Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Professional Accounting Skills For BusinessDecisions Essay

Professional Accounting Skills For BusinessDecisions - Essay Example Through the group works that I was a member, I developed the skills of being able to think deep in my presentations. The group members demanded that everyone has to contribute in the group works which made me to think deeply before making my contribution. This made it possible for me to give relevant contributions that were within the context of the topic. 2. Perceptual skill; perceptual skill is the skill of being able to interpret information presented to you. As a member of the module group, I was expected to interpret the topics that we were undertaking. Through my time in the group I developed the ability to interpret issues brought to me. This helped me in reading the questions to discuss and come out with an explanation on what we are supposed to cover. Thus, I developed the ability to illustrate problems we are supposed to work on from the assignments allocated. 3. Motor skill; motor skill is the ability to move and control muscle. As a group member I benefited in this skill as the group involved a lot of field work. There were assignments that involved getting to the field to learn practical experience covered in our module. Thus, I experienced a lot of movement in collection of information that were needed in compiling field work findings. Through this exercises I gained motor skills in movements and stretching muscles. 4. Perceptual motor skill; perceptual motor skill is the ability of being able to think, interpret and move at the same time. As illustrated above, the group work involved deep thinking in contributions. To be able to think in a relevant angle that is of benefit to the group, one had to be able to interpret the assignment the way it means. The experience I had with the class group exposed to a level of being able to interpret first correctly. This helped me in thinking in the right context of what is expected of us in order to make relevant contribution. Also, the group assignments involved getting to some practical experience in the g round field. Thus, in our field work learning it involved going to different work places to get what is involved in the real work (Healey, 2000). I gained in the skills of being able to move through various stations interpreting what is going on and thinking deeply on what needs to be improved on all at one. This was a great skill development that I gained from my time in professional accounting in decision making group works. To earn these skills, I underwent personal stage developments that shaped how I viewed the module, and follow it in my group work (Stewart and Joines, 1987). The personal stages that I went through are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence (Lapworth and Sills, 2011). Personal stages; 1. Unconscious incompetence; unconscious incompetence is the stage where a person in a group has no knowledge of what of the problems and how to fix them. During my first encounter with the group I was assigned to, I had a difficult moment understanding the group. At this stage I had the feeling that there is something that something was amiss but I lacked the knowledge on to identify it and how to fix it. This involved problems that I faced involved lack of leadership that caused problems in arranging venue to hold discussion and share tasks. I felt that as a group we were not taking the right decision in

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Crowdsourcing As An Effective E Commerce Strategy Business Essay

Crowdsourcing As An Effective E Commerce Strategy Business Essay ABSTRACT With the growing trend of social websites and their usage for e-commerce activities, crowdsourcing has become an innovative strategy to conduct e-commerce. The paper aims to explore on its effectiveness as an e-commerce strategy, firstly by trying to understand the history of crowdsourcing. Secondly the paper will look at the methodology and definitions of various types of crowdsourcing. Thirdly, the paper will define how crowdsourcing is used in e-commerce. Next, some case studies of business that uses crowdsourcing are discussed, with analysis on its success and failures. Finally, the paper will provide suggestion on how crowdsourcing can be an effective strategy. 1. INTRODUCTION Introduced by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, the term crowdsourcing describes a process of how new web-based businesses organize labor, by outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by contractors or employees, to a community (usually online) through what amounts to an open call for proposals. Howe offers the following definition: Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers. (Howe, 2006) Howe further explained that true crowdsourcing involves a company accepting the idea received, processing it and producing for sale; and the idea provider being rewarded, in most cases, monetarily. This is to differentiate crowdsourcing from open sourcing, which is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of public. In other words, crowdsourcing happens when a company posts a problem online, individuals in the community offer solutions to the problem, the winning ideas are awarded some form of a monetary reward, and the company mass produces the idea for its own gain. In another article, titled Power of Crowdsourcing, by Matt H. Evans, he states that Crowdsourcing taps into the global world of ideas, helping companies work through a rapid design process. From both definitions, it can be understood that crowdsourcing needs a channel that is able to reach out to the masses to be effective, and the most obvious choice is the internet. This is further complimented by the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, whereby individuals are able to interact and define the web rather than being passive browsers of the web. This makes crowdsourcing even more attractive as it allows companies to tap into the potential vast collective intelligence of the masses to achieve their business strategy. As such, e-commerce businesses (businesses that uses the internet to handle the buying and selling of products or services) are the most likely adopter of crowdsourcing technique for their e-commerce strategy. E-commerce strategy is the plan and courses of action that a company undertakes to offer its products and services on the internet to achieve its business goal. For companies that have existing offline operations, e-commerce strategy will most likely be focused on integrating its offline operations into an online presence. This will include how to best represent the company online, the infrastructure and framework required to do so and the range of activities needed to promote the companys core activities on the World Wide Web. Another reason that crowdsourcing is gaining popularity is because in todays globalised market, competition in innovation is very fierce and in-house research and development is getting more costly. As mentioned in The Global Brain, by Nambisan Sawhney, 2008, These forces rapidly decreasing product life cycles, decreasing internal innovation productivity, and global competition together are creating a Red Queen effect  [1]  in innovation: Companies have to invest more and more just to maintain their market position. This make crowdsourcing a viable option, as it allows the tapping into the vast intelligence of the masses, like what former Sun Chief Scientist, Bill Joy says, Most of the smart people in the world dont work for your company. More importantly, this intelligence can be obtained at relatively low cost. 2. POPULUARITY OF CROWDSOURCING To understand the current popularity of crowdsourcing, this paper has referred to PBworks ( http://crowdsourcingexamples.pbworks.com/ ), one of the worlds largest provider of hosted collaboration solutions for business and education, which has a wiki that provides a comprehensive list of companies that uses crowdsourcing. In addition to the wiki, as the list provided by PBworks is purely textual, this paper has also referred to Grant Silverstones article, Friday Fact Box Crowdsourcing ( http://www.gottaquirk.com/2010/01/29/friday-fact-box-crowdsourcing/ ), for graphical representation of the list. Extracted are two graphical breakdowns of industries that use crowdsourcing, one group using purely crowdsourcing as their business strategy, and the other using crowdsourcing as an add-on initiative to their current business, without disrupting their own core business strategy. In the chart (Fig 1.1), it shows the current industry breakdown of companies using Crowdsourcing as their main business strategy. According to PBworks, out of the listed 141 companies, the majority, or 43% belongs to general business, such as marketing, sales, advertising and finance. This is followed by Design (15%) and then Media (13%), while Tourism makes up the least at 1%. Fig 1.1 (Source: Grant Silverstone, Friday Fact Box Crowdsourcing) In addition to that, in Fig 1.2, it shows that of these 141 companies, a huge majority comes from USA (65%), Europe (13%) and UK (6%), while Brazil, Africa and Russia only make up 1% each. Fig 1.2 (Source: Grant Silverstone, Friday Fact Box Crowdsourcing) From these two charts, it can be derived that majority of companies using crowdsourcing efforts are those in industries that traditionally requires large community networks (such as sales, news and marketing) and creativity capacity (such as design, advertisement, media). While industries that requires specific skills (such as Education) and are more systematic (such as Science and IT) are less popular with companies to consider using crowsourcing as a business strategy. Moreover, crowdsourcing is mainly engaged in western countries, which the economy and infrastructure are much more developed. This is an important factor as mentioned earlier that a good networking channel is needed for the success of crowdsourcing. Next in Fig 1.3, it shows the industry breakdown of companies that initiated crowdsourcing efforts to complement their current business strategy, with the majority from IT at 33%. It is also interesting to note too that nearly all these companies in the list are big players in the industry, such as Adobe, BMW, Nokia and so on. Fig 1.3 (Source: Grant Silverstone, Friday Fact Box Crowdsourcing) From the chart and the list, it can be seen that currently, crowdsourcing is still a new idea and not attractive enough to draw companies to venture into it as a complement process to their existing business strategy. However, big companies, with huge resources, do see the potential of crowdsourcing and are able to invest into it. This is also the reason why IT industry is the major contributor to crowdsourcing initiatives, as they have the knowledge and expertise to tap on the internet to maximize crowdsourcing potential. 3. Examples of Business using Crowdsourcing To understand how crowdsourcing is currently being used in businesses and its effectiveness, it is necessary to look at real cases. The paper will look into 3 companies, each with distinctive methods of engaging crowdsourcing, namely Threadless, Amazon Mechanical Turk and Cambrian House. Threadless Threadless is a community-centered online apparel store launched in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, with $1,000 in seed money after entering and meeting in an Internet t-shirt design contest. They wanted to start their own design competition, but instead of hiring a jury, they decided to let the designers themselves pick the winner. Source: Threadless: http://www.threadless.com How it works In the beginning, members of the Threadless community will submit their t-shirt designs online, where the designs are then put to a member vote. The winner would get free T-shirts bearing the winning design, while everyone else would get to buy the shirt. Currently, Threadlesss receives on average, one thousand designs in any given week, of which, only ten designs from the voted top hundred to print and sell through an online store. DeHart and Nickell also increased the bounty paid to these winners to $2,000 in cash, a $500 gift certificate ($200 in cash if they trade in the certificate), as well as an additional $500 for every reprint. This is because limited batches are printed and sold out shirts will only be re-printed if there is enough demand from customers requesting for a re-print. On occasion, special contests will run in association with various sponsors. These contests set a theme for designs, with a selection of additional prizes, often related to the sponsor, being awarded to the chosen winner. How Successful was Threadless The Threadless community is currently six hundred thousand strong, producing about one thousand designs for voting each week. In 2006, Threadless had managed to generate $17 million in revenues and it is still growing rapidly. Threadless boasts, according to Jeffrey Kamikoff (Threadless Chief Creative Officer), incredible profit margins. Each shirt that sells for between $12 to $25 is produced at a cost of just $5. Moreover, Threadless need not do any advertising or marketing, as the community itself will self-perform such functions. The designers will persuade friends and community members to view and vote for their work. Threadless will also rewards the community for those who submit photos of themselves wearing a Threadless shirt or refers a friend who buys a shirt with store credits (worth $1.50 and $3.00 respectively). This crowdsourcing strategy helps Threadless to sell an average of ninety thousand T-shirts a month. However, Threadless had also suffered by their own success. Their spring sale in March 2008 resulted in serious server downtime, resulting in the offer of $50 vouchers to inconvenienced customers and the promise to never ever let this happen again forever ever. Eighteen months later, a special one day sale to tie into the 09/09/09 date saw Threadless pummeled again by insane amounts of traffic, with users reporting inability to access the site for extended periods some never getting through. The customer experience was impacted by such a lack of planning of traffic which was to be expected from a company dealing with such huge social community. It was only from these experiences that Threadless had begun to look into better managing their wildly fluctuating levels of traffic in their infrastructure. Amazon Mechanical Turk Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service launched on November 2, 2005 by Amazon.com, which was initially invented for in-house use by Peter Cohen as a service to find duplicates among its web pages describing products. As of 2010, though still in beta, Mechanical Turk has grown to be a crowdsourcing internet marketplace for work where businesses (known as Requesters) publish tasks (known as Human Intelligence Tasks or HITS), and workers (known as Providers) complete them for a monetary payment that was set by the Requesters. Amazon Mechanical Turk gives businesses immediate access to a diverse, global, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever and wherever its convenient. Source: Amazon Mechanical Turk: https://www.mturk.com How it works Amazon Mechanical Turk, as mentioned is a market place for tasks that computer and machines cannot do, or cannot do it precise enough. These tasks can only be done by human intelligence, such as writing reviews or detecting specific objects in images. The process of Mechanical Turk is firstly, companies will post jobs (HITS) at MTurk (Amazon Mechanical Turk Market Place), then deposit the HITS payout amount into their MTurk account. Next, workers, who are registered members of MTurks, will look for tasks that they feel that they can perform. Once they take up the task, they will be assigned to it, but there will not be any contract. These HITS are tasks that are fairly easy and quick to execute, with most of them being able to be completed under 20 to 30 seconds or less and payout at about 10 to 50 cents. After the HIT is completed and submitted, Amazon Mechanical Turk will automatically transfer the money from the Requesters prepaid HIT balance to the workers Amazon gift certificate account. With the payout, workers can choose to either transfer the money to their bank account or to their amazon.com gift certificate balance. For every task performed, Amazon will take a cut. In addition, Requesters can also give bonus to workers w hom they like the task done. Besides the Official MTurk website, there is another website, Turker Nation (http://www.turkernation.com ), a forum for workers and requestors to meet and discuss the work at hand. Issues with Hits are discussed here. The site is independent from Amazon, and is not related to Amazon in any way. How Successful was Mechanical Turk Since its launch in 2005, the number of worker members in Amazon Mechanical Turk had grown in numbers. By March 2007, there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries. MTurk is popular with companies as they find that HITS are a very affordable way to outsource large groups of similar tasks that are very simple to complete. Companies find the MT task auction model attractive because it reduces payroll costs of having to employ normal workers to perform such tasks. However, while Companies or Requesters find the cost of engaging MTurk to complete HITS attractive, there are many criticisms. As HITS are typically simple, repetitive tasks and users are paid often only a few cents to complete them, many have criticized Mechanical Turk as a market place for slaves. Moreover, workers are paid as contractors rather than employees, requesters enjoy tax advantages and low cost, and they also avoid laws regarding minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation. Workers, on the other hand, must report their income as self-employment income. In addition, some requesters have taken advantage of workers by having them do the tasks, then rejecting their submission in order to avoid paying. Amazon.com does not monitor the service and refers all complaints to the poster of the HIT. Nevertheless, in view of such criticism, MTurk is still attracting workers, especially those living in second and third-world economies, because the impact of earning those few extra dollars will be magnified many times over. Cambrian House Launched in 2006, Cambrian House started as a crowdsourcing community that pioneered the idea of harnessing the power of the crowd to create ideas for websites and software products. Its mantra is You think it; crowds test it; crowds build it; you sell it; you profit. Source: Cambrian House: http://www.cambrianhouse.com How it works Cambrian House calls itself a community of people with broad talents and interests to create web-based products that the world wants, markets those products, and shares in the profits. They cater to people with no time to pursue new ideas or anyone with a vision and motivated to submit ideas. The way Cambrian House works is, firstly, Individuals register and create a profile of their capabilities in its website. They can then participate within the community by initiating ideas. The community will then test these ideas and give the approval on those that are feasible. Next, Cambrian House staff will create a brochure site to test the winners popularity and usability within the community. If the idea survives, the contributor will then seek people with passion and skills in the community to construct or co-develop the commercial version of the idea, by awarding them with Royalty Points (the amount you receive for coming up with an original idea) or Cambro (Cambrian Houses currency, 1 Cambro = $1 USD). Cambrian House will fund the project and if needed, they can also seek additional funding from the community. Once the product is created, the project champions can then seek marketers, business development professionals, and or SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts in the Cambrian House community to deal with the promoting, selling and delivery of the product. Finally, once the product starts to sell, every member that contributed will earn Royalty Points or Cambro that had been negotiated with the business champion. In short, every member in the Cambrian House community can participate by not just giving ideas but also in bringing members ideas to life. There are no limits to number of projects members can join. During every development stage, everyone involved will also participate as peer-reviewers at select decision gates along the way to measure the individuals contribution. Although Cambrian House crowdsources the conception and creation of its products, ideas are subject to editorial review by a core team and actual production is subject to a set of quality guidelines. In the case of conflicting code or design contributions, the community decides which the best is. An example of how Cambrian House involves in every project is its first product (a video game) which was emerged from the community forums and seemed popular, so it risked $8,000CAD on a preliminary website to promote the game. It sailed through the market test selling hundreds of pre-orders at half-price ($9.95CAD) in a single weekend. That response encouraged Cambrian House to invest more for the next development stage. Cambrian Houses eventual goal is to turn each project into a separate, independently funded firm, but only after it has been market-validated. How Successful was Cambrian House The original Cambrian House community was deemed successful as it managed to achieve the most important component of crowdscourcing by attracting 50,000 plus members and more than 7000 ideas from the crowd. However, Cambrian House did not realized that although the crowd was great at thinking and testing, it was less interested when it came to the building element of Cambrian Houses model. Moreover, there are weaknesses in the idea-community model which include the challenge of convincing users to study and vote a rapidly growing pool of ideas, of which some are of relatively low quality, the management difficulty of distributed development, and the large number of duplicate submissions. After unsuccessfully trying to raise a new round of capital, in May 2008, Cambrian House announced the sale of much its assets to the New York-based venture capital company Spencer Trask. While Cambrian House will carry on as a vendor of Crowdsourcing software, its existence as a crowdsourcing community had come to a close. In reflection, Cambrian House CEO Michael Sikorsky states in a letter (excerpt): Indeed, our model failed. In short: we became a destination people loved to bookmark more than they loved to actively visit. The limiting reagent in the startup equation is not ideas, but amazing founding teams. A key assumption for us, which proved out NOT true: given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find (crowdsource) a team willing to execute it OR we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas this is where our model fell short. What we learned: it would have been better to back great teams with horrible ideas because most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select community members. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse. Hence: the wisdom of crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down. Trying to find people willing or capable to take on the offspring (our outputs) of the Cambrian House model was hard and/or incredibly time consuming. (Michael Sikorsky, 2008) The lesson from Cambrian House is that the crowd only is not enough as it needs to be managed and needs an inspiring leader to guide it. 6. How can Crowdsourcing be an Effective E-Commerce Strategy? After looking at the definition and cases of crowdsourcing, it is understood that crowdsourcing has the potential to help e-commerce businesses gain competitive advantage, but like all business strategies, it is does not guarantee success. Nevertheless, crowdsourcing can be effective as an e-commerce strategy by helping companies in 5 ways. Crowdsourcing, firstly, can help companies to do market prediction by using the crowd to understand market desires. Companies can use the crowd to test the appeal of any new business ideas. Besides that, companies can derive from the crowd, emerging market desires and trends. Secondly, in addition to the knowledge of market desire, companies can draw information from crowdsourcing for product and business innovation. Based on information drawn from the crowd, companies can prioritize new business ideas, conduct product tests, rank next best enhancements with existing products and uncover methods to reduce costs and improve service. Thirdly, as mentioned, the knowledge of the crowd is very powerful. As such, crowdsourcing is a good option to solve problems that are difficult to solve internally with the companies current resources, by inviting answers or solutions from the crowd. Companies can also collaborate with the crowd to find new scientific discovery. Fourthly, besides solving internal problems, crowdsourcing can also help to tackle external issues, such as marketing. Companies can invite crowd to help in the creation of campaigns. Lastly, crowdsourcing is relatively much cheaper than hiring workforce for doing similar jobs. As companies only need to reward those who had contributed in the crowd, and it is usually not of huge amount, crowdsourcing is able to help companies to cut cost. With the above it mind, crowdsourcing effectiveness depends on how and under what environment it is used. Based on all the information gathered, the paper has come up with a few key points to effective crowdsourcing. Firstly, the crowd that crowdsourcing wants to tap into must be of substantial size. For example, if Threadless has only a member base of 100, and maintains its process of choosing ten winning designs every week, it will come a time whereby members might lose interest or doubt the integrity of these winning designs. Moreover, one of the characteristic of crowdsourcing is that the crowd is to represent the market, as such, the larger the community or crowd, the better the representation it will be. Secondly, companies must understand the crowd. When companies use crowdsourcing, they are usually targeting a specific community, which is formed by a common interest. Therefore, if companies want to crowdsource, they will need to know the community strengths and weaknesses. For example, if Threadless decides to request its community to submit computer programming works, it might not get anything or the works might be of inferior qualities. Thirdly, companies need to know what they want and need from the crowd. This is one important factor that determines the effectiveness of crowdsourcing. For example, in Amazon Mechanic Turk, if requesters post HITs with ambiguous requirements, the workers might have difficulty understanding what is needed of them and provide works that are irrelevant or not to the intended requirements. This will cause many rejected tasks, which is a waste of time of the companies and crowd, thus causing inefficiency. Next, companies need to recognize the contributions of crowd. Monetary reward is a way to acknowledge the crowds contribution, but usually crowd works mainly not for monetary reason. Participants of crowdsourcing are often leisure users, whose main motivation to participate is to be recognized and feel they are part of the community. The more affiliated they feel towards the community, the more willing they will be in providing help in tasks presented. Lastly, companies need to have adequate resources to manage the crowd and support the output from the crowd. This is one mistake that many companies make when they do crowdsourcing, as they thought the crowd will be able to contribute in every part of their business plan. This is generally not the case, as experienced by Cambrian House. As mentioned in the previous point, the crowd is usually made up of leisure participants, as such, they will be more willing to engage in task that requires less effort like providing ideas and suggestions, as compared to more tedious task like building the actual product which will be avoided. 7. Conclusion The above discussion has shown that crowdsourcing, when used correctly can be highly effective as an ecommerce strategy. It is able to tap into the power of the crowd for knowledge which is virtually unlimited at very low cost. Just like Threadless, by keeping the crowd motivated, business will grow as knowledge from crowd grows. However, it is important to note that there are situations where crowdsourcing is not possible or impractical. First of all, jobs that are confidential in nature, such as lawyers and accountants, and high level jobs, like business process planning, are not possible to be crowdsourced. As shown by Cambrian House, the crowd needs to be monitored by the company and provide resources when needed for successful manifestation of ideas. As such, it is not possible to fully crowsource a business process to the crowd. Internal workforce is still needed as the crowd might not fully understand the companies business models and goals and these internal employees are able to monitor and ensure the crowds contributions are within the companies guidelines and process. Moreover, too much reliance on the crowd could be construed as unethical and open the company up to criticism about the true nature of its social mission. By using Amazon Mechanical Turk, many companies have been seen as operating virtual sweat shops. As such, physical workforce is needed to balance the image of the company.

Friday, October 25, 2019

Enigmatic Lights On The Moon :: essays research papers

Enigmatic lights seen on the Moon are a classic example of a Fortean enigma. Called transient lunar phenomena (TLP), they have been a mystery and a source of wonder to skywatchers since the earliest times. And yet, as astronomer Peter Grego points out, despite a wealth of detailed observations we seem no closer to an understanding of what these anomalous flashes are. Not long after the telescope was invented at the beginning of the 17th century, astronomers came to realise that the Moon, our only natural satellite, was not as dynamic a world as the Earth. The dark lunar tracts which early astronomers had somewhat optimistically called "maria" (seas) turned out to be nothing more than deceptively smooth plains of solidified lava. Much to astronomers' disappointment it became apparent that there were no appreciable expanses of water, though the new romantic marine nomenclature was retained, regardless - names like Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises) and Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms) were given in a vain attempt to grant the Moon an air of mystery and excitement. In reality, the Moon's surface appeared solid and unchanging. The Moon possessed no appreciable atmosphere and there were no detectable signs of lunar life; the Church breathed a sigh of relief, having been spared the embarrassment of attempting to explain why the book of Genesis forgot to mention that our sister planet was teeming with the products of DNA. This initial impression of the Moon as being a barren and entirely dead world has been propagated in the astronomical literature ever since Galileo first published his observations in 1610.2 It seems, however, that the Moon has been receiving unjustifiably bad astronomical press for nearly three centuries, for reports of its long-standing status rigor mortis have been greatly exaggerated. Lunar observers (mainly amateurs) have noticed that the Moon's surface is occasionally host to anomalous transient lunar phenomena (TLP) which have assumed a variety of forms, including isolated flashes or pulses of light, coloured glows and obscurations of portions of the lunar surface. Just why the science of astronomy has been unwilling to accept that our satellite occasionally displays obvious signs of activity is almost as big a mystery as TLP themselves. There is no shortage of TLP having been observed by reputable astronomers. William Herschel, one of history's greatest astronomers - he discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 - observed a red glow in the vicinity of the crater Aristarchus on 4 May 1783, at a time when that feature was situated on the unilluminated lunar hemisphere.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Poetry Analysis Essay

Poetry is a beautiful form of art a writer uses to express ones emotions and thoughts. One of the hardest tasks is analyzing and understanding a poem. One line in a poem can be interpreted in so many ways, but when poetic devices are included in a poem, it makes it much easier to understand the theme and emotions the author is trying to portray. The two poems by John Donne that use poetic devices cleverly are â€Å"The Flea† and â€Å"Batter my heart†. The themes of the two poems are all referring to the speaker’s desire. In each poem, the speaker is expressing his or her wants and needs. At least two poetic devices per poem help contribute to each poem’s meaning because a lot of poems are hard to understand and make the reader think and analyze the poem. John Donne seeks the theme of desires towards God and sexual intimacy through his use of poetic devices of metaphor, internal rhyme, and rhythm in â€Å"The Flea† and â€Å"Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you†. John Donne services the devices of rhythm and metaphor to describe the characters’ desires. In â€Å"Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You†, John Donne uses the poetic devices of tone and rhythm to emphasize the desire and passion the speaker has for growing closer to God. The poem uses a desperate tone: â€Å"Take me to You, imprison me. † By using the word â€Å"imprison†, it allows the reader to focus in on the speakers’ desire. The speaker is so desperate to be drawn closer to God. Donne presents this character as a lost soul seeking the love of God. Donne uses the rhythm of the poem to portray the level of desire the speaker wants â€Å"Divorce me, unite or break that knot again. † There are a lot of pauses and emphasis after deep meaningful words. First person is also used a lot to show a closer connection to the speakers’ feelings. The rhythm is moving at a more slower, dramatic pace. This is allowing the reader to view the speakers desire as deep and meaningful. â€Å"The Flea† uses a metaphor to imply that the flea is more than just a bug. Proving that the recurring theme in this poem is that the man is justifying his desire for intimacy with this woman. The speaker of the poem proclaims, â€Å"Thou know’st that this cannot be said a sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead. † The sense of doubt and hesitation from the woman causes the speaker to become defensive. He sees nothing wrong with them getting intimate and uses the excuse: â€Å"Wherein could this flea guilty be,† trying to heighten the woman’s desire to sexually intimacyThe line â€Å"This flea is you and I† implies the connection that the flea has with the two of them. Making them one, as if they are married. The speaker uses this line as a viewpoint through which the reader is able to see the speaker’s passion. The flea serves as a symbol of intimacy that the speaker wants to have with the woman and as the flea mixes both of their bloods, it was as if they already had sex. He is justifying his desire by using the flea as the excuse. John Donne explores the lengths humans would go to get what they desire within each poem. Although, each poem illustrates different desires, it is able to be captured within the poems. â€Å"The Flea† represents the lust through the metaphor of the flea. There is a lot of attention being given to the flea and the bite it made on the two of them. The speaker keeps referring to the flea and puts emphasis on the connection it has made between him and her by mixing their blood. The speaker’s goal was to fulfill his desire of intimacy without having the woman feel any guilt or self-doubt. â€Å"Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You† dials in on the passion to be a new person who is closer in God: â€Å"Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. † This poem examines the speaker’s want and need to be near to God. It gives a lens for the readers to see the depths this person will go and the sacrifices they will make to have the comfort of God. The use of internal rhyme is being used in â€Å"The Flea†- making it easier to understand the theme and speaker’s feelings. The first few lines of the poem consist of internal rhyme, as well as the rest of the poem:â€Å"Mark but this flea, and mark in this How little that which thou deny’st me is. † John Donne is able to capture the speaker’s theme and flow while still sticking to the consistency of internal rhyme. The poem has a consistency of using internal rhyme throughout the entire poem â€Å"’Tis true, then learn how false, fears be; Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me. † Internal rhyme helps the reader understand the theme because the choice of words the speaker chooses to use all rhyme but are meaningful in the sense that they are adjectives for the speaker’s feelings. John Donne uses the poetic devices of tone and rhythm in â€Å"Batter my heart, three-personed God, for You† to emphasize the desire and passion the speaker has for growing closer to God. The things humans are willing to do to fulfill their desires is being examined by John Donne. In order to help better understand the theme in â€Å"The Flea†, John Donne makes great use of internal rhyme. The use of a metaphor in â€Å"The Flea† helps prove that the recurring theme in this poem is that the man is justifying his desire for intimacy with this woman. In â€Å"The Flea† and â€Å"Batter my heart, three-personed God for you†, John Donne made great use of poetic devices to bring attention to the speaker’s desires for God and sexual intimacy.

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Cyclin-Dependent Kinase

In the beginning, cyclin-dependent kinase 1 CDK1 for example, is a cell division cycle protein homolog 2, regarding a research paper that explains the role of CDK1 in the human breast cancer cells. They found that CDK1 rather than any types of CDK is fatal to the mutated version of MYC- dependent cancer that leads to a depletion of the oncogene in human cancer cells. The study reveals that the reason for the MYC breast cancer cells duplation is targeting CDF1 exhibit any other CDK cell lines. The primary purpose was to figure out the mechanism of CDK1 inhibition which controls and target the breast cancer cells in human and both phosphorylation and expression of MYC during the cell cycle process. To confirm that, they used siRNA knockdown to measure the expression level of MYC. Further, other than any mutants, apoptosis leading to the uncontrolled cell proliferation especially in human breast cancer disease that was measured by the detection of caspase-cleaved cytokeratin 18 using flow cytometry technique. The controls that were used are estrogen receptor ER-positive and ER-negative, they found increased at the number of the protein activity for the positive and the negative correlation, but the gene expression was high at the positive one and decreased to zero at the negative control (that means no reaction between them). They confirmed that CDK1 is essential for cell division and necessary for driving the cell cycle in all cell types.To initiate intracellular signaling pathways and stimulate the cell cycle entry, mitogens substance bind to the cell surface receptor with the activation form of GTPase Ras that activates MAP kinase cascade. That will lead to the expression of encoding gene of the transcription regulatory protein like MYC. Moreover, MYC will increase the expression of many late response genes, including some genes that lead to increased G1-CDK activity (cyclin D Cdk4), which triggers the phosphorylation of members of the tumor suppressor protein (Retinoblastoma protein) family. The inactive form of RB proteins can release the E2F target genes to initiate the transcription process in G1 and S phases, to enhance the G1- CDK and S- CDK activities and the phosphorylation of RB proteins forming a positive feedback loop.