...Many people do not believe that diversity truly exists in America. David Brooks is a huge advocate for this statement and has written an essay called “People Like Us” that claims diversity is an illusion in America. In this five page essay David Brooks starts off by saying he has never seen a truly diverse neighborhood where people of different backgrounds and careers live in the same area. When I read this statement by Brooks, I think of a multi fruit flavored pie that is covered by a layer of crust making it hard to see if the pie is actually mixed all together or if each slice is a separate fruit flavor. In retrospect to a neighborhood each part of a diverse neighborhood contains only one ethnicity in a slice of it (the mexicans are with the mexicans, and the asians are bunched with the...
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...Kimberly Huerta Frey English 102-167 January 25, 2012 A Rhetorical Critique of David Brooks “People Like Us” In David Brooks’ “People Like Us” passage on the issue of diversity, Brooks takes a personally emotional perspective of the way in which Americans don’t appreciate how diverse our nation is while “relatively homogeneous” (Brooks 136). His argument is weakened, however, through a bias and hypocrisy that his diction conveys. He claims that grouping ourselves with those who we are most alike is in our nature to, and in doing so, we separate ourselves from those who are different. Using certain statistics as evidence, Brooks points out that the social segmentation created by society will always exist. He argues that no matter where we go, we cannot find a neighborhood that is diverse in which no one is alike. Brooks utilizes the idea of human nature as support to his claim, by stating that those who come to America are naturally driven to live near those who they have the similarities as they do, whether it’d be their race, beliefs or educational level. Reasons such as racism or “psychological comfort” can aspect in this occurrence, however Brooks argues that we act this way subconsciously (Brooks 133). Brooks makes the point that we connect diversity with racial integration and that we are happiest when surrounded by the people we have most in common with. The majority of Brooks’ claim is reinforced by his utilization of his researched statistics. For instance, as...
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...diversified and rich with culture. Sure that may be true, however in People Like Us, written by David Brooks, he discusses upon the common issue within our country, if or if not America is truly diverse. People tend to group themselves to others that are basically like themselves, and to people who they can be comfortable around. Brooks argues that the reason why we are diversified is because of human nature. Human nature is the barricade that prevents us from achieving the ideal goal we want. Brooks tried to convince his readers by pointing out and focusing on racial integration as the main factor of diversity. He is correct to a certain extent, however there are many factors such as sexuality, and economy class that plays a part of the diversion America has....
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...been ingrained in a person’s mental state through socialization. In his article “People Like Us,” David Brooks explores the idea of the human habit of gravitating to like-minded people through the concept of diversity. Brooks uses the examples of both racial diversity in neighborhoods and political diversity in the academic field (n. pag.). In the very first paragraph of the article Brooks describes his idea of a diverse neighborhood and at the end, he implores the American public to make an attempt at increasing the diversity of their institutions and communities (n. pag.). However, in doing so, he implies that it is possible to have a “truly diverse neighborhood” despite having said previously that he has “never seen nor heard of that neighborhood” (Brooks n. pag.). He has not seen that neighborhood because it does not exist and, as long...
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...David Brook’s article, “People Like Us” makes a valid point of self-segregation. When growing up around different environments and in different areas we sometimes are not exposed to diversity. Since a lot of people are not exposed to diversity we tend to not agree with what other cultures, races, or towns/cities do this is true because, this is what I witness every day growing up. We do not notice it, but we segregate every day. When we come out the wound we are set in a category either one is a girl or a boy and one is either Asian, African American, Caucasian, or even Mexican. Children self–segregate for example if a child sees another with a different skin color they may not want to play with them because they are different from them. Not only does children separate themselves but adults are the same way. We are taught to stick with our own kind....
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...Op-Ed Columnist The Odyssey Years By DAVID BROOKS Published: October 9, 2007 There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood. Skip to next paragraph [pic] David Brooks The Way We Live Now During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another. Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed. They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They’re delaying having children. They’re delaying permanent employment. People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family. In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent...
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...jeopardy: America dethroned Justine Leonard English 102 Derek Blemberg April 23rd, 2013 “The first step in solving any problem is recognizing that there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore” (Sorkin, 2012). As Americans we like to think, and in fact for decades have also been misleading others to believe, that we are the best at just about everything. Sadly, that hasn’t been true for quite some time. These troubled times are due to bias voters and lack of real leadership in presidential candidates. Despite the idealization of America, it is no longer the greatest country in the world; the U.S used to be known as the land of opportunities, freedom, diversity and equality but today we are being defined by such things as political parties that are tearing us far from being a united nation. There is nothing to prove we deserve the gold medal. We claim to be the land of the free but we actually rank seventh in that category beat by other nations like Japan and Belguim. We claim to be a nation of equality and opportunities, but in reality we sit thirty-ninth in income inequality and second in child poverty. As American citizens we are full of pride and take joy in our country. Likewise, people from all around the world desire to live here too. We all wish to experience “the good life,” but the truth is that the U.S. is eleventh on happiness scale. In the HBO drama The Newsroom, the lead character Will McAvoy, states that America is not the greatest...
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...WOMEN AND LEADERSHIP: THE STATE OF PLAY Deborah L. Rhode and Barbara Kellerman July, 2006 c Some four decades ago, Betty Friedan helped launch the contemporary women’s movement with her publication of The Feminine Mystique. The book famously identified a “problem that has no name”: American women’s confinement to a separate and unequal domestic sphere. One factor contributing to women’s unequal status was their absence from leadership positions. Another aspect of the problem was the lack of cultural consensus that this absence was itself part of the problem, and a matter of social concern. Over the last several decades, we have named that leadership problem and created a cottage industry to address it. Women’s underrepresentation in positions of power generates an increasing array of committees, commissions, consultants, centers, conferences, and commentary such as the essays that follow. Yet while we have made considerable progress in understanding the problem, we remain a dispiriting distance from solving it. I. The Underrepresentation of Women in Leadership Roles The facts are frustratingly familiar. Despite almost a half-century of equal opportunity legislation, women’s opportunities for leadership are anything but equal. To be sure, the situation has improved significantly over this period, particularly if leadership is broadly defined to include informal as well as formal exercises of authority.[i] By that definition, the percentage of women...
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...Secularism A Religion Profile from International Students, Inc. Secularism: An Overview Number of Adherents Demographer Davit Barrett estimates that there are 150 million atheists and 768 million nonreligious people in the world. The combined total comes to more than 918 million people (Barrett). Toward the end of the Renaissance, the modern method of empirical science began to develop. The key players were Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), Johannes Kepler (15711630), and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Although it may seem ironic now, each of these men believed in the Christian God. They viewed science as studying the handiwork of an almighty Creator and discerning His natural laws. Galileo considered God to have written two “books”: the Bible and nature (Hummel, p. 106). Contrary to popular belief, the cause for the diversion between Christianity and science originated not with the Church but with the university professors who were threatened by Galileo’s revolutionary ideas. These professors were steeped in the Greek scientific method, which included observation to a small extent, but mostly explained the workings of nature through rational deduction from first principles, or assumptions, an entire view of the universe had been built up. Consequently, the professors embraced such misconceptions as the sun having no imperfections, the moon being a perfectly smooth sphere that shone with its own light, and the earth alone having a moon since the earth was at the center of the...
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...Loss of Top Predators is Humankind’s Most Pervasive Influence on Nature Thesis: For thousands of years, nature and humans have coexisted in equilibrium. As human population increases and expands, it cases severe effects in every ecosystem. Evidence of human growth and urbanization can be seen through the impacts on virtually every ecosystem in planet earth, marine and terrestrial. Effects of, such as species decline, endangerment and extinction of enormous proportions. In most cases, driving some species to the edge of extinction. Possibly no species are more affected than the world’s large top predators. These animals are extremely important to the overall health and function of an ecosystem, but conservation and restoration of them and their habitat is a remote thought on humans. The absence of predators in certain areas has led to an explosion of their natural prey, which leads to a damaging impact on their habitat. Ecosystems need to be healthy in order to maintain the health of all living things within and around them, including humans. It seems logical then to restore the natural balance by reintroducing the animal’s natural predator, conserving the population, and protecting the wild environment. Humans can no longer wait to address this growing environmental and ethical issue, and by establishing clear goals they can ensure the future of these species and ecosystems along with the continuing growth and success of their own. DOT: Sharks influence on the structure and...
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...Organizational design of Internet University 1. introduction This project is to create an organization of Internet University without central back office and describe the contents in designing the organization. Chapter 1 will provide the definition of the organization, moreover briefly illustrate the type of this organization and growing challenges, plus the reasonable solutions. The organizational strategy and structure will be mentioned concisely as well, but details of them will be respectively analyzed afterwards. Analysis of environments included external and internal factors, and illustrated effectiveness model of organization will be provided in chapter 2. Two organizational structures will be compared with each other in terms of vertical (efficiency) and horizontal (learning) in chapter 3. Certain approaches of organization steering will be proposed and analyzed in chapter 4. The effects of innovation and change to organization will be described in chapter 5 and finally the transaction cost will be evaluated in the last chapter. 2. organizational definition As mentioned this internet university will be constructed without the central back office, which means the processes such as recruiting, enrolling, teaching, hiring, paying, administrating, managing are all available on the internet. To design this organization and implement the idea, personally I suggest to start it as an small example, in this case the investment and cost could be effectively...
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...the global economy. Two factors which play an essential role in the global political economy are Power and Wealth. These are considered to be significantly linked, as they share many similar attributes, and many corporations and actively involved members of the State seek to achieve and/or maintain both aspects. Power is globally acknowledged as the ability to influence the behavior in other individuals, or the authority to make decisions. As illustrated by Dahl (1957), the intuitive idea of power allows for the understanding that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” This alluded to the understanding that power is a relation, and more importantly that it is a relation among people. (Parsons 1997) This definition by Dahl has, however, received criticism from Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) for its inability to examine the second face of power, which is recognized as “a person or group – consciously or subconsciously – creates or...
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...RESEARCH 2015 R E S E A R C H , 2 015 The Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School educate scholars who make a difference in the world through rigorous academic research that influences practice. More than 140 strong, HBS doctoral students represent diverse backgrounds, degrees, undergraduate schools, and disciplines includ— ing economics, engineering, mathematics, physics, psychology, and sociology. They examine the most critical issues in business management through rigorous research, creating and disseminating new knowledge as the next generation of thought leaders. By the time they graduate, students will have authored and co-authored publications with faculty members, who often become important mentors, colleagues, and collaborators. ACCOUNTING AND MANAGEMENT Chattopadhyay, Akash , Matthew R. Lyle, and Charles C.Y. Wang. “Accounting Data, Market Values and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns Worldwide.” Working Paper, April 2015. (Revise and resubmit to Journal of Accounting and Economics.) Gow, Ian D., Sa-Pyung Sean Shin, and Suraj Srinivasan. “Activist Directors: Determinants and Consequences.” HBS Working Paper 14-120, June 2014. Gow, Ian D., Sa-Pyung Sean Shin, and Suraj Srinivasan. “Consequences to Directors of Shareholder Activism.” HBS Working Paper 14-071, February 2014. Ioannou, Ioannis, Shelley Xin Li, and George Serafeim. “The Effect of Target Difficulty and Incentives on Target Completion: The Case of Reducing Carbon Emissions.”...
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...participate in creative activities (Rich, Bradshaw & Mattingley 2005), and some studies have suggested a correlation between synaesthesia and creativity (Domino 1989; Dailey, Martindale & Borkum 1997).”[i] After reading an extract on sense experience from the text Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau Ponty, I decided to find out more about the condition of synaesthesia. I discovered the quote above and became intrigued by the idea that creativity could be linked to a specific genetically predisposed condition in the brain, as I had always believed that while some people are just naturally gifted when it comes to creativity, that to think in a creative way could be learned and developed through practice. If the experience of perceiving more than one sense at the same time is simply a natural part of the way we experience the world, then maybe multi-sensory art can be better appreciated by more people than an art piece that involves the use of only one of our senses to experience it? I decided to research further into the condition of synaesthesia in order to help me determine if the use of multi-sensory techniques and devices in the arts creates a better experience for the viewer. What is Synaesthesia? Synaesthesia is probably best described as being a neurological condition in which two or more senses are joined. Common forms include grapheme-colour synaesthesia where letters or numbers are perceived as coloured, ordinal linguistic personification where...
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...my recognized tenacity, try another route. I will reveal as well how I carry that spirit, that life-affirming energy (Bataille, 1962; Whitehead, 1999) embodied in my whole being with a passion and internal power to effect good. Feminist Barbara Du Bois (1983) writes of "passionate scholarship" as being "science-making, which is rooted in, animated by and expressive of our values" (p. 113) (Belenky, et. al., 1986, p. 141). One of the reasons I can accomplish as much as I do is that the work and the relationships appear to be many and complex but because they are inter-related and connected they provide a synergy that produces results in numbers of seemingly different and unrelated focus areas. I find that as I am supporting individuals like Cheryl and Greg[1] and Maria[2] and Kim[3] in dialectical and dialogical processes that I am learning and improving myself and at the same time educating social formations (Bourdieu, 1990). I hold onto a vision of a whole system dedicated to the learning of everyone in the organization, but most especially the learning of the students. That vision is wrapped up in an...
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