The issue of national or international importance which have an impact Essay

The issue of national or international importance which have an impact on society - Essay Example This research tells that terrorism has had a lasting impact on the society in more ways than one. It must be understood here that there are only negatives attached with terrorism and absolutely no positives could be drawn from such a heinous issue. The wave of terrorism sparked much debate and controversy after the 9/11 attacks on the US soil. After this, the world scenario started to change for the worse, so much so that terrorism seems to be the only constant amongst the different international issues of the current times. This essay discusses that the turn of the new century has meant nothing else but sheer terrorism with terrorist activities breaking headlines with each passing day, in different regions of the world. Taliban and Al Qaeda have been credited with most of these terrorist activities and there is enough evidence to suggest that these two outfits have brought much harm to the ranks of global peace and sanity than any other terrorist wing. In the coming times, terrorism will continue to pose as a major problem. It will haunt the lives of the people and destruct their property and wealth just like it is doing in the present times. It does not guarantee peace to prevail in the near future. The world is plunged into a fighting zone, with non-state actors fighting it out for their own ulterior motives. Some state-level terrorism is also being given air and this has meant disaster and nothing else in the long run.

Main Functional Metrics Employed to Measure ShareHolder Value Essay

Main Functional Metrics Employed to Measure ShareHolder Value - Essay Example Many firms calculate the profitability in their own method of calculation where as investors take a different method to do the same, and it makes a hard time for the management of the firm to coordinate the results. An investor always focuses on the economic profits of the firm as well as looks at the extent of debt and equity that is invested in the business. Some of the important financial metrics employed to measure shareholder value are given below; 1. Shareholder Value Analysis (SVA) The shareholder value analysis (SVA) approach was developed by Alfred Rapport during 1980s and is used to estimate the value of the shareholders’ stake within a company or business unit which can also be adopted as the fundamental measure to formulate and evaluate strategic decisions (CIMA, 2004. p.10). The estimation of the value of a firm’s operations is usually carried out through the process of discounting anticipated future operating â€Å"free cash flows† at a suitable cos t of capital. Here, the free cash flow shows the cash flow derived from a business for a specified period, i.e. the cash flow before extracting any financial-related cash flows associated with share or debt. For the purpose of calculating the shareholder value, the value of â€Å"marketable securities and other investments† must be added to, and the value of debt must be subtracted from the business valuation (CIMA, 2004. p.10). The advantage of shareholder value analysis is that it can be used to value a business, and also to value alternative strategic decisions, by contrasting the pre- and post-strategy positions of the firm. Moreover, it is a simple most common method of calculation by considering the seven key value drivers, which can be broken down into comprehensive practical measures in order to encourage the managers to act on the ultimate objective of generating shareholder wealth. 2. Economic Profit (EV) Economic Profit (EP) is another method for evaluating the sha reholder value which is also known as â€Å"residual income† as a method of measuring divisional performance. It determines how well a firm is performing. The EP evaluates the surplus return gained by the business in a specific period after deducting all expenses, including the cost of using investor’s capital in the business (Encyclopedia of Business, 2011). The measure of net profit cannot be used for analysis even though the interest charged on debt capital is deducted, as its cost related with using equity funds is omitted. So many opt for the EP, arguing that net profit would be mislead and would erroneously exhibit a firm to be profitable based on net profit, where as the actual economic profit would describe it as economically unprofitable. We can state that economic profit is the variance between the return on capital and the cost of capital which can be computed using the following two methods: EP = Invested capital x (return on capital – WACC) EP = Ope rating profits after tax less capital charge 3. Economic Value Added (EVA) According to Bennet and Stewart (p.40, 2007), Economic Value Added is the financial performance evaluation method which is able to accurately capture the true economic profit of an organisation, and is the performance measure most directly associated with the creation of shareholder wealth over time. EVA is an evaluation of finding out

Is Oil a Blessing or a Curse for the Middle East Essay

Is Oil a Blessing or a Curse for the Middle East - Essay Example The reality that many nations face with regards to being nearly entirely dependent upon their natural resources as the basic foundation of their economies is referred to as both â€Å"renterism† and the â€Å"Dutch disease†. The first term, renterism has to do with the fact that these nations ultimately rent out the access to their resources in exchange for direct payments for such an agreement. Similarly, the term Dutch disease is with regards to the Dutch nation’s dependence upon the revenues from the natural gas fields in the 1960’s and 1970’s. For purposes of this brief analysis, the issue of the resource curse will be viewed within the prism of seeking to understand it as it is exhibited within the nations of Saudi Arabia and Iran. These two nations have been selected due to the fact that they are both regional powers that have defined their economies around the oil wealth that they possess; albeit through slightly different means. Moreover, ev en though a similar economic stance has been taken with regards to a centrally planned economy in both nations, the overall levels of extreme wealth and pervasive poverty, social divisions, non-democratic forms of governance, problems with radical forms of Islam, and a host of other byproducts of the uneven economic development that oil wealth dependence portends crates a great deal of similarity between these two nations. History and Background: Prior to the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of these regions were seeking to integrate at a rather rapid rate with the rest of the world by developing their economies and seeking to industrialize. Although it is not fair to say that these nations were particularly backwards as compared to their neighbors, they exhibited a relatively low level of growth and change as compared to Western Europe and parts of Asia at that time. It can be noted that within both Iran and Saudi Arabia, there existed and much more decentralized und erstanding of governance and power. Although it is not the purpose of this analysis to go into a great deal of defining the means by which resource wealth encourages further levels of despotism, it should be understood that once a high level of valuable resources are located within a given region, it necessarily encourages individuals within government to more fully and completely exert their control over these resources as a means of promoting sovereignty, stability, and deriving profitability; both for themselves and for the nation in general. A byproduct of this increased level of centralization and control is necessarily the loss of specific civil liberties and freedoms. Aside from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and redefining the post-colonial borders, the discovery of oil and natural gas resources has had the most profound impact upon the course of development, politics, war, and even radical forms of Islam. With respect to the actual discovery of oil within the Middle Eas t, Iran was the first in 1908 (Neilberg, 2012) followed by Saudi Arabia in 1923 (Jones, 2012). Oil came to be an even more coveted resource to which all developed nations sought to procure. Accordingly, it was not abnormal to merely take over another country as a means of extracting its mineral wealth and diverting it back to the homeland. Such a model was utilized for nearly 25 years as the British extracted oil wealth from Saudi Arabia and Iran (Mainuddin, 2007). The ways in which key actors within

International Businesses And Knowledge Transfer Essay

International Businesses And Knowledge Transfer - Essay Example Focusing on this construct, the current discourse will be developed using theory and literature relevant to internationalization while focusing on the main factors driving or contributing to knowledge transfer and development as well as highlight factors, if any, that inhibit this process. An overall conclusion will be drawn based on the findings from the entire study before reflecting on the entire learning and relating the same to practical experiences wherever feasible.  Etemad (2013) stressed that literature points to numerous reasons why businesses decide to explore international opportunities that could be related to internal and/or external factors. Internal factors are usually related to organizational factors such as organizational goals and objectives; and external factors are related to the environmental drivers such as competition in host countries, the huge business potential in international locations/markets, changing workforce demographics and economic situations et c. Based on these factors, organizations adopt different approaches to establish their businesses in international spheres. Based on these approaches, various theories have been formulated to explain the nature and reasons of internationalization of firms, some of which include Vernon’s (1966) life-cycle theory, Johanson and Vahlne’s (1977) Process theories, Bilkey and Tsar’s (1977) innovation-diffusion theories, the internalization theories (Buckley & Cason, 1976) and the Eclectic paradigm of multinationals by Dunning (1988); the latest additions include two models: AAA-framework by Ghemawat (2007) and gateway-hub model by Prahalad and Bhattacharyya (2008).  Knowledge transfer is a part of knowledge management process, which has been comprehensively explained by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1994), and this forms the foundation of all knowledge-related studies in organizations Dalkir.

Many people become Obsessed with Appearance Essay

Many people become Obsessed with Appearance - Essay Example Obsession with appearance is often referred to as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) or imagined ugliness in which an individual begins to notice flaws in their body design, such as facial features or body structure, until these thoughts become a long-term obsession (Phillips, Didie, Feusner and Wilhelm, 1112). Obsession generally involves a relatively harmless belief, based often on the aforementioned media influences including celebrity worship and plastic surgery-related media, which turns into a lasting fixation on the perceived problems and can lead to disastrous social consequences such as the inability to function in society. This obsession with appearance can also stem from the natural course of aging in which the skin begins to lose its elasticity, tooth begin to lose their bright white faà §ade, and lines begin to appear on the face around the eyes and mouth. Because society tends to create a portrait of perfection by which most members of society are expected to conform, in which youthful complexions are regarded as being satisfactory and aged appearance unsatisfactory, even older adults can become obsessed with appearance and find difficulty adjusting to social environments. Even though the aging process is a natural outcome of life experiences and decades of exposure to different elements, and many of their older peers share these same facial features, many people find it difficult to cope with the aging process and long for the days when their faces were youthful. These people who become obsessed with appearance are often drawn toward cosmetic surgery as a means to remove these fixations or, fail ing to act on the obsession, they face depressive disorders or have thoughts of suicide. Further, every human being maintains measurable levels of serotonin in their brains, which is a chemical neurotransmitter, which is, from a clinical perspective, highly important in regulating

Absence and Presence and the Disintegration of the Space-Time Essay

Absence and Presence and the Disintegration of the Space-Time Continuum in Kar Wais (2006) In the Mood for Love - Essay Example Absence and Presence and the Disintegration of the Space-Time Continuum in Kar Wai’s (2006) In the Mood for Love Kar Wai (2000) uses sound to demonstrate that the absence of the actual faces of the spouses engaged in the affair ironically highlights the presence of their affair and how it ruins their marriage. He does not show what these spouses look like at all, and instead, he uses sound to describe who they are as individuals and as spouses. As individuals, Mr. Chan and Mrs. Chow are always physically separated from their spouses. The first time that the audience sees Mrs. Chow is when she is running hastily across the stairs, while Mrs. Chan is walking on an opposite direction. The sounds of their footsteps sound hollow in the Byzantine stairway. These steps have the tone of loneliness in their singleness. Mrs. Chow is not with Mr. Chow, so there is already a foreshadowing that she will never be actually with her husband as a wife. Lee (2008) argued that invisibility on the film represents the presence of something else that is more important. She cites Brunette (2005) who talked about â₠¬Å"formidable absent preferences† (p.89) in the film and Brofen (1992) who said that the uncanny is shown as mobile because it is a â€Å"situation of undecidability†¦ the uncanny in some sense always involves the question of visibility/invisibility, presence to/absence from sight†.Sound is used to suggest the full meaning of the absence of characters in the film.

Digestive Enzyme Experiment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Digestive Enzyme Experiment - Essay Example There are two (2) main reasons why the digestion of starches starts in the mouth (i.e. salivary amylase) and eventually stops as soon as the partially digested starches could reach the stomach. First, it is important to know that digestion of food nutrients can occur using either mechanical digestion or chemical enzymes and that starch is a polysaccharide that can be digested only via chemical reactions (Eliasson, 2006, p. 475; Sullivan and Cooley, 2004, p. 45). Second, the stomach is responsible for mechanical digestion (Rechtman, 2004, p. 114). Since starch cannot be digested mechanically, it is impossible for starch to be digested in the stomach. Basically, starch is a good example of complex carbohydrates (Shetty, 2010, p. 24; Chopra, 2005, p. 91). Because of the long chains of glucose that are heavily tied up together, carbohydrates such as starch can only be broken down by enzymes such as the salivary amylase (Sullivan and Cooley, 2004, p. 45). Eventually the reaction of saliva ry amylase can break down starch into a much simple carbohydrates which then can be absorbed in the small intestine (Eliasson, 2006, p. 475). In general, salivary amylase is not the only enzyme that can be use to digest starch. Other enzymes such as the pancreatic amylase as well as maltase can also be used in the chemical digestion of starch (McGuire and Beerman, 2013, p. 130; Eliasson, 2006, p. 475). For instance, as soon as the pancreas releases pancreatic juice like pancreatic amylase, it can further break down the polysaccharides.