Compensation (Human Resources) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Compensation (Human Resources) - Essay Example Incentive plans normally endow with compensation foundation on a formula, on accomplishment of concert objectives, on an unrestricted decision, or an amalgamation of these. An organization internally could be measured adjacent to the individual performance. These plans consist of stock-based strategy, which put forward stock options based on stock performance or finance policy, which suggest cash booty joined to congregate objectives. These plans recompense performance with the time period of 2 to 5 years. The key similarity among the Apple Inc and the Microsoft is in the efficient potential by both the company sales. Good sales incentives are provided to the employees in both the organization and the bonus provided by both the companies are depended on the profitability of the company. The company insists in the working hours for making it a success in the market. The differences in the company are in terms of the payment structure. The basic payment provided by Microsoft are high compared to that of apple inc† Microsoft is reportedly trying to hire away Apples retail employees by bribing them with... wait for it, better wages. People that have spoken to The Loop on condition of anonymity confirm that Microsoft has contacted a number of Apples retail store managers to work in their stores. In addition to "significant raises," the managers have also been offered moving expenses in some cases.† (Microsoft reportedly poaching apple retail staff, 2009). The dissimilarity in the strategies of the companies occurs due to certain reasons. The main idea in the planning of the strategy is based on the efficiency in the company’s operations, productivity and profitability. Various reasons are there in expecting the positive relationship in the organization. The level of the executive employees also plays a vital role in the organization size and the positioning of the strategy. The different contingency approaches

Minority Group and Multiculturalism Essay Example for Free

Minority Group and Multiculturalism Essay Ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity — commonly termed â€Å"multiculturalism† — emerged in the West as a vehicle for replacing older forms of ethnic and racial hierarchy with new relations of democratic citizenship. Despite substantial evidence that these policies are making progress toward that goal, a chorus of political leaders has declared them a failure and heralded the death of multiculturalism. This popular master narrative is problematic because it mischaracterizes the nature of the experiments in multiculturalism that have been undertaken, exaggerates the extent to which they have been abandoned, and misidentifies not only the genuine difficulties and limitations they have encountered but the options for addressing these problems. Talk about the retreat from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a live option for Western democracies. This report challenges four powerful myths about multiculturalism. First, it disputes the caricature of multiculturalism as the uncritical celebration of diversity at the expense of addressing grave societal problems such as unemployment and social isolation. Instead it offers an account of multiculturalism as the pursuit of new relations of democratic citizenship, inspired and constrained by human-rights ideals. Second, it contests the idea that multiculturalism has been in wholesale retreat, and offers instead evidence that multiculturalism policies (MCPs) have persisted, and have even grown stronger, over the past ten years. Third, it challenges the idea that multiculturalism has failed, and offers instead evidence that MCPs have had positive effects. Fourth, it disputes the idea that the spread of civic integration policies has displaced multiculturalism or rendered it obsolete. The report instead offers evidence that MCPs are fully consistent with certain forms of civic integration policies, and that indeed the combination of multiculturalism with an â€Å"enabling† form of civic integration is both normatively desirable and empirically effective in at least some cases. To help address these issues, this paper draws upon the Multiculturalism Policy Index. This index 1) identifies eight concrete policy areas where liberal-democratic states — faced with a choice — decided to develop more multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups and 2) measures the extent to which countries have espoused some or all of these policies over time. While there have been some high-profile cases of retreat from MCPs, such as the Netherlands, the general pattern from 1980 to 2010 has been one of modest strengthening. Ironically, some countries that have been vociferous about multiculturalism’s â€Å"failure† (e. g. , Germany) have not actually practiced an active multicultural strategy. Talk about the retreat from multiculturalism has obscured the fact that a form of multicultural integration remains a live option for Western democracies. However, not all attempts to adopt new models of multicultural citizenship have taken root or succeeded in achieving their intended effects. There are several factors that can either facilitate or impede the successful implementation of multiculturalism: Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future 1 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE Desecuritization of ethnic relations. Multiculturalism works best if relations between the state and minorities are seen as an issue of social policy, not as an issue of state security. If the state perceives immigrants to be a security threat (such as Arabs and Muslims after 9/11), support for multiculturalism will drop and the space for minorities to even voice multicultural claims will diminish. Human rights. Support for multiculturalism rests on the assumption that there is a shared commitment to human rights across ethnic and religious lines. If states perceive certain groups as unable or unwilling to respect human-rights norms, they are unlikely to accord them multicultural rights or resources. Much of the backlash against multiculturalism is fundamentally driven by anxieties about Muslims, in particular, and their perceived unwillingness to embrace liberal-democratic norms. Border control. Multiculturalism is more controversial when citizens fear they lack control over their borders — for instance when countries are faced with large numbers (or unexpected surges) of unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers — than when citizens feel the borders are secure. Diversity of immigrant groups. Multiculturalism works best when it is genuinely multicultural — that is, when immigrants come from many source countries rather than coming overwhelmingly from just one (which is more likely to lead to polarized relations with the majority). Economic contributions. Support for multiculturalism depends on the perception that immigrants are holding up their end of the bargain and making a good-faith effort to contribute to society — particularly economically. When these facilitating conditions are present, multiculturalism can be seen as a low-risk option, and indeed seems to have worked well in such cases. Multiculturalism tends to lose support in high-risk situations where immigrants are seen as predominantly illegal, as potential carriers of illiberal practices or movements, or as net burdens on the welfare state. However, one could argue that rejecting immigrant multiculturalism under these circumstances is in fact the higher-risk move. It is precisely when immigrants are perceived as illegitimate, illiberal, and burdensome that multiculturalism may be most needed. I. Introduction Ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity have been in a state of flux around the world for the past 40 years. One hears much about the â€Å"rise and fall of multiculturalism. † Indeed, this has become a kind of master narrative, widely invoked by scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike to explain the evolution of contemporary debates about diversity. Although people disagree about what comes after multiculturalism, there is a surprising consensus that we are in a post-multicultural era. This report contends that this master narrative obscures as much as it reveals, and that we need an alternative framework for thinking about the choices we face. Multiculturalism’s successes and failures, as well as its level of public acceptance, have depended on the nature of the issues at stake and the countries involved, and we need to understand these variations if we are to identify a more sustainable model for accommodating diversity. This paper will argue that the master narrative 1) mischaracterizes the nature of the experiments in multiculturalism that have been undertaken, 2) exaggerates the extent to which they have been abandoned, and 3) misidentifies the genuine difficulties and limitations they have encountered and the options for addressing these problems. 2 Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE Before we can decide whether to celebrate or lament the fall of multiculturalism, we need first to make sure we know what multiculturalism has meant both in theory and in practice, where it has succeeded or failed to meet its objectives, and under what conditions it is likely to thrive in the future. The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism The master narrative of the â€Å"rise and fall of multiculturalism† helpfully captures important features of our current debates. Yet in some respects it is misleading, and may obscure the real challenges and opportunities we face. In its simplest form, the master narrative goes like this:1 Since the mid-1990s we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism. From the 1970s to mid-1990s, there was a clear trend across Western democracies toward the increased recognition and accommodation of diversity through a range of multiculturalism policies (MCPs) and minority rights. These policies were endorsed both at the domestic level in some states and by international organizations, and involved a rejection of earlier ideas of unitary and homogeneous nationhood. Since the mid-1990s, however, we have seen a backlash and retreat from multiculturalism, and a reassertion of ideas of nation building, common values and identity, and unitary citizenship — even a call for the â€Å"return of assimilation. † This retreat is partly driven by fears among the majority group that the accommodation of diversity has â€Å"gone too far† and is threatening their way of life. This fear often expresses itself in the rise of nativist and populist right-wing political movements, such as the Danish People’s Party, defending old ideas of â€Å"Denmark for the Danish. † But the retreat also reflects a belief among the center-left that multiculturalism has failed to help the intended beneficiaries — namely, minorities themselves — because it has failed to address the underlying sources of their social, economic, and political exclusion and may have unintentionally contributed to their social isolation. As a result, even the center-left political movements that initially championed multiculturalism, such as the social democratic parties in Europe, have backed 1 For influential academic statements of this â€Å"rise and fall† narrative, claiming that it applies across the Western democracies, see Rogers Brubaker, â€Å"The Return of Assimilation? † Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4 (2001): 531–48; and Christian Joppke, â€Å"The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,† British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004): 237–57. There are also many accounts of the â€Å"decline,† â€Å"retreat,† or â€Å"crisis† of multiculturalism in particular countries. For the Netherlands, see Han Entzinger, â€Å"The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands,† in Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, eds. Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (London: Palgrave, 2003) and Ruud Koopmans, â€Å"Trade-Offs between Equality and Difference: The Crisis of Dutch Multiculturalism in Cross-National Perspective† (Brief, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, December 2006). For Britain, see Randall Hansen, â€Å"Diversity, Integration and the Turn from Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom,† in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada, eds. Keith G. Banting, Thomas J. Courchene, and F. Leslie Seidle (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007); Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra, and John Solomos, â€Å"New Labour’s White Heart: Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assimilation,† Political Quarterly 73, No. 4 (2002): 445–54; Steven Vertovec, â€Å"Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity,† International Social Science Journal 61 (2010): 83–95. For Australia, see Ien Ang and John Stratton, â€Å"Multiculturalism in Crisis: The New Politics of Race and National Identity in Australia,† in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, ed. I. Ang (London: Routledge, 2001). For Canada, see Lloyd Wong, Joseph Garcea, and Anna Kirova, An Analysis of the ‘Anti- and Post-Multiculturalism’ Discourses: The Fragmentation Position (Alberta: Prairie Centre for Excellence in Research on Immigration and Integration, 2005), http://pmc.metropolis. Net/Virtual%20Library/FinalReports/Post-multi%20FINAL%20REPORT%20for%20PCERII%20_2_. pdf. For a good overview of the backlash discourse in various countries, see Steven Vertovec and Susan Wessendorf, eds. , The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London: Routledge, 2010). Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future 3 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE away from it and shifted to a discourse that emphasizes â€Å"civic integration,† â€Å"social cohesion,† â€Å"common values,† and â€Å"shared citizenship. †2 The social-democratic discourse of civic integration differs from the radical-right discourse in emphasizing the need to develop a more inclusive national identity and to fight racism and discrimination, but it nonetheless distances itself from the rhetoric and policies of multiculturalism. The term postmulticulturalism has often been invoked to signal this new approach, which seeks to overcome the limits of a naive or misguided multiculturalism while avoiding the oppressive reassertion of homogenizing nationalist ideologies. 3 II. What Is Multiculturalism? A. Misleading Model In much of the post-multiculturalist literature, multiculturalism is characterized as a feel-good celebration of ethnocultural diversity, encouraging citizens to acknowledge and embrace the panoply of customs, traditions, music, and cuisine that exist in a multiethnic society. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calls this the â€Å"3S† model of multiculturalism in Britain — saris, samosas, and steeldrums. 4. Multiculturalism takes these familiar cultural markers of ethnic groups — clothing, cuisine, and music — and treats them as authentic practices to be preserved by their members and safely consumed by others. Under the banner of multiculturalism they are taught in school, performed in festivals, displayed in media and museums, and so on. This celebratory model of multiculturalism has been the focus of many critiques, including the following: It ignores issues of economic and political inequality. Even if all Britons come to enjoy Jamaican steeldrum music or Indian samosas, this would do nothing to address the real problems facing Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain — problems of unemployment, poor educational outcomes, residential segregation, poor English language skills, and political marginalization. These economic and political issues cannot be solved simply by celebrating cultural differences. Even with respect to the (legitimate) goal of promoting greater understanding of cultural differences, the focus on celebrating â€Å"authentic† cultural practices that are â€Å"unique† to each group is potentially dangerous. First, not all customs that may be traditionally practiced within a particular group are worthy of being celebrated, or even of being legally tolerated, such as forced marriage. To avoid stirring up controversy, there’s a tendency to choose as the focus of multicultural celebrations safely inoffensive practices — such as cuisine or music — that can be enjoyably consumed by members of the larger society. But this runs the opposite risk 2. For an overview of the attitudes of European social democratic parties to these issues, see Rene Cuperus, Karl Duffek, and Johannes Kandel, eds. , The Challenge of Diversity: European Social Democracy Facing Migration, Integration and Multiculturalism (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003). For references to â€Å"post-multiculturalism† by progressive intellectuals, who distinguish it from the radical right’s â€Å"antimulticulturalism,† see, regarding the United Kingdom, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2000), and â€Å"Beyond Multiculturalism,† Canadian Diversity/Diversite Canadienne 3, no. 2 (2004): 51–4; regarding Australia, James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and regarding the United States, Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and David A. Hollinger, Post-ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, revised edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Alibhai-Brown, After Multiculturalism. 3 4 4 Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE of the trivialization or Disneyfication of cultural differences,5 ignoring the real challenges that differences in cultural and religious values can raise. Third, the 3S model of multiculturalism can encourage a conception of groups as hermetically sealed and static, each reproducing its own distinct practices. Multiculturalism may be intended to encourage people to share their customs, but the assumption that each group has its own distinctive customs ignores processes of cultural adaptation, mixing, and melange, as well as emerging cultural commonalities, thereby potentially reinforcing perceptions of minorities as eternally â€Å"other. † This in turn can lead to the strengthening of prejudice and stereotyping, and more generally to the polarization of ethnic relations. Fourth, this model can end up reinforcing power inequalities and cultural restrictions within minority groups. In deciding which traditions are â€Å"authentic,† and how to interpret and display them, the state generally consults the traditional elites within the group — typically older males — while ignoring the way these traditional practices (and traditional elites) are often challenged by internal reformers, who have different views about how, say, a â€Å"good Muslim† should act. It can therefore imprison people in â€Å"cultural scripts† that they are not allowed to question or dispute. According to post-multiculturalists, the growing recognition of these flaws underlies the retreat from multiculturalism and signals the search for new models of citizenship that emphasize 1) political participation and economic opportunities over the symbolic politics of cultural recognition, 2) human rights and individual freedom over respect for cultural traditions, 3) the building of inclusive national identities over the recognition of ancestral cultural identities, and 4) cultural change and cultural mixing over the reification of static cultural differences. This narrative about the rise and fall of 3S multiculturalism will no doubt be familiar to many readers. In my view, however, it is inaccurate. Not only is it a caricature of the reality of multiculturalism as it has developed over the past 40 years in the Western democracies, but it is a distraction from the real issues that we need to face. The 3S model captures something important about natural human tendencies to simplify ethnic differences, and about the logic of global capitalism to sell cosmopolitan cultural products, but it does not capture the nature of post-1960s government MCPs, which have had more complex historical sources and political goals. B. Multiculturalism in Context It is important to put multiculturalism in its historical context. In one sense, it is as old as humanity — different cultures have always found ways of coexisting, and respect for diversity was a familiar feature of many historic empires, such as the Ottoman Empire. But the sort of multiculturalism that is said to have had a â€Å"rise and fall† is a more specific historic phenomenon, emerging first in the Western democracies in the late 1960s. This timing is important, for it helps us situate multiculturalism in relation to larger social transformations of the postwar era. More specifically, multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity. Prior to World War II, ethnocultural and religious diversity in the West was characterized by a range of illiberal and undemocratic relationships of hierarchy,6 justified by racialist ideologies that explicitly propounded the superiority of some peoples and cultures and their right to rule over others. These ideologies were widely accepted throughout the Western world and underpinned both domestic laws (e. g. , racially biased immigration and citizenship policies) and foreign policies (e. g. , in relation to overseas colonies). 5 6 Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. (Toronto: Penguin, 1994). Including relations of conqueror and conquered, colonizer and colonized, master and slave, settler and indigenous, racialized and unmarked, normalized and deviant, orthodox and heretic, civilized and primitive, and ally and enemy. Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future 5 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE After World War II, however, the world recoiled against Hitler’s fanatical and murderous use of such ideologies, and the United Nations decisively repudiated them in favor of a new ideology of the equality of races and peoples. And this new assumption of human equality generated a series of political movements designed to contest the lingering presence or enduring effects of older hierarchies. We can distinguish three â€Å"waves† of such movements: 1) the struggle for decolonization, concentrated in the period 1948–65; 2) the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, initiated and exemplified by the AfricanAmerican civil-rights movement from 1955 to 1965; and 3) the struggle for multiculturalism and minority rights, which emerged in the late 1960s. Multiculturalism is part of a larger human-rights revolution involving ethnic and racial diversity. Each of these movements draws upon the human-rights revolution, and its foundational ideology of the equality of races and peoples, to challenge the legacies of earlier ethnic and racial hierarchies. Indeed, the human-rights revolution plays a double role here, not just as the inspiration for a struggle, but also as a constraint on the permissible goals and means of that struggle. Insofar as historically excluded or stigmatized groups struggle against earlier hierarchies in the name of equality, they too have to renounce their own traditions of exclusion or oppression in the treatment of, say, women, gays, people of mixed race, religious dissenters, and so on. Human rights, and liberal-democratic constitutionalism more generally, provide the overarching framework within which these struggles are debated and addressed. Each of these movements, therefore, can be seen as contributing to a process of democratic â€Å"citizenization† — that is, turning the earlier catalog of hierarchical relations into relationships of liberaldemocratic citizenship. This entails transforming both the vertical relationships between minorities and the state and the horizontal relationships among the members of different groups. In the past, it was often assumed that the only way to engage in this process of citizenization was to impose a single undifferentiated model of citizenship on all individuals. But the ideas and policies of multiculturalism that emerged from the 1960s start from the assumption that this complex history inevitably and appropriately generates group-differentiated ethnopolitical claims. The key to citizenization is not to suppress these differential claims but to filter them through and frame them within the language of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability. And this is what multiculturalist movements have aimed to do. The precise character of the resulting multicultural reforms varies from group to group, as befits the distinctive history that each has faced. They all start from the antidiscrimination principle that underpinned the second wave but go beyond it to challenge other forms of exclusion or stigmatization. In most Western countries, explicit state-sponsored discrimination against ethnic, racial, or religious minorities had largely ceased by the 1960s and 1970s, under the influence of the second wave of humanrights struggles. Yet ethnic and racial hierarchies persist in many societies, whether measured in terms of economic inequalities, political underrepresentation, social stigmatization, or cultural invisibility. Various forms of multiculturalism have been developed to help overcome these lingering inequalities. The focus in this report is on multiculturalism as it pertains to (permanently settled) immigrant groups,7 7 There was briefly in some European countries a form of â€Å"multiculturalism† that was not aimed at the inclusion of permanent immigrants, but rather at ensuring that temporary migrants would return to their country of origin. For example, mothertongue education in Germany was not initially introduced â€Å"as a minority right but in order to enable guest worker children to reintegrate in their countries of origin† (Karen Schonwalder, â€Å"Germany: Integration Policy and Pluralism in a Self-Conscious Country of Immigration,† in The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices, eds. Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf [London: Routledge, 2010], 160). Needless to say, this sort of â€Å"returnist† multiculturalism — premised on the idea that migrants are foreigners who should return to their real home — has nothing to do with multiculturalism policies (MCPs) premised on the idea that immigrants belong in their host countries, and which aim to make immigrants 6 Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE but it is worth noting that struggles for multicultural citizenship have also emerged in relation to historic minorities and indigenous peoples. 8 C. The Evolution of Multiculturalism Policies. The case of immigrant multiculturalism is just one aspect of a larger â€Å"ethnic revival† across the Western democracies,9 in which different types of minorities have struggled for new forms of multicultural citizenship that combine both antidiscrimination measures and positive forms of recognition and accommodation. Multicultural citizenship for immigrant groups clearly does not involve the same types of claims as for indigenous peoples or national minorities: immigrant groups do not typically seek land rights, territorial autonomy, or official language status. What then is the substance of multicultural citizenship in relation to immigrant groups? The Multiculturalism Policy Index is one attempt to measure the evolution of MCPs in a standardized format that enables comparative research. 10 The index takes the following eight policies as the most common or emblematic forms of immigrant MCPs:11 Constitutional, legislative, or parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism, at the central and/ or regional and municipal levels The adoption of multiculturalism in school curricula The inclusion of ethnic representation/sensitivity in the mandate of public media or media licensing Exemptions from dress codes, either by statute or by court cases Allowing of dual citizenship The funding of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities The funding of bilingual education or mother-tongue instruction Affirmative action for disadvantaged immigrant groups12 feel more at home where they are. The focus of this paper is on the latter type of multiculturalism, which is centrally concerned with constructing new relations of citizenship. 8 In relation to indigenous peoples, for example — such as the Maori in New Zealand, Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Australia, American Indians, the Sami in Scandinavia, and the Inuit of Greenland — new models of multicultural citizenship have emerged since the late 1960s that include policies such as land rights, self-government rights, recognition of customary laws, and guarantees of political consultation. And in relation to substate national groups — such as the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, Scots and Welsh in Britain, Quebecois in Canada, Germans in South Tyrol, Swedish in Finland — we see new models of multicultural citizenship that include policies such as federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy; official language status, either in the region or nationally; and guarantees of representation in the central government or on constitutional courts. 9. Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 10 Keith Banting and I developed this index, first published in Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, eds. , Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Many of the ideas discussed in this paper are the result of our collaboration. 11 As with all cross-national indices, there is a trade-off between standardization and sensitivity to local nuances. There is no universally accepted definition of multiculturalism policies and no hard and fast line that would sharply distinguish MCPs from closely related policy fields, such as antidiscrimination policies, citizenship policies, and integration policies. Different countries (or indeed different actors within a single country) are likely to draw this line in different places, and any list is therefore likely to be controversial. 12 For a fuller description of these policies, and the justification for including them in the Multiculturalism Policy Index, see the index website, www.queensu. ca/mcp. The site also includes our separate index of MCPs for indigenous peoples and for national minorities. Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future 7 MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE Other policies could be added (or subtracted) from the index, but there was a recognizable â€Å"multiculturalist turn† across Western democracies in the last few decades of the 20th century, and we can identify a range of public policies that are seen, by both critics and defenders, as emblematic of this turn. Each of the eight policy indicators listed above is intended to capture a policy dimension where liberaldemocratic states faced a choice about whether or not to take a multicultural turn and to develop more multicultural forms of citizenship in relation to immigrant groups. While multiculturalism for immigrant groups clearly differs in substance from that for indigenous peoples or national minorities, each policy has been defended as a means to overcome the legacies of earlier hierarchies and to help build fairer and more inclusive democratic societies. Therefore, multiculturalism is first and foremost about developing new models of democratic citizenship, grounded in human-rights ideals, to replace earlier uncivil and undemocratic relations of hierarchy and exclusion. Needless to say, this account of multiculturalism-as-citizenization differs dramatically from the 3S account of multiculturalism as the celebration of static cultural differences. Whereas the 3S account says that multiculturalism is about displaying and consuming differences in cuisine, clothing, and music, while neglecting issues of political and economic inequality, the citizenization account says that multiculturalism is precisely about constructing new civic and political relations to overcome the deeply entrenched inequalities that have persisted after the abolition of formal discrimination. It is important to determine which of these accounts more accurately describes the Western experience with multiculturalism. Before we can decide whether to celebrate or lament the fall of multiculturalism, we first need to make sure we know what multiculturalism has in fact been. The 3S account is misleading for three principal reasons. 13 Multiculturalism is first and foremost about developing new models of democratic citizenship, grounded in human-rights ideals. First, the claim that multiculturalism is solely or primarily about symbolic cultural politics depends on a misreading of the actual policies. Whether we look at indigenous peoples, national minorities, or immigrant groups, it is immediately apparent that MCPs combine economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions. While minorities are (rightly) concerned to contest the historic stigmatization of their cultures, immigrant multiculturalism also includes policies that are concerned with access to political power and economic opportunities — for example, policies of affirmative action, mechanisms of political consultation, funding for ethnic self-organization, and facilitated access to citizenship. In relation all three types of groups, MCPs combine cultural recognition, economic redistribution, and political participation. Second, the claim that multiculturalism ignores the importance of universal human rights is equally misplaced. On the contrary, as we’ve seen, multiculturalism is itself a human-rights-based movement, inspired and constrained by principles of human rights and liberal-democratic constitutionalism. Its goal is to challenge the traditional ethnic and racial hierarchies that have been discredited by the postwar human-rights revolution. Understood in this way, multiculturalism-as-citizenization offers no support for accommodating the illiberal cultural practices within minority groups that have also The same human-righ.

William Thomson Essay -- biographies biography bio lord kelvin

Born on June 26th 1824 in Belfast Ireland, William Thomson was one of many children. He was primarily raised by his father, James Thomson, as his mother died when he was six. James Thomson raised his family in a strict Presbyterian fashion. Although his father was strict and demanding, William mangaed to maitain a close relatioship with his father. James Thomson was the professor of engineering in Belfast and later was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Glasgow. He taught his son mathematics at a very early age and as a result, William Thomson became an accomplished mathematican beyond that of universities. William Thomson enterd Glasgow University at the age of ten. That was not as uncommon as it is today because back then the universities were competing for the best junior pupils. In 1838, when Thomson was 14, he began what people today would consider university work and when he was 15, his essay called An Essay on the Figure of the Earth won him a gold medal from the University of Glasgow. Thomson then went on to publish his first papers at ages 16 and 17. These papers were defending the work of Fourier who was being criticized by british scientists. Following his years at Glasgow, Thomson entered the University of Cambrige in 1841. He graduated in four years with a B.A. honors degree and was second wrangler. Further work in 1845 saw him become first Smith's prizeman and he was elected a fellow of Peterhouse. From there he went to Paris because of his interest in the French approach to mathematics and he wanted to gain practcal experience and competence in experimental work. Before leaving Paris, Thomson got involved in many discussions which led him to study th... ...that of electrical current flow which helped him solve the problems with trasmitting electrical signals over long distances. Following this project, thomson invented the mirror galvanometer which he patented in 1858 as a long distance telegrah reciever. These projects not only led him to a great deal of fame but also a lot of money. Because of the great success he had from his work, Thomson was Knighted by QueenVictoria in 1866. He then retired from Glasgow in 1889 after being a professor for 53 years. In 1890 he became president of the Royal Society and held that position for five years and in 1892 he was created Baron Kelvin of Largs and recieved the Order of Merit in 1902. William Thomson, better know as Lord Kelvin, eventually died at his home December 17th, 1907, in his estates close to Largs, Scotland, and was buried at Wetminster Abbey, London.

Environmental and Biological Influences in the Classroom :: Teaching Education Essays

Environmental and Biological Influences in the Classroom The fourth grade class that I looked at had a number of different personalities. Some of the differences can be attributed to either environmental or biological causes. Some of the differences I thought might be something that was due to environment however, after talking to the teacher, Mrs. St.Germain, I changed my opinion to being a characteristic due to the biological influences. Some of the differences I noticed I thought where due to genetics or biological causes. One student that I thought exhibited characteristics that may have been due to environment was a girl who exhibited a lot of shyness. She was very quit and sat following directions at all times. As a whole the girls in the class where much quieter than the guys, however, this girl was quite a bit more quite than all the other girls were. I attribute her shyness to the environment that she was brought up in. I feel this very strongly after talking to Mrs. St.Germain. The girl was an immigrant from Haiti and had just learned to speak English in the 2nd grade. This late introduction into American society, lifestyle, and way of life is probably rather overwhelming and that causes the environment to add to her shyness. Another student seemed very outgoing and rather loud compared to the rest of the students. When I was coming to the room he introduced himself right away and told me the rest of the class was in the media center. At times he interrupted class and could be a nuisance at times. At first I thought that this could be an effect of an environment where he did not receive enough attention. After talking to Mrs. St.Germain though it turned out that he has ADHD along with another hyper activity disorder and his mother would not allow him to be medicated. The next student that I observed was very smart in math. I was told that he often times beats the teacher when doing math multiplication dittos. I think that his intelligence is something that would be passed down through his genes. On the other hand if a learning environment is established than a higher intelligence may result from the learning environment.

Important lessons about West African history Essay

In light of current events – the resurgence of racism in the U. S. , the political and social upheavals in Africa, and other sad legacies of 300 years of slave trade and colonialism – it is easy to forget that in many ways, Africans brought these evils upon themselves. In the historical novel Segu by Afro-French Caribbean scholar Maryse Conde, we are presented with a vivid portrait of the political struggles and infighting, as well as social and cultural conflicts that put enough stress on traditional African societies so as to allow their exploitation by European powers as well as Arabs and Ottoman Turks. These sweeping events are presented in miniature through the story of Dousika Traore, advisor to the King of Bambara in the city of Segu (located in present-day Mali on the Niger River). His four sons represent the major forces that were tearing at the fabric of traditional African society during the late eighteenth century; Islam, Christianity, the slave trade and Western-style capitalism. Tiekoro, the eldest turns his back on tradition and embraces Islam, a rigidly patriarchal faith with harsh, ascetic demands. It requires that he turn his back on the ancestors, â€Å"protectors of his clan,† (Conde, 35), and required that a man give up many pleasures: â€Å"Monzon, even though he made use of the services of Muslim marabouts, had feelings of the greatest repugnance against Islam, which castrated men, reduced the number of wives they might have, and forbade dolo [an alcoholic beverage] . Could a man live without dolo? Without it, where was he to find the strength to face each succeeding day? † (131). Tiekoro soon learns some hard facts, however, especially in Part I, Chapter 8, as his natural physical drives come between him and his desire to become a devout Muslim. Naba, the youngest, is captured and sold into slavery. While the popular TV mini-series, Roots depicted this sort of kidnapping as perpetrated by white â€Å"slave-catchers,† the reality is this was rarely done. Most often – as depicted in Segu – this happened as the result of kidnapping or capture by other black Africans (typically of a rival nation or clan) or Muslim traders. In fact, it is noteworthy that Conde depicts the aristocracy of the kingdom as more than willing to finance their traditionally hedonistic lifestyles by means of the slave trade. Malobali embraces Christianity, another influence of white Europeans. In part, he appears to be driven to this, being pressured by his elder brother Tiekoro, who thinks what is good for him is good for the others (165). Eventually, he embraces Christianity (252), which involves losing his name and his language as he is renamed â€Å"Samuel† and taught the French language. Yet cultural and family issues (251-292) come between him and his full acceptance of what, like Islam, is a patriarchal and restrictive faith at odds with the cultural values with which he is raised. Siga is the son who attempts to hold on to the traditions of his father. Dousika’s death fairly early in the novel (135) is symbolic of a culture and a society that is dying all around him. As a younger son, Siga is not in a position of power, yet resists Tiekoro’s authority and attempts to force the family to accept Islam. Nonetheless, the forces tearing apart traditional society and culture are too powerful for him; ultimately, Siga adopts the life and occupation of a merchant of wares, enabling him to live in some degree of comfort, but stripping him of what status he might have enjoyed as Dousika’s son. In Segu, the reader has an excellent opportunity to see the slave trade and the exploitive colonization of Africa from the African perspective, gaining a greater understanding of the fact that no people in history have even been conquered without inside help. Work Cited Conde, Maryse. Segu. English ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1987)Ã'Ž

Dancing essays

Dancing essays When I look back through my old family photo albums, I find it difficult to recall much more than what is pictured in their pages. The dated clothing, the people, the locations... all of these are quite visible, and therefore appear memorable, but the fact is, without the visual prompt, I probably wouldn't recollect many of the pictured events at all. Things that made no major impact on my life remain simple illustrations in the back of my mind or images in the album tucked away in the back of an unused closet. Looking at a picture of my fifth birthday party, I can see who was there, what the cake looked like, the gifts I received, but I can't remember much else. Other times in my childhood I remember rather vividly, however. It's funny how memory is selective like that, how certain things can be completely retold down to every last detail. Often, however, a simple prompt can trigger an outpouring of memories that may have otherwise remained hidden deep in the mind. A sight, a sound, perhaps a smell...all of these things can trigger a deluge of retrospection. We have a home movie of this party...it is grainy and of short duration, but it's a great visual aid to my memory of life at that time. And it is in color - the only complete scene in color I can recall from those years. -Judith Ortiz Cofer, "Silent Dancing" In her book "Silent Dancing," Cofer recounts the memories of her childhood induced while watching this short piece of film. Each scene brought about more memories, as colors and scents of the past were relived through it. Because the film was silent, however, those parts of the past had to be made up...explored by her. When I think of the things that remind me of my childhood and development, one scene in particular stands out. I experienced more learning and exploration on the playground at age eight than any other time I can recall in my life. The many things I learned st...

Bpa Bisphenol a Essay Example

Bpa Bisphenol a Essay Example Bpa Bisphenol a Essay Bpa Bisphenol a Essay Bisphenol A Anais Rodriguez Munoz Colorado Technical University November 15, 2011 Bisphenol A What are some possible detrimental health effects associated with BPA? Bisphenol A has been labeled as an endocrine disruptor because it has been found that it mimics estrogen which we already have in our bodies a natural hormone, may fool the body by stimulating reactions that are unnecessary and potentially harmful. Scientist has found links to heart disease, diabetes and liver abnormalities in adults as well as brain and hormone development problems in fetuses and young children. Studies have also shown it can promote human breast cancer cell growth, and cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual problems in men. Explain the position of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding BPA. They have been avoiding the use of BPA such as removing baby bottle or cups off the U. S. market, developing alternatives or minimize BPA levels for the can lignin in food and baby formula. The FDA is also taking other measures to ensure there is no BPA in other products. They are doing new studies like the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has recently announced that it is providing $30 million in funding to study BPA, which includes support both for FDA studies and external grants. What is the position of your state government regarding BPA? Tuesday August 30, 2011 The California state Senate voted to ban the plastic chemical bisphenol A, also known as BPA, from baby bottles and sippy cups sold in the state of California. Opponents had argued that if the ban was approved more companies would be open to lawsuits if the chemical was found in baby products. Do you feel that BPA should be more tightly regulated in the US? Why or why not? I definitely think the U. S. should be stricter on the regulations of BPA especially because it’s found in so many products for children; they are the ones that are at higher risk. In my opinion it should be banned in every state even country no one should be consuming products that could possibly have harmful chemicals in it. Toys have BPA along with bottles and sippy cups why would it be alright for our children to be victims of this chemical when their immune systems are still immature? It just seems very selfish in order to avoid lawsuits form the companies the bill was denied in some states, makes no sense the facts are there that it is a harmful chemical that causes a number of illnesses in children and adults. So why are we even debating whether it should be more tightly regulated in the US of course it should! References: Health Effects of Bisphenol A http://environment. about. com/od/healthenvironment/f/bisphenol-a-health-effects. htm (2011) Retrieved November 16, 2011 California bill passes http://latimesblogs. latimes. com/greenspace/2011/08/bpa-ban-passes-state-senate. html (August 30,2011) Retrieved November 16, 2011 Drug and Food Administration 2011 fda. gov/newsevents/publichealthfocus/ucm064437. htm (January 2011) Retrieved November 16, 2011

ACT Scorers How to Perfect Your Score

Guide for Top SAT / ACT Scorers How to Perfect Your Score SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips Are you already scoring well on the SAT and getting a 1400 or above (2100 in the 2400 scale)? This puts you in a special class, and your strategy for improving your SAT score will be very different from the average students'. Having made the improvement myself, I’ll show you how you can aim for a perfect SAT score too. Why Strategies for Top Scorers and Average Scorers Are Different Where you are on the learning curve absolutely affects what you’ll learn next. Learning to walk as a baby is very different from learning to run in middle school, which is again very different from learning to run in pro marathons. Strategies that are central when you’re doing poorly suddenly stop working when you’re doing well. The main reason for this is that gaining points when you’re an average scorer is more about increasing your skill, whereas gaining points as a top scorer means adapting to the exact shape and format of the test. Completely new strategies are needed, and I’ll show you those SAT strategies right here! My Own Experience as a Top Scorer When I first started studying for the SAT, I was already scoring a 1400 (equivalent to a 2100 on the 2400 scale). As defined above, this definitely qualifies me as a top scorer, and no doubt I was thankful to score even that much. I wanted to score higher though, so I picked up the most popular books: Kaplan, Princeton Review, you name it. I noticed one thing very quickly: All the books are aimed, in a fuzzy way, at average SAT scorers. If you were scoring 400-600 on each section, the material they presented could help you. Kaplan went over basic content like the general idea of geometry areas, but they never spent time talking about how to ace the hardest math questions. In fact, I noticed that many of Kaplan’s hardest math questions had errors, revealing that the book writer wasn’t the best at math. Likewise, Princeton Review was full of test-taking tactics, but they revolved around eliminating just one or two answers or skipping questions. If I’m aiming for a high score, I can’t afford to skip questions or just guess after eliminating a single answer. It dawned on me that the reason most sources were completely unhelpful to my situation was that as a top scorer, my path to improvement was much different than that of the average scorer. Upon realizing this, I began to sit down and spend dozens of hours thinking about the unique situation that we top scorers are in. Not very many resources target us. We suffer from a unique set of issues compared to the average scorer. And most books are written by people who are barely better test takers than us. After really thinking through the issues for many hours, I came up with a set of strategies. These strategies have worked well for me, my classmates, and my tutoring students. Today, we have proof through tens of thousands of our students at PrepScholar that these strategies universally work for top scorers. Let me show you how this strategy works for you! The results of applying my top-scoring strategies: a perfect score. Strategies That Work for Average Scorers But Won’t Work for You First, we will go over strategies that work for average students but will likely stop working once you cross that magical 1400 threshold (30 out of 36 on the ACT or 2100 on a 2400 SAT scale). I’ve picked the most common and helpful strategies for average students that totally stop working for top students. These strategies are alsogood first steps at illustrating how strategies in general can change as your skills change. Learning General Content When you’re scoring 500 in each section, it’s a pretty good idea to do a general review of all your skills. Review circles, rectangles, algebra, and so forth. Average scorers likely have general deficits in their subject knowledge of subjects. However, if you’re a top scorer, learning general content doesn’t work well for you. This is because, as a top scorer, there will likely only bea few areaswhereyou have deficits, and, even in these areas, your deficit will be slight. Unlike average scorers, you won’t be missing serious knowledge across a vast set of skills. This means that learning general content will be a lot less effective than focused study. If you’re a top scorer, you’ll want to hone in on weaknesses rather than gloss over broad topics. The key to thisis identifying exactly which areas are missing and doing a strong push to eliminate those few specific weaknesses. To use another analogy, an average scorer is like a lawn filled with lots of weeds. The best way to remove all the weeds is to spray herbicide everywhere. But as a top scorer, you only have a one or two clumps of weeds in your lawn. The best strategyfor you is just to see where the weed clumps are and target only those areas topull the weeds out. Question Skipping In Jekyll and Hyde, the same man transforms between a good Dr Jekyll and an evil Mr Hyde. In the same way, question skipping is the most powerful of strategies for a low scorer, but it can be harmful to a high scorer. If you’re scoring low, knowing how to skip makes a world of difference. Suppose you have 30 minutes to do 30 math problems. Tenof those problems are really easy, tenare medium difficulty, and tenare hard. If you’re not great at math, trying all 30 is crazy. You probably won’t get the medium and hard questions, and you’re spread thin for the easy questions if you try to answer one question per minute. You might get five problems correct. Instead, question skipping will save your day. If you focus all 30 minutes on the ten easy problems, you’ll spend a careful three minutes on each and probably get all the easy ones. This means you’ll get ten problems correct instead of five, doubling your score. However, if you’re scoring high, you are afforded no such luxury to skip. You have to do all the problems. Once your section score gets above 600, skipping questions starts becoming harmful. A 600 (say in Math) means that you are only allowed to get about ten questions wrong out of 50. If you skip even two or three questions in the entire section, you will already have used upa good part of your quota of tenquestions. With a low margin for error, you need to squeeze every problem for all the points it’ll give you by at least trying it and eliminating some answers. Thus, even at 600, there is no room for skipping. Note: when I say skipping here, I don’t mean leaving the question blank! The New SAT and ACT have a guessing reward, so you never leave the question blank. Skipping here only refers to not spending time on a question. These are the two biggest strategies that work for average scorers but not top scorers. Hopefully, now you have a bit of understanding for why the strategies are different. Just like a 3rd grader needs to learn different math than an th grader, you now need to learn new strategies. Skipping: works for average scorers and hopscotch, but not high scorers Strategies That Stay the Same Before we get into top-scorer specific strategies, I want to emphasize a few strategies that will stay the same. Not everything changes between a toddler learning to walk and a pro marathoner trying to break the time limit. Some things are the same for both of them: like being healthy and exercising. Likewise, top scorers have a few strategies in common with average scorers. In fact, we have alist of strategies that work for all test-takers, regardless of where you are scoring. There are many strategies that are still useful for top scorers like doing realistic practice, understanding your mistakes, not getting in your own head, and so forth. Some of these strategies are worth repeating: Putting in the Time You absolutely still have to put in the time to improve. Just like the old saying in sports goes, no pain, no gain. High scorers come in two camps. The first camp has already put in dozens of hours of SAT study by the time they read this, and they have no fear of putting in even hundreds of hours naturally. If you’re in the first camp, good for you. Work comes easy to you; you should target at least a hundred hours more of studying, and you can skip to the next section. The second camp is students who typically find studying hard. At this point, they may have put less than five hours into studying. They might have scored high because they’re â€Å"naturally smart†, but they haven’t studied a lot. I’ve been in this camp too, so I understand, but I have some advice for you. First, you absolutely can’t think of the SAT as a test of how smart you are. While you may feel good that your initial score was high, if you don't study you'll quickly get discouraged when your score doesn't improve. You might become prone to thinking that you’re just not that smart, and there’s nothing you can do about it the opposite of the truth! It’s much more effective to think of the SAT as not testing how smart you are right now, but how much you work. Thinking of the SAT as a test that reflects hard work isn’t just a useful mindset, it’s also true. After training thousands of students, I consistently find that those who put in more time score higher, even students who were already starting out with high scores. As motivation, you have to realize that, as a high scorer, it is even more important to put time into studying. First, you have less room to improve, so improvements will come harder. You can’t just learn some skipping strategy and raiseyour section score 50 points. Those 50 points will come from your sweat and tears. You need to work extra hard. As additional motivation, you have to really want it from inside. Not your mom, not your teacher, but you need to really want it. Choose a goal, either a school or a score, and convince yourself that it’s important. Then, set a specific amount of time that you want to study and goals for how much to study each week. Every week, see how you’re doing against the goals. Doing Realistic Practice Realistic practice has always been important, but as a top scorer, having real tests is even more critical. Like I said before, improving as a top scorer is all about understanding every contour, flaw and detail of the test. This process is incredibly test specific. Molding yourself into a perfect SAT test taker is way different than molding yourself into the perfect ACT taker. At the high score extremes of the test, all the flaws and quirks become magnified. The ACT always has more time pressure, but when you’re aiming for a perfect 36 on the Math section, you suddenly find yourself under immense time pressure to solve Math Olympiad-level problems. The SAT is known for being tricky, but when you’re aiming for an 800 on Math, you can suddenly end up losing substantial points for missing just a couple of very subtle definitions. When you’re a top scorer, improvement becomes very format-specific. The layout, timing, andfeel of the test all start mattering much more than general math or reading skills. Thus, it’s absolutely critical that you practice on actual SAT or ACT tests given the past. It’s OK to or drill on imperfect problems, but when you actually take a practice SAT or ACT for evaluation and learning, make sure you use a real test you haven’t seen before and make your setting as realistic as possible. Ideally, you’d usethe same exact timings for sections and breaks, and you’d do the entire practice test all in one sitting. At this point, everything matters. Power Strategies for Top Scorers Up to this point, we’ve been talking only about strategies for average scorers. First, we talked about strategies that won’t work for you anymore, and then we went over strategies that you can still use. In this section, we show the jewels, the unique power strategies for top scorers that will get you substantial further improvements. To reiterate, this section is for top scorers whom we define as students who score 700 or more in each section already. To understand top scorer strategies, I will explain the standard pattern of weaknesses that I see in top scorers. The standard pattern for top scorers is that they’re missing points for exactly three reasons: Content Gaps These are small, isolated areas of knowledge that the top scorer hasn’t mastered yet. A top scorer by definition can’t have minor gaps in all areas, and they can’t have major gaps in any area. Therefore, a top scorer may only have minor gaps in a small set of areas. Identifying these gaps, and whether they even exist, will itself take work. Carelessness Top scorers tend to be content masters, but carelessness doesn’t respect knowledge or intelligence. Carelessness can afflict anyone. No matter how good your math is, you’ll never get a question right if you miswrite a 2 as a 3. Time Trouble Top scorers need to answer all questions, and they need to not be careless. On top of that, the SAT and ACT are timed tests. Add this together, and all top scorers suffer from time trouble. That is to say, all top scorers run out of time, and mastering these tests is all about running out of time just as you get everything correct. Folks, take a look at the list above. For the vast majority of top scorers, this list covers all the reasons they score less than they’d like to. Attack Strategies The method that I will show you, the method that works, will go in tactically, surgically, and eliminate each one of the weaknesses above. The method doesn’t optimize for a fast bump in score at the start instead, it'sa surefire, robust way to completely eliminate all sources of error that a top scorer will have. My method is based on the concept of isolate and eliminate. The idea is that we will attack each of the reasons above, one-by-one, until you’re free of errors. Attacking Content Gaps First, we want to eliminate content gaps. To isolate content gaps, we will purposefully not focus on time issues for the moment, Thus, during this phase, you will give yourself double the usual amount of time to do problems. For example, give yourself 60 minutes to do a 30-minute section. We will also purposefully focus away from carelessness. For all questions where you can identify carelessness as the reason you answered a question incorrectly, you can ignore it. This only includes questions where you understand everything but literally misread a number or bubbled in the wrong letter. Carelessness does NOT include misinterpreting a confusing word or making a wrong judgmentcall. These cases are bothreal content issues and not carelessness. With these allowances, take your first practice test. That is, go through one full practice test, and give yourself double the time allowed (split into multiple test sessions if need be). Then, go through every single question you got wrong. The ones that were due to carelessness ignore for now. For all other questions, write down the reasons you didn’t get it. List all possible contributing reasons. For example, if you didn’t apply a sphere surface area formula correctly you should write: Did not understand surface area Did not remember surface area formula 3D geometry Since you’re a top scorer, you shouldn’t get many questions wrong, and you should only have a very short list of reasons at the end. Tally up the reasons, and look at the top 2-4 reasons. These are your content gaps that you need to solve. For each of the top content gaps, come up with a couple of training methods you can use to solve the gaps. Each training method should take at least an hour so you’re not looking for quick fixes. To continue the example above you would write: Did not understand surface areas (4 problems) Training: Review difference between surface and volume (1 hour) Training: Read calculus section on surface areas (2 hours) Training: Google â€Å"Surface area questions† and try a number of them (1 hour) Did not remember surface area formula Training: Create flashcards for 20 most popular surface areas and memorize (2 hours) Training: Open calculus textbook and use calculus to re-derive all above surface areas (3 hours) 3D Geometry Weaknesses Training: Read 3D Geometry Section (1 hour) Training: Do math textbook 3D geometry exercises, complete the three most difficult questions you find (1 hour) Training: Hunt for five 3D Geometry Problems on the SAT and solve each at least two different ways (1 hour) Then, implement your plan. Do all the steps you promised yourself in the time you promised, and then try again with another practice test. Keep on doing this until the number of content mistakes you make has decreased substantially. A good rule of thumb is that you want to eliminate 75% of your content mistakes by repeating the process above or spend 40 hours studying, whichever comes first. Note about PrepScholar: You can do the above method yourself. In fact, I just told you how to identify your errors, come up with the right training, and eliminate your mistakes. However, you might want a program to do it for you. In that case, it’s exactly what PrepScholar Online Prep is for. Our software automatically detects the questions you get wrong, how often you get them wrong, and why you get them wrong, so you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. As you go through practice tests, ask yourself: Are you seeing a reduction in content gap mistakes due to your training? If so, what parts of your training were most effective? How can you do more of this in the future? If not, why did you continue to make the same content mistakes despite training? Why was the training not effective? Improving your standardized testscores is hard work, both in terms of effort and intelligence. You have to put real time and thought into reflecting why you got questions wrong to improve. This deep thinking is a part of testprep that can’t be bypassed by any tricks. You need to spend effort and creativity to find why your training is working or not. Note about PrepScholar: While no one can do all the hard thinking for you, sometimes you can enlist the help of vetted professionals. PrepScholar Online Tutoring tutors are trained in the exact method above. They will help you think of training strategies and reflect on why certain strategies are working or not. Attacking Carelessness Now that you’ve finished attacking content mistakes, the second stage is to attack carelessness. You can blend this in with attacking content, but it’s best not to combine attacking carelessness with attacking time trouble. The method for attacking carelessness is the same as above. Give yourself more time than usual, and notice which problems you’re making careless mistakes on and what caused you to be careless. Somequestions you may want to ask yourself when you answer a question wrong include: Did you not read the question properly? Did you misread a number you calculated because your work was too messy? Did you know the correct answer but filled in the wrong bubble by mistake? When I started training for the SAT, I thought carelessness was an unchanging personality trait. I thought I was doomed to make a certain number of careless mistakes. It turns out that carelessness is something you can controlandcombat by having better habits.If you apply the right methods and safety checks, you’ll rarely be careless. For example, if you make it ahabit tobrush your teeth nightly or buckle your seat belt, you’ll find that very rarely do you forget to do these things. Since you have the luxury of extra time, you should try to adopt two habits. The first habit is double-reading each question and underlining keywords before you even begin working on the problem. A lot of carelessness comes from not reading the question correctly. For example, if you see the question: How many even integers are between -3 and 14 inclusive? I would read it twice, and then underline the question as follows: How many even integers are between -3 and 14 inclusive? Each of the underlined words, if misread, could lead to a disastrous misinterpretation of the problem. â€Å"Even† can be easily misread to meanodd or all integers. â€Å"Inclusive† is underlined to remind you that you should include the number 14 in your calculations. The second habit is to re-read the question one last time before filling in the answer. I learned this trick from a top scorer in my test competition days, and it has worked wonders for me and students I’ve taught it to. The idea is that, if you misinterpreted a problem, that misinterpretation will be obvious on your final reading of the problem. To recap:In order to reduce careless mistakes, read the question twice before you start working on it, and underline the keywords. Then, once you've figured out the answer, read the question through one last time to make sure you've understood it perfectly. You can develop your own habits based on introspection of what causes your careless mistakes. For example, if you make arithmetic mistakes, double-check each line, or show more of your work. If you keep in mind that the solution to carelessness can be method-based, you can use these methods to solve all your careless mistakes. However, what if some careless mistakes persist even if you use a lot of methods designed to catch carelessness? What if you’re careless in choosing which line to look at when looking at author intention? Or you’re careless in remembering which idiom is correct? You should understand that these are not careless mistakes, but mistakes of content. Remember, if a mistake persists even after a slow, careful reading of the problem, you canassumethat it’s not really carelessness, but rather a content problem. In the case of persistent problems, I would re-read the section here on carelessness as well as try to identify underlying content issues. Time Trouble Now that you have gotten rid of sufficient content and carelessness problems, it’s time to tackle that final problem all top scorers have time trouble. Generally, this refers to the feeling that you can do better if you had more time. The SAT and ACT are designed with strong time constraints. In fact, you're doing something wrong if you ever find yourself ending a section even a minute early. Up until now, you’ve been giving yourself double time (or more) so you can hone in on your content or carelessness issues. Now you can practice reducing your time. A good way to do this is to reduce your time by 20% each practice test and make sure your mistakes aren’t shooting up. Every time you repeat a 20% reduction, if your mistakes stay the same, then you’re good. For example, for a 50-minute section, start by giving yourself extra time: 100 minutes. If you’re doing well at 100 minutes, reduce this to 80, then 64, and then finally 50 minutes. Inevitably, you’ll need to start developing your own timing strategies to deal with the lower time. Many of these strategies will be ad-hoc. You’ll think of them, try them, and they’ll work. The best students are good at introspection, coming up with strategies, and evaluating whether those strategies work. Here are the two most common and helpful strategies for improving your time management: Rush Through the Easy Questions If a question is clear, go through it fast, but still apply your carelessness prevention habits (diligence) to ensure you get it right. When you’re at the top it’s a fight between diligence and time, and you want to do a bit of both. A common strategy is to reduce your time by 50% on easy questions, spend the standard amount of time on normal questions, and increase your time by 50% on hard questions. For example, suppose you have a 60-minute math section with 60 questions. Each question should take 60 seconds to do this is the standard time. For easy questions, you should target 30 seconds, for medium questions, you should target 60 seconds, and for truly hard questions, target 90 seconds. It makes sense to play with the cutoffs for difficulty and timing to see what works best for you. Skip and Come Back Everyone gets stuck on questions. I’ve scored 99.9th percentile on my SAT and ACT, and I routinely get stuck once or twice per section. If you allow getting stuck to cost you five minutes, you’ll be hosed. If you find that, after spending 90 seconds on a problem, you aren’t getting an answer, try your best guess and mark the question with a â€Å"G† (for guess). This means at the end of your first pass-through of the test, you’ll need to have some extra time. Use this extra time to come back to the guesses. Guesses aren’t the only problems you should come back to. There are certain hard questions that will take a while to double-check, which is not worth doing on your first pass-through the test. For these questions, you can mark them with a â€Å"C† and come back to them later as well. The general reason to skip and come back is because not finishing a single pass-through of every question is highly damaging. Not looking at two or three questions guarantees you won’t get those questions right. Thus, you want to at least touch all problems, and leave a few minutes at the end to come back. You should play around with the strategies above. Look at how double-checking reduces carelessness but increases time. Look at what sorts of markings you should make and how many passes you should make through your test (hint: it’s probably more than one). As you decrease your time, you’ll find these strategies continue to work well and allow you to maintain the same score at 1x standard time. Wrap Up The strategy guide above will carry you far, and likely all the way, if you follow it fully. To recap, I’ll touch upon a few points again. The first is that, for top scorers, losses come mainly from three sources: content gaps, carelessness, and time issues. By isolating each item, you’ll be able to solve each of them with much higher consistency. While you’re doing this, you should still maintain a few strategies that work for all scorers. Two strategies worth repeating are using real practice questions and putting in the time needed to really improve your score. Next Steps Now that you know which strategies a top scorer should use, there is no reason not to get started as soon as you can. If you’re self-studying, you should immediately try to apply the strategies above and also useour blog for further advice. You may also be interested in checking out PrepScholar Online Prep as it does all of the above for you, in optimal ways. For example, we know that you’re a top scorer, and we won’t give you strategies that only work for average students. We’ll emphasize strategies that work especially well for top scorersand give you tips for timing and diligence. Best of all, we’ll identify your exact content gaps which is the hardest and most important information for top scorers like you to know. Click below and you can try us out risk-free for 5 days! Further Reading Since you're already a top scorer, you're probably aiming for a perfectstandardized testscore. Check out our guides to getting a perfect score on the SAT and a perfect score on the ACT,written by our resident full-scorer on both tests. Want to know what it takes to get into the most competitive colleges? Learn how to get admitted to Harvard and other Ivy League schools from a Harvard alum. Need some practice tests to help with your test preparation?We have free and official practice tests for the SAT and the ACT.

Accountability of nursing professionals Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Accountability of nursing professionals - Essay Example In health care, professional accountability and responsibility go hand in hand.The two are related in the nursing profession and one must posses both to be an effective and reliable nurse.Thus both are very vital in the nursing profession. Both accountability and responsibility are concerned with taking care of a patient and his or her family.Thus both are very vital in the nursing profession. Accountability refers to the state of being liable to ones’ actions and willingness to accept the consequences of his or her own behaviour. In addition, they are also concerned with the code of conduct, behaviours and policies related to nursing profession. Thus both are very vital in the nursing profession. Accountability refers to the state of being liable to ones’ actions and willingness to accept the consequences of his or her own behaviour. It is a legal obligation and in nursing profession it entails ethical and moral responsibility. Nurses who are accountable treat their du ties with a lot of seriousness. It is the responsibility of a professional nurse to act within his or scope of care and call upon his or her knowledge and skills in making decisions that are in the best interest of the patient. According to the American Nursing Association code, a nurse is accountable for nursing judgments and actions. Professional accountability entails everything from the way nurses dress, to their values, ethics and moral beliefs (Fineout-Overholt et al 2005). According to Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt (2005),

Discussion 1 Week 6 "Comparing First-movers in Technology" Assignment

Discussion 1 Week 6 "Comparing First-movers in Technology" - Assignment Example 244). From the videos, it was evident that Intel’s development of the first microprocessor (Intel Free Press, 2011); while Microsoft’s software design enabled them to pioneer in this endeavor and assume a proactive stance in related technological developments (Microsoft, 2012). Moreover, Intel and Microsoft capitalized and reaped the following advantages: (1) captured the opportunity to â€Å"exploit network effects and positive feedback loops, locking consumers into its technology† (Hill & Jones, 2012, p. 244); (2) enabled establishment of brand loyalty; (3) generated substantial sales volume which eventually enabled economies of scale and learning effects; (4) enabled offering pricing strategies (switching costs); and (5) gained advanced knowledge on the pioneering experience (Hill & Jones, 2012). 2. From the first and second e-Activities, compare Intel’s and Microsoft’s strategies in terms of their ability to profit from innovation. Next, analyze the manner in which shifts in new technologies revolutionized the structure of the industry, increasing profitability and growth through global expansion. Provide a rationale to support your response. Intel’s strategies, when compared to Microsoft’s strategies in terms of abilities to profit from innovation were virtually on the same field. Through pioneering efforts, both Intel and Microsoft gained substantial market shares within their respective fields of endeavors. As such, the developed core competencies established significant competitive advantage that enabled them to retain leadership in these discoveries. Moreover, the manner in which shifts in new technologies revolutionized the structure of the industry, increasing profitability and growth through global expansion – more commonly known as technological paradigm shifts, affect both Intel and Microsoft. For example, cloud computing, which

Reading response Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 32

Reading response - Essay Example The amazing thing is that most of the ideas extended by the original work and its critics are in the nature of fictitious blames and lack any substantial material to base them on. The article also shows how the nation has a long standing history of being scared of minorities and diversity. It was not without a reason that the book, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk won an avid readership, not only in her days, but even today. The irony that the American masses do have a history of being afraid of the foreign and the different does ensue from this article. The writer in a way does succeed in bringing out the fact that the work The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk did intend to present the Catholic Church as a symbol of evil and it strongly intended to present the Catholic priesthood as embodiment of carnal pleasures and immorality. The author brings out the fact that Maria Monks never resided in a Catholic convent and that her mental capacities and morality were never beyond doubt. There is other side of the coin also. It is obvious that the writer Ruth Hughes is a Catholic and intends to unravel the lying and falsehood resorted to by Maria Monks and her supporters, to debase and vilify the Catholic Church. However, while doing so, Hughes did fail many times to show the kindness, compassion and forgiveness that so typically define the Catholic faith. Instead one is resorting to the kind of aggressive and base tactics that were resorted to by one’s opponents. Ruth Hughes is trying to do away with the accusation made by Maria Monks and her supporters by vilifying their character and sense of morality and ethics. It would have been much saner if Hughes had come down on this vilification of the Catholic by taking a higher ground. This would have presented one’s faith to the readers in a more favorable and benign light and would have brought out the irresponsible

Tony Blair and Liberal Democracy Ideology Essay

Tony Blair and Liberal Democracy Ideology - Essay Example Tony Blair played a major role in Unifying the Labour Party a fact that made the popularity of the Labour Party to rise in the United Kingdom. It is through this unification that the country experienced a balance between the two major parties the country and that is the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. This is referred to by some experts as the Blair effect. This shows that Tony Blair was a good leader by all means and this also brings about the question of liberalization. It is important to note that Tony Blair highly advocated for the liberalization of various aspects in the country as well as other parts of the world especially the developing countries and countries that were having political, social and economical problems. Tony Blair was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from the year 1997 to the year 2007 and during his premiership, he adopted various policies which have been seen by many as to advocate for Liberal Democracy and Nation State. Many people will remember him for the foreign wars that he was involved in when he was the Prime Minister and also his doctrines of military intervention in various conflicts in the world. When he was resigning, he argued in parliament that his successors should learn to use his foreign policy. Although these doctrines and policies were not instrumental in his first election to the premiership and were not cited in his campaign, the policies that were cited in his first campaign still remained instrumental in his leadership throughout his premiership1. The most prevalent political model of Tony Blair was the Liberal Democratic Nation State. This was his initial political ideology and while he exercised this at the domestic politics, his foreign policy leaned very much to the Liberal Democracy ideology. It is important to note that even though the Liberal Democracy was a prevalent policy in the United Kingdom long before Tony Blair was elected to the premiership but he also embraced this policy during his premiership2. On the international side, the global crusade for the policy of liberal democracy was taken by Tony Blair as his personal crusade during the conflict of Kosovo. Although he faced significant criticism from various quarters, he did not shy away from implementing this policy in the subsequent wars that included Afghanistan and Iraq. He was also very instrumental in bringing about neoliberalism to be the country's dominant social and moral philosophy. This does not meant that neoliberalism is just a synonym of capitalism because the society and the political culture of the country were transformed by numerous policies which sought to eliminate the ideal of equality from the political policies and this policies also encourage the establishment and acceptance of an underclass which had the outlook of permanency and hereditary social group. Under the administration of Tony Blair, the core electorate group also known as Middle Britain had the opportunity to dominate the country's politics and in so doing they excluded the disadvantaged and non-voting underclass from the politics of the country3. Blair also attempted to implement the Mazzinian Nationalism but this failed

CJUS 330 Book Review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

CJUS 330 Book Review - Essay Example The so called â€Å"liberalized† people have foregone the cultures and traditions of the American society and embraced new ways of living. For instance, gay marriages, pornography, abortion, and radical feminism have come to be accepted in the American society. Such actions are fuelled by an American Supreme Court that has lost faith in the norms of the society and continues to make decisions that will end up destroying the society. The author maintains that there is a faction of Americans who still believe in their traditions of low taxes, purity of marriage, justice, and the rule of law. However, this faction is ignored and the judges of the Supreme Court make rulings on cases based on what suits them (the judges) best. Robertson (2004) categorically states that the past fifty years have seen the Supreme Court in America become radicalized; resulting in the distortion of the very justice, law, and order the court is meant to uphold. In my opinion, the book is very engaging as the author takes us through the foundations of the American constitution. The author gives us an insight of what the framers of the constitution had in mind when they decided that the government should have three arms. According to Robertson (2004) the role of the judiciary is to interpret laws without being influenced by either the legislature or the judiciary. Today, however, decisions made by the Supreme Court are based on the political will of the government, with complete disregard for the ordinary citizen. The author gives many examples of how the Supreme Court has disregarded American culture in most of its rulings. There are examples in the book about how the Supreme Court voted for the exclusion of the phrase â€Å"under God† in the Pledge, though polls showed most Americans wanted the phrase to remain. Cases of rulings in favor of gay relationships and internet pornography are also used by the author to justify his claims about a wayward Supreme Court (Robertson,

Tony Blair and Liberal Democracy Ideology Essay

Tony Blair and Liberal Democracy Ideology - Essay Example Tony Blair played a major role in Unifying the Labour Party a fact that made the popularity of the Labour Party to rise in the United Kingdom. It is through this unification that the country experienced a balance between the two major parties the country and that is the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. This is referred to by some experts as the Blair effect. This shows that Tony Blair was a good leader by all means and this also brings about the question of liberalization. It is important to note that Tony Blair highly advocated for the liberalization of various aspects in the country as well as other parts of the world especially the developing countries and countries that were having political, social and economical problems. Tony Blair was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from the year 1997 to the year 2007 and during his premiership, he adopted various policies which have been seen by many as to advocate for Liberal Democracy and Nation State. Many people will remember him for the foreign wars that he was involved in when he was the Prime Minister and also his doctrines of military intervention in various conflicts in the world. When he was resigning, he argued in parliament that his successors should learn to use his foreign policy. Although these doctrines and policies were not instrumental in his first election to the premiership and were not cited in his campaign, the policies that were cited in his first campaign still remained instrumental in his leadership throughout his premiership1. The most prevalent political model of Tony Blair was the Liberal Democratic Nation State. This was his initial political ideology and while he exercised this at the domestic politics, his foreign policy leaned very much to the Liberal Democracy ideology. It is important to note that even though the Liberal Democracy was a prevalent policy in the United Kingdom long before Tony Blair was elected to the premiership but he also embraced this policy during his premiership2. On the international side, the global crusade for the policy of liberal democracy was taken by Tony Blair as his personal crusade during the conflict of Kosovo. Although he faced significant criticism from various quarters, he did not shy away from implementing this policy in the subsequent wars that included Afghanistan and Iraq. He was also very instrumental in bringing about neoliberalism to be the country's dominant social and moral philosophy. This does not meant that neoliberalism is just a synonym of capitalism because the society and the political culture of the country were transformed by numerous policies which sought to eliminate the ideal of equality from the political policies and this policies also encourage the establishment and acceptance of an underclass which had the outlook of permanency and hereditary social group. Under the administration of Tony Blair, the core electorate group also known as Middle Britain had the opportunity to dominate the country's politics and in so doing they excluded the disadvantaged and non-voting underclass from the politics of the country3. Blair also attempted to implement the Mazzinian Nationalism but this failed

Save the world proposal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Save the world proposal - Essay Example In this proposal, the threats facing this animal will be looked at especially the species belonging to the giant panda. Extinction results into complete eradication of an animal species from the earth surface which has a number of consequences to the ecosystem. The proposal will finally analyze some of the possible ways of saving this species of panda from the imminent eradication and extinction (Gong & Reid 246). The giant panda belongs to the bear family and occupies large parts of china and other areas of New Zealand and Australia. It is an omnivore eating both bamboo leaves and soft tissues sections and small animals found within its habitat. Moreover, it is one of the major sources of tourism revenue in china and New Zealand and foreigners troop these countries to be with this friendly animal. Furthermore, it presents many opportunities for the country that makes it essential for the world life conservancy authorities and groups to develop mechanisms of protecting the animal (Ou yang et al 622). The giant panda is considered as one of the rare species of bear currently available that depends on bamboos and soft tissue plants to survive. Bamboo has however attracted a number of economic applications across different levels of economic activities in the world. As a result, bamboo cutting has significantly increased as people use them for economic purposes or clear the land for farming activities due to increased human population. This deprives the giant panda of its main source of food, thus leaving the animal with small animals as the only alternative source of food. Additionally, the giant panda is slow to reproduce which means that the animal has minimal number of offspring during its lifetime, further increasing its vulnerability to extinction (Entwistle & Dunstone 87). The giant panda should be saved from extinction considering the significant role it plays in reinforcing the efforts of conservation of the flora and fauna. It is considered as one of the most loved animal species not just in china but also in other parts of the country. The region where the giant panda is found is considered as the heartland of Chinese which makes it essential to ensure sustainability in the region. Encouraging sustainability in this region will not only protect the giant panda from extinction but also improve the lifelines of the people around the Yangtze Basin in China. This area acts as the heartland of economic activities in china, being home to both tourist activities, subsistence fisheries and a number of economic activities essential for the growth of the country (Li et al 48). The extinction of the giant panda has a number of ecological, economical and agricultural impacts not just to china but also to the rest of the world. In the event of this extinction, China will end up losing a symbol of its national pride and conservancy efforts. The rate of bamboo consumption in the country will increase tremendously as there will be no concern arisi ng from the existence of the giant panda. This will create significant ecological and agricultural implications to the areas where bamboo is widely grown (Entwistle & Dunstone 87). Despite the widespread concerns on animal and plant conservancy, the benefits achieved maybe are overshadowed by the challenges. Extinction to some scholars is created by natural forces as explained by Darwin theories in relations to the available natural resources. The continued

Study Guide Questions for Fahrenheit 451 Essay Example for Free

Study Guide Questions for Fahrenheit 451 Essay Answer the following questions in paragraph form. These questions should act as a reading guide and are not intended to replace careful reading of the novels themes and development. Part I: The Hearth and the Salamander (pages 3-14) 1. What do the fireman do for a living? For a living the â€Å"fireman† burns books and occasionally some people, if they are with the book. It’s quite different that what firemen do today. 2. In the opening scene, why are the books compared to birds? In the opening scene, the books are refered to as flapping pigeon-winged books because the burning pages look as if they are wings of a bird flapping up and down. 3. What does Montag think of his job? Montag enjoys his job burning books and takes great pride in it. At the beginning of the novel, it largely defines his character. The opening passage describes the pleasure he experiences while burning books. He loves the spectacle of burning and seeing things â€Å"changed† by the fire. 4. Who does Montag meet on the way home? He meets his new neighbor, an inquisitive and unusual seventeen-year-old named Clarisse McClellan. She immediately recognizes him as a fireman and seems fascinated by him and his uniform. She explains that she is â€Å"crazy† and proceeds to suggest that the original duty of firemen was to extinguish fires rather than to light them. She asks him about his job and tells him that she comes from a strange family that does such peculiar things as talk to each other and walk places. Clarisse’s strangeness makes Guy nervous, and he laughs repeatedly and involuntarily. 5. During his conversation, Montag says that You never wash it off completely referring to the kerosene. What could this mean symbolically? This could mean that Montag always acts and thinks like a fireman, even when hes not working; that being a fireman affects the way you see the world. It could also mean that Montag doesnt want to wash off the smell completely, that he likes and is proud of it. 6. Speculate: Why do you think that Bradbury would introduce Clarisse before Montags wife, Mildred? I think that Bradbury introduces Clarisse before Mildred because of the impact she has on Montags way of thought and sense of being in the world. Even though she is his wife, Millie really has little bearing on causing change in Montag. She is representative of the Status Quo, the way things are. Yet, Clarisse is a voice, the first real and definitive voice that represents how things should be for Montag. She is the first voice to challenge him and compel him to think and reflect about how what he is doing needs to stop.

Wavelet Packet Feature Extraction And Support Vector Machine Psychology Essay

Wavelet Packet Feature Extraction And Support Vector Machine Psychology Essay ABSTRACT- The aim of this work is an automatic classification of the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by using statistical features extraction and support vector machine. From a real database, two sets of EEG signals are used: EEG recorded from a healthy person and from an epileptic person during epileptic seizures. Three important statistical features are computed at different sub-bands discrete wavelet and wavelet packet decomposition of EEG recordings. In this study, to select the best wavelet for our application, five wavelet basis functions are considered for processing EEG signals. After reducing the dimension of the obtained data by linear discriminant analysis and principal component analysis, feature vectors are used to model and to train the efficient support vector machine classifier. In order to show the efficiency of this approach, the statistical classification performances are evaluated, and a rate of 100% for the best classification accuracy is obtained and is compa red with those obtained in other studies for the same data set. Keywords- EEG; Discrete Wavelet Transform, Wavelet Packet Transform, Support Vector Machine, Statistical analysis, classification. 1. Introduction In neurology, the electroencephalogram (EEG) is a non-invasive test of brain function that is mostly used for the diagnosis and classification of epilepsy. The epilepsy episodes are a result of excessive electrical discharges in a group of brain cells. Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder of the brain that affects over 50 million people worldwide and in developing countries, three fourths of people with epilepsy may not receive the treatment they need [1]. In clinical decisions, the EEG is related to initiation of therapy to improve quality of epileptic patients life. However, EEG signals occupy a huge volume and the scoring of long-term EEG recordings by visual inspection, in order to classify epilepsy, is usually a time consuming task. Therefore, many researchers have addressed the problem of automatic detection and classification of epileptic EEG signals [2, 3]. Different studies have shown that EEG signal is a non-stationary process and non-linear features are extracted fr om brain activity recordings in order to specific signal characteristics [2, 4, 5, 6]. Then these features are used as input of classifiers [11]. Subasi in [7] used the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficient of normal and epileptic EEG segments in a modular neural network called mixture of expert. For the same EEG data set, Polat and Gà ¼nes [8] used the feature reduction methods including DWT, autoregressive and discrete Fourier transform. In Subasi and Gursoy [9], the dimensionality of the DWT features was reduced using principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The resultant features were used to classify normal and epilepsy EEG signals using support vector machine. Jahankhani, Kodogiannis and Revett [10] have obtained feature vectors from EEG signals by DWT and performed the classification by multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function network. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) appears as one of most promising methods as shown by a great number of works in the literature [11] particularly for ECG signals and relatively fewer, for EEG signals. In [12], Wang, Miao and Xie used wavelet packet entropy method to extract features and K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) classifier. In this work, both DWT and WPT split non stationary EEG signals into frequency sub-bands. Then a set of statistical features such as standard deviation, energy and entropy from real database EEG recordings were computed from e ach decomposition level to represent time-frequency distribution of wavelet coefficients. LDA and PCA are applied to these various parameters allowing a data reduction. These features were used as an input to efficient SVM classifier with two discrete outputs: normal person and epileptic subject. A measure of the performances of these methods is presented. The remaining of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the data set of EEG signals used in our work. In Section 3, preliminaries are presented for immediate reference. This is followed by the step up of our experiments and the results in section 4. Finally, some concluding remarks are given in Section 5. 2. DATA SELECTION We have used the EEG data taken from the artifact free EEG time series database available at the Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn [23]. The complete dataset consists of five sets (denoted A-B-C-D-E). Each set contains100 single-channel EEG signals of 23,6s. The normal EEG data was obtained from five healthy volunteers who were in the relaxed awake state with their eyes open (set A). These signals were obtained from extra-cranially surface EEG recordings in accordance with a standardized electrode placement. Set E contains seizure activity, selected from all recording sites exhibiting ictal activity. All EEG signals were recorded with the same 128 channel amplifier system and digitized at 173.61Hz sampling. 12 bit analog-to-digital conversion and band-pass (0.53-40 Hz) filter settings were used. For a more detailed description, the reader can refer to [13]. In our study, we used set A and set E from the complete dataset. Raw EEG signal Feature extraction: Energy, Entropy and Standard deviation from DWT and WPT decom-position coefficients Dimensionality reduction by LDA and PCA Classification and Performance measure Healthy Epileptic Figure 1 The flow chart of the proposed system 3. methods The proposed method consists of three main parts: (i) statistical feature extraction from DWT and from WPT decomposition coefficients, (ii) dimensionality reduction using PCA and LDA, and (iii) EEG classification using SVM. The flow chart of the proposed method is given in figure 1. Details of the pre-processing and classification steps are examined in the following subsections. 3.1 Analysis using DWT and WPT Since the EEG is a highly non-stationary signal, it has been recently recommended the use of time-frequency domain methods [14]. Wavelet transform can be used to decompose a signal into sub-bands with low frequency (approximate coefficients) and sub-bands with high frequency (detailed coefficients) [15, 16, 17]. Under discrete wavelet transform (DWT), only approximation coefficients are decomposed iteratively by two filters and then down-sampled by 2. The first filter h[.] is a high-pass filter which is the mirror of the second low pass filter l[.]. DWT gives a left recursive binary tree structure. We processed 16 DWT coefficients. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) is an extension of DWT that gives a more informative signal analysis. By using WPT, the lower, as well as the higher frequency bands are decomposed giving a balanced tree structure. The wavelet packet transform generates a full decomposition tree, as shown in figure 2. In this work, we performed five-level wavelet packet deco mposition. The two wavelet packet orthogonal bases at a parent node (i, p) are obtained from the following recursive relationships Eq. (1) and (2), where l[n] and h[n] are low (scale) and high (wavelet) pass filter, respectively; i is the index of a subspaces depth and p is the number of subspaces [15]. The wavelet packet coefficients corresponding to the signal x(t) can be obtained from Eq. (3), l (3,0) (3,1)†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦(3,6) (3,7) h l h l h l h h l h l h l SIGNAL (0,0) (1,0) (1,1) (2,0) (2,1) (2,2) (2,3) Figure 2 Third level wavelet packet decomposition of EEG signal Table 1 gives the frequency bands for each level of WPT decomposition. Figures 3 and 4 show the fifth level wavelet packet decomposition of EEG segments, according to figure 2. We processed 32 WPT coefficients. Therefore, in this study, three statistical parameters: energy feature (En), the measure of Shannon entropy (Ent) and standard deviation (Std) are computed, (4) (5) (6) 3.2 Principal component analysis To make a classifier system more effective, we use principal component analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction. The purpose of its implementation is to derive a small number of uncorrelated principal components from a larger set of zero-mean variables, retaining the maximum possible amount of information from the original data. Formally, the most common derivation of PCA is in terms of standardized linear projection, which maximizes the variance in the projected space [18, 19]. For a given p-dimensional data set X, the m principal axes W1,†¦,Wm where 1≠¤ m≠¤ p, are orthogonal axes onto which the retained variance is maximum in the projected space. Generally, W1,†¦,Wm can be given by the m leading eigenvectors of the sample Table1 Frequency band of each wavelet decomposition level. Decomposition level Frequency band (Hz) 1 2 3 4 5 0-86.8; 86.8-173.6 0-43.5; 43.5-86.8; 86.3-130.2 ;130.2-173.6 0-21.75; 21.75-43.5; 43.5-54.375; 54.375-86.3; 86.3-108.05; 108.05-130.2; 130.2 130.2-151.95; 151.95-173.6; 0-10.875; 10.875-21.75; 21.75-32.625; 32.625-43.5; 43.5-54.375; 54.375-65.25; 65.25-76.125; 76.125-87; 87-97.875; 97.875-108.75; 108.75-119.625; 119.625-130.5; 130.5-141.375; 141.375-152.25; 152.25-163.125; 163.125-173.6 0-5.44; 5.44-10.875; 10.875-16.31; 16.31-21.75: 21.75-27.19; 27.19-32.625; 32.625-38.06; 38.06-43.5; 43.5-48.94; 48.94-54.375; 54.375-59.81; 59.81-65.25; 65.25-70.69; 70.69-76.125; 76.125-81.56;81.56-87; 87-92.44; 92.44-97.87; 97.87-103.3; 103.3-108.75; 108.75-114.19; 114.19-119.625; 119.625-125.06; 125.06-130.5; 130.5-135.94; 135.94-141.38; 141.38-146.81; 146.81-152.25; 152.25-157.69; 157.69-163.125; 163.125-168.56; 168.56-173.6 covariance matrix where is the sample mean and N is the number of samples, so that SWi= ÃŽ »iWi, where ÃŽ »i is the ith largest eigenvalue of S. The m principal components of a given observation vector xi are given by the reduced feature vector . 3.3 Linear discriminant analysis Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) projects high-dimensional data onto a low-dimensional space where the data can achieve maximum class separability [19]. The aim of LDA is to create a new variable that is a combination of the original predictors, i.e. the derived features in LDA are linear combinations of the original variables, where the coefficients are from the transformation matrix i.e. LDA utilizes a transformation matrix W, which can maximizes the ratio of the between-class scatter matrix SB to the within-class scatter matrix SW, to transform the original feature vectors into lower dimensional feature space by linear transformation. The linear function y= WTx maximizes the Fisher criterion J(W) [19], where xj(i) represents the jth sample of the ith of total c classes. k is the dimension of the feature space, and  µi is the Figure 3 Fifth level wavelet packet decomposition of healthy EEG signal (set A). Figure 4 Fifth level wavelet packet decomposition of epileptic EEG signal (set E). mean of the ith class. Mi is the number of samples within classes i in total number of classes. where is the mean of the entire data set. As a dimensionality reduction method, LDA has also been adopted in this work. 3.4 SVM classifier In this work, SVM [20] has been employed as a learning algorithm due to its superior classification ability. Let n examples S={xi,yi}i=1n, yià Ã‚ µ{-1,+1}, where xi represent the input vectors, yi is the class label. The decision hyperplane of SVM can be defined as (w, b); where w is a weight vector and b a bias. The optimal hyperplane can be written as, where w0 and b0 denote the optimal values of the weight vector and bias. Then, after training, test vector is classified by decision function, To find the optimum values of w and b, it is required to solve the following optimization problem: subject to where ÃŽ ¾i is the slack variable, C is the user-specified penalty parameter of the error term (C>0), and φ the kernel function [21]. A radial basis function (RBF) kernel defined as, was used, where ÏÆ' is kernel parameter defined by the user. 4. results and discussion Before we give the experimental results and discuss our observations, we present three performance measures used to evaluate the proposed classification method. (i) Sensitivity, represented by the true positive ratio (TPR), is defined as (ii) Specificity, represented by the true negative ratio (TNR), is given by, (iii) and average classification accuracy is defined as, (16) where FP and FN represent false positive and false negative, respectively. All the experiments in this work were undertaken over 100 segments EEG time series of 4096 samples for each class set A and set E. There were two diagnosis classes: Normal person and epileptic patient. To estimate the reliability of the proposed model, we utilize ten-fold cross validation method. The data is split into ten parts such that each part contains approximately the same proportion of class samples as in the classification dataset. Nine parts (i.e. 90%) are used for training the classifier, and the remaining part (i.e. 10%) for testing. This procedure is repeated ten times using a different part for testing in each case. As illustrated in Fig.3 and 4, feature vectors were computed from coefficient of EEG signals. Taking energy as feature vector, figure 5 shows that the features of both normal and epileptic EEG signals are mixed. The proposed analysis using wavelets was carried out using MATLAB R2011b. In literature, there is no common suggestion to select a particular wavelet. Therefore, a very important step before classifying EEG signals is to select an appropriate wavelet for our application. Then, five wavelet functions namely Daubechies, Coiflets, Biorthogonal, Symlets and Discrete Meyer wavelets are examined and compared, in order to evaluate the performance of various types of wavelets. Figure 6 shows accuracy, sensitivity and specificity from different wavelets. We see that the best wavelet giving good correct rate is the Db2, Db4, coif3 and Bior1.1.The choice of the mother wavelet is focused on daubechies where the length of the filter is 2N, while coifflet wavelet filter is 6N and biorthogonal wavelet (2N +2). After EEG signal Db2 wavelet decomposition and dimensionality reduction, results of correct rate classification are showed in Table 2. The classification accuracy varies from the optimum value (100%) to a lowest value (87%). The results using standard deviation are the best results obtained and using entropy is better than using energy in EEG signals classification. In this study, experimental results show that linear discriminant analysis based on wavelet packet decomposition improves classification and the optimum SVM results are obtained by using standard deviation feature computed from wavelet packet coefficient and LDA reduction method. For this proposed scheme, the accuracy of the classification is 100%. This method presents a novel contribution and has not yet been presented in the literature. Figure 7 shows the average rate of classification (accuracy, sensitivity, specificity) obtained with different methods of decomposition (DWT or WPT), two reduction methods (LDA or PCA) and three characteristic features (standard deviation, energy, entropy) using the four best wavelet (Db2, Db4, coif3 and Bior1.1). We see that the combination of LDA with standard deviation have an optimum average accuracy rate of 99.90% and combination of standard deviation with PCA reaches 99.50 %. Table 3 gives a summary of the accuracy results obtained by other studies from the same dataset (set A and set E) using extraction of features from EEG signal and their classification. 5. conclusion In this paper, EEG signals were decomposed into time-frequency representations using discrete wavelet transform, wavelet packet transform and statistical features were Figure 5 Energy feature vector coefficient D3versus D2 (adapted from [22]). Table 3 Epilepsy classification accuracies evaluation obtained in literature from the same data sets Authors Method Accuracy (%) [7] Subasi DWT + Mixture of Expert 94.50 [8] Polat and Gà ¼nes DWT+DFT+ Auto-regres-sive model + Decision Tree 99.32 [9] Subasi and Gursoy DWT+PCA+ LDA+ICA +SVM 98.75(PCA) 100(LDA) 99.5(ICA) [12] Wang, Miao and Xie WPT+ Entropy-hierarchical K-NN classification 99,44 [14] ÃÅ"beylà ¯ Burg autoregressive + LS-SVM 99.56 Our method WPT + Standard deviation+ LDA + SVM 100 computed to represent their distribution. The most suitable mother wavelets for feature extraction and classification were found. The selection of the suitable mother wavelet and using reduction methods lead to the improvement of performance of EEG signal classification. It has been shown by experiments that for the SVM and the combination of the standard deviation with LDA have the highest correct classification rate of 100% in comparison with other techniques. The interest in expert systems for detection and classification of epileptic EEG signal is expected to grow more and more in order to assist and strengthen the neurologist in numerous tasks, especially, to reduce the number of selection for classification performance. These promising results encourage us to continue with more depth our study and to apply it to other databases recorded with other diseases.