workers Occupational Health and Safety requires workers to comply with all safety and health standards that apply to their daily requirements on the job. Employees should follow the employers safety and health rules and use all necessary protective gears and equipments and follow safe work practices for the job directed by the employer. Employees should report all hazardous conditions to a supervisor or safety committee and report hazardous conditions to relevant authorities, if employers do not fix them. Duties of everyone at workplace Everyone in the workplace is to provide protection when required, any suitable protective tools, for his use alone or for use by him in common with others, for securing his safety, health while at workplace and to co-operate with his employer or any other person to such extent that will enable his employer to comply with the provisions of the Act. No employees at workplace shall wilfully or recklessly interfere with or misuse any appliance, protective clothing, convenience, equipment or other means or thing provided pursuant to any requirement under this Act for securing the safety, health of persons at workplace. Any employee who wilfully or recklessly does any act which endangers the safety or health of himself or others shall be guilty of an offence. Task 2: Identifying Hazards and Managing Risk A hazard is something which endangers people health or environment. Risk is the likelihood that the harm will occur from exposure to the hazard. Accidents rate will increase if the management having the mindset of nothing will go wrong There might be some hazards in the working environment which are not obvious such as poor lightings, slippery floor and etc. Hence, Risk Management is crucial in all working environment. It allows the management to detect hazards early and taking all precaution to prevent accidents from occurring. There are 5 steps to perform risk management; looking for Hazard, decide who might be harm and how, decide on control measures, put control in place and review the controls Look for hazard Management can walk through the workplace and look for hazards in a systematic way looking at physical things and workplace activities, asking workers regarding hazards around them, conducting a safety audit and reviewing your workplace records such as sick leave and incident reports. Decide who might be harm and how Estimate the likelihood of an incident occurring at your workplace and the consequences if incident had occurred for each hazard. Management should involve employees in this assessment such as women who are pregnant or employees whom are not familiar in your workplace. Decide on control measures Measures should be implemented such as getting rid of the hazard or replacing it with a less harmful or using of protective equipments unless there is a provision that you must follow for specific hazards. Put control in place Management need to put controls in place and supervise through a process of systematic observation to allow a feedback on the effectiveness of the new control measures compared to the seriousness of the risk which previously assessed. Review the Controls Review the controls that you have put in place and makes improvements if necessary. Task 3: Managing Psychosocial Hazards In workplace Psychosocial Hazards are issues obstructing to a persons psychological development in an environment. Issues like, work related stress cause by excessive overwork, violence, being bullied, mobbing and burnout. One of the most common issues that occurred in a workplace is Work Stress. There are different perspectives at looking on issue Stress. Stress can be looked as a form of motivation, allowing organizations to push employees to their limit and obtain the best performance out of its employees and it can be also an issue which will affects employees health, performance as they will be less motivated and less productive. Excessive demands and pressure can be caused by a poor work design and poor management from an organization. Most cases of work stress are caused by how the work is designed and the way organizations are managed. Stress can affects different people in different way. Employees whom are affected by stress can become increasingly distressed and irritable, unable to relax or concentrate while working, having difficulty to think logically and making decisions and experience insomnia. In extreme cases, employees may not able to handle stress and do something that is unexpected which endangers the health of their colleagues or even themselves. If a large numbers of employees in an organization are affected, performance of the organization will also be affected. Organizations will experience employees increasing absenteeism and decreasing commitment to work, impairing performance and productivity, unsafe working environment and damaging its image among its workers and externally. Organizations with such issues will not only affect its performance, it will also be less likely to succeed in a competitive market. Therefore, Human Resource Department needs to understand the importance of Work Stress in an Organization. Risk Management must be managed well in order to asses all possible risks in the working environment that have high possibilities causing damage to employees and the organization. The most effective method to find out the employees problems and why, is to question them directly as managers may have a different point of view from his employees about what are the causes of the problems. There is a strategy to solve the issue which is crucial for employer to understand is to prevent the problems, foresees problems. Monitoring employees satisfaction and health regularly, ensuring employees know whom to talk to about their problems and having the ability to give them a helping hand in their problems, refer them to the right channel when they are experiencing real difficulties. Managers should do a follow up after a period of time and if necessary, revise your approach to work stress problems. A good employer not only designs and manages work in a way that avoids common risk factors for stress but also to achieve a healthy working environment, minimize harmful aspects of work. Work can be a self-promoting activity as long it takes place in a safe and health promoting environment. Task 4: Notifying, Reporting and Managing Incidents Immediate corrective activities are used when an accident occurred and the true nature was unknown. It is an activity that required a description of what had to be done after a problem had occurred and what are the actions were to be taken to prevent the same problem from happening. Direct Cause The direct cause is the direct results in actions that most people do not do. Incidents should be investigated to identify the cause of the incident. There are also tools to assist the investigation like 5 whys, cause and effect, fish bone diagram, design of experiment, simulations, process deconstruction and analysis of design implementation. 5 Whys 5 Whys is a question-asking method used to understand the cause and effect of a particular problem. 5 Whys will lead you there but sometimes it will be more, and sometimes less. Based on the scenario, Tony was injured when he was attempting to clean the chute on the back of the truck and lost his balance and fell. Did the Company inform all concrete drivers the safety regulations and procedures to clean a truck? Yes. What are the reasons that Tony did not follow the Safety regulations and procedures? No. The Company should come up with safety regulations and procedures to clean a truck. Did all concrete drivers understand the safety regulations and procedures? Yes. The company should impose a fine to allow the drivers to understand the importance to follow the safety regulations and procedures strictly. No. The company should simplify the handout or even translate into difference language for difference race of employees. Contributing Factors Contributing causes are those careless actions that result a direct cause. Such actions may not be sufficient to result in the event taking place. Below are some examples; Drivers parked the truck on an uneven road. Handbrake was not properly pulled. No proper footwear. Preventive Activity Preventive Activities are to prevent the same incident to occur and it can only be determined when direct and contributing factors have been identified. Solutions should be considered on its effectiveness and suitability to the company and its employees and is within the companys budget. It is better to consider about alternatives before choosing a solution and to correct the process for a long term perspective instead of the short term. As a project usually takes years to complete, company should implement building a station for drivers, allowing them to park the truck at their convenience and a stairs up to a floor whereby drivers are able to stand there to wash their truck with a minimum risk. Follow-up Activity Follow-up Activities allows company to have knowledge about whether the implementations are able to minimize risk or even any other improvements are required to achieve zero percentage of risk. Information from this process results in an effective future of the Company. Surveillance and Supervision Supervision of the implementation can be undertaken on a regular or periodic basis. It is to observe the performance of the implementation and ensuring drivers are using the new implementation with safety regulations and right procedures. Monitoring Monitoring the performance of the new implementation through a process of systematic observation and detect changes which are attributable to the new implementation. Evaluation Evaluation is a review of its performance and effectiveness of a new implementation, looking at what the new implementation had achieved and what could be done to improve it.

Sell Your Troubled Websites :: Sell Websites Buy Websites

Sell Your Troubled Websites Reprinted with permission of VotanWeb.com You awaken one morning to the realization that the website you've poured so much time, energy and thought into; the dream that was once the preoccupation of your every waking moment has turned sour - what do you do? Market forces, changing consumer tastes, cash flow problems, or some unforeseen outside factor has brought you to the point of not being able to keep things going much longer. Do you, shut the doors and call it a day or declare bankruptcy? These options are certainly worth considering but though you weren't able to make it happen, does not necessarily mean that your business isn't valuable. If your website is failing, tough decisions need to be made. At the best of times, making objective decisions about something so close to you, something that you've put so much thought, energy, planning and dreaming into, can be challenging. Conditions such as these make it all the more difficult. Despite how things may appear at such a bleak moment, oftentimes failing websites are able to find buyers. Though it may seem unlikely, there are people and companies out there looking for opportunities to acquire failing or troubled websites. Here are seven good reasons why a buyer may seriously consider purchasing your website: The buyer may already have an existing website like yours and, by combining the two, be able to operate at lower cost. The buyer may have expertise in restructuring or repositioning websites, and has a plan to make your website profitable. The buyer may decide that it is more feasible to acquire your website, to invest in it and make it successful, than it would be to build a comparable website from the ground up. The buyer may have sufficient finance sources to carry the loss until your website becomes profitable. The buyer may have lower financial expectations and feel that, by lowering expenses and perhaps making a small investment, modest profits are achievable. The opportunity of a sale may, however, give rise to tangential issues needing consideration. It's very likely that by this point, in an effort to keep things going as long as possible, that you've incurred some personal liability for your website debts. You may even have pledged some personal assets as security. If the proceeds of selling your website won't be enough to pay off all your creditors in full, then you'll still be personally liable for the previous arrangements that you made.

A Comparative Study of Government-Business Relations and Benefits for Citizen in the United States (U.S) and Japan

The success of any national economy in the world is the sum of the successes of the different sectors that make up that economy.This is because every nation has more than one economic sector which is used for the purposes of enhancing the performance of the national economy. It has been paramount for every government to ensure that there are appropriate measures being put in place ensure that these various sectors of the national economy are performing well to be able to deliver the value needed for developing the nation and ensuring that there is rapid development (AMBA, 2009).Therefore, in view of this – and given that the manner in which the business environment is able to operate is a key factor in the determination of the performance of economies of nations – it is critical that governments are able to devise models that will ensure that their relationship with businesses is such that benefits are able to be realized for the enjoyment of their citizens.This paper c ompares the government-business relations employed in the United States of America and Japan, with a view to establishing the inherent benefits of each of them and so establishing which model is more appropriate owing to its ability to bring more in returns in the form of varied benefits to the country and to its citizens. The main focus will be on the manufacturing sector.The Role of Government in Business and in SocietyThere is always an intrinsic relationship between government and business because the two are the main institutions in the society. The actions of one are affective of the other and the actions of the two affect the way the society is viewed.As such, government – being the main player and coordinator of all affairs in a country – ought to ensure that it is in a position to work well enough to ensure businesses operate in the right way and that whatever is done is for the enhancement of the mutual good of the organization (AMBA, 2009). Governments play a very important role determining the direction of the economy and in influencing the outcomes of the economy.Among other approaches, the nature of measures like protectionism, currency rate determination and control, free market policies, and the handling of globalization determines how businesses in the country operate and so their eventual outcome. The manufacturing sectors of the United States and Japan – the world’s largest and second largest economies – are very different. The main difference is in the relationship between the government and business.The government-business approaches in the manufacturing industry come in different ways and vary in each of these countries.Common policies in the sector have largely covered the areas of grants and subsidies, regulation with the aim of shielding the sector from stiff competition from the external environment especially in the face of widespread globalization of trade as well as other forms of regulation aimed at protecting the public from environmental pollution and other wasteful manufacturing practices; and ensuring that labor issues like employee rights, minimum wage, union autonomy, and work-place safety.The manufacturing sector is usually a very important sector and is in most cases the main source of the country’s much–needed foreign through its exports (Toshiyuki, Mika & Yusuke, 2010).Japan and the United States both have booming manufacturing sectors and although the United States has a relatively greater number of industries, Japan has tended to benefit a lot from the industry owing to its approaches to handling business matters (Toshiyuki, Mika & Yusuke, 2010).The American government has emphasized the need to subsidize its products from the manufacturing sector so as to shield the sector from stiff competition brought about by the influx of other goods from other countries in the age of globalization; as well as to ensure that the consumers benefits from reduced prices.Subsidies have made the cost of locally produced goods to be lower such that it makes it hard for products from other sectors to be able to compete on a level playing field with the American commodities (Toshiyuki, Mika & Yusuke, 2010). Therefore, although the country might not have a totally regulatory mechanism to check an influx of imports, it uses subsidies to give its products an unfair advantage over other products.

You Low Essay

American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition. * | Colonial literature Owing to the large immigration to Boston in the 1630s, the high articulation of Puritan cultural ideals, and the early establishment of a college and a printing press in Cambridge, the New England colonies have often been regarded as the center of early American literature. However, the first European settlements in North America had been founded elsewhere many years earlier. Towns older than Boston include the Spanish settlements at Saint Augustine and Santa Fe, the Dutch settlements at Albany and New Amsterdam, as well as the English colony of Jamestown in present-day Virginia. During the colonial period, the printing press was active in many areas, from Cambridge and Boston to New York, Philadelphia, and Annapolis. The dominance of the English language was hardly inevitable. [1] The first item printed in Pennsylvania was in German and was the largest book printed in any of the colonies before the American Revolution. [1] Spanish and French had two of the strongest colonial literary traditions in the areas that now comprise the United States, and discussions of early American literature commonly include texts by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and Samuel de Champlain alongside English language texts by Thomas Harriot and John Smith. Moreover, we are now aware of the wealth of oral literary traditions already existing on the continent among the numerous different Native American groups. Political events, however, would eventually make English the lingua franca for the colonies at large as well as the literary language of choice. For instance, when the English conquered New Amsterdam in 1664, they renamed it New York and changed the administrative language from Dutch to English. From 1696 to 1700, only about 250 separate items were issued from the major printing presses in the American colonies. This is a small number compared to the output of the printers in London at the time. However, printing was established in the American colonies before it was allowed in most of England. In England restrictive laws had long confined printing to four locations: London, York, Oxford, and Cambridge. Because of this, the colonies ventured into the modern world earlier than their provincial English counterparts. [1] Back then, some of the American literature were pamphlets and writings extolling the benefits of the colonies to both a European and colonist audience. Captain John Smith could be considered the first American author with his works: A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia†¦ (1608) and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Other writers of this manner included Daniel Denton, Thomas Ashe, William Penn, George Percy, William Strachey, Daniel Coxe, Gabriel Thomas, and John Lawson. The religious disputes that prompted settlement in America were also topics of early writing. A journal written by John Winthrop, The History of New England, discussed the religious foundations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Edward Winslow also recorded a diary of the first years after the Mayflower’s arrival. Other religiously influenced writers included Increase Mather and William Bradford, author of the journal published as a History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–47. Others like Roger Williams and Nathaniel Ward more fiercely argued state and church separation. And still others, like Thomas Morton, cared little for the church; Morton’s The New English Canaan mocked the religious settlers and declared that the Native Americans were actually better people than the British. [2] Puritan poetry was highly religious in nature, and one of the earliest books of poetry published was the Bay Psalm Book, a set of translations of the biblical Psalms; however, the translators’ intention was not to create great literature but to create hymns that could be used in worship. [2] Among lyric poets, the most important figures are Anne Bradstreet, who wrote personal poems about her family and homelife; pastor Edward Taylor, whose best poems, the Preparatory Meditations, were written to help him prepare for leading worship; and Michael Wigglesworth, whose best-selling poem, The Day of Doom, describes the time of judgment. Nicholas Noyes was also known for his doggerel verse. Other late writings described conflicts and interaction with the Indians, as seen in writings by Daniel Gookin, Alexander Whitaker, John Mason, Benjamin Church, and Mary Rowlandson. John Eliot translated the Bible into the Algonquin language. Of the second generation of New England settlers, Cotton Mather stands out as a theologian and historian, who wrote the history of the colonies with a view to God’s activity in their midst and to connecting the Puritan leaders with the great heroes of the Christian faith. His best-known works include the Magnalia Christi Americana, the Wonders of the Invisible World and The Biblia Americana. Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield represented the Great Awakening, a religious revival in the early 18th century that asserted strict Calvinism. Other Puritan and religious writers include Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Wise, and Samuel Willard. Less strict and serious writers included Samuel Sewall (who wrote a diary revealing the daily life of the late 17th century),[2] and Sarah Kemble Knight. New England was not the only area in the colonies; southern literature is represented by the diary of William Byrd of Virginia, as well as by The History of the Dividing Line, which detailed the expedition to survey the swamp between Virginia and North Carolina but which also comments on the different lifestyles of the Native Americans and the white settlers in the area. [2] In a similar book, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West, William Bartram described in great detail the Southern landscape and the Native American peoples whom he encountered; Bartram’s book was very popular in Europe, being translated into German, French and Dutch. [2] As the colonies moved towards their break with England, perhaps one of the most important discussions of American culture and identity came from the French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crevec? ur, whose Letters from an American Farmer addresses the question what is an American by moving between praise for the opportunities and peace offered in the new society and recognition that the solid life of the farmer must rest uneasily between the oppressive aspects of the urban life (with its luxuries built on slavery) and the lawless aspects of the frontier, where the lack of social structures leads to the loss of civilized living. [2] This same period saw the birth of African American literature, through the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and, shortly after the Revolution, the slave narrative of Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. This era also saw the birth of Native American literature, through the two published works of Samson Occom: A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul and a popular hymnbook, Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, â€Å"the first Indian best-seller†. [3] The revolutionary period also contained political writings, including those by colonists Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, John Dickinson, and Joseph Galloway, a loyalist to the crown. Two key figures were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin are esteemed works with their wit and influence toward the formation of a budding American identity. Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense and The American Crisis writings are seen as playing a key role in influencing the political tone of the period. During the revolution itself, poems and songs such as â€Å"Yankee Doodle† and â€Å"Nathan Hale† were popular. Major satirists included John Trumbull and Francis Hopkinson. Philip Morin Freneau also wrote poems about the war’s course. During the 18th century, writing shifted focus from the Puritanical ideals of Winthrop and Bradford to the power of the human mind and rational thought. The belief that human and natural occurrences were messages from God no longer fit with the new human centered world. Many intellectuals believed that the human mind could comprehend the universe through the laws of physics as described by Isaac Newton. The enormous scientific, economic, social, and philosophical, changes of the 18th century, called the Enlightenment, impacted the authority of clergyman and scripture, making way for democratic principles. The increase in population helped account for the greater diversity of opinion in religious and political life as seen in the literature of this time. In 1670, the population of the colonies numbered approximately 111,000. Thirty years later it was more than 250,000. By 1760, it reached 1,600,000. [1] The growth of communities and therefore social life led people to become more interested in the progress of individuals and their shared experience on the colonies. These new ideals are accounted for in the widespread popularity of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Post-independence In the post-war period, Thomas Jefferson’s United States Declaration of Independence, his influence on the United States Constitution, his autobiography, the Notes on the State of Virginia, and his many letters solidify his spot as one of the most talented early American writers. The Federalist essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay presented a significant historical discussion of American government organization and republican values. Fisher Ames, James Otis, and Patrick Henry are also valued for their political writings and orations. Much of the early literature of the new nation struggled to find a uniquely American voice in existing literary genre, and this tendency was also reflected in novels. European forms and styles were often transferred to new locales and critics often saw them as inferior. First American novels It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation’s first novels were published. These fictions were too lengthy to be printed as manuscript or public reading. Publishers took a chance on these works in hopes they would become steady sellers and need to be reprinted. This was a good bet as literacy rates soared in this period among both men and women. Among the first American novels are Thomas Attwood Digges’ â€Å"Adventures of Alonso†, published in London in 1775 and William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy published in 1791. [1] Brown’s novel depicts a tragic love story between siblings who fell in love without knowing they were related. This epistolary novel belongs to the Sentimental novel tradition, as do the two following. In the next decade important women writers also published novels. Susanna Rowson is best known for her novel, Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, published in London in 1791. [4] In 1794 the novel was reissued in Philadelphia under the title, Charlotte Temple. Charlotte Temple is a seduction tale, written in the third person, which warns against listening to the voice of love and counsels resistance. In addition to this best selling novel, she wrote nine novels, six theatrical works, two collections of poetry, six textbooks, and countless songs. [4] Reaching more than a million and a half readers over a century and a half, Charlotte Temple was the biggest seller of the 19th century before Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although Rowson was extremely popular in her time and is often acknowledged in accounts of the development of the early American novel, Charlotte Temple is often criticized as a sentimental novel of seduction. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette: Or, the History of Eliza Wharton was published in 1797 and was also extremely popular. [5] Told from Foster’s point of view and based on the real life of Eliza Whitman, this epistolary novel is about a woman who is seduced and abandoned. Eliza is a â€Å"coquette† who is courted by two very different men: a clergyman who offers her the comfort and regularity of domestic life, and a noted libertine. She fails to choose between them and finds herself single when both men get married. She eventually yields to the artful libertine and gives birth to an illegitimate stillborn child at an inn. The Coquette is praised for its demonstration of this era’s contradictory ideals of womanhood. [6] Both The Coquette and Charlotte Temple are novels that treat the right of women to live as equals as the new democratic experiment. These novels are of the Sentimental genre, characterized by overindulgence in emotion, an invitation to listen to the voice of reason against misleading passions, as well as an optimistic overemphasis on the essential goodness of humanity. Sentimentalism is often thought to be a reaction against the Calvinistic belief in the depravity of human nature. [7] While many of these novels were popular, the economic infrastructure of the time did not allow these writers to make a living through their writing alone. [8] The first author to be able to support himself through the income generated by his publications alone was Washington Irving. He completed his first major book in 1809 entitled A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. [9] Charles Brockden Brown is another early American novelist, publishing Wieland in 1798, Ormond in 1799, and Edgar Huntly in 1799. These novels are of the Gothic genre. Of the picaresque genre, Hugh Henry Brackenridge published Modern Chivalry in 1792-1815; Tabitha Gilman Tenney wrote Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventure of Dorcasina Sheldon in 1801; Charlotte Lennox wrote The Female Quixote in 1752, and Royall Tyler wrote The Algerine Captive in 1797. [7] Other notable authors include William Gilmore Simms, who wrote Martin Faber in 1833, Guy Rivers in 1834, and The Yemassee in 1835. Lydia Maria Child wrote Hobomok in 1824 and The Rebels in 1825. John Neal wrote Logan, A Family History in 1822, Rachel Dyer in 1828, and The Down-Eaters in 1833. Catherine Maria Sedgwick wrote A New England Tale in 1822, Redwood in 1824, Hope Leslie in 1827, and The Linwoods in 1835. James Kirke Paulding wrote The Lion of the West in 1830, The Dutchman’s Fireside in 1831, and Westward Ho! in 1832. Robert Montgomery Bird wrote Calavar in 1834 Niguel Miller and Tacoya Hughes and Nick of the Woods in 1837. James Fenimore Cooper was also a notable author best known for his novel, The Last of the Mohicans written in 1826. [7] Unique American style Edgar Allan Poe portrait. With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving, often considered the first writer to develop a unique American style[citation needed] (although this has been debated) wrote humorous works in Salmagundi and the satire A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). Bryant wrote early romantic and nature-inspired poetry, which evolved away from their European origins. In 1832, Poe began writing short stories – including â€Å"The Masque of the Red Death†, â€Å"The Pit and the Pendulum†, â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher†, and â€Å"The Murders in the Rue Morgue† – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo (which includes The Last of the Mohicans) were popular both in the new country and abroad. Humorous writers were also popular and included Seba Smith and Benjamin P. Shillaber in New England and Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris writing about the American frontier. The New England Brahmins were a group of writers connected to Harvard University and its seat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The core included James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture. Emerson’s most gifted fellow-thinker was perhaps Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), a resolute nonconformist. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a book-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. His radical writings express a deep-rooted tendency toward individualism in the American character. Other writers influenced by Transcendentalism were Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Jones Very. [10] Just as one of the great works of the Revolutionary period was written by a Frenchman, so too was one of the great works about America from this generation, viz. , Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume Democracy in America, which (like the colonial explorers) described his travels through the young country, making observations about the relations between democracy, liberty, equality, individualism and community. The political conflict surrounding Abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography, of which the best known examples from this period include Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. At the same time, Native American autobiography develops, most notably in William Apess’s A Son of the Forest and George Copway’s The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. Moreover, minority authors were beginning to publish fiction, as in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig as early African American novels, and John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, which is considered the first Native American novel but which also is an early story about Mexican American issues. Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length â€Å"romances†, quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery. Hawthorne’s fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819–1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic and sensational sea narrative novels. Inspired by Hawthorne’s focus on allegories and dark psychology, Melville went on to write romances replete with philosophical speculation. In Moby-Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. In another fine work, the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his death. He was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century. Anti-transcendental works from Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all comprise the Dark Romanticism subgenre of literature popular during this time. American dramatic literature, by contrast, remained dependent on European models, although many playwrights did attempt to apply these forms to American topics and themes, such as immigrants, westward expansion, temperance, etc. At the same time, American playwrights created several long-lasting American character types, especially the â€Å"Yankee†, the â€Å"Negro† and the â€Å"Indian†, exemplified by the characters of Jonathan, Sambo and Metamora. In addition, new dramatic forms were created in the Tom Shows, the showboat theater and the minstrel show. Among the best plays of the period are James Nelson Barker’s Superstition; or, the Fanatic Father, Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion; or, Life in New York, Nathaniel Bannister’s Putnam, the Iron Son of ’76, Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana, and Cornelius Mathews’s Witchcraft; or, the Martyrs of Salem. Early American poetry Walt Whitman, 1856. See also: American poetry. America’s two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War (1861–1865), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself without being egotistical. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: â€Å"These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me †¦ † Whitman was also a poet of the body – â€Å"the body electric,† as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman â€Å"was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something ‘superior’ and ‘above’ the flesh. † Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime. Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. One, â€Å"Because I could not stop for Death†, begins, â€Å"He kindly stopped for me. † The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a male-dominated society and an unrecognized poet: â€Å"I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too? † American poetry arguably reached its peak in the early-to-mid-20th century, with such noted writers as Wallace Stevens and his Harmonium (1923) and The Auroras of Autumn (1950), T. S. Eliot and his The Waste Land (1922), Robert Frost and his North of Boston (1914) and New Hampshire (1923), Hart Crane and his White Buildings (1926) and the epic cycle, The Bridge (1930), Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and his epic poem about his New Jersey hometown, Paterson, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Langston Hughes, in addition to many others. Realism, Twain and James Mark Twain, 1907. Mark Twain (the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast – in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir Life on the Mississippi and the novels Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s style – influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently humorous – changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. Other writers interested in regional differences and dialect were George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry Cuyler Bunner, and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). A version of local color regionalism that focused on minority experiences can be seen in the works of Charles W. Chesnutt (African American), of Maria Ruiz de Burton, one of the earliest Mexican American novelists to write in English, and in the Yiddish-inflected works of Abraham Cahan. William Dean Howells also represented the realist tradition through his novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham and his work as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Henry James (1843–1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional and psychological nuance, James’s fiction can be daunting. Among his more accessible works are the novellas Daisy Miller, about an enchanting American girl in Europe, and The Turn of the Screw, an enigmatic ghost story. Realism also influenced American drama of the period, in part through the works of Howells but also through the works of such Europeans as Ibsen and Zola. Although realism was most influential in terms of set design and staging—audiences loved the special effects offered up by the popular melodramas—and in the growth of local color plays, it also showed up in the more subdued, less romantic tone that reflected the effects of the Civil War and continued social turmoil on the American psyche. The most ambitious attempt at bringing modern realism into the drama was James Herne’s Margaret Fleming, which addressed issues of social determinism through realistic dialogue, psychological insight and symbolism; the play was not a success, as critics and audiences alike felt it dwelt too much on unseemly topics and included improper scenes, such as the main character nursing her husband’s illegitimate child onstage. Beginning of the 20th century Ernest Hemingway in World War I uniform. At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction’s social spectrum to encompass both high and low life and sometimes connected to the naturalist school of realism. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane (1871–1900), best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman. Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris wrote about the problems of American farmers and other social issues from a naturalist perspective. More directly political writings discussed social issues and power of corporations. Some like Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward outlined other possible political and social frameworks. Upton Sinclair, most famous for his muck-raking novel The Jungle, advocated socialism. Other political writers of the period included Edwin Markham, William Vaughn Moody. Journalistic critics, including Ida M. Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens were labeled The Muckrakers. Henry Brooks Adams’ literate autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams also depicted a stinging description of the education system and modern life. Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music. Stein labeled a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as the â€Å"Lost Generation†. The poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In The Waste Land, he embodied a jaundiced vision of post–World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound’s, Eliot’s poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Stein, Pound and Eliot, along with Henry James before them, demonstrate the growth of an international perspective in American literature, and not simply because they spend long periods of time overseas. American writers had long looked to European models for inspiration, but whereas the literary breakthroughs of the mid-19th century came from finding distinctly American styles and themes, writers from this period were finding ways of contributing to a flourishing international literary scene, not as imitators but as equals. Something similar was happening back in the States, as Jewish writers (such as Abraham Cahan) used the English language to reach an international Jewish audience. And a small group of Arab American writers known as the Al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyah (a. k. a. the â€Å"New York Pen League†) and under the leadership of Khalil Gibran, were absorbing modernist European influences and thereby introduced innovative forms and themes into Arabic-language literature. American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald’s characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth’s golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment. Fitzgerald also elucidates the collapse of some key American Ideals, set out in the Declaration of Independence, such as liberty, social unity, good governance and peace, features which were severely threatened by the pressures of modern early 20th century society. Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson also wrote novels with critical depictions of American life. John Dos Passos wrote about the war and also the U. S. A. trilogy which extended into the Depression. F. Scott Fitzgerald, photographed by Carl van Vechten, 1937. Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized grace under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897–1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippian region of his own invention. He recorded his characters’ seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states, a technique called â€Å"stream of consciousness†. (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seemingly chaotic structure conceals multiple layers of meaning. ) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past – especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South – endures in the present. Among his great works are Absalom, Absalom! , As I Lay Dying, The Sound and th .

#8220;Argumentative Essay Sample on Women in the Army Should They Be There or Not #8220;

#8220;Argumentative Essay Sample on Women in the Army Should They Be There or Not #8220; Society says that women are equal to men, and can do anything a man can. For the most part that is right, there have been women that have excelled and achieved things society thought only men could do. There is an exception to this, WAR. Women are not built for war, they do not have the strength it requires or the mental stability, but they still want to try to succeed. This is not because they want to serve there country as much but to show society that women are just as capable as men are. War requires a lot of training, physical strength and stamina. These characteristics most men have. Doctors and physical trainers show facts that even the most robust women do not have all of these qualities. Most soldiers carry around a 400 pound backpack plus a gun, they have been trained to run and dodge bullets while firing back and not to leave any soldier behind, so they lift a 400 pound body onto there shoulders and run him to safety as well. The facts show that a woman does not have the body build for these kinds of tasks. This is why in present day women have different training standards to men. We all know that there are some strong women that will be able to do the menà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢s training, but the emotional side of war will get them. Most men have problems handling these emotions during and for a long time after the war. Now doctors know that women are very emotional people due to there hormones, but they also know that when you put a women in a danger zone men become emotionally involved too. This is because society shows that men are supposed to protect the women, and that is what there jobs are. This causes problems on the battlefield, if someone gets shot and they go down, a man wonà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã¢â€ž ¢t leave a woman, and women will try not leave a man to lie there and die even if they told them to go. Just war its self emotionally affects you, the bombs going off, bullets wizzing past your head, soldiers dieing all around you will cause major emotional problems to a man, but to a woman the emotions would be unbearable causing her training and skills to falter. When you go into battle, you will be fighting for months at a time. Soldiers tend to make friends and form relationships with the men or women they are fighting with. Now with a man you can become good friends but a woman u could get awfully close. This happens especially if she is the only women they have seen in months. Physical facts show that women get abused on the battle field, women get captured and they get tortured and rapped over and over again by the enemy, but this happens with in the lines of your own men too. These are the main reasons women should not be put on a battlefield, the relationship with men, there physical and there mental strength just do will not handle war. For the women that have made it through war and made it out will be mentally unstable for the rest of there lives, Yes they set out to do what they wanted to prove to men that they can do it and at times prove that they can serve there country, but paid a higher price at the end.

Rationalizing drug patent system - striking the balance between the pioneer drug manufacturers and the public interest The WritePass Journal

Rationalizing drug patent system - striking the balance between the pioneer drug manufacturers and the public interest Abstract: Rationalizing drug patent system striking the balance between the pioneer drug manufacturers and the public interest Abstract:1. Introduction2. Patent Protection for Drugs:2.1 Rationale2.2 Effects: Are generics at stake of malady of public health?3. Measures adopted to address the drug pricing problem4. WTO –TRIPS and Traditional Methods to the Address the Problem through Compulsory Licensure and Parallel Imports4.1 Misdirected innovation4.2 Me-too drugs4.3 â€Å"Deadweight losses†5. New Reward System for Pharmaceutical Innovation: Reward Contests as a Primer for Innovation5.1   The proposed reward system and its implementation: Generics a New stand5.2   Significances of the proposed system5.2.1 Better direction of research expenditures5.2.2 Elimination of â€Å"Deadweight Loss† (DWL)5.2.3 Efficient marketing5.3 Possible global implications of the proposed system6. Discussion and conclusionBibliographyRelated Abstract: Pharmaceuticals and drug markets functioning poorly because, system of patent does not effectively stimulate drug research and development. Instead, it is inducing large amounts of research into therapeutics with relatively low incremental therapeutic index, while providing inadequate incentives to innovate in some areas of great therapeutic value life saving drugs. As a result, patents lead to high prices which exclude many users from access to potentially life-saving drugs and anti-retroviral.In this essay, I supported to proposed novel reward system for pharmaceutical innovation, in which innovators are rewarded based on the incremental therapeutic outcomes of their innovation. This may align innovators’ incentives with social objectives i.e., public interest of affordable price of drugs and lead to the best possible allocation of RD investment. When rewards given directly to innovators, patents could be compulsorily licensed to enable competitive drug pricing, thus solving problems of drug access. Government expenditures on rewards could be largely derived through reduced expenditures on patented drugs, and pharmaceutical innovators could continue to earn a good return on their RD investments. 1. Introduction The patent system was designed to foster the research, development and cater the need of the society by using it for the public welfare. The members of the WTO have to follow the minimum standards of the intellectual property protection laid by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The WTO-TRIPS try to create a common platform for countries of different economic caliber to have a common trading platform. The idea is to provide all the essential products like drugs to be made available at an affordable price. In this assignment the first part deals with global efforts of international organizations and domestic legislations of developed nations to achieve the above purpose and the pharmaceutical lobby to curtail it. It also deals with the generic drugs and their availability .The latter part will also discuss the policy considerations, reforms and alternatives   to make the pharmaceutical patent system a more effective and strong structure by creating a striking balance between the interests of the brand drug pharmaceutical companies on one side and the public interest on the other side. 2. Patent Protection for Drugs: 2.1 Rationale General rationale for patent system comes in two forms. There is the argument of natural rights, where product (drugs) rights are seen as property rights owned to the companies that develop them. The protection is there to prevent other companies from free riding. The theoretical basis is strong, Consistent with Locke’s theory of labor and property rights, in an industry that is labor (intellectual labor) intensive, where generics can easily take the profit away from the companies that made the investment, the fruits of labor are entitled to strong property rights. The second and more pragmatic view is that such system enables pharmaceutical companies to recoup their investment in the RD of new drugs and therefore offers the right incentives for those manufactures to continue their innovation and investment. It is reasoned that such a policy will reap the maximum social benefits. The high cost of drug RD is real; United States has one of the most stringent FDA approval protocols, in order to ensure the safety and efficacy. The three clinical trials usually last between five and seven years. Less than one percent of all drugs make it to clinical trials and four percent of those make it to the market.[1] Therefore, the cost of one drug in the market also includes, and should include the RD costs for the several drugs that never made it to the market. U.S government in 1990 estimated that a new drug took ten to twelve years to come to market at a cost of $359M.[2] Such money and time commitment, it is argued, justifies the pharmaceutical companies’ need for a relatively long time of exclusive market monopoly to make some profits. 2.2 Effects: Are generics at stake of malady of public health? The generic medicine is what comes to market after the patent term expires.[3] Currently, this is the only legal way for consumers in most parts of the globe to get a medicine for a cheaper price. Because of the low price of generic medicines, they constitute only a small portion of the overall pharmaceutical revenue. In 1997, the dollar sales of branded drugs in the United States amounted to $71.8 billion, and 90% comes from brand name prescription drugs.[4]   Sooner the generic medicine comes into the market, greater the financial loss to the branded pharmaceutical companies. Therefore the RD pharmaceutical companies have employed a variety tactics to elongate their term of patent protection. At the same time, generic drugs are the saviors of some of the under developed nations in the world that are also burdened with the highest HIV infection rate. Without generic medicines coming to them sooner, the horrible situation there will get worse. 3. Measures adopted to address the drug pricing problem The issue of consumer access to generic drugs through the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984[5], (the Hatch-Waxman Act) was trying to do two things: it reduces the burden on generic drug companies in their effort to get FDA approval; and it compensates RD pharmaceutical companies for their time spent in the FDA approval process with more patent protection time. The Hatch-Waxman Act has not achieved its intended purpose, it has been reported that pharmaceutical companies have designed strategies to take unfair advantage of this act to maximize their profits. These strategies include applying for patents over a period of time that covers different aspects of a drug so that new patents become active as old patents expire.[6] It is extensively acknowledged that some patent legislation do serve remarkable public interest. The Orphan Drug Act[7] grants exclusivity to drugs that affect fewer than 200,000 people where pharmaceutical companies that develop them would otherwise not be able to realize a profit at all. The pediatric exclusivity clause of the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 also uses patent protection to promote overall social benefits.[8] Similarly, the European Parliament gave a fillip to the Bolar-type exception by its 16 April 1996 resolution which supported the measure, albeit in a much narrower sense.[9] Specifically, European Community Directive 2001/83/EC on medicinal products for human use, provides for the Bolar-type exemption provisions.[10] This exception is particular relevance to generic drug manufacturers who wish seeking regulatory approval for their products, modeled on patented pharmaceuticals that are in their twilight. 4. WTO –TRIPS and Traditional Methods to the Address the Problem through Compulsory Licensure and Parallel Imports The context of access to life saving medicines in developing countries, the WTO Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Doha Declaration on Public Health[11] provides for special provisions ranging from parallel import, government use, to compulsory licensing, to facilitate and improve access to affordable life-saving drugs.[12] However, it has been noted that Article 31bis, the arrowhead of the new amendment to TRIPS, that is especially ratified to facilitate access to essential drugs by developing countries that have limited or no manufacturing capacity, is encumbered with administrative barriers that could hamper its effectiveness. Furthermore, the proliferation of bilateral trade agreements requiring stronger intellectual property protection than TRIPS does, are generally perceived as obstacle to the implementation of TRIPS’ flexibilities by developing countries.[13] With essence, even with exceptions to pharmaceutical patent exclusivity, the current patent system is by no means, weak, and there is an ample evidence of a causal link between the current system of stronger patent protection and higher pharmaceutical prices.[14] One major concern is proliferation of patented research tools, which can potentially up the costs of pharmaceutical RD.[15] The ambiguous and perennially shrinking scope of research or experimental use exception offers little space for unfettered use of patented research tools.[16] This arguably informed the recent report of the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Health (CIPIH) of the World Health Organization, urging developing countries to, inter alia; devise appropriate national legal frameworks to facilitate access to affordable prescription drugs.[17] This essay also reiterates, inter alia, the virtues of the rewards system, and open source approaches to pharmaceutical RD, with a view to easing p atents’ stranglehold on pharmaceuticals.[18] Other major issues of Patent Monopoly System and Pharmaceuticals 4.1 Misdirected innovation Since prices in pharmaceutical markets do not necessarily satisfy value to consumers, profits are not expected to be proportional to the social value of an innovation. There are four types of problems which arise here, which are. First, the pricing of branded (pioneer) drugs may bear no particular relationship to social value. Second, â€Å"me-too† drugs may be able to yield large profits even though they offer little or no therapeutic advantage over prior existed therapies. Third, firms may find it very profitable to develop minor modifications to their own prior existing drugs, as a sort of ever greening strategy. Fourth, profits from RD and showing new uses for non-patented compounds will be small and may not support investing in clinical trials to demonstrate efficacy. 4.2 Me-too drugs Many commentators have been very critical of what appears to be an accelerating number of â€Å"me-too† drugs (also called â€Å"follow-on† drugs). Me-too drugs are products which largely duplicate the action of existing drug. For example, there are now many â€Å"statins† to help fight cholesterol, and, as some commentators have observed, it is not evident that there is much social benefit from so much variety.[19] Me-too drugs can be precious in providing therapeutic choice, and perhaps also benefits from competition; but they also may harm the returns available to the break-through drug in a class by capturing market share[20]. It is arguable that firms have devoted an excessive share of innovative research into developing me-too drugs, which have relatively little incremental therapeutic value, but which harms the returns available to the first drug in the market. 4.3 â€Å"Deadweight losses† The current implemented patent system also causes substantial welfare losses because consumers who would buy the product if it were priced at somewhere nearer production cost do not buy it at the monopoly price.[21] The welfare loss caused by this is called the â€Å"deadweight loss† (DWL) of monopoly pricing, since there is a pure loss to society when consumers do not obtain a product which they value more than the cost of manufacturing it.[22] Using highly aggregated data, claim that the scale of deadweight loss in the US drug market is on the order of $3bn- $30bn annually; the same authors estimate deadweight losses of $5bn on $8bn of sales, which indicates very large DWL for the market overall.[23]   Globally, the DWL is clear, because in many markets, drug insurance is unavailable and so consumers are more price-sensitive. The following section will briefly review the literature on the possible alternatives to the patent system, and how best to deploy them to mitigate the costs of patents. 5. New Reward System for Pharmaceutical Innovation: Reward Contests as a Primer for Innovation As seen above, the patent monopoly system doesn’t serve the pharmaceuticals market very well – it leads to misdirected innovation[24], to substantial deadweight losses[25], to counterfeit drugs[26], to price controls[27], and arguably to excessive marketing and unnecessary risks to patients. These features are not observed in other markets.[28] This suggests that there are two crucial requirements for an effective system of funding innovation in pharmaceuticals. First, the rewards for innovation in pharmaceuticals should be proportional to the social value of the innovation. Second, prices should be near average production cost, in order to minimize deadweight losses and counterfeit drugs, and to eliminate the need for price controls. The following section details a proposal for a system which meets these requirements. 5.1   The proposed reward system and its implementation: Generics a New stand Method for rewarding patented pharmaceuticals with payments or rewards paid out of a government-financed Pharmaceutical Innovation Fund (PIF). When a drug is approved for use in a country, it would be registered by a firm, normally by the owner of related patents required in the production of the drug.[29] PIF would make payments to registrants, and in exchange for such payments, registrants would be compelled to grant zero-priced licenses for all listed patents when used to make and sell the drug. The payments would be annual during the period in which the registrant’s drugs were patented. Rewards might also be paid for patented cost-reducing process innovations, and for court verdicts of invalidity or non-infringement which allowed for generic production without a compulsory license. The aim of this section is to outline how the fund should determine the reward for a given innovation. Each patented drug would given points reflecting gain in average therapeutic value less costs of treatment over that of the next best pre-existing treatment, for all units of the drug sold by the registrant and by other manufacturers in a given year. Drugs that improve health would get reward = Incremental value of QALY[30] Ãâ€" Dollar value of QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years)[31]. This will be determined on the therapeutic value determinant of the drugs. Better the therapeutic value more the reward. This put simply means that the pleasure drug like Viagra would enjoy less reward than the life saving essential drug. Cost reducing innovations should be given the points that have been achieved by using the patented technology = Average price of the medicine set by all sellers using patented innovations – Average price not using the patented innovation Ãâ€" number of pills sold. This can be a parameter for the successful invention as the number of drugs sold will generate more revenue and this parameter can be used for determining successful invention. Registrant would get points for every sale of its drug, no matter who produced or sold the product, so that the reward is really for the innovation, clinical testing, and marketing of the product. In principal, the innovator need not produce/sell the drug, though it would have an incentive to market the drug so as to increase the volume of sales on which it could earn points. In many instances, drugs are given for a variety of different conditions, and so the therapeutic value, as well as the next best therapies, would be different for different conditions. This implies that it would be useful to obtain evidence from prescribing doctors on what conditions drugs were prescribed for, through random sampling of doctors.[32] 5.2   Significances of the proposed system The potential significance of the proposal are immense, including making drugs more widely accessible, eliminating over pricing, improving the direction of research spending, and marketing incentives more efficient. 5.2.1 Better direction of research expenditures This proposed system would make the incentives to innovate proportional in a meaningful way to social value, since the award given to the drug registrant would be appropriate with the net benefit created by the drug. This would increase the incentives to find new drugs with large incremental therapeutic value, and decrease the incentives to find new products which offered little extra benefit. (And with fewer me-too products, and less incentive to advertise them, profits of pioneer innovators would be even higher.) And it could become profitable to demonstrate the therapeutic value of old, unpatented compounds for new uses, if rewards were paid to patentees who had shown the therapeutic value of the patented use of the drug 5.2.2 Elimination of â€Å"Deadweight Loss† (DWL) Prices of drugs under this proposal would fall to approximately the average cost of production. Based on experience with medicines facing generic competition today, this implies that patented drug prices would decrease by on average 50% to 80%. This would obviously be beneficial for consumers, with total savings in the US of on the order of $100bn annually. Global, savings might be on the order of $200bn. Much of this saving would be used up in paying for rewards. Aside from the reduction in total expense to consumers, there would be a welfare gain from increased consumption of lower-priced medicines. Deadweight loss (DWL) from the current patent system is certainly immense in pharmaceutical markets. The efficiency gains from reducing drug prices to approximately the average cost of production could easily be over $100bn, and the gains in terms of saved lives would likely be very good in number. 5.2.3 Efficient marketing The proposed system of rewards would not prevent marketing by the drug registrant. Indeed, promotions which prolonged demand could be profitable, since the registrant obtains points for more sales, based on the average net benefit. However, the effect of this marketing would be wholly profitable: marketing with increased sales such that the net benefit was negative would decrease the reward obtained. So manufacturers would have an incentive to promote the drug to obtain the largest number of consumers with a positive net profit. However, the amount of promotional activity would be declined under this proposal because there would be lesser copycat drugs competing to attract a restricted number of prescriptions. 5.3 Possible global implications of the proposed system This system is ideal for enabling wide international access to life saving drugs, while eliminating ineffective parallel imports between nations having different prices. Innovator could be resident anywhere; and with prices equal to the average cost of production, even developing nations would be well served. However, if not all states adopted this model, then one could expect substantial parallel imports into the non-adopting states. The asymmetries could lead to some problems of coordination between adopting and non-adopting nations with respect to pharmaceutical trade and commerce. But the system if adopted by many nations could be designed to allow for small contributions in developing nations, basically by assigning them a small dollar value for each QALY. 6. Discussion and conclusion The proposal outlined in this essay presents an effective method of rewarding pharmaceutical innovation which yields two major benefits. First, it aligns private research incentives with social objectives i.e. as much focused issues of high drug prices by rewarding innovations based on their assessed therapeutic value. This is an improvement over the ordinary implementation of the current monopoly patent system, which cannot be efficient in bringing out pharmaceutical innovation given that pharmaceutical markets are extraordinarily dysfunctional. The proposed system can therefore be used to increase the rate of drug development cycle. Second, it allows for medicines to be priced at near the average cost of production, enabling widespread access to life saving drugs. It is possible to achieve both of these goals without increased government expenditures on drugs, since governments are already large buyers of high-priced medicines. The proposed system is not intended to be an assault o n the pharmaceutical industry: on the contrary, it continues to offer healthy benefits to pharmaceutical manufacturers which successfully bring valuable, innovative drugs to market, while removing the spectre of poorly-conceived, arbitrary price controls and satisfying the public interest. These significances suggest that this system deserves serious investigation. Bibliography STATUTES Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 US, (the Hatch-Waxman Act) The Orphan Drug Act of US Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 Food Drug Cosmetic Act  §525-528 European Community Directive 2001/83/EC, Article 10 (1), (a), (i), (ii), (iii) OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, at wto.org/English/thwto_e/minist_e/min01_e/mindec_trips_e.htm Oxfam, â€Å"Fatal Side Effects: Medicine Patents Under the Microscope.† In Brigitte Granville, ed., The Economics of Essential Medicines, (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2002). Report of the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health, Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, (Geneva: WHO Press, 2006), at 175-188. Carlos Maria Correa, â€Å"Implications of bilateral free trade agreements on access to medicines,† Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 84, No. 5 (2006). John H. Baton, â€Å"Research-tool patents: issues for health in the developing world,† Bulletin of the World Health Organization vol. 80, No. 2 (2002). The Gale Group, Intellectual Property Rules: A Delicate Balancing Act for Drug Development, 23 Chain Drug Rev. RX13 2001. BOOKS Peter Drahos and Ruth Mayne, Global Intellectual Property Rights: Knowledge, Access and Development, eds., (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) JOURNALS Angell, Marcia, â€Å"The Pharmaceutical Industry: To whom is it Accountable?† (2000), 342:1902-1904, New England Journal of Med Elyse Tanouye Robert Langreth, ‘Times Up: with Patents Expiring on Big Prescriptions, Drug Industry Quakes’, (Aug 12, 1997) The Wall Street Journal. Frederick M. Abbott and Jerome H. Reichman, â€Å"The Doha Round’s Public Health Legacy: Strategies for the Production and Diffusion of Patented Medicines under the Amended TRIPS Provisions,† (December 2007), vol. 10, No. 4, JIEL. George Foster, ‘Opposing Forces in a Revolution in International Patent Protection: the U.S. and India in the Uruguay Round and Its Aftermath’, (1998) 3 UCLA J. Int’l L For. Aff. Lara Glasgow, ‘Stretching the Limits of Intellectual Property Rights: Has the Pharmaceutical Industry Gone Too Far?’ (2001) 41 J.L.Tech. Tao Huang, â€Å"The Experimental Purpose Doctrine and Biomedical Research,† (2004), vol. 11 Michigan Telecom Tech L Review.       [1] Elyse Tanouye Robert Langreth, ‘Times Up: with Patents Expiring on Big Prescriptions, Drug Industry Quakes’, (Aug 12, 1997), The Wall Street Journal. [2] George Foster, Opposing Forces in a Revolution in International Patent Protection: the U.S. and India in the Uruguay Round and Its Aftermath, (1998), 3 UCLA J. Int’l L For. Aff. 283. [3] This is the stage when the drugs that are almost equivalent in substance and efficacy to the original drugs can be sold for a fraction of the original price. [4] The Gale Group, Intellectual Property Rules: A Delicate Balancing Act for Drug Development, 23 Chain Drug Rev. RX13 2001. [5] See Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, Pub. L. No. 98-417, 98 Stat. 1585. Codified as 35 USC. [6] Lara Glasgow, Stretching the Limits of Intellectual Property Rights: Has the Pharmaceutical Industry Gone Too Far?, (2001), 41 J.L.Tech, 227.( For example, Bristol-Myers secured a new patent that was closely related to its original patent on the anti-cancer drug Taxol months before its original patent expired in 1997) [7]  §360aa-360ee (Food Drug Cosmetic Act  §525-528); An   example of this system working is that Merck, Sharp Dome, Inc. is developing drugs to treat Wilson’s disease, where only about one hundred Americans can potentially benefit from such a drug. Without proper patent protection, such development would not have taken place in the first place and people who suffer from the disease would be the ones to lose. [8] There an exclusive period of six months following a patent term is offered to pioneer companies to conduct clinical investigations to determine safe and effective doses for children. [9] Paragraph 17 of the European Parliament 1996 Resolution provides as follows: â€Å"Measures should be introduced which enable pharmaceutical companies to begin, in advance of patent or supplementary protection certificate (SPC) expiry, such laboratory experiments and regulatory preparations as may be required only for the registration of generic pharmaceuticals developed in the EU, to be available on the market immediately, but only after the expiry of a patent or SPC for a proprietary product.† [10] See Article 10 (1), (a), (i), (ii), (iii), Directive 2001/83/EC on the Community code relating to medicinal products for human use, (as amended). [11] See Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, at wto.org/English/thwto_e/minist_e/min01_e/mindec_trips_e.htm (accessed on May 20, 2011). [12] See Frederick M. Abbott and Jerome H. Reichman, â€Å"The Doha Round’s Public Health Legacy: Strategies for the Production and Diffusion of Patented Medicines under the Amended TRIPS Provisions,† (December 2007), vol. 10, No. 4, Journal of International Economic Law, at 929-957. [13] See for example, Carlos Maria Correa, â€Å"Implications of bilateral free trade agreements on access to medicines,† (2006), vol. 84, No. 5, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, at 399-404. [14] See Oxfam, â€Å"Fatal Side Effects: Medicine Patents Under the Microscope.† In Brigitte Granville, ed., The Economics of Essential Medicines, (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2002) at 81-99, (noting that patented drugs are more expensive than off-patent drugs); Kumariah Balasubramaniam, â€Å"Access to Medicines: Patents, Prices and Public Policy – Consumer Perspectives.† In Peter Drahos and Ruth Mayne, Global Intellectual Property Rights: Knowledge, Access and Development, eds., (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) at 90-107. [15] See John H. Baton, â€Å"Research-tool patents: issues for health in the developing world,† (2002) vol. 80, No. 2, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, at 121-125. [16] See for example, Tao Huang, â€Å"The Experimental Purpose Doctrine and Biomedical Research,† (2004), Vol. 11, Michigan Telecommunication Technology Law Review, at 97-115. [17] See Report of the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health, Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, (Geneva: WHO Press, 2006), at 175-188. [18] Id [19] Angell, Marcia, â€Å"The Pharmaceutical Industry: To whom is it Accountable?† New England Journal of Medicine, 2000, 342:1902-1904. p. 90) argues that many me-too drugs are never tested at equivalent doses to show that there are significant differences in outcomes for some patients, and claims that â€Å"the idea that patients respond differently to me-too drugs is merely an untested – and self-serving – hypothesis.† [20] DiMasi J and C Paquette, â€Å"The Economics of Follow-on Drug Research and Development Trends in Entry Rates and the Timing of Development† Pharmaco-economics 22 (Suppl. 2), 2004: 1-14. [21] Avorn, Jerry, Powerful medicines. (New York, 2004): Knopf. p. 262(discusses how deadweight losses can occur even when there is full insurance. Insurers may be unwilling to cover certain medicines, such as osteoporosis drugs, whose benefits mainly appear only after some years.); the patent system as now implemented also causes substantial welfare losses because consumers who would buy the product if it were priced at somewhere nearer production cost do not buy it at the monopoly price. The welfare loss caused by this is called by economists the â€Å"deadweight loss† (DWL) of monopoly pricing. [22] Guell R. and M. Fischbaum, â€Å"Toward allocative efficiency in the prescription drug industry.† Milbank Quarterly, 1995, 73: 213-229. [23] Douglas and Guell (2004) use US and Canadian data to argue that the DWL in the US market for a large number of drugs is at least 25% of sales. [24] It is well known that monopoly exploitation of innovations under the patent system can reduce the benefits or â€Å"surplus† available to society from an innovation. [25] Supra note 21. [26] A recent statement of the US Assistant Attorney General in a vaccine price-gouging case claimed that an â€Å"exorbitant market price †¦ may increase the incentive for counterfeiters to manufacture fake, ineffective, and potentially unsafe† drugs. (Statement of Interest of the United States, in Office of the Florida Attorney General v. ASAP Meds, Inc., Broward County Circuit Court, October 22, 2004.) [27] Supra note 20 [28] For example, in automobile markets, consumers are relatively competent to assess product quality and to make informed decisions about purchasing based on prices, quality, and their own budgets. Automobile makers therefore have incentives to develop differentiated products which respond to consumers’ demands. Deadweight losses are relatively small in automobile markets because prices are close to the average cost of production, counterfeits are relatively rare, and price controls are not used. [29] It is possible that a registrant might not own all the required patents, in which case registration would require the registrant to obtain a license to the patents from the patentee. [30] Quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a measure of disease burden, including both the quality and the quantity of life lived. It is used in assessing the value for money of a medical intervention. The QALY is based on the number of years of life that would be added by the intervention. Each year in perfect health is assigned the value of 1.0 down to a value of 0.0 for death. If the extra years would not be lived in full health, for example if the patient would lose a limb, or be blind or have to use a wheelchair, then the extra life-years are given a value between 0 and 1 to account for this. In a worst possible health state it will be from 0 to negative value. [31] Drugs which advance health should be given points reflecting the gain in average therapeutic value less costs of treatment over that of the next best pre-existing treatment. It will determine the net benefit of a drug, and then compare it to the net benefit of the next most effective pre-existing therapy, and award points based on the improvement. These points would be awarded to the registrant for each year in which the registrant’s patents would, in the absence of compulsory licensing, be sufficient to prevent other firms from producing bio-equivalent products. [32] This would be particularly important for some drugs which have extensive off-label uses (uses for which the FDA has not approved the product). There are claims that up to half of all prescriptions are written for off-label uses. â€Å"How Drug Directory Helps Raise Tab for Medicaid and Insurers†, Wall Street Journal Oct. 23, 2003. IMS Health already conducts in the US a survey of this sort entitled the â€Å"National Disease and Therapeutic Index.†

Boyle Heights Los Angeles Community Needs Assessment

Boyle Heights Los Angeles Community Needs Assessment Boyle Heights is a neighborhood located on the east side of Los Angeles (Healthy City, 2010). An initial assessment of the community revealed issues of poverty and crime. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, Hollenbeck Division (2011), the majority of crimes committed in the Boyle Heights community are property crimes such as auto theft and burglary, however there are also violent crimes such as robbery and aggravated assaults (Los Angeles Police Department COMPSTAT, 2011). According to detective Antonio Macklin of the Hollenbeck police station in Boyle Heights, the majority of crimes are motivated by economic factors as Boyle Heights is a poor community (A. Macklin, personal communication, February 10, 2011). An initial drive and walk through the residential areas of the community of Boyle Heights revealed homes in various states of disrepair. The majority of houses are old. As one walks further along through the streets graffiti is visible. However, this is also a commu nity rich in cultural history. A further walk through the community reveals a historical museum, Mariachi Plaza, Murals depicting Mexican American Culture, Catholic Churches, and family-owned markets, restaurants and clothing stores. Despite crime in the area, children are observed playing in the streets, in the local parks and in their backyards. The community does have various parks and recreation centers as well as community centers. Community Characteristics Physical/Geographical Boyle Heights is located in East Los Angeles and its geographical boundaries are demarcated by the City of Vernon to the South, East Los Angeles to the east, Lincoln Heights and El Sereno to the north, Los Angeles River and Downtown Los Angeles to the West (City of Los Angeles, 2005). For the purpose of this needs assessment, the boundaries of Boyle Heights were narrowed to boundaries as defined by the Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council website (2011) consisting of Marengo Street to the North, 25th stre et to the South, Indiana street to the East and the Los Angeles River to the West (Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council, n.d.). Boyle Heights is a mixture of residential areas, commercial areas, open space and public facilities (City of Los Angeles, 2005). According to data obtained from HealthyCity.org (2010), there are 12 Parks and Recreational Centers within a one mile radius of the Boyle Heights community. Additionally, Boyle Heights has a variety of small businesses punctuated by assets in the community such as White Memorial Medical Center, the extension of the Metro Gold Line and Los Angeles USC Medical Center, which according to the President of the Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce, Alicia Maldonado, these assets have â€Å"brought improvements to the community, jobs for the residents, customers to the retail establishments and better health care (Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce, 2011, p. 1)†. Former resident of Boyle Heights, Geneva Garcia, who resided in the area f rom the 1950’s until 2009, stated that â€Å"independent of the presence of gangs and crime in the area†, she has fond memories of her childhood and her life in Boyle Heights because of the many parks, recreational activities, sports and other community activities available to her (G. Garcia, personal communication, February 10, 2011). Ms. Garcia also confirmed that the majority of the community is Latino. This has further been confirmed through data obtained from the HealthyCity.org website and observation of the community.

Questionnaire-Based surveys Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Questionnaire-Based surveys - Research Paper Example One of the most effective and popular ways of collecting any important data are the surveys; the primary objective of a survey is to gather data about various aspects of the individuals such as their beliefs, ideas, attitudes and perceptions. The survey is mainly used in the fields of psychology, marketing research, public administration, public health and communication studiesto study the participants involved in the data collection process (Yaoxiang, &Lihai, 2008). The survey can either focus on some factual information about the individuals or might collect opinion of the respondents. The questionnaire-based surveys are used especially by Marketing and Human Resource Departments as they comprise of the experts who want to gather detailed information about the perceptions of their stakeholders so that they can meet their requirements (DeMooji & Hoftsedd, 2010; Ferguson & Rio, 2010). These surveys are frequently used by them to provide in-depth information about the areas that shoul d be focused on by a corporation so that it can implement appropriate procedures within the business operations for enhancing its productivity and performance. In questionnaire-based surveys, the candidates have to fill the questionnaire by themselves and have to interpret the questions’ meanings on their own. While, in interview based surveys, the researcher asks the questions to respondents so that more in-depth data can be collected. The data collected from the questionnaire-based surveys is quantitative that allows easy interpretation of information that is gathered. On the other hand, interview sessions are time-consuming and data collected will need more time for analysis; however, the information in interview surveys is of a higher quality (Brugger, 2010). Questionnaire-based surveys The questionnaire-based surveys involve the designing and development of a questionnaire that will ensure that assessment about the attitudes, opinions and perceptions of the respondents i s done in an effective manner. The main element in this research method is the questionnaire as it is the key instrument for gathering information about any particular issue or factual knowledge of the participants (Kalpana&Jeyakumar, 2011). According to Fanning (2005), the questionnaire development is a critical aspect in questionnaire-based survey as the researchers have to ensure that it has all those questions stated that will help them in retrieving the required information effectively. Since questionnaires are self-administered, the sequencing of questions along with their wordings is important determinants of the data quality; therefore, an adequate amount of time should be spent on developing the questionnaire so that real and factual results can be drawn from the research (Lee, Benoit-Bryan & Johnson, 2010). The questionnaire-based surveys can take place in three ways i.e. online surveys, direct mail surveys and face-to-face surveys. The latest trend is of online surveys as it allows data to be collected quickly and analysis of the data can be done with the