...Accountability and Rhetoric during a Crisis: Walt Disney’s 1940 Letter to Stockholders Joel H. Amcrnic UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO and Russell J. Craig AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY ACCOUNTABILITY AND RHETORIC DURING A CRISIS: WALT DISNEY’S 1940 LETTER TO STOCKHOLDERS Abstract: In 1940, Walt Disney was faced with crafting a message of corporate accountability under duress. His company, the product of his creative genius, had been forced to submit to public accountability. It had a pressing need to raise preferred equity finance for a major expansion during a period of market uncertainty, war, and reported losses. This paper conducts a “close reading” of the “Letter to Stockholders” in Walt Disney Productions’ 1940 annual report, the first such letter signed by Walt Disney. The letter’s rhetorical features, including metaphor and ideology, are examined in the context of the times. What is revealed is an accountability document skillfully crafted with the exigencies faced by Disney’s company firmly in mind. The letter offers suggestive insight to the world as Disney made sense of it. The paper contributes to understanding the use of rhetoric by top management in activities related to aspects of financial accountability and reporting. It also helps to understand better a significant public persona of the 20th century, Walt Disnev. Acknowledgment The authors wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of the reviewers. SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES Analysis of annual reports, including letters...
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...How to Write a Term Paper I. Choosing a Topic: For this paper you get to choose your topic, so pick something that interests you. Once you have decided what you want to write about in general terms, refine that general idea to a specific topic for your paper. Keep in mind that you have a maximum of 12 pages of text to work with, so your topic is going to have to be pretty narrow in its focus. Also bear in mind that this is a research project, not a high school report; it should center around a thesis that you will prove in your paper. Example: I am interested in World War II, but I’m pretty sure that I can’t cover six years of global warfare in fifteen pages of text. Let’s see...I’m more interested in the War in Europe than in the Pacific, so that narrows that down some, but I need something tighter. I like airplanes, so something about the air war would be interesting, and there was this documentary on the History Channel about the Battle of Britain last month...but even the Battle of Britain is too big for twelve pages. Right, have to narrow it down some more here...do a little preliminary research and reading. Ah, here it is: the German Air Force started out trying to destroy the Royal Air Force by bombing RAF airfields, but then switched to targeting British cities. This decision cost them the battle, because it let the RAF rebuild its fighter strength and shoot down enough German bombers to force the Germans to call off the offensive. Wait a minute. ...
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...Initially, the United States was hesitant to become involved into another war under the Roosevelt administration however, policy makers and top military officials understood that this inevitable outcome would eventually come to fruition. By the early 1940’s “British and American staff talks emerged, the principle if the U.S. entered the war, the Allies would seek first to defeat Germany... the main effort would to be made in the Atlantic and the European area...marking the earliest of their important strategic decisions—Germany First” (Paret, 1996, p.683). Axis powers were growing stronger due to formal alliances established between Germany, Italy, and Japan. Thus, regional threats were emerging far beyond the Atlantic and all throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia. The United States eventually came to the conclusion that forming a strategic partnership and alliance with the United Kingdom and Soviet-Union was in the country's national interest. By “1941-1942 represented a formative era…a period witnessed the emergence of a Grand Alliance” (Paret, 1996,...
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...hundreds of books and an uncountable number of articles on the subject. Curiously, in spite of its wide applicability today to everyday problems, it was unknown prior to 1947. This is not quite correct; there were some isolated exceptions. Fourier (of Fourier series fame) in 1823 and the wellknown Belgian mathematician de la Vallée Poussin in 1911 each wrote a paper about it, but that was about it. Their work had as much influence on Post-1947 developments as would finding in an Egyptian tomb an electronic computer built in 3000 BC. Leonid Kantorovich’s remarkable 1939 monograph on the subject was also neglected for ideological reasons in the USSR. It was resurrected two decades later after the major developments had already taken place in the West. An excellent paper by Hitchcock in 1941 on the transportation problem was also overlooked until after others in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s had independently rediscovered its properties. What seems to characterize the pre-1947 era was lack of any interest in trying to optimize. T. Motzkin in his scholarly thesis written in 1936 cites only 42 papers on linear inequality systems, none of which mentioned an objective function. The major influences of the pre-1947 era were Leontief’s work on the Input-Output Model of the Economy (1933), an important...
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...War 2, German submarines operating together with planes and surface raiders, accounted for 754,000 tons of Allied shipping losses. This represented 99.6 per cent of all shipping sunk in 1939. At this point in the war Britain had less than 3 weeks supply of wheat; stocks of many other commodities such as sugar had fallen to under 6 weeks supply. A solution had to be found, and quickly. England in great danger As Europe fell to the advancing German armies, the UK became more and more isolated and increasingly dependent on the Atlantic trade route for industrial raw materials and food. If this lifeline were broken England would starve both physically and financially. Following the successful conclusion of the 'Battle of Britain' in October 1940 England prepared immediately for what was to become known as the ' Battle of the Atlantic '. Although some air cover was already provided, a 'black gap' existed in mid-Atlantic, a section that could not be reached from existing air bases. Both Germany...
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...| | A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations. Since a sequence of operations can be readily changed, the computer can solve more than one kind of problem. Conventionally, a computer consists of at least one processing element, typically a central processing unit (CPU) and some form of memory. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logic operations, and a sequencing and control unit that can change the order of operations based on stored information. Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, and the result of operations saved and retrieved. The first electronic digital computers were developed between 1940 and 1945 in the United Kingdom and United States. Originally they were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers (PCs).[1] In this era mechanical analog computers were used for military applications. Modern computers based on integrated circuits are millions to billions of times more capable than the early machines, and occupy a fraction of the space.[2] Simple computers are small enough to fit into mobile devices, and mobile computers can be powered by small batteries. Personal computers in their various forms are icons of the Information Age and are what most people think of as "computers". However, the embedded computers found in many devices from MP3 players to fighter aircraft and...
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...Vannevar Bush (/væˈniːvɑr/ van-NEE-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He is also known in engineering for his work on analog computers, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext. In 1945, Bush published As We May Think in which he predicted that "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified".[1] The memex influenced generations of computer scientists, who drew inspiration from its vision of the future. For his master's thesis, Bush invented and patented a "profile tracer", a mapping device for assisting surveyors. It was the first of a string of inventions. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1919, and founded the company now known as Raytheon in 1922. Starting in 1927, Bush constructed a differential analyzer, an analog computer with some digital components that could solve differential equations with as many as 18 independent variables. An offshoot of the work at MIT by Bush and others was the beginning of digital...
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...The intent of the paper is to inform the reader of the Bailey bridge and how it impacted the World War II. In doing so, the research provides evidence to support the claim that the bridge design was a very effective use of technological engineering. While the main purpose was to help militant troops transport their machinery, the bridge still serves as a useful tool for many other natural disasters. The Bailey bridge During World War II, heavy machinery was used to transport from one location to another. The bridges could not withstand the drastic weight. Soldiers needed something to transport their machines over rivers and ravines. Thus, the Bailey bridge was created. Named after Sir Donald Bailey, Britain’s Royal Engineers designed the Bailey bridge in 1940....
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...popular piece of test equipment for engineers. • 1940 The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed. George Stibitz demonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College. Stibitz performed calculations remotely on the CNC using a Teletype connected via special telephone lines. This is the first demonstration of remote access computing. • 1941 Konrad Zuse finishes the Z3 computer. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. • 1942 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed. The ABC was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942. • 1944 Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Created by Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized relay-based calculator. This machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts. • 1946 The first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries. • 1949 Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University. For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes. • 1950 The first commercially produced computer was built called the ERA 1101 by the Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis. • 1953 IBM shipped...
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...negative values obtained by the balance technique. Since the present study shows that, in the rat, it is possible to restrict the withdrawal of bone salt to the spongiosa, leaving the shaft unaffected, it seems reasonable to suggest that lactation requirements could be defined as those intakes which, for a given output of minerals in milk, will restrict the withdrawals to the spongiosa. Thus, using a similar technique, the problem ofthe mineral requirements for lactation in domestic aniimals might become more amenable to experimental attack. This preservation of the diaphyses may be an unattainable ideal in the high-producing Bauer, W., Aub, J. C. & Albright, F. (1929). J. exp. Med. 49, 145. Bloom, W. & Bloom, M. A. (1940). Anat. Bec. 78, 497. & McLean, F. C. (1941). Anat. Bec. 81, 443. Coons, C. M., Schiefelbuwch, A. T., Marshall, G. B. & Coons, R. R....
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...The Life and Contributions of Carl Gustaf Rossby Meteorologist and Pioneer in Atmospheric Dynamics ABSTRACT Carl Gustaf Rossby, a Swedish born mathematical physicist and later meteorologist is among the greatest contributors to modern-day meteorology. It was through his extensive research in the general circulations, that modern day weather forecasting has emerged to what it has become today. Rossby had a well-established career in the geosciences, with a broad educational background. It wasn’t until later in his life did he come to publish his greatest works. Rossby published three works in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s that involve potential vorticity, which would help establish the ground work for his most famous work on Rossby waves. The 1936 paper shows the conservation of potential vorticity in a hydrostatic, shallow fluid state, while the 1938 paper is an extension to the highly stratified hydrostatic flow, this time using isentropic coordinates. The term potential vorticity is actually never used until the 1940 paper where it is introduced. The 1939 work by Rossby is considered by some the most famous work contributed by Rossby, as he explains the semipermanent centers of action which would become the well-known Rossby waves. INTRODUCTION When people think of meteorology, the first names to appear are John Dalton, Gabriel Fahrenheit, William Ferrel, and Anders Celsius. These men are...
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...World War II was a bloody world war that involved multiple nations and multiple actors, but in this Research Paper, I will be discussing the role of Japan in WWII as well as the short term and long term consequences of said role. Today Japan and the United States are close allies, but from 1941 and 1945, they fought a bitter and bloody war-Why did they fight this war? The answer to that question, from the American perspective is simple: the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Americans were angry at the Japanese for their invasions of first Manchuria (1931), then China (1937), and later French Indochina (1940). After the Japanese moved into Indochina, President Roosevelt ordered a trade embargo on American scrap steel and oil, on which the Japanese military depended. But the American people felt that Asia was far away, and a large majority of voters did not want to go to war to stop Japan. The surprise attack on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 changed this, outraging was the prevailing sentiment among Americans, along with a pretty unanimous belief that it was time to go to war with Japan. Why did Japan decide to attack the United States? This question is a little bit more complicated. Japan was fully aware of the fact that the United States was economically and militarily powerful, but it was not afraid of any American attack on its islands. Japan did worry however, that the Americans might help the Chinese resist the Japanese invasion of their country....
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...When American schoolchildren are educated about Europe between the years 1936 through 1975, they are taught about the aftereffects of World War I and about World War II. Europe, in high school history classes, ceases to exist after 1945 and the close of World War II unless, of course, one is learning about the Cold War and the Berlin Wall may be mentioned. They do not learn, however, that World War II era Spain—because Spain was neither an ally or a foe during the war—went through enormous conflict of its own. The three-year Spanish Civil War and the fascist dictatorship that followed are largely kept out of the American history books. Yet, the world is privy to much of its legacy through literature, art, film, and personal memory. Spain certainly remembers three hellish years of war and thirty six years of repression under Generalisimo Fransisco Franco, but how is General Franco remembered by the rest of the world? What legacy did he leave internationally? 2 It is a confused and varied one: to those closest to him he was a husband, father, and statesman; to Hitler, he was an obstacle on the road to world domination; to the Jews who fled from Hitler he was a hero; but to the many Spanish minorities and to his opponents in the Spanish Civil War he was a monster. 3 The answers to the questions posed are addressed in a variety of sources. One of these sources is the book Hitler Stopped by Franco, by Jane and Burt Boyar, who write a relatively straightforward book that explores many...
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...PHI 115- Ethics 5/7/2014 Euthanasia The purpose of this research paper is to prove that the process of euthanasia is wrong, it is against the natural and moral end of human’s life , and the most of all , it is unethical. Euthanasia from Greek: “good death” or “mercy killing”, is the practice of ending of life intentionally to relieve intractable problem of suffering. There are plenty of ethical issues to discuss, regarding this one. Proponents of euthanasia consider that death filled with suffering is wrongful and bad death. That is why these people are for legalization of euthanasia. On the other hand, opponents( including my person) of euthanasia would say that any deliberate effort to cause death is wrong and against eternal law ( God’s law). Ethics and morality, basically state the same to many people and they mean exactly one. For Instance, morality refers to personal character, belief and behavior, ethics is the reflection on morality with that person’s actions and his /her professionalism. When we say an ethical person or a moral person, that is the same meaning. Very often, in or common life we can hear both terms like medical ethics or bioethics, they both describe the same and have the same meaning. These are the guidelines...
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...EnrichmEnt GuidE – A true story School Dates: September 14 – OctOber 5, 2007 Adapted by Emil Sher Based on the book by Karen Levine Originally published by Second Story Press Media Sponsor: nal dditiovisit For a rials, mate tage.org! FirstS Please be sure to share this guide with all teachers who are taking their students to see this production. Photocopy or download additional copies from FirstStage.org INSIDE THE GUIDE preparing for the play A NOTE TO TEACHERS AND PARENTS HANA’S SUITCASE is the true story of Jewish girl who died at Auschwitz at the age of thirteen and how, although her life was taken at such a young age, her memory and spirit continue to live on today. Adapted from the book of the same title by Karen Levine, HANA’S SUITCASE explores the journey of teacher and children at the Tokyo Holocaust Education Center take to find out who Hana Brady is—all from a suitcase the Center received with Hana’s name, birth date, and the word waisenkind (orphan) written on it. The children at the Center are captivated by this suitcase, and the girl who once owned it, and they begin flooding Fumiko Ishioka, the Center’s Director, with question after question about Hana. Fumiko recognizes the importance of uncovering Hana’s story for her students. This tragic event cannot be summed up in numbers or facts— it affected individuals, young and old, who each had a story, families, and hopes and dreams. As Fumiko slowly but determinedly reveals Hana’s story...
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