Choose an issue impacting your High School, Community, Country, or the Essay

Choose an issue impacting your High School, Community, Country, or the World and why it is important to you - Essay Example to balance the act by â€Å"affirmative action programs to help blacks, women and other minorities to get better jobs and education," although no clear-cut public opinion is available on â€Å"racial preferences.† Although people have made real progress in eliminating racial discrimination from all walks of life yet we can see that employment opportunities are limited for blacks, housing problems are more severe for belonging to another nation and race. African-Americans of the same qualifications are offered 25 percent less salary than their white counterparts while holding the same high school certificates. Similarly, Latino men earn 37 cents less in a dollar than their white co-workers. Women are also a victim of racial discrimination; they earn just 76.2 percent of what men earn. Discrimination among women employees happens at work places, as African American, Native American and Latino women are offered less than white and Asian American women. Discrimination is happening at national level in all opportunities, which are offered to whites more than to blacks. Other than employment and housing, education is also affected. People commit hate crimes and racial profiling is going without interruption. It is very pathetic that in the time of grief when communities were struck by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the African Americans were made to suffer more than white community people. The road to race based discrimination does not come to an end there. This pervasive color based discrimination was also noticed in relocation of Katrina victims. As per the tests made by the National Fair Housing Alliance, bias treatment was made in the matter of relocation, favoring white people to blacks. Discrimination is also made in rental transactions, as in about 6 out of 10 rental contracts occupants were not favored because of their color. It has been noticed by the Urban Institute in a study that African Americans and Hispanics are not preferred by mortgage lending

Investigating Robbery, Burglary and Larceny Essay Example for Free

Investigating Robbery, Burglary and Larceny Essay Investigating a case of robbery requires employing all the important elements involved in criminal investigation beginning with crime scene processing, interviewing both victims and witnesses, possible method analysis of perpetrating crime, and checking records.  The incident of the robbery occurs so quickly, most of the victims are either in a state of shock or surprise. Hence, victims’ statement should be properly analyzed and investigators should be careful about possibilities of wrong estimation of things by perpetrator’s age, height, and weight by the victim. The important aspect of initial investigation is to have careful retrieval of information present in victim’s subconscious mind. Investigation in burglary begins with the crime scene and it begins with entry and exit. The possibilities of getting fingerprint evidence have been higher at the above mentioned two places as at these places the offender may take off his gloves. A very close analysis of the exact entry point is required. The possibilities of a forced entry and the use of any tool have to be ascertained. Apart from these, other physical evidences in form of dusts and small debris should be collected as these small bits sometimes connects with offender’s clothing, tools and the stolen articles. This form of crime is stealth in nature, possibilities of a witness are bleak and the whole chain of perpetrated crime scene is being created by linking various smaller elements in a chain of events. Larceny has been a crime of opportunities with possibilities of perpetration can be any local setting. Investigation agency looks into the place of incident and tries to ascertain the periodicity of larceny in that area. Even the frequency of the incident of larceny is being correlated with the articles that are of being stolen. As in this case also, possibilities of getting a witness is bleak, the investigation agencies look of any CCTV footage to get hold of perpetrator and in case of absence of any visual assistance, a list of all visitors is developed and are interviewed over certain issues like the purpose of visit and information they could provide about other visitors.

Gerald Graffs Hidden Intellectualism Essay -- ethos, pathos, logos, T

Co-author of â€Å"They Say/I Say† handbook, Gerald Graff, analyzes in his essay â€Å"Hidden Intellectualism† that â€Å"street smarts† can be used for more efficient learning and can be a valuable tool to train students to â€Å"get hooked on reading and writing† (Graff 204). Graff’s purpose is to portray to his audience that knowing more about cars, TV, fashion, and etc. than â€Å"academic work† is not the detriment to the learning process that colleges and schools can see it to be (198). This knowledge can be an important teaching assistant and can facilitate the grasping of new concepts and help to prepare students to expand their interests and write with better quality in the future. Graff clarifies his reasoning by indicating, â€Å"Give me the student anytime who writes a sharply argued, sociologically acute analysis of an issue in Source over the student who writes a life-less explication of Hamlet or Socrates’ Apology† (205). Graff adopts a jovial tone to lure in his readers and describe how this overlooked intelligence can spark a passion in students to become interested in formal and academic topics. He uses ethos, pathos, and logos to establish his credibility, appeal emotionally to his readers, and appeal to logic by makes claims, providing evidence, and backing his statements up with reasoning. In the first sentences of this essay, it is easy to relate to Graff’s words. Immediately, he engages readers in the topic and begins to establish his pathos. By using the phrase â€Å"Everyone knows some young person†, Graff relates to a common identity and appeals to his readers emotions. This broad generalization expands the author’s audience by automatically including all of his readers. It is Graff’s opinion that â€Å"schools and colleges might be at fau... ...ting them choose their own groups to be in during class, as offering multiple ways to complete projects, different assigned reading topics, and etc. The student can only get out of the class as much as they put in. Even though the students may wish the teachers would give less homework or let them read Sports Illustrated in class, there is a fine line between academic learning that incorporates â€Å"street smarts† and academic learning that lacks on the academic part. Teachers must insure their students are learning the required material and that they are not taking detours from learning about topics and ideas that students need to be successful after college. Works Cited Graff, Gerald. â€Å"Hidden Intellectualism†. They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Comp. Graff, Gerald, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russell Durst. New York W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Bank of China and HSBC comparative analysis Essay

From the experiences of customers with internet banking, it would be evident that the internet services of HSBC have been well established and have also been accepted as customer friendly, timely and efficient. An overwhelming three fourths customers have accepted that the security of the internet is greater than physical banking which indicates a high level of its effectiveness. It is also evident that those customers who have got accustomed to the use of the internet for banking are likely to continue with this experience. Thus where Bank of China had quite low scores for customer friendliness and efficiency at 32 and 41 % respectively, an overwhelming 81 % of the populace still wanted to continue with internet banking. The overall banking experience has been positive for 54 % of the customers of Bank of China and 67 % of the HSBC. Thus there is adequate scope for improving its services for the customer to provide them an excellent banking experience. Since banking is a personalized event, it is of essence that the customer is provided a special touch be it the individual or the corporate. Failure to do the same will lead to loss of a client which is not good for any business. As the competition in the Chinese banking space grows, it would be important to enhance the satisfaction level to the customer. The Bank of China is a well established banking financial institution, which has a tradition of almost a century of banking, It has been able to adapt to the changing environment very rapidly over the years which is evident from a past turbulent history. Despite nationalization of the banking services in China in 1949 and subsequent liberalization in the 1990’s the Bank has demonstrated admirable resilience in adapting to the changing norms and focusing on the development of services appropriate to the needs of the time. After the Chinese economy has opened, the bank has been particularly benefited as it has been able to exploit its strength of global business by integrating Chinese business needs with the global requirements. The Bank of China was the first Chinese bank to list in domestic as well as the international stock exchanges during the year 2006. (Interim Report, 2006). This will subject it to greater accountability and the management will have to conform to international standards of accounting systems with greater verification by share holder bodies. (Interim Report, 2006). The bank recorded very impressive results for the first half of 2006 with profits of RMB34,338 million and RMB19,477million, operating and net respectively. This was an increase over last year of 19. 72% and 28. 30% respectively. It is however seen that impairment losses are quite high at RMB5. 479 billion, which demonstrates increase of RMB513 million over the same period last year. (Interim Report, 2006). This is the area of concern as controlled by the state, there is a possibility of increase in this facet which will be a set back to the growth and credibility of the Bank. Internationalization is the focus of the Bank of China and it has adapted maximum international banking practices in China. The Bank is always looking for opportunities to enhance its corporate as well as financial image and in pursuance of which it has become the sole banking partner of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. This to some extent will contribute to its brand image and also indicate its role towards fulfilling corporate social responsibility. (About Bank of China,. 2006). In China, the Bank has a very high reputation, being recognized internationally as the Best Bank as well as the Best Domestic Bank in China by Euromoney for a record eight times. (About Bank of China,. 2006). Apart from these many other awards are accredited to the Bank. Bank of China has a wide range of products and services for the corporate as well as the personal consumer which compare quite reasonably with that provided by HSBC. It has considerable advantage in offering foreign exchange services since it has been nominated as the lead branch and hence it obtains considerable benefits from the same. The ability of the bank to exploit its advantage is evident with its spot transaction policy to be settled on the second working day of conclusion of the foreign exchange transaction. It has various types of foreign exchange dealings, conducted by individuals the counter personnel or through the internet. (Forex, 2006). That the Bank is enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of its services is evident from the credit card programme. BOC provides a credit card which is valid nationally as well as internationally. There is a 50 day interest free repayment period and all payments up to the provided line of credit are provided conveniently. (Card, 2006). The card can also be used for drawing cash, there is a no risk report after loss which can be given on telephone. The BOC is increasingly attempting to popularize this concept and has also tied up with various discounted retailers to provide benefit and enhance card usage. A recent introduction is a reward for increased usage of the card.(Card, 2006) Thus by spending 1 RMB, a customer gets the benefit of 1 point and for spending 1 US dollar, benefit of 8 points are given. These points can then be exchanged for various gifts including travel tickets, phone recharging and ordinary purchases based on various schemes prevalent. (Card, 2006). The application procedure has been simplified and there is a double currency facility for consumption as well as for withdrawal of cash based on the credit card. The services available through the bank being world wide, it proves of great benefit to Chinese individuals as well as business persons to hold these cards. (Card, 2006).

Rene Descartes Essay

It is a well-established fact in various literatures in philosophy that Rene Descartes pioneered the modern philosophy tradition. He was the first one who veered away from philosophic tradition that uses Christian faith as the backbone of philosophizing such that of the minds of the medieval philosophers. Rene Descartes’ main philosophical thesis is derived from his famous approach of methodological skepticism or metaphysical doubt. In this regard, he seeks to arrive at a set of principles that will then lead him to prove the truth without generating any doubt. According to his thesis, those things that can be doubted should not be considered as genuine knowledge. Consequently those that cannot be doubted in any respect can be the foundation of genuine knowledge. There is a single principle that he uses as the foundation of his philosophy namely the thought exists. Given that a thought cannot be separated from a any person who thinks, then, the thinking person exists. It is in this simplistic manner that we can come to know and, hence, verify our existence. If a person doubts his existence and, since, nobody can deny the fact that doubting is just another act of thinking, then (by so doing the doubting), the person is in a way asserting his own existence. The very act of doubting your own existence is a proof that you exist. The nature of mind in his writings can be seen to have a distinct function which is to think. It is an indivisible, non-extended thing. But to better understand his propositions in reference to the mind, we must take into account his proposed mind and body problem. The non-thinking thing, he states, is the body. It is a divisible, extended thing and a material substance that suggests spatial extendedness. The mind and body can so exist independently of each other and while any person can doubt of his own body, he can never doubt his own mind – the thinking thing. It is through apprehension of the necessary existence which is embodied in the clear and distinct idea of the supremely perfect being that we can so acquire knowledge of God. He holds his view that the necessary existence cannot be disconnected to the essence of the supremely perfect being (God) without any form of contradiction. Moreover, the existence of God is indeed conspicuous and self-evident according to his thesis. The cause that contains much of a reality that the object of the idea has is God. The God put the idea of something that exists clearly and distinctly in our minds. The idea of something draws its reality from the cause. God’s existence is, for Descartes, the most basic mathematical truth. For any person to arrive at genuine knowledge, one has to know the distinction between impulses that lead one to believe and insights to necessary truths. The former implies that it cannot be doubted whereas the latter cannot be doubted at all. The latter are the principles in our minds by which we acquire knowledge. We must also consider where the errors are coming from in our epistemological pursuit. God, according to him, can never lead people to deception and if only people will use their abilities that they received from God, there will be no chance for any faults. But since people do not easily stay in the narrow realm of truth because of the clashing interests of the will and intellect, people fail to recognize sound judgments. Senses should not be relied upon (in searching for a genuine knowledge); for they only serve confused notions of matter. Sense perceptions are the results of the body’s influence in the mind not from the mind’s apprehension of the necessary characteristics of matters. Rene Descartes believes that people obtain knowledge through the apprehension of the necessary attributes of beings. The physical world, for Descartes, should be visualized as a complicated machine but not in the manner of using our bodily perceptions; rather by the way it is cognized in mathematical terms. The idea that philosophy should have an exact method like that of the natural science of first came from Franz Brentano. Franz Brentano is known because of his works in philosophy of psychology and his reintroduction of the concept of intentionality. Unlike Rene Descartes, Brentano does not use the idea of God in his philosophy and his explanations concerning his theses. Intentionality, according to his writings, can be summed up into the relationship of mental phenomena (consciousness) and the physical phenomena, that is, every single mental phenomena or any psychological act has content and is directed towards an object (intentional object). To signify the status of the object of thoughts in the mind, Franz Brentano uses the term â€Å"intentional inexistence†. The mental phenomenon has the capacity to be intentional, thus it can have an intentional object that the physical phenomenon does not have the ability of generating of. Physical phenomenon is deficit of the ability of generating original intentions but can assist in the progress of intentional relationship in a second-hand manner called derived intentionality. On the other hand, Franz Brentano states that a mental phenomenon is not dependent on the actual existence of an object to be able to form a quasi-relation to it. It should be noted that a thing that does not exist literally in the physical world can be an intentional object of a mental phenomenon. There are criteria to differentiate mental phenomena from physical phenomena. The three most important among those are (1) the exclusive object of inner perception is the mental phenomena, (2) mental phenomena appear as unity and (3) they are directed to an object with a certain degree of intentionality. Mental acts do not necessary have duration. When we are directed towards an object, the object does not vanish from our consciousness for it remains present but just in an altered state. On the contrary, this is not about the act of remembering per se but rather a kind of memory that keeps â€Å"what had been experienced† lively. In the epistemological sense, Franz Brentano states that all knowledge should be from direct experiences that entails the use of first person pronoun, â€Å"I†. However, this should not be confused in the idea that Brentano is upholding the standard of empirical science nowadays. He is introducing here another of approach of performing psychology from an empirical standpoint. This means that those things that one directly experiences in inner perception must be described using the first-person point of view. This then inaugurates another brand of empiricism. Resembling the idea of Descartes, Brentano maintains the idea that perception is erroneous and it could not lead us to de facto existence of the perceived world which could be just an illusion. Moreover, he believes that we can find absolute certainty in our inner perception. Just like the problem that we can see in Descartes disapproval of the use of bodily senses in approaching knowledge, we cannot deem Brentano’s ideas compatible to the tenets of natural science and its course of experimentations. Reality for Franz Brentano does not reside on the perceived world. As what has been mentioned above, the perceived world can only be an illusion and to properly combat this possible error in our judgment (if we only rely on our senses), we must put in higher regard our introspection of our inner perception. Following Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality, Edmund Husserl has formulated another version of the study of the structure of consciousness and its corresponding acts. There is a remarkably similar ideas perpetuating from Brentano’s ideas to that of Husserl notion of the consciousness or the mind. The consciousness acts intentionally toward an intentional object. Consciousness then is always directed toward something, whatever that something is. But then again, the concepts that these two philosophers individually present do not resemble each others in all aspects. Edmund Husserl proposes that there is a need in pointing out the differences between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which the act is intentionally directed. We must know the object-in-itself, transcendent to consciousness. Phenomenology does not displace the notion that objects are indeed real but it puts these objects under the method of â€Å"bracketing† just so to regard the object as it is and not merely that of the object’s features. It also seeks to pinpoint the constant features that define how objects are perceived. In a phenomenological standpoint, the object is not regarded based on its external features, it is not its â€Å"aboutness† that is being scrutinized, it is the object-in-itself. It is not, therefore, in the business of phenomenology to assume the existence of anything. It is a discipline that means to describe the things in themselves. Edmund Husserl gives a little significance to the perennial metaphysical problem of setting up the whole foundation of material reality of what we constantly perceive. The task of a philosopher, for him, is to look at essences of things. The knowledge of essences can only be attained by not letting the assumptions of an external world interfere in epistemological pursuit. This is â€Å"bracketing† that is entailed in the procedure called epoche. It is through constant act of varying the object in our imagination that we can then arrive at the essences of that object. Husserl’s notion of natural standpoint is marked by a certain belief that there are objects that materially exist and that their properties and characteristics are exhibited by them that we then perceive. He declares that mental and spiritual (mind) realities are not the same. These two different concepts are independent of any kind of physical evidences. The above paragraph implies that the natural science, in Husserl’s philosophy, is also in a problematic seat just like the problem we see in Descartes and Brentano’s philosophy. The true knowledge is not attainable in the realm of empirical observation however there is rationality involved. The â€Å"brand† of reality that these three philosophers advertise is the reality that we cannot grasp in the physical world. Reality does not have a place in the realm of the senses.