...Holy Grail The Holy Grail is a very perplexing subject (O’neal). It has a mysterious hold on imagination and appears in different places and changes form. It is often described as a platter, cauldron, stone, dish, chalice, and horn of plenty. When depicted as a cup, it is described as gold, studded with jewels (O’neal) “The Grail is perpetually treated as something strange, mysterious, awe-inspiring; not to be lightly spoken of” (King Arthur). This relic is a symbol or metaphor that came from medieval story tellers (Borg). The word “Grail” is derived from the Latin word “gradalis”, signifying a step-by-step descent (O’neal). It is thought of as source of healing, inspiration, and vision. Some say that Joseph of Arimethea knew the secrets...
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...maintaining of an all-encompassing population register, managing migration of people, control of borders and supervising the welfare of refugees in Kenya. DISK is responsible for facilitating international travel and regulating citizenship, residency, entry and exit in Kenya. This paper describes the history and set up of DISK and highlights corruption and unethical practices that subsists within the department, consequently presenting a threat to social justice and economic development in Kenya. The paper introduces the findings of an examination on systems, policies, procedures and practices that promote corrupt practices at the DISK, conducted by Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), an agency mandated by the Government of Kenya (GOK) to ensure that public resources in Kenya are managed through prudent and transparent systems. The paper also draws comparisons between corrupt and unethical practices as viewed by local Kenyans Vis-a Vis the views of corruption in the eyes of Western countries. We have also compared Kenyan corruption index against other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and developed countries as reported by Transparency International Corruption Perception Index 2014. Finally the paper recommends on ways to mitigate the impacts of these unethical and corrupt practices to the Department and the people of Kenya, and analyzes factors that would affect the implementation of these recommendations. Introduction The pursuit for ethical and moral leadership in...
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...ABSTRACT In the straitjacket world of Indian banking, something as fascinating as Islamic banking is a distant dream. Nonetheless, countless advocates of Islamic banking have been trying their best over the years to propagate the concept .India has 14 percent Muslims population which is more than the Muslim population of Bangladesh, turkey, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia etc But there is no any full-fledged Islamic bank currently working in this country. Reserve Bank of India and other legal institutions of India are not issuing license to banks to work as per the principles of Islamic banking. Necessary measures are, however, being taken by India Government for the same. The present study is taken to explain how Islamic banking is better for India and weather it is possible to integrate Islamic banking to current financial system. It also explains how Islamic bank can commence in India by suggesting necessary measure for the same 1 INTRODUCTION Islamic banking has been defined as banking in consonance with the ethos and value system of Islam and governed, in addition to the conventional good governance and risk management rules, by the principles laid down by Islamic Shariah. Interest free banking is a narrow concept denoting a number of banking instruments or operations, which avoid interest. Islamic banking, the more general term is expected not only to avoid interest-based transactions, prohibited in the Islamic Shariah, but also to...
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...As we can notice, paranormal power has been a more and more common topic in contemporary popular culture such as films, TVs series, especially literatures, many fiction novels and mystery books have been the holy grail of their fans and scholars. People are showing greater interest in paranormal things which include vampire, werewolf, wizard, alien, superhero, or psychic abilities like telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychometry ever than before. On the other hand, according to David W. Moore’s statistic in 2001, about three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief, which is very unexpected for me. As far as I can see, there must be an inseparable relationship between these two phenomenon. What are the reasons behind...
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...Business Research Applications Business research is an organized and systematic inquiry used to obtain data and yield information to support and guide managerial decisions. Organizations use the process to plan, acquire, analyze, and disseminate insights to guide their business decisions with the ultimate goal of maximizing business performance (Cooper & Schindler, 2006). All organizations, no matter how large or how small, will use business research at some level. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how research is used in the wind energy business in relation to developing and building wind farms. Business Research in Wind Energy A good research initiative is valuable to the success of any organization. In the wind energy business several major components must be considered in the building of a wind farm. Strong wind is an endless natural resource to be transformed into capital for both an individual landowner as well as for the wind company. However, before development of a wind farm can be undertaken, the company must first find a windy site and determine if the site has nearby transmissions lines. Once wind and transmission is determined, the value to landowners and the value to governments and local communities must be ascertained and brought to those groups. A wind project will not be successful without the buy-in from the local government, the community, and the landowners. Chasing the Wind The first step to building a wind farm is to find locations to...
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...Current Events in Business Research Business Research RES/351 July 23, 2012 Business research is an organized and systematic inquiry used to obtain data and yield information to support and guide managerial decisions. Organizations use the process to plan, acquire, analyze, and disseminate insights to guide their business decisions with the ultimate goal of maximizing business performance (Cooper & Schindler, 2006). Organizations, no matter how large or how small will use business research at some level. I will discuss research used in the wind energy business in relation to developing and building wind farms. Business Research in Wind Energy A good research initiative is valuable to the success of any organization. In the wind energy business several major components must be considered in the building of a wind farm. Strong wind is an endless natural resource to be transformed into capital for both an individual landowner as well as for the wind company. However, before development of a wind farm can be undertaken, the company must first find a windy site and determine if the site has nearby transmissions lines. Once wind and transmission is determined, the value to landowners and the value to governments and local communities must be ascertained and brought to those groups. A wind project will not be successful without the buy-in from the local government, the community, and the landowners. Chasing the Wind The first step to building a wind farm is to find locations...
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...plan of a major bank. Propose the key elements of your audit plan and the end result you expect from implementing the audit. Justify the key elements you chose for the plan. * From the e-Activity, analyze the systems the company used and propose a computer analysis plan that would have detected the fraud. Support your analysis with examples. ACC 578 Week 2 Assignment 1 Fraud Prevention and Detection Policy Due Week 2 and worth 160 points You are a senior accountant at a new start-up information technology company known as Dingwow Inc. You have just recently been hired and the company has charged you with recommending a fraud policy. Use the Internet, Strayer databases, or your text, to research the elements of an effective fraud policy. Write a two to three (2-3) page paper in which you: 1. Construct a letter to the senior leaders of a publicly traded company that communicates the most...
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...The Top Five Market Research Articles of Q3 2012 By Kathryn Korostoff and Todd Haylon, Research Rockstar LLC We live in an instant gratification society, or so it is widely said. If we want something (be it information or products), we click a few buttons, then wait for it to be delivered—instantly or via overnight shipping. One can debate the societal implications of this, or embrace the shift. For now, we choose to embrace it by bringing our version of instant gratification to market research article reading. No time to flip through pages of ads and irrelevant articles to find the gems? Here are our picks for the best market research articles of Q3 2012, in no particular order. Measuring Emotions Through a Mobile Device Across Borders, Ages, Genders, and More September 2012 ESOMAR Conference Authors: Rolfe Swinton and Rana El Kaliouby Remember when measuring consumer emotions was a new field that required clunky equipment? That day has long since passed. In this paper Rolfe Swinton and Rana El Kaliouby discuss the use of mobile devices to capture immediate facial and verbal responses to advertisements. Today’s smartphones are essentially handheld computers. And they have become widely used; indeed. Nielsen estimates over half of US adults have one. Smartphones, as our title suggests, span across age, gender, and many other demographics, allowing researchers to gather broad data. Swinton and El Kaliouby started by testing smartphones as a way to investigate...
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...Executive Summary In today’s economy so many of us find ourselves in difficult circumstances and in situations we never thought we would be in. So many people are wondering where their next meal will come from, the problem is these individuals are not even unemployed. Employed people in this economy are facing many economical hardships and have to change their way of living. WIC, The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children is a Federal assistance program of the Food and Nutrition Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for healthcare and nutrition of low-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and infants and children under the age of five has seen increase in the past five years growing from 8,088,005 to 9,176,736 participants [ (FNS USDA, 2011) ]. Many families that participate in the WIC program are military families in the U.S. military, I find it sad that the families who sacrifice for our freedom are stretched so thin that they need programs such as WIC. Many families use all of their coupons given to them to purchase food however many have found that the foods are sometimes what they don’t need, many wish they had more variety of fruits and vegetables instead of cereal, juice and peanut butter. Many families can’t use all the items they receive because their families don’t like what they are able to get or they don’t know what to use it for. A cookbook that allows moms to use the ingredients that they normally...
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...BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TRENDS The Next Generation of Performance Management Updated 2/16/2010 Attivio® 246 Walnut Street Newton, MA 02460 o +1.857.226.5040 | f +1.857.226.5072 | e info@attivio.com www.attivio.com BI Trends: The Next Generation of Performance Management Every year, technology research firm Gartner surveys 1,500 CIOs. As has been the case for several years, the firm’s 2010 survey1 revealed that BI applications are among the top technology focus areas for CIOs. And business process improvement is the top business priority for IT, followed immediately by reducing costs and improving the use of information and analytics. According to Bob Kaplan and David Norton, the creators of the Balanced Scorecard (the most commonly used performance management system2), “breakdowns in a company’s management system, not managers’ lack of ability or effort, are what cause a company’s underperformance.” Kaplan and Norton define a management system as the “integrated set of processes and tools that a company uses to develop its strategy, translate it into operational actions, and monitor and improve the effectiveness of both” and point out that “the failure to balance the tensions between strategy and operations is pervasive…with various studies published in the past 25 years indicating that 60% to 80% of companies are fall short of the success predicted from their strategies.”3 So why are CIOs spending so much time and energy on BI? These technologies are the platform...
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...© Copyright by Institute of Organization and Managment in Industry „ORGMASZ” Vol 1(1); p. 37 - 45 Year 2008 10.2478/v10061-008-0005-y Intellectual Capital Measurement Methods Jolanta Jurczak* Introduction Evolution of economy has caused important changes in activity of companies on the global market. Nowadays we are observing a growth the importance of intellectual resources as an effective tool for increasing corporate competitiveness. This fact has caused the need to manage companies and to measure their performance in a new way. Measuring Intellectual Capital is essential and very important in order to compare different companies, to estimate their real value or even to control their improvement year by year. Also to improve the way in which companies manage its intellectual resources that generate value and give back some benefits in consequences maximizing advantages for the company. Authors like Kaplan and Norton (1996), Stewart (1997), and Kerssens (1999) use phrases like “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” to justify the search for new Measurement Methods.1 But to measure Intellectual Capital is necessary to determine exactly what the Measurement Methods are, which are the best and which the company should choose to evaluate its assets in proper way. Properly using Intellectual Capital Measurement Methods can cause the creation of competitive advantage and in consequence create development of the whole company at the present day. The Concept and Classification...
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...July 2012 BRANDGYM RESEARCH PAPER 6 By David Taylor Managing Partner Can social media show you the money? www.thebrandgym.com Can social media show you the money? About the research The first part of the research was with over 100 senior marketing professionals across Europe, Africa, Asia, the USA and Latin America, covering a broad range of sectors. In addition, we did research with 1000 consumers each in the UK and USA, to compare their actual use of social media* with how marketers think they use it. Read on to see how wrong most marketers are! We have brought to life the findings with examples from our work on brandgym projects, and through interesting case studies we have come across in our blogging and book writing. * To clarify, this study focuses on the creation of content using social media (e.g. Facebook pages, Twitter feeds) and not online advertising on social media sites. In this, our 6th global survey, we ask “Can Social Media Show you the Money?”. The brandgym partners Introduction Social media is a red-hot topic today. Social media is sexy, shiny and new. And it’s also a bit scary, with headlines screaming that the whole world of marketing is changing, and that ‘old’ media like TV advertising is dead. However, data on the brand and business building effects of social media is thin on the ground. We felt it was time to cut through the hype and hysteria around social media, to better understand the role it can play. We wanted to find out: “Can social media show...
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...want to be cool? There are many reasons why you should not-start smoking and why you should stop smoking now. II. Backgroud of the study Smoking is an adaptive behaviour which in most cases acquired when an individual is aware of the effects the associated with the habit. A large number of smokers know both the long and short term, smoking is the major cause of cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer, emphysema, and also premature aging. ‘‘Cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health?” This is the packaging warning message. Cigarette, from the french word “cigarette”, meaning “small cigar”. Is a small cylinder effects of this habit which include respiratory diseases and cancer. Shockingly of finely cut tobacco leaves rolled in thin paper for smoking. The term cigarette is commonly used, refers to a tobacco but can apply to similar devices containing other herbs, such as ascloves or cannabis. The smoking habit is easily acquired by an individual. This is because there are various reasons attract an individual into attempting to smoke. Some individuals take the habit as a show off thus they start smoking since they believe in an ideology which says that it looks cool to smoke in public. Others start through copying members of their families or friends who are smokers. The other reason is age pride. This is whereby an individual starts smoking after attaining the age of eighteen years which is taken as maturity age by many teenagers. More also, peer...
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...The Long Road to Direct Factor Xa Inhibitors: A History of Anticoagulation Marjorie Burnsworth Tacoma Community College July 24, 2014 Abstract This paper explores the history of the chemical research and development of anticoagulant medications over the years and how this has lead to the development of direct factor Xa inhibitors (fXa inhibitors). Since ancient doctors first used leeches to treat their patients, people have been aware of the properties of anticoagulants and anti-thrombolytics, but the development of Heparin almost 100 years ago signified the start of a century of chemical discovery and development in the field of anticoagulation that has peaked in the last 25 years. Following the development of Heparin, scientists next developed Vitamin K Antagonists (VKA's), such as Coumadin, which gave an oral option for anticoagulation but they were not without side effects. Nearly 30 years passed before chemists came up with the next step forward in anticoagulation, low-molecular-weight-heparin (LMWH). It was LMWH that first opened scientists eyes to factor Xa and the possibility of considering it as a possible target for future anticoagulation. In order to proceed with development, however, they had to look back to the past. Back to leeches and heparin, as these would prove hold the keys to the future development of direct factor Xa inhibitors. The Long Road to Direct Factor Xa Inhibitors: A History of Anticoagulation ...
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...Swinburne University, Hawthorn, Australia Abstract Purpose – The concept “flexibility” is ubiquitous as a rationale for organizational change. However, its broad application is accompanied by a general lack of definitional agreement or theoretical cohesion. The purpose of this paper is to propose the merits of an alternative approach – applying a discourse perspective to the use of flexibility as a rationale for organizational change. Design/methodology/approach – This paper first illustrates the broad referencing of flexibility as a desired organizational characteristic. It then discusses the associated lack of theoretical coherence associated with the use of the concept “flexibility” before arguing the merits of a discourse perspective on flexibility as a rationale for organizational change. Findings – This paper identifies a set of questions to frame a discourse perspective on the use of “flexibility” as a rationale for organizational change. Research limitations/implications – The questions derived in this paper provide a research agenda for an investigation of the use and effects of the concept “flexibility” in the context of organizational change. Practical implications – The questions derived in this paper provide practice-based insights into how the concept “flexibility” is and/or could be...
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