Leadership & Change Management Essay

Transactional leadership styles are more concerned with maintaining the normal flow of operations. Transactional leadership can be described as â€Å"keeping the ship afloat. † Transactional leaders use disciplinary power and an array of incentives to motivate employees to perform at their best. The term â€Å"transactional† refers to the fact that this type of leader essentially motivates subordinates by exchanging rewards for performance. A transactional leader generally does not look ahead in strategically guiding an organization to a position of market leadership; instead, these managers are solely concerned with making sure everything flows smoothly today. Transactional leadership motivates followers by setting up social or financial transactions that persuade them to act. For example, a transactional leader might offer bonuses to her sales staff for exceeding quotas. The bonus is a form of financial transaction. Transactional leadership often is set in opposition to transformational leadership, which is a leadership style that relies on convincing followers that a particular vision of what the organization can achieve is worth working toward. Transformational leadership A transformational leader goes beyond managing day-to-day operations and crafts strategies for taking his company, department or work team to the next level of performance and success. Transformational leadership styles focus on team-building, motivation and collaboration with employees at different levels of an organization to accomplish change for the better. Transformational leaders set goals and incentives to push their subordinates to higher performance levels, while providing opportunities for personal and professional growth for each employee. Transformational leadership might sound preferable because the leader doesn’t cynically harness the self-interest of her followers, as the transactional leader does. But there’s a problem. A transformational leader might not be forthright with her followers. For example, a business owner might motivate her workforce with stirring speeches about the nobility of hard work, while her real aim is to increase production for personal gain. This type of transformational leader might be called inauthentic. Advantages Both leadership styles are needed for guiding an organization to success. Transactional leaders provide distinct advantages through their abilities to address small operational details quickly. Transactional leaders handle all the details that come together to build a strong reputation in the marketplace, while keeping employees productive on the front line. Transformational leadership styles are crucial to the strategic development of a small business. Small businesses with transformational leaders at the helm shoot for ambitious goals, and can they achieve rapid success through the vision and team-building skills of the leader. Applications Different management styles are best suited to different situations. When it comes to front-line supervisors of minimum-wage employees, for example a transactional leadership style can be more effective. Shift supervisors at a fast food restaurant will be much more effective if they are concerned with ensuring all of the various stations run smoothly, rather than spending their time thinking up better ways to serve hamburgers. On the other hand, CEOs or sales managers can be more effective if they are transformational leaders. Executive managers need the ability to design and communicate grand strategic missions, passing the missions down to transactional leaders for implementation of the details. Organizations emphasize the concept of leadership in training managers or group leaders to propel a team or the organization forward. Within leadership, the effectiveness of the transformational versus transactional leader is often debated. Transactional leadership relies more on a â€Å"give and take† understanding, whereby subordinates have a sense of duty to the leader in exchange for some reward. Transformational leadership, on the other hand, involves a committed relationship between the leader and his followers. In 1985, industrial psychologist Bernard Bass identified and wrote about four basic elements that underlie transformational leadership. Idealized Influence Transformational leaders act as role models and display a charismatic personality that influences others to want to become more like the leader. Idealized influence can be most expressed through a transformational leader’s willingness to take risks and follow a core set of values, convictions and ethical principles in the actions he takes. It is through this concept of idealized influence that the leader builds trust with his followers and the followers, in turn, develop confidence in their leader. Inspirational Motivation Inspirational motivation refers to the leader’s ability to inspire confidence, motivation and a sense of purpose in his followers. The transformational leader must articulate a clear vision for the future, communicate expectations of the group and demonstrate a commitment to the goals that have been laid out. This aspect of transformational leadership requires superb communication skills as the leader must convey his messages with precision, power and a sense of authority. Other important behaviors of the leader include his continued optimism, enthusiasm and ability to point out the positive. Intellectual Stimulation Transformational leadership values creativity and autonomy among the leader’s followers. The leader supports his followers by involving them in the decision-making process and stimulating their efforts to be as creative and innovative as possible to identify solutions. To this end, the transformational leader challenges assumptions and solicits ideas from followers without criticizing. She helps change the way followers think about and frame problems and obstacles. The vision the leader conveys helps followers see the big picture and succeed in their efforts. Individualized Consideration Each follower or group member has specific needs and desires. For example, some are motivated by money while others by change and excitement. The individualized consideration element of transformational leadership recognizes these needs. The leader must be able to recognize or determine through eavesdropping or observation   what motivates each individual. Through one-on-one coaching and mentoring, the transformational leader provides opportunities for customized training sessions for each team member. These activities allow team members to grow and become fulfilled in their positions. The Benefits of Transformational Leadership Motivation A transformational leader uses her belief in the vision of the company to inspire the staff to be more productive and work towards company goals. The drive behind a transformational leader is to find ways in which she can get the entire staff on board with corporate strategy and planning. When the entire company is on the same page with the corporate vision, it can make achieving that vision easier. Planning Inspirational managers do not focus their energy solely on motivating the staff. A good transformational leader has broad visions for the company’s future, and those visions can become instrumental in company planning. Whether it is refining the overall business plan or affecting individual marketing programs, the transformational manager has ideas and visions for the future of the company that he wants to share with the management team and work to turn those plans into reality. Retention The idea of transformational leadership is to reach out to each employee and bring out the best in them. An inspirational manager spends time with each employee discussing ways to make the employee’s job easier, and helping to create plans for developing the employee’s career. This individual attention that is offered by transformational leaders helps to create a strong bond between the manager and his employees that will reduce employee turnover. Growth  A manager that is not intimately involved in the growth of the company and the development of her staff can start to struggle with managing her department as the company grows. A transformational leader is constantly involved with the growth of the company and the ongoing development of employees. As the company grows, the transformational leader maintains that close contact to the company and employees and can make the process of growing a more involved experience for new and veteran employees.

Literature Step by Step Wicked Essay

Theme In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, the theme that can be found is surviving divorce and remarriage The first challenge is getting used to complicated living arrangements. Ralph had to remember whose house to go to on different days of the week. He ended up having two different lunch boxes to remind him where to go. Another challenge is to accept a stepparent and stepsiblings. Pixie had a tough time trying to get along with her  stepsisters, Hetty and Sophie. She was annoyed when she had to share a room with Hetty The last challenge is loyalty. Claudia was not friendly to Stella at first because she did not want to hurt her  mother. She was worried that being nice to Stella would mean that she is disloyal to her mother It is not easy to cope with divorce and remarriage. It takes a lot of patience, tolerance and acceptance Most Interesting Character In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, the most interesting character is Pixie Pixie is interesting because she is smart. She was the first to realize what the five pupils had in common Besides that, Pixie is very imaginative. She is able to create ghost stories to scare Hetty from staying in the same room with her Pixie is outspoken and honest. She tells Lucy exactly what she thought of  her daughters. She also told Lucy that she hated pretending that everything is all right Pixie is interesting because she is smart, imaginative, outspoken and honest One Moral Value In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, a moral value that can be found is love and devotion The first character who showed love and devotion is Richard’s mother. She spent a lot of money seeking for  Richard although she had to suffer  Reverend Coldstone’s anger and disapproval. Another character who demonstrated love and devotion is Charlotte. She continued her mother’s search for her  brother, Richard. Since she did not have any money, she married a rich man she did not love at 16. Colin showed love and devotion too. He kept his Dad’s tobacco tin and hummed their favorite song. He does three paper rounds to earn money to search for his Dad when he is old enough These characters have greatly showed their love and devotion. They proved that people will do anything for the ones they love A Memorable Incident In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, a memorable incident is the death of  Richard’s father The first change that Richard had to face is his mother’s marriage to Reverend Coldstone. Richard hated his stepfather  because he enforced strict rules and made Richard feels that his house was like a prison. He also sent Richard away to Mordanger School for four years Another change is betrayal. Richard felt that his mother had betrayed him when she allowed Reverend Coldstone to treat him  badly. He also felt betrayed when Charlotte persuaded him not to hate his stepfather Finally, Richard decided to run away and vanish. His departure caused financial ruin and heartbreak to his mother and sister. His mother spent a lot of money to search for  him. Charlotte married a man she did not love to continue the search after their  mother died The death of Richard’s father brought about a lot of changes to Richard’s family. Most of them are sorrowful. From this incident, we must remember that we should be courageous in difficult times and not let others suffer from our bad decisions Problems Faced By A Character In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine. Colin had a few problems and had his own ways of overcoming them The first problem that Colin had is when his mother suddenly decided to move away without his dad’s knowledge. He was always waiting for his dad to come to see them but he never did. So, he wrote a letter to his dad, but he never received any reply Another problem is Colin missed his dad very much. Colin consoled himself by pretending his dad was around. He would put his dad’s tobacco tin under his pillow, hummed their  favorite song and finally unscrewed the lid of the tin to take in the smell of his dad Colin wants to find his dad. But he cannot do it now as he does not have enough money and is not old enough. So, he does three paper  rounds to save enough money to find his dad when he is older Problems are common in life. We must think  carefully of how we want to solve it so that the consequences of our decision will not trouble others Compare Two Characters In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, I choose two compare two characters that are similar Richard and Colin The first similarity is both Richard and Colin are missing their fathers. Richard’s father  died of an illness while Colin was missing his father after his mother decided to move away without his father’s knowledge Another similarity is their mothers ignore both of them. Richard’s mother did not defend him when Reverend Coldstone treated him badly. Colin missed his dad a lot but his mother did not seem to be aware of how Colin felt Both Richard and Colin decided to run away to make things work. Richard ran away from home as he thought that his action would make life more pleasant for everyone. Colin wants to run away to find his dad whom he misses a lot. He does three paper rounds to save money and will leave when he is old enough The two characters suffered much pain and sorrow. No one cared how they felt. Running away is not a solution. But, it may have been the best option for the both of them, as they had no one to advise them Point Of View In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, the story is mostly written in the first person point of view Richard wrote his story in his diary/album so it is in the first person point of view. We as readers learn of the events in his life through his eyes. We know from his writing that he had come home to find Charlotte’s letter, but we do not whether he decided to stay or leave Old Harwick Hall Claudia, too, told her story through her point of view. We only know her feelings and thoughts and not of her mother, father, granny and Stella. We know that Claudia sympathized Stella for the guests’ cold treatment, but we do not know how Stella truly felt Pixie also tells her story through her own point of view. We know all her thoughts as she speaks. For instance, from her point of  view, we find that the actions of the other  characters annoy her. Pixie is annoyed with most of Hetty’s actions like calling her  Priscilla, rolling the cat on the carpet like a sausage and sniffing while reading Writing the story in the first point of view helps us as readers to understand the story better. We get first-hand knowledge of the characters’ feelings, thoughts and decisions A Character That Changed After An Event In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, a character that has changed due to certain events in his life is Colin Colin changed into an unhappy and lonely boy when his mother decided to move. He had to start at another school. It was an unpleasant experience as everyone ignored him as they had their own set of friends already. Besides that, his mother was busy with work and was always too tired to listen to Colin’s problems Colin became a dreamy boy because he missed his dad. Every night, he would hold on to his dad’s tobacco tin and hum their  favorite song. He pretended his dad was around. This habit caused him to have less focus in class and do badly in school Being apart from his dad made Colin become very resourceful. He did three paper rounds to earn enough money to search for his dad when he is old enough At first, Colin responded negatively to the changes in his life. He was sad and dreamy. But at last, he decided that he must do something in order to see his dad again. This shows that he is optimistic and is determined in finding his dad Family And Relationship Portrayed In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, Richard’s family is portrayed to have a strong sense of love Richard showed that he had strongly loved his family. Although he ran away and vanished, he still came by the house twice to catch a glimpse of his mother and sister Richard’s mother, Lilith was the first to show her love and devotion. She spent a fortune seeking for Richard and suffered Reverend Coldstone’s anger as their money lessened. She died of broken heart because of her  undying love for her son, Richard Charlotte, too, showed her love and devotion. She wanted to keep searching for Richard after her mother’s death, but had no money of  her own. So, she married a rich man she did not love because he promised to help her find Richard Love leads to reunion and healing in a family. We should love our family unconditionally and be prepared to make sacrifices for them An Interesting Event In the novel Step by Wicked Step by Anne Fine, an event that I find interesting is when Robbo gave Dumpa an ice lolly This event is interesting because it showed how smart kids could be. Robbo gave the ice lolly to Dumpa because he wanted Dumpa to not be out in the cold. However, Dumpa outsmarted them by not eating it and stayed outside with Roy It is also interesting because it led Robbo, Callie and their mother talking realistically about their conflict. Robbo said that he was fed up with the whole situation and Callie confessed that she could never get along with Roy Lastly, this event is interesting because it brought a good change to Robbo’s family. Callie wanted to move to their dad’s house, so their mother helped made it more comfortable for her. In return, their dad agreed to look  after Dumpa to let their mother and Roy have a break It is important for all of us to be honest to each other. Pretending that everything is all right will not make things better. But once everyone is honest about their feelings, it is easier to make things work for everybody A Character That I Admire In the novel Step by Wicked Step, written by Anne Fine, the character that I admire is Claudia. There are many reasons why I admire her very much First of all, I admire Claudia because she is a gentle person. Listening to Richard’s sad story makes her weep. Besides, she is loyal to her mother. She tries not to sound too happy when speaking to her father because she does not want to hurt her mother’s feeling. She rejects Stella and refuses to enjoy her time with her father out of loyalty to her mother. She knows that her parent’s break-up is serious even though her mother sounded cheerful Apart from that, I really admire Claudia because she is a fair and sensible person. She does not blame Stella for her parents’ break-up. At the dinner party, she thinks that the guests are rude for not appreciating Stella’s hard work. She realizes that ignoring Stella would not help solving matters between her parents. Feeling sorry for Stella who is being ignored by the guests, she decides to help her get accepted by showing off the green pajamas that Stella gave her. In a nutshell, the character that I admire from Step by Wicked Step is Claudia because she is gentle, loyal, fair and sensible. I think we could learn a lot from her character. In The Midst Of Hardship Scratches – Cuts on the body/limbs Despair – Hopelessness Horrendous – Awful, dreadful Bloated – Swollen Carcasses – Dead bodies Chips – Broken pieces

Using Kiosk Banking to Lower Cost Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Using Kiosk Banking to Lower Cost - Essay Example Such machines, also called electronic kiosks, are used for data retrieval, information gathering, and dispensing banking services. They have an interface platform and a personal computer powered by software to handle financial transactions. Some kiosks also have videoconferencing, magnetic stripe readers, smart card reader and â€Å"electronic pads† that reproduce signatures on laser printed mortgage forms. The banks also realized later that the use of kiosks needs to be marketed pro-actively. These machines can’t attract customers on their own. Olivetti North America Inc, of Liberty Lake, Washington and NCR, Dayton, Ohio are the market leaders in manufacture of kiosks, though not without competition. The kiosks may differ in variety, color, style and working. Washington Mutual Bank of Seattle has installed its kiosks in discount stores where they are used for requesting loan applications besides normal banking functions. The Bank is also experimenting in the kiosk usage in absence of store staff. The Bank feels that the kiosks have made a positive difference to the business. Ed Reger, vice-president of the Bank says that unlike some other banks, they will not give up on developing customer relations and will not put up kiosks in stand alone environment. Reger feels that places like retail outlets, offices of realtors, and retirement homes hold great potential for the use of kiosks. In a typical kiosk operation, a person can fill an application to open a bank account, append electronic signatures and discuss with customer s ervice department through video conferencing. However, the high costs associated with the technology dissuade smaller institutions from using it. Meanwhile NCR and Affinity Technology group have joined hands to put to use NCR software to develop automated lending capabilities. On the other hand, Olivetti kiosks have different core module for different operations. The machine of Dyad Inc., another manufacturer helps the customers to secure a

Knowledge Management and High Performance Organizations Essay

Knowledge Management and High Performance Organizations - Essay Example As the essay stresses human knowledge may be an organization’s most valuable asset, much of this knowledge is never shared. Harnessing critical knowledge and using it to create a common vision and objectives can move a company closer to making an HPO. KM supports the notion of HPO through â€Å"†¦organizational values, culture, processes and tools that stimulate and support the organization's employees, partners and customers to create, capture, organize, access, and properly use the organization’s knowledge that enables people to personally and collectively become more productive, collaborative and innovative†. According to the paper findings the trend toward serious management changes made by large companies on the way toward making high-performance organizations is stressed in numerous theoretical and empirical studies. These changes revolve around one of the four commonly recognized approaches to organizational performance, namely employee involvement, total quality management, re-engineering, and knowledge management. Although neither of these categories can be addressed as simple knowledge management is â€Å"...the least well-defined and articulated of the four organizational improvement concepts†. Knowledge Management (KM) is a very broad discipline that integrates a number of organisational endeavours and practices used by different organisations in a variety of ways in order to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge and thus ensure competitive advantage of the company. KM represents one of the most recent developments in the long line of organisational tools a nd techniques such as 'the scientific management', X and Y' theory', 'T-groups', 'total quality management', 'organizational learning' 'systems thinking', 'benchmarking', 'business process re-engineering' and other methods meant to create economic value and competitive advantage. After becoming an independent established discipline in the middle of 1990s, KM is perceived as an essential aspect of HRM and information technology in modern organisations (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). The integrative and rather broad nature of KM contributes to the difficulties associated with defining this paradigm. Generally, KM is viewed as a new form of management which facilitates organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly dynamic environmental changes. This broader perspective incorporates the processes of knowledge use, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer and knowledge renewal with each of these concepts being defined independently (Malhotra 2000). Therefore, Skyrme (2002) suggests defining KM as "the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation, in pursuit of organizational objectives" (p. 4). However, this definition of KM is far from being unanimous: the views vary substantially by representatives of different theories and approaches. Traditionally, two major views have been presented in the scholarly literature on KM, namely: the informational resources management (or management of explicit knowledge) and management, which creates the environment in which people could easily develop and share the knowledge while the increasingly serious

Nothing But Death by Pablo Neruda Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Nothing But Death by Pablo Neruda - Essay Example According to the research findings, it can, therefore, be said that the poem "Nothing But Death" is full of pathos, anguish, pain, desolation, and isolation or rather alienation of Neruda with the world, in general, and with himself, his inner trials and tribulations, in particular. In the second phase, we discover a new Neruda, like a sphinx that is reborn from its own ashes. In the second phase, Neruda has discovered his mission as a poet, whose ultimate aim and responsibility is to give encouragement to man. This poem begins on a bleak note, continues in this dark vein and ends in utter desolation. "Nothing But Death" has an elegiac character and overall gives an impressionistic picture of doom and gloom. It has a hermetic tone and sketches a metaphysical meditative picture on the grim reality and final tyranny of death. The omniscient narrator is in a dream-like state and with him also hypnotically takes the reader into this stance. Moreover, the poem is replete with dark allegor ical imagery, which at times is almost corporeal. The symbols employed by Neruda in this poem are surreal, while the oxymoron ( silence-sound ) used to have more than their common, mundane rhetorical value. Essentially, the whole mood and tone of the poem is dark__ a black hole like vacuum fills the poetic canvas and draws the reader into it, who is engulfed by darkness, that pervades the entire creation. In the damp darkness, the heart of the reader sinks like the illusionary ship of the poem.

A-Level Law in Action Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

A-Level Law in Action - Essay Example For instance, in R v Steane, the accused lent his services to the enemy, in order to protect his family from harm. Consequently, his conviction was set aside6. Â  On the other hand, indirect or oblique intent arises when the accused can foresee the outcome, as being highly probable, and the accused does not desire that outcome. In Hyam v DPP, the accused’s intention had been to terrify the victim and not to cause her death, when he set fire to her house. Their Lordships upheld the conviction for murder, as the accused could anticipate that his actions could result in death or grievous bodily harm7. Â  In the present problem, Bob with the intention of killing Alice exploded a petrol bomb. As a consequence, Alice lost her life. Bob caused her death intentionally.This constitutes, the crime of murder, and Bob will be accordingly held liable. Â  In Goodfellow, the accused was convicted of constructive manslaughter, for having caused the death of his family, while attempting to set his house on fire. It is important to note that he had no intention of causing the death of his family8. Â  Bob had claimed that it was not his intention to cause harm to anyone other than his wife, Alice. This is untenable, on account of the doctrine of transferred malice. The letter states that if an individual has the Mens rea to commit a specific offense against a particular person, and if that crime had been committed by that individual against some other person, then the Mens rea is transferred to the actual victim. This is borne out by the decision in R v Mitchell, wherein the accused had caused the death of an old woman, by striking an old man who fell on that old woman. The latter died subsequently, due to the complications that had arisen in her treatment.

Your values or expectations in life- how do you measure sucess Essay

Your values or expectations in life- how do you measure sucess Happiness fulfillment - Essay Example He was not sure what they did with their money, but he was reasonably sure it at least consisted of all night video gaming, unlimited ice cream and pizza, and a carnival in your backyard. As he progressed through life and my expectations changed he began to define success as social acceptance and respect. As a student one’s concerns are not always directly focused on subsistence, so success became tied to popularity. The most successful people were clearly those who had all the parties, had attractive boyfriends and girlfriends, and sat at the right lunch tables. Today he looks back at this adolescent phase and consider that while his understanding of success was widely shared, he cannot help but feel it was rooted in an illusionary understanding of reality and what is important in life. Today he defines success much differently. Rather than viewing success in terms of other people, he understands success as a matter of personal meaning and social contribution. He think that i t iss important that human beings live their lives with purpose. Too often people are caught seeking acceptance from others and personal wealth as they believe these things constitute success and personal happiness, when in actuality they are a mirage. True success is living life to one’s full potential in ways that contribute to the world in positive ways. For him, this means seeking out and sharing new and interesting ideas, living with a social conscience, and a sense of morality. He iss not a stoic, and he believes life is full of enjoyment, but he believes if we are to achieve a lasting sense of accomplishment it must come from a personally defined sense of meaning and purpose. This is the true definition of success. For him happiness was a complicated issue that he came to understand throughout his life experience. He believes that happiness begins with achieving success. Having defined success, it follows that one must

Why There Would Be No People Without Plants Essay - 2

Why There Would Be No People Without Plants - Essay Example Since humans exhale carbon dioxide, plants use that to create oxygen that enables humans to live. This makes life possible for all living forms on earth. This paper will review the importance of plants, and how their existence orchestrates the existence of other life forms. Plants have the task of cleaning the air. This implies that they take up all the carbon dioxide that humans exhale, and turn it into oxygen. They are a primary source of energy. This is because some individuals somewhere in the world do not have electricity as a form of energy. They provide basic heat energy in the form of charcoal and wood. It is a known fact that, without this heat source, many lives would perish (Balick & Cox, 1997). Through plants, the soil pH and acidity is maintained. It is through the existence of shrubs and grasses that the top soil is stabilised and held in place. Through any form of erosion, soil would be rendered useless. The growth of anything on earth depends on how the soil tends to behave. Supporting life form on earth is based on the ability to grow and sustain food (Balick & Cox, 1997). This can only be possible if rich, top soil is maintained. Through plants, it is possible for human beings to get treatment for certain diseases. Some plant species aid in the excretion of chemicals that help combat diseases. Without some of these plants, it would be next to impossible for humans to exist for long (Chiras, 2011). Isolating plant proteins is responsible for this, and through technology; many scientific breakthroughs in medicine are made possible. These proteins are synthesised in plants. Through cellular respiration, the conversion of these nutrients into biochemical energy occurs. This further leads to the breakdown of large molecules into much smaller ones, thus releasing energy to the immediate environment. This occurs through aerobic and anaerobic respiration. Though they perform almost similar functions, the two operate under different conditions

How can the treatment of cancer with recombinant antibodies be Essay

How can the treatment of cancer with recombinant antibodies be improved - Essay Example The process focuses on the production of recombined genes leading to the rapid re-production of genetically modified bacteria causing the process to continue further by virtue of reproduction of DNA segments and recombination with original DNA. Antibodies, resembled to ‘Y’ shape, refer to the protein molecules with a crucial role for keeping and restoring our health to its optimum state by identifying and attacking foreign bodies entering into our health system. Several types of antibodies have been acknowledged in scientific studies, each type has the capability to recognize unique and distinctive antigens and to get combined with the targeted antigens by using the method of molecular structuring leading to the eventual destruction of several antibodies of foreign objects like viruses or bacteria. There are several reasons associated with the advantages of application of recombinant antibodies such as there no animals are needed so inflexibility regarding the issue of u sing animals for human research could possibly be avoided. Secondly, the manufacturing time for producing recombinant antibodies is significantly less compared to the conventional method. Thirdly and most importantly the quality of the product is far more acceptable than that of the traditional one by virtue of the production of a large number of various antibodies working against a particular antigen in a single selection procedure is possible. The aim of this research is to describe the development of new role and techniques of producing recombinant antibodies in cancer treatment. The library structure of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) may be biased towards specificities in particular present in the immunized fragments of immunized animals (Clackson et al, 1991) or naturally immunized or contaminated individuals (Burton et al, 1991). These libraries are primarily structured from VH and VL gene pools which are derived on the basis of either PCR-based (Orlandi et al,

Psychological Concerns in Medicine Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Psychological Concerns in Medicine - Essay Example Pain management is one of the biggest psychological concerns in the field of medicine, there are so many herbal as well as other medicines which help patients in difficult circumstances, but almost all the people lose their composure when in pain. Like in so many divisions of medicine, it is also seen lately that doctors have become experts in treatment of pain. These doctors study about pain inside out, "studying what causes it, how the body reacts to it, how different medications dull or eliminate the pain, and how other treatments can be used to relieve many painful conditions." (American Society, September 2, 2008). These doctors are very good at diagnosis and are very efficient when it comes to pain management provided the patient goes to a trusted Doctor. Pain doctors collect all the necessary details required to know about the pain and then they produce results by curing the patient's pain within very less time. There are many treatments for pain, some of the most used treatme nts are through injections, the affected area is injected with appropriate medicine and pain is taken care of. The next most widely used treatment is the nerve block, in which the plexus better know as the bunch of nerves are blocked by anesthesia and the patient gets relief. Acupuncture comes next, this hails from the Chinese culture, very thin needles are used in this procedure at specific points and the people who do this undergo rigorous training. Some other methods include surgery, various therapies and offering psychological support to the patient. Psychological support can also help a lot and can make a person feel much better; this treatment should always be used because this is one of the best treatments a patient can ever get. Sadness and depression is another psychological concern in the field of medicine, sadness and depression can happen for more reasons than one, for instance lets take an example of a lady who has just recovered form cancer, she might end up sad and depressed because of the shape of her body, appearance does matter to an extent and contributes in a very big way in forming our personality. Even suicide also is a very big concern, suicide also is just like sadness and depression or it is fair to put it this way that sadness and depression triggers off the feeling of suicide in a person. Suicide also can be committed for many reasons for instance if a person knows that he/she is suffering from a deadly disease like AIDS or cancer, it is so often seen in such cases that the patients decide to give up their life, so considering all this it is very fair to say that suicide, sadness and depression are major psychological issues or concerns in medicine. Sadness and depression can also trigger off series of other dysfunctions, for instance a cancer patient feels sad during intercourse, and the same will also contribute towards sexual dysfunction. The people who suffer from deadly diseases may face low self esteem and many other problems. Psychological issues often prove fatal and end up taking the life of so many people and this happens very frequently. Anxiety and depression among children is common, but when it reaches an alarmingly high level, it becomes a big psychological concern. It is often treated by psychotherapy, which involves diagnosis; to know exactly

Gas and Soft Drinks Essay Example for Free

Gas and Soft Drinks Essay 1- That would be inelastic. Even though people gripe about the rising prices, that doesnt stop people from stopping by the gas pumps to fill up. Elastic is more like candy bars or soda; if priced at 50 cents, there will be high demand, but if the price rises to 2 dollars, the demand will go down. Because there are many alternative brands for Coca Cola that have more or less the same taste. When the price of coca cola rises, demand decreases because consumers will find alternative brands that taste the same but at a lower price, therefore demand is elastic. Demand for soft drink as a whole is inelastic because whether or not the price increases/decreases, demand would not decrease/increase by a whole lot, since its the consumers preferred choice of drinks (just like milk is inelastic). Just because the price increases, doesnt mean that consumers will start to drink water all the time, theyll just drink less amounts of soft drink than usual (and vice versa). Elastic means by increasing the price, the demand for that product decreases as well. For example when the price of lamb increases, people will shift to chicken. We say the demand for lamb is elastic. Inelastic means, no matter how much the price changes, people still use it and the demand doesnt change a lot. Same as your example, Although the oil price increases, but the demand for oil didnd decrease. 2-petrol is also sold from especialy designed petrol pumps which costly to buld and operate . in the other hand coke and soft carbonated drinks is sold everywhere and can be sold to anyway and any gae. patrol selling you must be an adult and hold a drivers licience . Gas in the long term has higher elasticity of demand. meaning since in short term people do not have much choice,so they consume whatever is available at whatever price. 3- the coke is advertosed on over hundered tv channels around the world and it is the best known trademark in the world is sold in about one hundred and forty countries to 5. 8 billion people in eight different languguages . The cross price elasity of demand would be for the coca cola since the demand for it is growing A third example of cross-price elasticity is between Coke and Pepsi. If the price of Coke increases by 10%, then the demand for Pepsi will increase by 20%. This results in a cross price elasticity between the two of 2. Like the example above, these two would be substitues since the cross-price elasticity is greater than zero. http://mbaecon. wikispaces. com/file/view/cross_2. gif/30502983/cross_2. gif.

Geographically Weighted Regression to Model Housing Prices

Geographically Weighted Regression to Model Housing Prices Introduction In chapter 2, HPM has been used to model the relationships between characteristics of property and neighbourhood. However, HPM treats the whole housing market as a single homogenous market and assumes a stationary process, i.e the parameter estimates are assumed to apply equally over space. This presumes the influences of various factors on house prices in one location are the same as those in another location so that space, place and location do no matter (Foster refer). However, as shown in Chapter 2, the residuals derived using HPM are correlated. Additionally, Chapter 3 shows that when MLM approach is employed to account for spatial heterogeneity, the effects of those various factors in fact vary across neighbourhoods at different scales and there are great price differentials between neighbourhoods. The global approach, such as HPM, masks those local deviations from this average relationship. Disadvantages of MLM Although MLM approach takes into account spatial heterogeneity by specifying the spatial units as levels in the model, there are some weakness of this approach. Firstly, there is no agreement on the definition of neighbourhoods (Kearns and Parkinson 2001: 2103), so the specification of the macro level units (i.e. neighbourhoods) is fairly arbitrary. In the past, census boundaries (†¦),administrative boundaries (†¦.), or school catchment areas (goodman) have all been used to delimitate the whole house market into smaller submarkets, or local neighbourhood areas. Some researchers combined a series of dataset, such as travel-to-work, immigration and house price information and constructed a so-called housing market areas (HMAs)(†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦..) . HMAs neither match the census boundaries, or the administrative boundaries, but instead, they represents†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. . The existence of spatial dependency in geographical data means that the observations that are most spatially dependent in the locations that are close to each other should constitute a neighbourhood. A predefined hierarchy of spatial units based on administrate or census boundaries may not necessarily appropriate. Secondly, MLM[1] treats space and assumes that same spatial process applies within the neighbourhoods and discontinues at the boundaries of the neighbourhoods. (†¦). Additionally, the highest level of spatial units (for example, MSOAs in our analysis) are assumed to be spatially dependent. This assumption is unrealistic because the â€Å"effect† of a neighbourhood is more likely change gradually from one neighbourhood to its adjacent ones rather than completely stops, the so-called â€Å"spill-over† effects. Therefore, there might be presence of spatial dependency between MSOAs that MLM is unable to capture. In contract, GWR (Brunsdon et al, 1996†¦..) relaxes the assumptions of the effects of various variables being constant over space (Dark, 2004,Mitchell, 2005andShi etal., 2006) and treats space as continuous. It calibrates locally a spatially varying coefficient regression model for each location of the study area by weighting the attributes of it neighbouring locations based on distance-decay functions (†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.). The attributes of neighbours of a fitted location are all considered so the spatial dependency and heterogeneity can be taken into account in this approach (Paez 2005). This chapter therefore introduced this type of modelling technique to explore the spatial variations that may exist in the relationships between house price and its predictors. Purpose and Structure of the Chapter The aim of this chapter is to identify whether the relationships of house prices and a range of characteristics of houses and neighbourhood attributes) are relatively stable, or they vary substantially over space? If there are spatial variations, how does the relationships vary within and between neighbourhoods and how does this variation differ from the results derived from MLM approach? In addition, how good is the GWR approach in terms of its predictive capability, compared with MLM.? In the next section, a brief description of this technique is introduced. Section 3 follows with a review of previous applications of GWR is presented. The proposed study in relation to the empirical implementation of the technique then follows in section 4. The final section summarise the comparison between GWR and MLM the results and discusses the appropriateness of both techniques. 4.2 Brief Description on GWR Models What is GWR? GWR technique is fully descried by Fotheringham etal., 2002[2] and just a brief description of the approach is presented here. GWR is a spatial analysis technique that takes into account spatial autocorrelations among the observations in surrounding locations by allowing for spatial nonstationarity in the linear regression coefficients for each location. In GWR literature, the â€Å"location† can be a point or an aggregated area. describe local geographical variations in the relationships between a response variable and its explanatory variables by a set of local estimates for all the predictors for each geographical location (Fotheringham et al. 2002). A set of estimates and standard errors for each local coefficients are produced by focusing each location in the study region and weighted matrix of its nearby observation. The basic GWR equation can be written as: (4.1) Where denotes the coordinates of the th point in a two-dimensional study area; is the dependent variable at point , is the estimated intercept at point , ( represents the estimated coefficient for variable at point , is the independent variable of the th parameter at location , and is the error term for the local model at point . The estimation of ( is derived using weighted least squares (WLS) regressions (Moore and Myers, 2010; Fotheringham et al., 2002) by weighting the observations near location in accordance with their distance to that fit point. It is given by: where is a diagonal matrix denoting the geographical weighting of the observations around the fit point . Weighting The weighting is based on the distance between the regression location and its nearest neighbours, defined as bandwidth. The points in closer proximity to location is given more weight and therefore has more influence on the estimation of than the observations that are further away to location . A number of weighting schemes are available, but they tend to be Gaussian or â€Å"Gaussian-like† function, which is the types of dependency generally found in spatial processes (Forthemham). Two Commonly used distance-decay functions in GWR are Gaussian and Bi-square function (Fotheringham et al. 2002), which are expressed as below: Gaussian Bi-square Where is the th element of the diagonal of the matrix of the geographical weights , is the bandwidth, a threshold distance that any observations beyond this distance will not be used for calibrating the local model, and represents the distance between observation and focus point . When and coincide, the weighting equals to 1. Source: Gollini et al (2014) GW model: an R Package for Exploring Spatial Heterogeneity using Geographically Weighted Models Both functions are continuous up until the bandwidth, but the weights of Bi-square function decrease faster than that of Gaussian function and eventually become zero at the boundary of the bandwidth, while the weights of Gaussian function do not become zero. Both of the weighting functions will be tried in the planned research. Bandwidth Bandwidths can be specified either as fixed or adaptive (in terms of physical distance). The physical distance for adaptive bandwidth is changeable according to the spatial density so as to capture a fixed nearest neighbours for each local model: a shorter distance for areas where observations are dense and longer distance when data are sparse. The benefit of using adaptive bandwidth is that it can ensure sufficient local information be utilised for areas where observations are spatially scares and reduce the estimate variance for local coefficient and still reveal subtle local variations where observations are dense (Fotheringham et al. 2002). Therefore, adaptive bandwidth will be used in the planned research as the density of house price data vary geographically. The size of bandwidth affects gradient of the kernel and thus the rate of decay function. A small bandwidth have fewer observations included in the local model and rapid decay whereas a large bandwidth will have more observations in the local model and a smoother weighting scheme. The size of the bandwidth is important as if the bandwidth is too small, although the model would fits better for the local observations, but at the same time local noise may also be fitted thus the local estimates will have large variances. Conversely, if the bandwidth is too large, although the variances will become smaller, but the estimates of local coefficients are based on a much larger area and result in biased estimates which masks the true local relationships, especially if the relationships vary dramatically over small areas. This is the so-called bias-variance trade-off (Fotheringham et al., 2002)[3]. The effective number can be used to reflect bias-variance trade-off in GWR, which is a measure o f the number of observations that have been used effectively for calibrating the local model. Bias-Variance Trade-Off To find the best bias-variance trade-off, an appropriate weighting function and optimal bandwidth need to be selected. It has been argued that the selection of bandwidth selection is far more important than the weighting scheme as the weighting all decreases as distances increase by all weighting functions but the size of bandwidth decides the degree of decay (Fortherham†¦). The optimization process is generally exploratory and can be very compute-intensive process as it requires all the local regressions fitted at each step[4]. It can be achieved by either cross-validation method or use corrected Akaike information criterion (AICc) (Fotheringham et al. (2002). Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) is a commonly used cross-validation method in GWR, where for each local model, it is validated by using all the cases except for one observation and the model is tested on that single observation. The bandwidth which produce the smallest root mean square prediction errors for all the dependent variables of all the local models is deemed as the optimal bandwidth. AICc is an indicator of goodness-of-fit and can be used to compare competing models while taking into account the complexity of a model. A lower AIC score indicate a better fit of a model. As a rule of thumb, a decrease of 3 in AIC of two competing model score indicates an improvement in the model fit for the model with lower AIC (Fotheringham et al 2002; Zhang etal., 2011). It is common though to get different optimal bandwidth from the two methods as the criteria for optimal is different for AICc and for CV[5] and the AIC value is not based on prediction of the dependant variable (†¦[6]..). In addition, AIC score can be corrected for small sample size, while classical CV method tend to produce under-smoothed result for small sample size[7]. One thing is note is that AIC should be avoided when the sample size is large as it requires the creation of an n by n matrix [8]so the optimization can be very slow[9]. Both method will be tried out in the planned research. Why Use GWR and when? As mentioned earlier, when there is spatial dependency between variables and spatial non-stationarity, GWR can be used to disaggregate global relations to local levels to obtain a better understanding of spatial data in more details. As every local model is fitted to local observations, it fits better to data than a global model and residuals are generally lower and less spatially dependent. The outputs, the estimates of local coefficient are specific to each location. In Chapter 2, Moran’s I has been used and indicate that there is statistical significant spatial autocorrelation within both house prices and the residuals of HPM results. This means that the global fitted coefficient value of HPM does not represent detailed location variations adequately and GWR should be used in this instance to taken into account the spatial dependency and examine the heterogeneity in housing market. A review of GWR approach in house price estimation This section reviews the application of GWR technique with a focus on residential real estate, as well as the comparisons of GWR with a range of other methodologies. The section will conclude with the identification of the research gap and thus the contribution of the current chapter. Application in Real Estate Valuation GWR has been applied to a number of field, including land use (Geniaux et al. 2011†¦.), environment (Harris et al. 2010a), health (Comber et al. 2011, Helbich et al. 2012b, Yang and Matthews 2012; [10]) and crime studies (Leitner and Helbich 2011), economics ([11]), regional studies ([12]) and residential real estate studies (Kestens et al. 2006; Bitter et al. 2007†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦). In terms of the application to real estate, GWR has been used to investigate the effects of the locations and surrounding neighbourhood characteristics, such as †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦,the effects of accessibility, such as the new bus transitway in†¦..((Mulley, 2013), infrastructure availability in †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.(Cellmer, 2012), and the effects of open space amenities (Nilsson, 2014). GWR has also been used to identify housing sub-markets (Borst Mccluskey, 2007; Crespo Grà ªt-Regamey, 2013; Helbich, Brunauer, Hagenauer, Leitner, 2013). GWR compared with other modelling techniques GWR has also been compared with a few valuation tools in real estate, such as multiple regression analysis (MRA), simultaneous autoregressive model (SAR), Artificial neural networks (ANN), spatial expansion method (SEM) and Spatial lag model (e.g., Brunsdon et al., 1999[13]; LeSage 1999[14]; (Bitter, Mulligan, Dall’erba, 2006; Helbich, Brunauer, Vaz, Nijkamp, 2013; McCluskey, McCord, Davis, Haran, McIlhatton, 2013; Yu, Wei, Wu, 2007). More specifically Bitter, Mulligan, Dall’erba (2006) demonstrated in their study that GWR was superior to spatial expansion method ( define briefly †¦.)in terms of predictive accuracy and explanatory power when applied to examine the marginal price of key housing attributes in the Tucson, Arizona housing market. McCluskey, McCord, Davis, Haran, McIlhatton (2013) also showed that GWR outperform MRA, ANN and SAR in term of predictive accuracy, transparency, and cost-effectiveness and offered when applied to 2,694 residual properties in for real estate price estimation. In a case study of spatial heterogeneity in Austria, Helbich, Brunauer, Vaz, et al. (2013) extended GWR to a mixed-GWR(MGWR), which allows some coefficient to be stationary while others to be non-stationary. This approach is more flexible and parsimonious than standard GWR (Wei and Qi, 2012). Both MGWR and GWR has smaller prediction errors in comparison with a global approach, such as OLS, SAR and spatial t wo stage least square procedure (S2SLS)[15]. There are other extensions of GWR. To deal with cross-sectional time series data, GTWR (Huang, Wu, Barry, 2010) was developed to integrate both temporal and spatial information in the weighting matrices to capture spatial and temporal dependency and heterogeneity[16] . GTWR is able to model spatial and temporal nonstationarity simultaneously and therefore offers a better goodness-of-fit. LeSage (2003) incorporate a Bayesian treatment into GWR in order to improve the estimates of GWR parameters. Contextualized Geographically Weighted Regression (CGWR) was developed by adding contextual variables into standard GWR. The research applied this approach to model spatial heterogeneity in the land parcel prices of Beijing in China and demonstrated that the incorporation of contextual information improved the model fit. However, multicollinearity between explanatory variables may result in unstable results in GWR models and cause more problem for GWR than in a global regression model (Lloyd 2007). Therefore, extreme caution should be exercised when analysing the spatial patterns of local coefficients derived from GWR (Wheeler Tiefelsdorf, 2005). A range of diagnostic tools was proposed and usage of PCA to identify the most influential predictors or integrating ridge regression into the GWR framework (D. C. Wheeler, 2007) can help stabilize GWR regression coefficients. There is only limited comparison of GWR with MLM, or random coefficient model (RCM). These two approaches are very different in terms of its underlying assumptions of the spatial process and yielded completely different results in the study of long-term illness in the UK (Brunsdon, Aitkin, Fotheringham, Charlton, 1999). There has no published research that compares GWR with MLM in terms of their capability to model spatial heterogeneity of house price data and their predictive accuracy. In addition, although GWR can be applied at any geographic scale of measurement, in practice however, may applications and previous research applied it to an coarsely aggregated scale due to the availability of data or keep anonymized information. Unlike previous studies, we have geo-code the â€Å"location† of each house based on its unit postcode location, which only contains typically around 15 residential addresses[17]. We hope to offer further insight into the geographical variation of the relationships at this detailed level, which previously might be disguised in previous research when the level of analysis was carried out at a much coarser scale. Planned Research Standard GWR is applied to the same dataset in chapter two and three, the house price data of the Greater Bristol area. Two extended version of GWR, GTWR and CGWR, will be explored with the former to capture the temporal dependency and heterogeneity and the later to incorporate contextual information into the model. In GWR and CGWR, the whole dataset will be split into yearly data to avoid the potential temporal autocorrelation within the data. There is no need of doing so in GTWR, as the time of sale has been taken into account in the model. Individual house characteristics are all categorical variables as described in Chapter 2 and will be modelled first and then neighbourhood variables will be added in the subsequent models. The planned procedures and a few methodological issues are addressed as follows. Firstly, before carrying out actual modelling of GWR, whether there is significant spatial autocorrelation within the data, which can be between the response variables and its lagged values or between the explanatory variables and their lagged value. Two most commonly used weighting function, Gaussian and Bi-squares functions will be used, although it has been shown that the selection of the weighting function does not have as much an effect on the results as the selection of bandwidth (Fotheringham, Brunsdon, and Charlton 1998). If it is the case, just one weighting function will be used in the subsequent yearly models and the focus will be one the optimization of bandwidth. An adaptive bandwidth is proposed, as there is a good mixture of rural/urban of housing stock in Greater Bristol and the density of the house sales varies dramatically over space. Both CV and AIC will be used to obtain optimal bandw idth and measure model fit as it was shown in the past that the two methods resulted in different optimal bandwidth and regression coefficients ([18]). Once a weighting function and bandwidth has been selected, the weighting matrix can are defined and used to estimate the coefficient for every location based on equation (4.1) and calibrating local GWR. The standardised residuals and the parameters, and their estimated standard errors will be mapped to investigate whether they vary spatially[19]. This will also be compared with the map of the shrinkage estimates of the neighbourhoods (OAs, LSOAs and MSOAs) derived by MLM in previous chapters. It is expected that the mapped patterns of MLM coefficient exhibit more â€Å"noise† than that of GWR, since GWR is essentially a spatially smoothing calibration. All of the model caliberation will be conducted in R, using GWmodel package as this software is free and the process can be easily replicated. Lastly, the predictive accuracy of GWR will be measured and compare with MLM. R squared is used for goodness of fit of the model and it measures the proportion of variation in the data that is explained by the model. Adjusted Rsquared takes into account the complexity of the model in terms of the number of variable that are specified in the model. It is expected that extended version of GWR, GTWR and CGWR, may provide better model fit and more accurate predictions based on their previous applications. In the past, there has been criticism that GWR cannot produce confidence intervals (†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦..) and the significance of the estimates for parameters cannot be tested. However, Monte Carlo significance tests have been used to test whether there is significant variability (†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦..) so this test is also planned to test if the spatial variation of the coefficients are statistically significant. â€Å"Wild bootstrap† approach as suggested by by H ¨ardle (1990) and McMillen (2004) can also be used to produce a weighted average of the variance of the separate parameter estimates. Conclusion GWR generally give much better fits to the data and the residuals are less autocorrelated. Its advantages over MLM is that it no longer treats space as discrete, which more likely resemble the spatial process in reality, and it models both spatial dependency and heterogeneity. In addition, it is essentially a non-parametric approach that does not requiring any assumptions with respect to the predictors, which can be categorical or the underlying distributions of the predictors can be highly skewed. There is no need to specify a functional form to produce the estimates of spatially varying parameters (Brunsdon et al 1998). The underlining concept of â€Å"letting the data speak for themselves† make it a good exploratory tool [20] for spatial analysis. This concept is very much similar to another modelling technique, ANN, except that in ANN, there is no implication of nearer locations have more influences on the estimates of local coefficients than locations that are further awa y as in GWR. This although unlikely in reality, but it might happen. How does GWR compared with ANN will be discussed in the next chapter. Link GWR and ANN: a set of estimates of spatially varying parameters WITHOUT specifying a functional form – â€Å"let the data speak for themselves† (Chris et al 1998) [1] the parameter estimates are assumed to be randomly distributed with either a finite (Wedel and Kamakura 2000) or a continuous mixture distribution (Aitkin 1996). [2] And Legendre, 1993 [3] Check: Bias-variance trade-off: MLM (Goldstein 1987) and Ridge Regeression (Hoerl and Kennard 1970a, 1970b) [4] check reference Schabenberger and Gotway (2005 316-317) statistical methods for spatial data analysis Waller and Gotway (2004, p434) – applied spatial statistics and Lloyd (2007 pp 79-86): local models for spatial analysis [5] http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/body.cfm?tocVisable=1ID=-1TopicName=Interpreting GWR results [6] Housing Sub-markets and Hedonic Price Analysis: A Bayesian Approach by David C. Wheeler1*, Antonio Pà ¡ez2* , Lance A. Waller1 and Jamie Spinney3 Chapter 4 [7] Encyclopedia of Geographic Information Science edited by Karen Kemp (p183) [8] (gwr.sel {spgwr}) [9] NOTE AIC be applied in non-Gaussian GWR( Local Models for Spatial Analysis, Second Edition By Christopher D. Lloyd) [10] Modelling spatially varying impacts of socioeconomic predictors on mortality outcomes, J Geograph Syst (2003) 5:161–184, DOI: 10.1007/s10109-003-0099-7, proposed for modelling spatially varying, predictor effects on a disease or mortality count outcome The methodology is illustrated by suicide mortality in 32 London Boroughs over the period 1979–1993, in terms of area deprivation and a measure of social fragmentation disease mapping methods [11] SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY AND THE WAGE CURVE REVISITED*Simonetta Longhi, ISER, Peter Nijkamp [12] The Geographic Diversity of U.S. Nonmetropolitan Growth Dynamics: A Geographically Weighted Regression Approach Mark D. Partridgey Dan 5. Rickman, Kamar AU, and M, Rose Olfertte.st for geographic heterogeneity in ihe growth parameters ami compare iliem to global regression estimates. The results indicate significant heterogeneity in the regression coejjkients across the country, most notably for amenities and college graduate shares. V.sing GWR also exposes .signiftimt local variations that are masked by global estimates [13] A Comparison of Random-Coefficient modelling and Modeling and Geographically Weighted Regression for Spatial Non-Stationary Regression Problems, Geographical and Environmental Modeling, 3 (1), 47–62 [1

Review Of The Catwoman Movie Film Studies Essay

Review Of The Catwoman Movie Film Studies Essay Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. is the biggest American film and television production company. They produce huge amounts of movies in all genres with big budgets. The company had reached big successes since its founding year in 1903. In the past more than a hundred year its productions received many awards from different foundations. However the award received contains not only positive recognitions but also negative ones. How is it possible that a huge company like this makes mistakes that can lead to a bad reputation? What can be the mistakes they make? How do these mistakes affect the future of the staff of the company, the directors, the actors and the company itself? I would like to find the answers for these questions through a movie failure that was the biggest flop in the decade. I will examine as many aspects as possible that can lead a movie that is so eagerly awaited to a huge failure. To examine the aspects I will introduce you to the unsuccessful story of the 2004 movie Catwoman. 2. Who is the Catwoman? Catwoman, namely Selina Kyle has been described as the ultimate fantasy character who is a defender of the underdog who is not above the law when it comes to her own desires. She is not an ordinary woman due to her powerful strength. She is sleek, mysterious and thanks to the leather-clad, whip-wielding costume, ultra sexy. (Bowes, 2004) 2.1 History of catwoman There are many versions of the origin of Catwoman and back-story seen in comic books over the decades but it can primary be attached to the to the Batman Universe series as the most popular female character of the story. Batmans creator, Bob Kane was a great movie fan and his love for film provided the impetus for several Batman characters, among them, Catwoman. He wanted to attach a female character into the comic books to give them a sex appeal and someone who could appeal to female readers as a female Batman. I felt that women were feline creatures and men were more like dogs. While dogs are faithful and friendly, cats are cool, detached, and unreliable. I felt much warmer with dogs around me-cats are as hard to understand as women are. Men feel surer of themselves with a male friend than a woman. You always need to keep women at arms length. We dont want anyone taking over our souls, and women have a habit of doing that. So theres a love-resentment thing with women. I guess women will feel that Im being chauvinistic to speak this way, but I do feel that Ive had better relationships with male friends than women. With women, once the romance is over, somehow they never remain my friends. Kane 1989, pp. 107-108 That catwoman character appeared in huge numbers of cartoons over the decades. After it became very popular in this kind of media, others started to use it as their superhero. In 1966 catwoman appeared in the Batman television series then more than twenty years later in the success movie Batman Returns. In Batman Returns Selina Kyle is played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Here she is depicted as the lonely, frustrated, yet dutiful and efficient secretary of corrupt tycoon Max Shreck. After she accidentally discovers his plot to build a power plant that would steal Gothams electricity, Shreck pushes her out the window of his top story office. Selina is resurrected by a group of cats after her death and she is given powerful strength and characteristics of cats. She goes home and makes her cat costume herself and goes after her murderer. She also starts a romance with Batman and joins him in the chase of the evil head of the company. (IMDb) Batman Returns was first showed in 1992 and it received 6.9/10 stars with 80,751 votes on IMDb international movie database. This means that the movie was mainly liked by the public and critics. On its opening day on June 19 the movie earned $45.69 million which was the highest opening weekend of any movie released up to that point. The movie went to total of $266.83 million all together. It was the third highest grossing film in America of 1992 and the sixth worldwide. It received 14 nominations and 2 winner awards from 7 different institutions including the award by Golden Raspberry for Danny DeVito as worst supporting actor nominee. In 2004 another movie was released. This was the first catwoman release which stars the catwoman character as the main character which the movie is about. 3. Catwoman 2004: The Movie Catwoman is the story of shy, sensitive artist Patience Philips (Halle Berry), a woman who cant seem to stop apologizing for her own existence. She works as a graphic designer for Hedare Beauty, a mammoth cosmetics company on the verge of releasing a revolutionary anti-aging product. When Patience inadvertently happens upon a dark secret her employer is hiding, she finds herself in the middle of a corporate conspiracy. What happens next changes Patience forever. In a mystical twist of fate, she is transformed into a woman with the strength, speed, agility and ultra-keen senses of a cat. With her newfound prowess and feline intuition, Patience becomes Catwoman, a sleek and stealthy creature balancing on the thin line between good and bad. Like any wildcat, shes dangerous, elusive and untamed. (IMDb) She opens a box from her closet with an ultra tight skin showing leather costume. Her adventures are complicated by a burgeoning relationship with Tom Lone, a cop who has fallen for Patien ce but cannot shake his fascination with the mysterious Catwoman. The things around catwoman do not go easy as she is attached to many crimes happening in the city. However the only crime she is guilty of is breaking into a jewelry store and stealing jewels. Later she returns these and says sorry. Unfortunately, the city believes that this new creature is evil and causes most of the crimes happening in their city lately. Tom Lone tries to stop her but he does not know that Patience who he is already starting a relationship with is the same lady who he is trying to put behind bars. Reading the plots of Batman Returns and Catwoman a lot of similarities can be noticed. Actually the both stories of becoming catwomen are perfectly same as both ladies die by an evil company president and are resurrected as catwomen after their deaths. Selina is more focused on saving the innocent but Patience is not still clear about her purpose and she some bad things before realizing her real purpose. Still the biggest difference is the stories are the importance of the characters. Patience is the only main character who is the whole story about while Batman and Selina are sharing this spot. The movie was release on 23 July, 2004 in the United States but not even the Oscar-winner Halle Berry warmed the critics to the film. It was released some weeks after Spider-Man 2, Catwoman paled in comparison with that comic book adventure, which broke box office records. It is difficult to watch Catwoman prowling over city roofs without thinking Spiderman did the same trick with so much energy some weeks before. (Bowes, 2004) This was just one of the critics the movie received out of many after the release. There were many complaints regarding almost all aspects that can be examined in a movie. 3.1 Comparing Catwoman with the original character of the Batman movies When Box Office came up with the idea of creating a whole new movie about the so successful catwoman character of the Batman movies the biggest question was that can the new movie be accepted by the fans of Batman. How the changes in the story and the actors will affect the outcome of the movie? Who would be the best director, actors and actresses to choose to make a huge success? And there were so many questions could be raised and even Warner Bros. tried to make good choices for these questions it happened that they could not. They probably did not consider many aspects carefully enough and fell in a very embarrassing situation when the movie came out. 3.2 Pitof Jean-Christophe Pitof Comar is a French film and visual effect director primary known about the movies Vidocq and Catwoman. Pitof had never created a big budget American movie film before Catwoman. The only one movie he directed before was the French speaking Vidocq which received 6.5/10 rating on IMDb. Viewing his first movie as a success Warner Bros were brave enough to hire him for the direction for Catwoman. Probably that was the first and biggest mistake they made. (IMDb) Warner Bros probably chose him because of his good reputation of visual effects and they knew that the new movie will need to contain a whole bunch of these. Still it is very hard to image how could they chose and trust someone with $100 million who made only one movie before and that one was not even American. According critical reviews about the movie Pitof had made almost all the mistakes that can be made while creating a movie. This includes badly chosen actors and actresses, screen writings, time management, dialogues, framing, costumes. (Rotten Tomatoes, 2004-2005) 3.3 Actors One of the questions that was raised when Halle Berry was chosen as Catwoman was that can she match for the legendary performances of Eartha Kitt in 1960s Batman series or of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman returns? According to reviews the answer was not even. There are many complaints with the choice of Halle Berry. According to critics her acting was over exaggerated while trying to be a cat. The character of Patience is no longer a human. Her inclination to hiss at dogs and devour canned fish, as well as her urge to bury her face in catnip, eventually convince her that something is going on. Unfortunately, the feline personality traits emerge in a rather clumsy fashion. You almost expect the character to seek out a litter tray or a scratch pole, just to prove the point of being a cat. (Bowes, 2004) Other complaints were about the color of the chosen actress. A critic commented on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes that It is like James Bond being black. It might sound very racist but if we think deeply into this statement it might be very abusing for fans that their favorite character is played by a so different actress than before. They expected Seline who is now Patinece to be similar as she was before but they received something else. Frances Conroy plays a reclusive cat lady, Ophelia who becomes the mentor of Patience. Her role is to explain what is pretty obvious already that the young woman had turned into a cat. Unfortunately Ophelia looks like she walked out of an episode of a funeral parlour drama and seems to be yearning for a decent line or two. (Bowes, 2004) Another big star comes up in the movie: Sharon Stone who plays the evil character but who in the first time in her career is not icy enough. According to rumors there were some problems with the actress during the shootings as she was so displeased of her role and the whole project that she did not take the shooting as serious and she actually answered her cell phone during the filming. This was not the only one thing that did not go easy during the filming but also Berry suffered an injury that landed her in the hospital when she crashed into a piece of equipment. These problems probably would have not happened if the planning and directing would have been more careful. Here is another point that can be written to the bill of Pitof. 3.4 Screening and dialogues Screenings and dialogues were so bad that some scenes needed to be reshot only thirty days before its scheduled release. Critics review that even the trailer of the movie was so bad but it could not be better anyways as there were not really as many good shots in the whole movie that could be chosen for the trailer. The final trailer was redone several times. How this could happen? We can say too many hands in the cookie jar because as many as 28 scribers worked on the scripts which led to very bad dialogues. Only the number of writers of the movie exceeded the usual number of writers of a movie: Bob Kane, Theresa Rebeck, Michael Ferris, John D. Brancato, John Rogers. The dialogues and the scenes did not match enough with storyline and even if Berry seemed like making a decent job to play her act she had a very difficult job when she were forced to utter laughable lines like Its over time. (Riemer, 2004) In the beginning sequence of the movie contains a montage of old newspaper cutting and ancient manuscripts about the history of the cat. It seems like the director suggests a depth to the film through this sequence but later it is never comes back in the storyline. Basically they put something into the film that they never talk about later. This is totally unnecessary and it seems like it is just there to make the movie longer or create some cool beginning screen. (Bowes, 2004) The story of the movie is even too predictable after the unlucky and ordinary lady turns into a superhero who needs to take a revenge on her murders and needs to save the poor people of the city from crime. We can say that all superhero movies are about the same topic but at the same time somehow they are created more interesting. We can also raise a question that can a lady be a successful superhero? According to statistics the answer could be that it is probably impossible since heroes were always been males. Most movies with female superheroes failed like Supergirl, Catwoman, Elektra, Street Fighter: Legend of Chun li, Blood. Why is it like that? The answer could be that the directors of these movies try to make the characters as sexy as possible instead of working more on the story and making it more interesting and exciting. 3.5 Costumes Reviews about the costume designs appearing in the film share the opinions. Movie critics dislike them opposed to male fans of the movie who think that the only one reason to watch the movie was only because of the sexy costumes. According to the first catwoman costume that appeared in the original comic book series our superhero first wore only a cat mask which was later change to a sweater with a hood that had cat ears on the top. Later in the batman movies the costume was changed to the tight black latex suit that showed not much skin. In Pitofs movie there is a huge impact put on the costume. It suggests that the whole movie is around showing Halle Berrys skin and making her into a domina-like sex symbol. The members of Gothamists website think that Pitof is trying too hard to make the new character better than in Batman Returns by putting a bikini on Berry. At least the costume shops will have something to profit on for Halloween. The cat suit was always one of the most liked wear for costume events and after a new cat movie it just even going to be better. 3.6 Turnout After the movie was released the reviews were expressly negative and also Warner Bros made very bad incomes. The $100 million budget movie only made a domestic gross of $40 million and another $42 from foreign countries. This means that the movie itself did not even make as much money as it cost. Unfortunately, there are no data available about the DVD sales income. Warner Bros might have made at least as much on it as the film cost. On Rotten Tomatoes it received 10% score and 3.2/10 on IMDb. On Rotten Tomatoes critics are very harsh and heavy. Even on the opening page it appears that Halle Berry is the lone bright spot, but even she cant save this laughable action thriller. 3.7 Awards The film was nominated 7 times on the Golden Raspberry or Razzies award. Razzies awarded for the worst movies of the year. Catwoman was nominated for worst Picture, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Couple, Director, Screenplay and with this it get in to the competition of Razzies Special Worst of Our 25 Years Awards and it won first place. This means that in the past 25 years there was no other movie made that received so many bad reviews and award as Pitofs Catwoman. (Razzies) 3.8 Later How did this affect the careers of the staff? Obviously the one who came out of this the worst was Pitof who had never get another opportunity to make a movie so far. Halle Berry wasnt so unlucky as she got 12 acts in movies since 2004 (X-man 2006, Perfect Stranger 2007, Things We Lost in the Fire 2007, etc) Out of these 12 production 5 are under production still and are awaited to come out. Berry did not see Catwoman as something that can affect her career hard even if she has now a Golden Razzie award for worst actress next to her Oscar. Sharon Stone also had 18 acts since Catwoman and Frances Conroy had 21. It seems like that the only one person who came out bad from this production was the director and maybe Warner Bros who did not make any money on the production. 4. Own opinion According to the assignment to examine a huge management failure of our times I decided to choose a movie as my interest is enormous in this media. There were a lot to choose from. I was hesitating between Transformers 2: Revenge of the fallen, Land of the lost, The adventure of Pluto Nash and Catwoman. I watched all 4 movies and I did not like three of them at all. I finally chose the one I actually liked and this was Catwoman. I also made some primary research making interviews with friends about the movie. Without exaggerating the outcome of the research I have to say that there was no one who did not like the movie and actually have seen it. I realized that I made a huge task for myself because I needed to watch something over and over with a very critical eye. First I did not read any of the critical reviews so I do not fall in that mistake that they change my own opinion. For fist two watches in English and Hungarian the only one aspect I did not like was the special effects. I saw them too computer like but I needed to realize that the movie was made more than 6 years ago when this technology was not as good as today. After watching it again and again I started to get nervous as there is nothing I can be critical about. So I read the reviews. They were very critical and negative. Most of them made a big affect on me and after re-watching I could notice some of them. I was sure about the bad choice of Pitof as he had no background in American movie making. I actually liked all of the actors in the movie but noticed sometimes weird and over exaggerated facial expressions and movement especially by Sharon Stone and Berry. These were very irritating and ridiculous. I was not much abused by Patiences cat costume. It was obvious that some very sexy leather piece of tiny cloth would be chosen for a 21th century superhero movie. I do not think that critics should talk too much negative things about this or they do because they probably have not seen Batman. Its true that Batman isnt showing much of his skin but his muscular six-pack costume was also very sexy. In my opinion this aspect of criticizing in catwoman is just an addition to the list. Due to my research most of the men I asked liked the movie because the sexy Berry and her tiny costume. I was very worried about viewing the dialogues critically. Watching it in English with subtitles I could not really find any of these ridiculous lines but this can be due to my own English language skill. Probably someone whose mother language is English would have felt that something just sounds wrong. In the Hungarian version there were no mistakes but obviously the translators will not put anything wrong in their own language if they feel that it does not sound right in the original language. Overall, after viewing the movie 5 times in two languages with two kinds of subtitles and without subtitles, reading walls of texts by critics and fans and making primary researches I can say that the movie should have come out so bad as it does. The huge money loss and the small income can be due to the very negative critics that were written fight after the release date. I know this from first hand. If I cannot decide what to watch in the cinema I go to Rotten Tomatoes and check the reviews. If they are very negative then I will never go and pay money for it. The only way to might watch it is to download it later. Doing this examination of failure the biggest thing I have learned was that how much the internet and someone who is call a movie critic can affect the outcome of a new movie release.

The Importance of Joseph Conrad’s Congo Journey Essay -- Biography Bio

It was the year 1868. A young boy of about nine years of age stood looking at a map of Africa. The boy raised up his hand and stuck his finger directly into the middle of the â€Å"dark continent.† â€Å"When I grow up I shall go there,† said this boy with great enthusiasm (Conrad 13). Little did he know that some years later his childhood wish would come true. Joseph Conrad grew up to become quite the sailor, starting as an apprentice on a French vessel in 1875 and working his way to become a master of English ships from 1878-1889 (Jean-Aubrey 19). He spent fifteen years at sea, traveling to destinations all over the globe. After much traveling he returned home to Europe. While there, he tried desperately to find a new ship to command, but there were none available. He spent months searching and still could not find a ship to call his own. It was then, while stuck in Europe with nothing to do, that Conrad wrote Almayer’s Folly, his first novel. When Conrad was presented with the opportunity to go to the Congo in 1889, he did not hesitate. After months of correspondence between himself and members of the Societe Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo in Brussels and the killing of a steamboat captain by natives in the Congo, Joseph Conrad was ready to journey deep into the heart of Africa. The first part of Conrad’s trip would take him to Brussels, where he would sign the final contract, obligating himself to serve for three years as an officer on river steamboats in the Congo. Conrad was to sail on the Ville de Maceio to get to â€Å"Boma, seat of the Government of the Independent State of the Congo since 1886† (Jean-Aubry 46). On the steamer, he traveled with a man by the name of Harou. He was a â€Å"Belgian officer who had mad... ...e, including â€Å"attacks of fever and gout† (Jean-Aubry 73). But, more importantly, the trip had changed who Conrad was. The best way to describe this change would be to quote his lifelong friend Edward Garnett who said, â€Å"Conrad’s Congo experiences were the turning-point in his mental life and that their effects on him determined his transformation from a sailor to a writer† (Garnett 8). Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. A Personal Record. New York: Harper, 1912. Garnett, Edward. Letters From Joseph Conrad 1895-1924. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928. Jean-Aubry, Georges. Joseph Conrad in the Congo. New York: Haskell, 1973. Karl, Frederick Robert and Laurence Davies, eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Vol. 1-6. New York: Cambridge U., 1983. Najder, Zdzislaw, ed. The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces. New York: Doubleday, 1978.

Lord Of The Flies Story :: essays research papers

The war was over, but not without casualties. Numerous ships, planes and factories had been bombed with regular bombs, and London was totally destroyed - by a single atomic bomb. Only derelicts lived there now, not knowing of the harmful radiation that surrounded what once was the great capital.Slowly though, things were getting back to normal, shops began opening, and the war started to shift to the back of people's minds. Life was becoming more normal, but the memory of the war was still there, and always would be. Unfortunately, my memories of our time on the island would never shift to the back of my mind - I would never forget what the war meant to me. I might not have been killed, though I wish I had been, I might not have lost my home or seen London go up a huge mushroom cloud of bright red light, but I had lived with people that hardly deserve that title, people that became animals, people that were worse than animals - murderers. And I myself, was one of them.I was slowly getting better, but I never got through a night without hearing the chant and Simon's furtive screams as we jabbed, attacked and mauled him, without seeing Piggy's fat body flying into the air and then crashing down on the rocks. I had never recovered from those experiences and at no time had a job. I live in a small, damp apartment above a coin laundry. The greatest pleasure I had in life was feeding the pigeons in the park. I would get what stale bread I could from the bakery to feed the birds. They would rush at me when they saw me and fight for the small scraps of bread before it had even hit the ground. They were animals, but not like Jack and the others, they were kind animals, they never hurt anyone - they went about their lives regardless of us. Many times I wished that I too could be a pigeon. I wanted to lead the simple life that they did, I wanted to forget what had happened, I wanted to escape the plaguing memories.It was Tuesday morning and I was feeding pigeons in the park. They were fighting for the pathetic scraps of stale bread I threw on the ground as usual, looking at me begging me with their eyes for more.

Living for Normality :: Cultural Culture Essays

Living for Normality Most people want to be normal. The definition of normal however, depends on the culture of the person making the judgment. Far too often, normal is defined in America by looking at the actions and beliefs of the average white middle class family. This definition of normal fails to let other cultures to be accepted, creating distance and misunderstanding. One type of culture, which has traditionally been labeled as uncivilized, are those found in Africa. Other more civilized cultures tend to look down on those who belong to African cultures, labeling their customs and ways of life as abnormal. Randall Bass, an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, made an interesting argument in his book, Bordertexts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writer. Bass describes a passage from a local newspaper out of Louisville, Kentucky. The newspaper coined the phrase, "national geographic nudity" in describing a movie. Bass's impression of the phrase is shown in the following passage, "Somehow the phrase 'national geographic nudity' implies that the natives were not as present or as visible as the other people in the movie." Here Bass is proving the point of cultural differences relating to the definition of normality. While the natives view their nudity as normal, nudity is generally not accepted by any class from America. This dif ference is a prime example of clashing definitions of what cultures accept to be normal. The next step up the ladder of normality is the lower class. Unlike the natives who don't look to fit into the normal set by American middle class, American lower class are constantly looking for ways to improve. PBS ran a very interesting special on classes within the United States. In the special, "People Like Us," was a section devoted to a woman named Tammy and her family. Tammy is a typical lower class citizen; she lives in a trailer in a small town, trash piled around, and no car to drive. After being on welfare for eighteen years, Tammy got a job at a Burger King restaurant 15 miles away. Tammy wants to become better; in fact she wants to go back to school. "I'm hoping to go to college and be a school teacher. That was my goal from the time I was five years old up until now." Even though Tammy wants to move up a class, she still realizes to which group she belongs.

Issues of Conflict in Juno and the Paycock

The theme of conflict is a brooding and dominant characteristic of the playwright Sean O'Casey's acclaimed masterpiece Juno and the Paycock, first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1924. The events' portrayed in the drama unfold against the backdrop of the sectarian violence of the Irish Civil War, waged from1922-1923, in an Ireland not yet healed from many recent years' of armed political struggle with the British authorities' who for centuries' had controlled the governance of the island.This modern armed struggle began with the Easter Rising of 1916, carrying through to the events' of The Irish War of Independence, fought from 1919-1921, which resulted in the signing of the Anglo Irish Treaty of 1921, the root of the current aggression in the play being engaged in by former comrades' on the streets' and in the homes' of towns' and cities' across the nation. Pivotal to the action of the play are the Boyle family, terribly poor, working class tenants' living in the tenement s' of Dublin, the slums' of the period, in conditions' comparable with the worst known anywhere in Europe.The narrative explores their efforts' to carry on with their normal daily lives' in the tumultuous, often explosive conditions' they are encompassed by. To accurately discuss every aspect of conflict that exists' within the pages of, arguably, O'Casey's finest work would be a monumental undertaking and unfortunately would require significantly more time than this discussion could allow. The purpose of this essay instead, will be to examine the conflict existing in the relationship, and acted out within the pages of the play, between two of the central characters', â€Å"Captain† Jack Boyle, the self deluded patriarch of the household, and his long suffering wife, the titular Juno.The aim of this work is to dissect the dynamics' of their relationship, examining the roles' they have adopted that lead, despite a temporary lull in hostilities during act two, to the irrevocabl e breakdown of the marriage, helping Juno to the final courageous decision to place the welfare of her daughter and unborn grandchild before that of her layabout, thankless, disaster of a husband, a truly radical and virtually unheard of decision for a woman to take in the male dominated, patriarchal  society of that time.From the outset of the play we are confronted with the animosity that exists between Jack and Juno. In the opening scenes of act one, we are introduced to Juno who has just returned from an early morning shopping trip with breakfast items for the not yet returned Jack, who has apparently stayed out all night with his ne'er do well, parasitic drinking buddy Joxer Daly. The tone of her exchange with Mary, her daughter, in reference to Jack's absence is unmistakeable.Mary has just informed her mother of her father's failure to return to which she replies, â€Å"Oh, he'll come in when he likes; struttin' about the town like a paycock with Joxer, I suppose.† Th is is a woman unimpressed with her missing husband to say the least, the reader is left with the impression that not only will Jack feel her wrath when their paths' cross, Joxer will receive a lashing also should he surface alongside his nefarious companion! Act one progress’s to the point where the trio meet. The exchange is filled with vehemence from the wrathful Juno, determined to exact her revenge on the lackadaisical duo presented before her.Joxer and the â€Å"Captain† have entered the tenement believing Juno long gone to work, but secretly secluded behind hangings separating her bed from the living quarters she has listened to both men insult and berate her in her believed absence. She emerges from her seclusion and unceremoniously chases the vagrant Joxer from her home despite the protestations of a perplexed Jack, who in cohorts with his partner in crime, has tried to convince his wife the two loafers' have the potential of work that afternoon. Juno retorts t o Jack, â€Å"Look here Mr. Jacky Boyle, them yarns won't go down with Juno. I know you an' Joxer Daly of an oul' date, an' if you think you're able to come it over me with them fairy tales, you're in the wrong shop.†The exchange continues with Jack unable to get a word in his own defence and Juno revelling in her dressing down of the â€Å"Captain†. His sparse responses', when allowed, are pleading and full of self pity, â€Å"it ud be betther for a man to be dead, betther for a man to be dead.† is as useful a response as we receive from Jack as Juno's tirade against him continues.The reader is left in no doubt throughout the exchange that this morally indolent little man is no match for his wife. We are also left in no doubt as to the roles occupied by the couple within the relationship at this point. Jack is a fantasist, he  refuses to accept his responsibility to help provide for his family, he refuses any and all offers of work, claiming chronic pain when genuine opportunities arise, â€Å"I'm afther gettin' a terrible twinge in me right leg† he is heard to cry when presented with the possibility of work by Jerry Devine.Yet he is found to be in the rudest of health when no work is to be found, â€Å"it's miraculous that whenever he scents a job in front of him, his legs begin to fail him!† is the explanation presented to us, tongue firmly in cheek, by Juno. He prefers to spend the family's last few pounds loafing from bar to bar with the lecherous Joxer in tow, rather than contribute to help relieve the crushing poverty trap into which his family have found themselves ensnared. His is an existence full of exaggerated exploits, â€Å"Everybody callin' you the â€Å"Captain†, an' you only wanst on the wather in an oul' collier from here to Liverpool†.He believes thoroughly in the legend he has created around himself and believes completely in his right as the patriarch of the family not to have his decision s questioned regardless of how morally deficient to their situation they may be. In the character of Jack we find comparisons, as suggested by Pressley, N, (2011), in his review of the play for The Washington Post, to Shakespeare's Jack Falstaff â€Å"for his inflated presentation and chronic lack of means†.In contrast to this vulgar fantasist we are given the ultimate realist in the downtrodden and hassled form of Juno, named by O'Casey for the Roman goddess of â€Å"Protection, Motherhood & Marriage†, Waldherr, K, (2007). Through Jack's refusal to embrace his responsibility to provide for his family and be a dutiful husband Juno has been forced over time to assume the role of wife, mother and sole provider for the family.She is all to aware of the severity of their situation, walking the tight rope alone of providing for her invalided son, out of work daughter and obnoxious husband as well as herself in an environment where not only must she contend with the harsh an d unrelenting poverty stricken conditions, inescapable for most at the best of times, she must also contend with the bitter knowledge of the potential for any of her loved ones to lose their lives at any given time if caught up in the guerrilla warfare being waged around them on the streets' of their home. Juno faces all this with a reality and strength of character befitting her name that shines through despite the best attempts of her  Falstaffian husband to break her spirit and reduce her life to the petty existence of his own.One would argue, to be judged successfully or not by the reader that these traits already existing in the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Boyle, explored throughout the piece, doomed them to the fate to which they inevitably succumbed. The events of the play may have been the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back but the foundations of this relationship had long since been rendered asunder by years of neglect, abuse and selfishness from Jack towards h is wife and family.This finally culminated in our heroines realisation that no matter how much she tried, no matter how much effort she made her feckless husband was never going to be capable of any sort of decency towards her or the family and the radical road she was forced to choose with Mary, helping to raise and provide for her daughter's unborn child was not only the right thing to do for themselves but it was the only chance the child would have at a decent beginning for the future. The humanity, courage and strength of Juno are fully realised in this exchange with Mary;Mary. â€Å"my poor little child that'll have no father!Mrs Boyle. â€Å"It'll have what's far betther – it'll have two mothers.†This exchange is an act of selflessness that Jack could never comprehend of making, representing the final nail in the coffin of the Boyle's marriage and the final separation of the characters involvement with each other on a relationship or any other level imaginable. This is the decisive moment where Juno transcends both her husband and the restrictions of her environment ending her conflict and enabling her to move on to the next stage of her life as a single, yet more complete person.