Largest brand in L’Oreal group Essay

The company of my product is Garnier. Garnier is a company that produces cosmetics and hair care products. It was founded in 1904.For more than 100 years; Garnier has been creating new and available cosmetics to cover multiple beauty needs. Garnier is the second largest brand in L’Oreal group. Garnier is in the fast moving consumer goods sector. Garnier produces hair care products, including the Fructis line, and most recently skin care products under the name, Nutritioniste, that are sold around the world. Garnier is also a mass market cosmetics brand. The company’s product lines are targeted for different skin types and cultures. Garnier has a line of extensive range of beauty products. The company has changed as it has become part of the L’Oreal group. This means that there are more competitors to the company because it has joined a very competitive brand. Also the company will gain a lot of customer because of L’Oreal. Garnier also partnered with TerraCycle to promote their product containers and the introduction of biodegradable products. Garniers first product was made by Alfred Garnier in 1904. This was a hair tonic product. After this, Garnier developed their products into sun care items in 1936. Garnier also started to produce Garnier Fructis hair cares and Garnier Fructis style products. This shows that Garnier has changed their products into different segments to aim at different markets. Garnier also changed their shampoo products from dandruff control to colour protection. Garniers mission is to continue producing hair products made with natural ingredients. The full company name, Laboratories Garnier, originated in the 1920’s as a producer of hair care products made with organic ingredients. Also, Garniers objectives were to capture market share in a wide range of benefit-oriented segments of the hair care market. Garnier promised their market that they will deliver affordable but sophisticated products on a range of needs. To keep their promise, Garnier promoted its hair care products as natural and high technology. Their objective is to reduce by 50% of their environmental impact in the following areas by 2015: Greenhouse gas emissions Water consumption Waste generated per product unit As Garnier joined with L’Oreal, their competitors changed, Garniers competitors were Unilever and P&G. As you can see, these two companies are very high in competition. Garnier has launched their products in USA as well which has given them more competitors. Garnier operates in the tertiary sector as well as secondary. As you can see, Garnier manufactures their products as well selling them to their market. Sources: http://www.mbaskool.com/brandguide/fmcg/1120-garnier-fructis.pdfhttp://www.studymode.com/essays/Garnier-Report-1374615.html http://www.studymode.com/essays/Garnier-1233052.html http://www.slideshare.net/DebasishPadhy/garnier-fructis The product is Garnier Fructis Strength and Shine 2 in 1 shampoo and conditioner. The target market for this product is adults. I have chosen this product because it has both shampoo and conditioner in it. Also the product is mainly aimed at women’s. This product is designed to smooth normal hair and leaving it glossy. I will adapt the use of this product. Also I will change who the product is aimed at. This product makes hair -feel nourished -shinier -smoother -and stronger. Also this product has grape fruit extracts. This means that the developed product will have different fruit extracts which will attract the target market. I have changed this product into a 2 in 1 shampoo and conditioner for teens and young adults aged between (15-19). I have chosen this product because in my research I found that Garnier currently only have shampoo and conditioner together for adults (mainly women’s) and not for teens or young adults. The target market for this product will be young adults. This is because young adults would be interested in hair care products to keep their hair secure and good looking, also there are not many hair products for young adults produced by this company therefore it would be a new release in the market for this target market products. The price of the shampoo is  £2.54 and the price of the conditioner is  £2.54.The use of this product is to perform two different functions in one go .I would set the price at an average because young adults would want to spend on a high price on their products but would prefer at an average . The price would be about  £5-6 pounds. I have set the price high because other shampoos that are aimed at this target market are at a high price such as ‘Bed head’. The costs of shampoos made by this company is around  £10.00 Also the product will be sold with difference fragrances which will also attract the young adults because the smell will be on their hair. These will be artificial fragrances of fruits. This is an advantage because they care a lot about their hair and would want it to be in good condition .This product would be a good choice for people who buy Garnier products because it is a new product that has not been produced by this company. I have found out that there are more hair care products for adults rather than teens and young adults. My competition is Pantene. I found this in my research. Marketing strategies- used different market strategies in order to penetrate the market. -Aggressive -Add value -Market segment Competitors- strengths and weaknesses of the competitors. How I gain advantage from the competitors Have they got a usp that im gnna build up on. Extensions strategies used for other products in the company. Where are the products in the life cycle Where does your product fit into that life cycle.

Legal and Ethical Issues in Healthcare

Josh tests positive for hepatitis C. DR. Smith who ordered the labs is also Josh’s brother-in-law. When Dr. Smith informs Josh that his results will be reported to the public health department, asks Dr. Smith not to report him as a favor since they are family and he promises to get treatment somewhere else. Josh is embarrassed by the way he contracted the disease. Not only is Dr. Smith asked to break the law by his brother-in-law, his wife, Josh’s sister, who is concerned for her brother expects Dr. Smith to share the test results of his patient.If he tells her anything without Josh’s consent he will violate HIPPA. Dr Smith is worried about being accused of malpractice if he gives in and doesn’t ensure Josh’s results are not only reported but also that he receives proper care for the diagnoses. This case is legally and ethically sensitive. The doctor faces issues with relationships, confidentiality, consent, legal requirements of treating communicab le diseases, as well as malpractice. Legal and â€Å"Ethical issues in healthcare are common. Nearly every decision that’s made has ethical implications–for patients, for providers and for healthcare leaders.â€Å" (Larson, 2013).The first ethical violation that Dr. Smith is guilty of is having a personal relationship with a patient. â€Å"Relationships with patients are forbidden by both the medical and nursing code of ethics. Such actions are considered serious misconduct and can result in expulsion from the profession and losing the license to practice† (Greenwood, 2013). Because of the relationship with the patient, Dr. Smith is being asked to violate the patient’s confidentiality. â€Å"Confidentiality is both an ethical and a legal issue.Keeping information about a patient confidential is a way of showing respect for the person’s autonomy; releasing information can damage the patient. † (Greenwood, 2013). Dr. Smith’s wife asks him to share medical information about her brother, She feels she has the right to this information but does not understand the position she is putting her husband in. he understands her concerns for her brother, however if this were any other patient Dr. Smith would never consider discussing a patient with her. â€Å"There are also specific laws regarding the release of information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.The laws define exactly what information can be released and to whom. † (Greenwood, 2013). Dr. Smith needs to ensure he keeps the confidentiality of his patient and doesn’t violate HIPPA. Josh is also asking Dr. Smith to break the law by not report the test results to the public health department. There is a legal requirement for reporting and treating communicable diseases. â€Å"Reporting of cases of infectious diseases and related conditions has been and remains a vital step in controlling and preventing the spread of communicable disease. † (CDC, 1990).Dr. Smith must report the positive test results according to the law; however he does have a close relationship with his brother-in-law and does not want to lose his trust, especially with his current medical condition. Although Dr. Smith does not need consent to report the case of hepatitis C, he will need the patient’s consent to begin any treatment for the disease. â€Å"Patients must provide informed consent for treatment to be legal. † (Greenwood, 2013). â€Å"Health care practitioners of all sorts face the risk of being sued for malpractice.A lawsuit may be brought from an injury related to surgery, defective equipment or medical products, care that was omitted or a deliberate act that caused harm to a patient. † (Greenwood, 2013). Dr. Smith can be sued for malpractice by anyone who contracts hepatitis C from Josh if he does not report the case and give Josh the proper treatment. By choosing to not report or tr eat Josh’s case, Dr. Smith will be guilty of omitting care. A kind act by a caring doctor has quickly turned into a legally and ethically nightmare. Dr.Smith chose to make his brother-in-law a patient by ordering labs that gave a positive result for hepatitis C. Dr. Smith can now face charges and lose his license to practice medicine. This whole situation could have been handled differently and the weight of violating medical law and ethics would not be on Dr. Smith’s shoulders. There is still a way for out of the doctor to correct the situation. All he has to do is report the case of hepatitis C, and hand off his brother-in-law to another provider with no connection to ensure he does in fact receive the proper care.

Organic Foods Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Organic Foods - Research Paper Example An entire industry dedicated to promoting organic food has established itself in recent years. So why the sudden attention towards organic food? What exactly is it about organic food that makes it popular? The answer is probably a simple one: organic food is very nutritious, chemical-free and provides a way of taking back your diet from the big agricultural companies that have come to dictate our diets to us and in some ways our whole lives. It is also a way of empowering people to make healthy choices about their bodies and the world around them. These products are worth the extra cost and are healthier than the alternative. As the middle class expanded more and more throughout the 1980s, people got richer and more affluent. They became more educated and the had more money in their pockets to spend as they saw fit. The result was that they wanted more choice. In the past people used to simply buy what was available to them in the supermarket, now however with more time and more education they have asked for more choice and more control over the products that they want to buy—in particular when it comes to something as important as food, what everyone needs to live and what can affect our health so profoundly. Instead of simply buying what the supermarket has on sale, consumers these days will read the labelling, look at nutritional information, and perhaps even perform research about food companies. There is a real impulse to buy ethical products, products that are environmentally friendly, and products that don’t harm the world around us. A newspaper reporter named Mark Bittman recently w rote in the New York Times: There’s plenty of evidence that both a person’s health — as well as the environment’s — will improve with a simple shift in eating habits away from animal products and highly processed foods to plant products and what might be called â€Å"real

An account of an argument Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

An account of an argument - Essay Example The fire engine from the New York fire department with its ladders could not go beyond the sixth floor and the safety nets that had been put in place could not sustain the weight of the people jumping in to them. A question that remains unanswered is where are the children who were working in the factory since official reports of the dead workers did not include children in it. The report was modified to include some few teenagers who died in order to meet the requirements of labour law in those days. Another recent tragedy happened in 1993 in Thailand when the factory of the Kader Industrial Toy Company was burnt. Among the 188 victims of the fire, most of them were described as teenage girls, however the actual figure may never be known, as a large number of workers in such factories are children. In another fire incident in November 25, 2000, at the Chowdhury Knitwear and Garment factory near Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed 52 people, 10 of them were reported to be girls aged betw een 10 and 14 years. A more recent case is in the KTS Composite Textile factory fire in Chittagong, Bangladesh where the official reports record the death toll at around 50 but other sources claim the number of deaths was more than 80 (Weber, n.d). One of the argument strategies that the author has used is the inductive style, which is a form of logical argument that uses examples to illustrate the main point. This form of argument uses examples from the beginning to the end and the main question that the readers ask themselves is whether there are enough examples and whether those examples are relevant to the issue being addressed. In the ‘factories of lost children,’ the author has used several examples of fire tragedies where the casualties, who are mainly underage children, have not been reported due to labor laws regarding child labor. The main examples that the author has used include the fire tragedy in Asch building, which is in Washington square in

Analyzing Criteria on Online Reporting Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Analyzing Criteria on Online Reporting - Article Example On the other hand, the website (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304898704577482650368103084.html) has employed the art of short sentences that nail the case to the bone (Maher, 2012). In other words, website information is easy and quick for understanding than other media forms in information dissemination. Furthermore, the avoidance of what people said in unlike in the latter website is an indication of a narrative writing technique that appeals to a mass readership. On that note, if compared to print media, there are some differences. For instance, the reportage of the sex abuse case in local papers delved into the smaller details of the case that did not feature in the online articles in the aforementioned websites. In conclusion, this means that information included in the websites are not always comprehensive as compared to print media (Craig, 2010). Alternatively, I think websites enhance a story with its visual information such as the websites described above. Additionally, the hyperlinks they provide give an element of human touch because of its visual

Sale and purchase agreement, contract Assignment

Sale and purchase agreement, contract - Assignment Example ivers the Goods to Carrier or Bill of Sale to Purchaser: The seller allows the allocation of his land to the buyer, which in this cases the good, is land upon the completion of the remaining amount of money, which is SR 500.000. Any Risk of Loss or Damage is transferred to the Purchaser when: land sales and purchase agreement involves a lot of risk bearing. If the land on sales is by law owned by the government for instance, the purchaser will bear the risk of losing his money to the seller. A comprehensive agreement should henceforth be arrived at after the land search process as per the legal requirements by land laws have been constitutionally verified. Purchaser Receives the Goods or a Bill of Sale: Land sales is instant upon the payment of full amounts of money by the buyers. In Ahmed and Saleh’s case, there would be need to wait until the last payments are made an title issued in the name of the buyer then the transfer of ownership would be legally made. Seller delivers the Goods to a Carrier or a Bill of Sale is given to the Purchaser: The bill of sale must be issued to the purchaser of the land as there is some monetary value already attached to this sales. Mr. Saleh has paid in deposit SR 1.5 hence he is allowed to acquire a bill of sale to warrant him the unconditional ownership of this land in case of any mischief by the seller. Whether Assignment of this Agreement is allowed: the assignment of this agreement would be finally sealed as both Ahmed and Saleh are in a business agreement wherein there must be a willing seller and willing buyer. Warranty (what I am promising about the Goods): The seller must promise on the legitimacy of his land whereas the purchaser must pledge the payment of the remaining sum of money that is SR 0.5 million in this sale and purchase agreement. Additional Clauses: Additional clauses may include the validity of the land ownership. In this case the land is purchased by a foreigner thus the time frame for ownership of

Assignment 3 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Assignment 3 - Essay Example However, the mode of electronic commerce also brings and invites many kinds of problems both for the customers and vendors. Some of such problems faced by dot-com companies are listed under: Technical problems This is one of the significant problem faced on the part of both customers and vendors in making payment through online sites. The technical problems develop a kind of resistance among both customers and vendors in using e-commerce sites for purchasing goods and services. Some of the common technical problems faced by the customers and vendors relate to system failure, case of amount debited twice, late processing of payments, failure to provide notifications, etc. All these technical issues and problems have been faced by the companies in real sense. For instance, in the year 2012, around 12 million NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland have faced the freezing issue of their salaried accounts. The technical fault and problem has resulted the computer system to freeze the salaried accounts unnecessarily (Bidgoli 20-25). This case of freezing of salaried accounts prevented the large customer base from making online payment through their salary accounts. Likewise, system failure and late processing of payments also prevents the customers from getting up-to-date balance and payment status. In some instances, it has also been noticed that customers are fined for late payment due to the system failure or any other technical difficulty. The technical problem relates to failure of the system to show updated payment status also creates difficulty for vendors in forwarding the request of debiting or crediting accounts. It is due to reason that vendors can direct the banking channels to debit or credit the customer account on the basis of latest updated information of their accounts. But, system failure and technical problems creates difficulty for the vendors in assessing and tracking updated status and proceeding payment accordingly. Difficulty related to payment pr oviders The wide popularity and emergence of large number of e-commerce sites have also increased proportion of payment providers simultaneously. The availability of large number of payment providers created difficulty for the vendors and customers in selecting appropriate and authentic payment provider. There are various cases demonstrating fraudulent payment done by service suppliers. The instances of fraudulent cases pose a question on the trust and authenticity of payment providers. The world of e-commerce has also witnessed the difficulty faced by the vendors and customers in cancelling the transaction and processing payment remittance. The cancellation of transaction by the mutual agreement of customers and vendors also made the issue unsolved for many days. It happens due to long time taken by the payment providers in forwarding the payment back to the customers. This practice of payment providers of forwarding payment with excessive delay spoiled the trust and authenticity o f online payment mechanism. It has also been identified that vendors and customers need to install multi-currency support system

Culture Influence on Education Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Culture Influence on Education - Research Paper Example This research paper analyses the influence of culture on education within the perspective of critical pedagogy. Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Education The United States is increasingly becoming culturally diverse. The effect of this increasing cultural diversity is most evident in schools. But in spite of the increasing cultural diversity all over the country, cultural or racial-based segregation in schools has been growing. Alongside the evolving nature of U.S. education, ideas of how best to teach and learn in a culturally diverse setting have also evolved over time. The educational history of the United States, in fact, is full of examples of culturally biased policies that worked to segregate or exclude from formal education students of Latino, Asian, African American, and Native American backgrounds (Doyle 82). It is evident that ideas about racial and cultural inferiority and dominance have a profound and long history in the U.S. educational history. For a considerable pa rt of that educational history, the traditional knowledge was that students who come from minority cultures have a weakness ingrained in their identities. As a result, the faster students assimilated to the mainstream society the smoother would be their move to the upper rungs of the social ladder. In the second half of the 20th century, these assumptions were criticised and disproven, mostly by individuals from the cultures being forced to change. It is not accidental that educational campaigns supporting multicultural education and ethnic studies all appeared simultaneously (Nieto 88). Such campaigns stood for the condemnation of ideologies that had prevented numerous cultural groups from attaining educational success. All teachers nowadays deal with students who are more culturally diverse than ever before. This increasing cultural diversity influences teaching and learning. As an outcome of the evolving demographics of the United States and the rest of the world, culture and lan guage are ever more essential issues in contemporary schools across the globe. Unfortunately, only a small number of educators aside from experts in bilingual education, urban education, or English as a second language (ESL) have been sufficiently trained or experienced to teach students who come from diverse cultural backgrounds (Phipps & Guilherme 62). Consequently, numerous educators are not prepared to confront cultural diversity in schools. Such realities demonstrate that educational reform has to occur in certain areas, especially at the national, societal, and ideological levels. Meanwhile, students who are culturally different from the majority are especially at risk in a society that has viewed such differences to be weaknesses, and financial hardships to be a moral violation (Phipps & Guilherme 29-30). Nevertheless, change can start at any level, and this paper is rooted in the idea that teachers can and, indeed, should positively influence and inspire their students throu gh critical pedagogy. Knowledge is not unbiased, but it is usually viewed and handled by schools, teachers, and students as though it were. As a result, education has a tendency to be limited or narrow; it tends to accept only the least questionable and least offensive. But the truth is history is filled with fascinating controversies, debates, and socio-political conflicts. All

A Data Warehouse Appliance Can Have a Huge Positive Impact on Businesses and Organizations Essay Example for Free

A Data Warehouse Appliance Can Have a Huge Positive Impact on Businesses and Organizations Essay Businesses and organizations of all sizes are becoming increasingly dependent on data analytics, and data warehouses or business analytic infrastructure has become a business critical application for many (if not most) companies. Indeed, these companies have always searched for better ways to understand their customers, and anticipate their needs. They have longed to improve the speed and accuracy of operational decision-making. Equally important as timeliness is the depth of the data analysis. Generally, the companies want to decipher all secrets hidden within the massive amounts of ever-increasing data. A data warehouse appliance, which is an integrated collection of hardware and software designed for a specific purpose typically involving the high throughput of data and analytic functions, can be used by organizations to optimize various areas of data processing. Its main intent is to supplant conventional business intelligence functions, such as warehousing, extract-transform-load (ETL), analysis and reporting. Due to its cost-effectiveness and efficiency, the data warehouse appliance has become an important segment of the data warehousing market. In this paper, I will examine the data warehouse appliances and describe its positive impact on business enterprises. Introduction Since introduced in the early 1990s, data warehouse (DW) has proven to be the key platform for strategic and tactical decision support systems in the competitive business environment today. See more: Analysis of Starbucks coffee company employees essay It has become a major technology for building data management infrastructure, and resulted in many benefits for various organizations, including providing â€Å"a single version of the truth, better data analysis and time savings for users, reductions in head count, facilitation of the development of new applications, better data, and support for customer-focused business strategies† (Rahman, 2007). The technology has become extremely important in an environment where increasing competition, unpredictable market fluctuations, and changing regulatory environments are putting pressure on business organizations. Data warehouses are also becoming the central repositories of organization/company information for data, which is obtained from a variety of operational data sources. Business applications will find data warehouses more beneficial and rely on them as the main source of information as they progress. These applications are able to perform all sorts of data analysis, with increasing customer demands for having the most up-to-date information available in data warehouses. Improving data freshness within short time frames is essential to meeting such demands. According to Hong et al, virtually all Fortune 1000 companies, today, have data warehouses, and many medium and small sized firms are developing them. The desire to improve decision-making and organizational performance is the fundamental business driver behind data warehouses. DW help managers easily discover problems and opportunities sooner, and widen the scope of their analysis. Hong also mentions that data warehouse is user-driven, meaning that users are allowed to be in control of the data and will have the responsibility of determining and finding the data they need. But however, the data warehouses have to be designed and evaluated from the user perspective in order to motivate users to be responsible for finding the data they need. Data warehouse is said to be â€Å"one of the most powerful decision-support tools to have emerged in the last decade† (Ramamurthy, 2008). They are developed by firms to help managers answer important business questions which require analytics including data slicing and dicing, pivoting, drill-downs, roll-ups and aggregations. And these analytics are best supported by online-analytical processing (OLAP) tools. A data warehouse appliance, which is the main topic of discussion in this research, is referred to as an integrated collection of hardware and software designed for specific purposes involving the high throughput of data and analytic functions. Data warehouse appliance has become an important segment of the data warehousing market, due to its cost-effectiveness and efficiency. A business or organization can use a data warehouse appliance to optimize various areas of data processing. In general, the main purpose of the DW appliance is to supplant conventional business intelligence (BI) functions including warehousing, extract, transform, load (ETL), analysis, and reporting. A data warehouse appliance can have a huge positive impact on a business enterprise. Large organizations are able to staff their data warehouse more efficiently, while assisting mid-level companies in solving business intelligence challenges. Data warehouse is fundamentally changing the way the businesses operate, as they are increasingly adopted across various companies. The purpose of this paper is to present the data warehouse appliances and how they impact businesses and organizations. In the next sections, I present a brief overview of data warehousing and the current state of BI, then I define and discuss DW appliances including its benefits, after which I describe the positive impact of DW appliances on businesses. Data Warehousing A data warehouse can basically be defined a subject-oriented, integrated, non-volatile, and time-variant collection of data in support of managements decisions. Unlike the on-line transaction processing (OLTP) database systems, data warehouses are organized around subjects storing historical/summarized data for business requirement purposes. According to O’Brien and Marakas, a data warehouse is a central source of data which have been cleaned, transformed and cataloged so they are usable by managers/business professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, market research, and decision support. These stored data are usually extracted from various operational, external, and other database management system of an organization. DW can be sub-divided into data marts, holding subsets of data from the warehouse that focus on specific aspects, such as department, of a company. In general all data warehouse systems comprises of the following layers; data source, data extraction, staging area, ETL, data storage, data logic, data presentation, metadata, and system operations layer. But the four major components include the multi-dimensional database, ETL, OLAP, and metadata. The dimensional database applies the concept of standard star-schema including dimension and fact tables, hierarchies for drill-down, role models, aggregates and snow flaking. It optimizes database design for better performance. The ETL process involves the extraction, transformation and loading of data with appropriate ETL tools. Data integration is one of the most important aspects of data warehouse, whereby data is extracted from multiple heterogeneous source systems and placed in a staging area where it is cleaned, transformed, pruned, reformatted, standardized, combined, and summarized before loading into the warehouse. OLAP (online analytical processing) tool provides the front-end analytical capabilities including slice and dice, drill up, drill down, drill across, pivoting, and trend analysis across time. And metadata stores information (or data) about the data in the warehouse system. The components of a complete data warehouse architectural system are illustrated in Figure 1 below. Figure 1 An important characteristic about the data in a data warehouse is that they are static, unlike a typical database with constant changes. Once the data are gathered up, formatted for storage, and stored in the data warehouse, they will never change. The restriction is such that complex patterns or historical trends can be searched for, and analyzed, by queries. Data warehouses are also non-volatile in the sense that end-users cannot update the data directly, thereby being able to maintain a history of the data. A major use of the data warehouse databases is data mining, in which the data are analyzed to reveal hidden patterns and trends in historical business activity. Such analysis could be used to help managers make decisions about strategic changes in business operations in order to gain competitive advantages in the marketplace. Data warehousing is a relatively new technology that â€Å"brings the vision of an entirely new (customer-centric) way of conducting business to reality†, and can provide â€Å"environments promising a revolution in organizational creativity and innovation† (Ramamurthy, 2008). Ramamurthy also mentioned that data warehouse generally serves as an IT infrastructure technology, focused on data architecture, as it provides a foundation for integrating a diverse set of internal and external data sources, enabling enterprise-wide data access and sharing, enforcing data quality standards, providing answers to business questions, and promoting strategic thinking through CRM, data mining, and other front-end BI applications. Users of the data warehouses are from virtually every business unit, amongst which information systems, marketing and sales, finance, production and operations, are the heaviest users. Current State of Business Intelligence Business Intelligence are computer based techniques used in identifying, extracting and analyzing business data. Sales revenue by products, department, time, region or income are such examples. The BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Some common functions of BI technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, text-mining and predictive analytics. As BI aims to support better business decision-making, they can also be referred to as a decision support system. BI applications often use data gathered from data warehouses or data marts, however, not all BI applications require a data warehouse. With sources from Wikipedia, business intelligence can be applied to business purposes in order to drive business value. Amongst these business purposes include measurement, analytics, reporting, collaboration, and knowledge management. BI is widely used today, mainly to describe analytic applications. According to Watson, BI is currently the top-most priority of many chief information officers. In a survey of 1,400 CIOs, from Gartner Group, it was discovered that BI projects were the number one technology priority for 2007. Watson further informs that the BI is a process which basically consists of two primary activities; â€Å"getting data in and getting data out†. Getting data in, also referred to as data ware housing, delivers limited value to a business enterprise. Organizations realize the full value of data from data warehouses only when users and applications access the data and use it to make decisions. Getting data out receives the most attention, as it consists of business users/applications accessing data from DW to perform enterprise reporting, OLAP, querying and analytics. The business intelligence framework is depicted in figure 2. Current BI infrastructure is a patchwork of hardware, software and storage that is growing ever more complex. Figure 2 – BI framework BI is continuing to evolve, and several recent developments are generating widespread interest, including real-time BI, business performance management, and pervasive BI. Data Warehousing Appliance A data warehouse is developed to support a broad range of organizational tasks. It can be referred to as an organized collection of large amounts of structured data, designed and intended to support decision making in organizations. The import of information and knowledge from a data warehouse is a complex process that requires understanding of the logical schema structure and the underlying business environment. According to Hinshaw, a data warehouse appliance, applied to business intelligence, â€Å"is a machine capable of retrieving valuable decision-aiding intelligence from terabytes of data in seconds or minutes versus hours or days†. The appliances represent the difference between decision-making using either stale data or the freshest information possible. With sources from Wikipedia, a more standard definition of the data warehouse appliance is an integrated collection of hardware and software designed for a specific purpose that typically involves the high throughput of data and analytic functions. It typically consists of integrated set of servers, operating systems, data storage facilities, database management systems (DBMS), and software that is pre-installed and pre-optimized for data warehousing. DW appliances provide solutions for the mid-to-large volume data warehouse market, offering low-cost performance usually on data volumes within the terabyte range. Due to its cost-effectiveness and efficiency, the data warehouse appliance has become a critical segment of the data warehousing market. A business or an organization can use a data warehouse appliance to optimize various areas of data processing. The main purpose of a DW appliance, in general, is to supplant conventional business intelligence functions, such as warehousing, extract, transform, load (ETL), analysis, and reporting. A true DW appliance is defined as one that does not require fine-tuning, indexing, partitioning, or aggregating, whereas, some other DW appliances use languages such as SQL to facilitate interaction with the appliance at a database request level. With reference to Wikipedia, most data warehouse appliance vendors use massive parallel processing (MPP) architectures to provide high query performance and platform scalability. The MPP architectures consist of independent processors or servers executing in parallel, implementing a â€Å"shared nothing architecture† which provides an effective way to combine multiple nodes within a highly parallel environment. A DW appliance is capable of deploying up to thousands of query processing nodes in one ppliance package, compared to traditional solutions where the cost and complexity of each additional node prevents a high level of hardware parallelism. Leveraging fully integrated data warehouse architecture, a data warehouse appliance can deliver a significant performance advantage, performing up to 100 times faster than general-purpose data warehousing systems. Maturation With reference to Hinshaw, data warehouse appliance is specifically designed for the streaming workload of business intelligence and is built based on commodity components. It integrates hardware, DBMS and storage into one opaque device and combines the best elements of SMP and massively parallel processing (MPP) approaches into one that allows a query to be processed in the best possible optimized way. A data warehouse appliance is fully compatible with existing BI applications, tools and data, through standard interfaces. It is simple to use and has an extremely low cost of ownership. The development of standardized interfaces, protocols and functionality is one of the most important trends in BI. In comparison to about a decade ago, there are a wealth of tools and applications using these standardized interfaces including MicroStrategy, Business Objects, Cognos, SAS and SPSS. And these are coupled with ETL tools having standardized interfaces such as Ab Initio, Ascential and Informatica. The appliances work seamlessly with these tools and other in-house applications. A data warehouse appliance is truly scalable. The bottlenecks are the speeds of the internal buses, internal networks, and disk transfer in BI, whereas in transactional workloads, scalability is limited primarily by CPU. Reliability, which is provided by the homogenous nature of an appliance – all parts of the system coming from a vendor, is also critical. A data warehouse appliance also provides simplicity for the administrators, in that it allows administrators spend a more productive time in troubleshooting complex database systems. And DBAs can be deployed to assist end users doing real-time BI. A data warehouse appliance offers the lowest cost of ownership as it has one source and one vendor, thereby reducing costs associated with support. Businesses and organizations will run more efficiently with the simple, efficient solution provided by a data warehouse appliance. Benefits Data warehouse appliances provide freedom to the business user. With patch-work systems, users are limited in the queries they can run due to the time required to run them. And with the time required to run a complex query reduced to seconds, users can not only run their old analysis with more iterations, but have the time to devise and run entirely new sets of analysis on granular data. With sources from Wikipedia, some researched benefits of DW appliance are briefly discussed as follows; Reduction in costs – As a data warehouse grows, the total cost of ownership of the data warehouse consists of initial entry costs, maintenance costs, and the cost of changing capacity. DW appliances offer low entry and maintenance cost. Parallel performance – DW appliances provide a compelling price/performance ratio. The vendors use several distribution and partitioning methods to provide parallel performance. With high performance on highly granular data, DW appliances can address analytics that could previously not meet performance requirements. Reduced Administration – DW appliances can provide a single vendor solution, taking ownership for optimizing the parts and software within the appliance, thereby eliminating the customers costs for integration and regression testing of the DBMS, OS and storage on a terabyte scale. DW appliance reduces administration via automated space-allocation, reduced index-maintenance and reduced tuning and performance analysis. Scalability – DW appliances scale for both capacity and performance. In massive parallel processing architectures, adding servers increases performance as well as capacity. Built-in high availability – Massive parallel processing DW appliance vendors provide built-in high availability via redundancy on components within the appliance. Warm-standby servers, dual networks, dual power-supplies, disk mirroring with fail-over and solutions for server failure are offered by many. Increasingly, business analytics are expected to be used to improve the current cycle, and DW appliances provide quick implementations without the need for regression and integration testing. Also, DW appliances provide solutions for many analytic application uses. Some of these applications include; enterprise data warehousing, super-sized sandboxes isolating power users with resource intensive queries, pilot projects, off-loading projects from the enterprise data warehouse, applications with specific performance or loading requirements, data marts that have outgrown their present environment, turnkey data warehouses, solutions for applications with high data growth and high performance requirements, and applications needing data warehouse encryption. Impact of Data Warehouse Appliances on Businesses and Organization Demand for data warehouse appliances is increasing, and businesses taking advantage of the benefits of this hardware range from a world-wide large-scale business to the smallest individual business. Data virtualization could be a useful partner to appliances, providing a single view of information across multiple appliances. Data virtualization is also useful because it provides a stable reporting layer during normal migration exercises, such as the circumstances during addition of data warehouse appliances to the information infrastructure. As businesses today continue to process extremely large volumes of data, there is always the need to keep data warehousing costs under control while ensuring a superior BI and application performance. Scalability, flexibility, and affordability are essential requirements for designing an infrastructure capable of supporting next-generation BI performance. When asked why the demand for data warehouse appliance is increasing, during an interview, Robert Eve (executive vice president of marketing for Composite Software Inc. ) stated that it is the confluence of three primary drivers at the macro level. The first is â€Å"the well-reported information explosion, and the technical challenges involved in making this information accessible in forms that business decision-makers can easily use†. Secondly, data warehouse appliances are more affordable and appealing, as the costs per terabyte and for support are coming down. And finally, recent advancements in analytics technology, notably in predictive analytics, promise to concur with the massive data volumes. Data warehouse appliances offer numerous advantages some of which are similar to benefits. Amongst the advantages include; more reporting and analytical capabilities – data warehouse appliance are able to handle bigger and more complex query workload, if it executes queries, Cost reductions – data warehouse appliance requires a minimal amount of tuning and optimization of the database server and database design. It is also able to run most queries with a quick speed, Flexibility – it will be easier to implement new user requests if less tuning and optimization is needed. With other database servers, a new query might lead to quite a number of technical changes, such as creating and dropping indexes, repartitioning tables, etc. Sometimes, decision is made not to implement the new request at all, due to the overwhelming work. The need for these additional technical changes is less with a data warehouse appliance. Data warehouse appliances helps support impressive BI deployments. With reference to Hinshaw, real world application examples of the positive impact of DW appliance on businesses are discussed. The rapid growth of call detail records, in the telecommunications industry, creates an imposing amount of data, which makes it difficult for companies to quickly and efficiently analyze customer and call plan information. And traditional approaches have been inefficient in processing queries on even a months data, seriously hampering an organizations ability to perform trend analysis to reduce customer churn and generate timely reports. However, with a DW appliance, the telecom user can analyze customer activity down to the call detail record level over a full years worth of detailed data. Another industry where data warehouse appliances have begun to prove their worth, and are poised to play a bigger role in the future, is the retail. Hinshaw states that Brick-and-mortar and online retailers are capturing great amounts of customer transaction and supply chain information, creating a data explosion that threatens to overwhelm an average retail organization and its current IT infrastructure. But data warehouse appliances enable these retailers to manage and analyze the terabytes of information in near-real time. They are able to use the information to effectively forecast buying patterns, quickly generate targeted promotions and optimize their inventory and supply chain. Business intelligence remains the foundation for the success of decision making in any company. And BI, itself, relies on the underlying database architecture. Eve also presents other real world examples of positive business impact among a broad range of industries. A leading worldwide convenience foods business uses data warehouse appliances and analytic applications to acquire major business benefits in two specific areas. One of which the company optimizes its international network of delivery routes, making the system more efficient and ensuring timely delivery of its products. Secondly, it continuously refines its merchandizing mix daily, on a retail basis, in order to maximize sales and margins. Major League Baseball captures information about every pitch, at-bat, and fielding play within a data warehouse appliance, using this data to predict players’ future on-field performance. This can help teams to evaluate current and free-agent talent, refine coaching and development methods, and determine salaries, hence maximizing their wins. Also, a global freight, transportation, and logistics company uses data warehouse appliances to identify behavioral patterns that indicate potential dissatisfaction within its existing customer base. The customer care group then proactively takes steps to improve satisfaction before they lose their customers. Currently, smaller data warehouse appliance vendors seem to be focusing on adding functionality to their products in order to compete with the mega-vendors. However, it is anticipated that all appliance vendors will be impacted by the trend toward an inexpensive, high-performance, and scalable virtualized data warehouse implementations which use regular hardware and open source software. Conclusion In general, data warehouse appliance is a combination hardware and software product specifically designed for analytical processing. In a traditional data warehouse implementation, the database administrator can spend a significant amount of time tuning and putting structures around the data to get the database to perform well for large sets of users. But with a data warehouse appliance, it is the vendor who is responsible for simplifying the physical database design layer and making sure that the software is tuned for the hardware. In this research, a comprehensive examination/review of the data warehouse appliances, their benefits, and how they positively impact businesses and organizations, was presented. Based on this research, the negative impact of DW appliances on businesses are negligible compared to its positive impact. And there is an increasing demand for DW appliances. I believe that, in the near future, the DW appliances will become the sole platform for all business intelligence applications and requirements. I gained much knowledge and insights from researching this topic, and I intend to further my research on future impacts of DW appliance on businesses.

Economic Contribution of Women Essay Example for Free

Economic Contribution of Women Essay 1. Introduction This short paper aims to highlight the important role women have and can play in economic development. It addresses three questions: what is the evidence base to support investing in women? What are the current constraints on realising the full potential of women in the process of economic development? What are the priority areas of intervention necessary to unblock these constraints? It is focussed on women and on economic development, rather than on the wider issue of gender and development. However, before looking at the evidence base, constraints, and interventions, it will provide a brief context of the evolution of thinking around women and development.1 1. The Evolution of ‘Women in Development’ to ‘Gender and Development’ In the  1970s, research on African farmers noted that, far from being gender neutral, development was gender blind and could harm women. Out of this realization emerged the Women in Development (WID) approach, which constructed the problem of development as being women’s exclusion from a benign process. Women’s subordination was seen as having its roots in their exclusion from the market sphere and their limited access to, and control, over resources. The key was then to place women ‘in’ development by legislatively trying to limit discrimination and by promoting their involvement in education and employment. The WID approach led to resources being targeted at women and made particularly women’s significant productive or income generating contribution, more visible. Their reproductive 1 This paper has been prepared with inputs from the membership of the SDSN Thematic Group on the â€Å"Challenges of Social Inclusion: Gender, Inequalities and Human Rights†, including: Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua (University of Ghana, Legon), Jan Egeland (Human Rights Watch), Todd Minerson (White Ribbon Campaign), Richard Morgan (UNICEF), Sanam Naraghi-Anderlin (International Civil Society Action Network), Elisabeth Prà ¼gl (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies), Magdalena Sepà ºlveda Carmona (UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights), and Valmaine Toki (UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues). contribution was less well emphasised. While WID advocated for greater gender equality, it did not tackle the real structural problem: the unequal gender roles and relations that are at the basis of gender subordination and women’s exclusion. This approach also focussed on what have been termed practical gender needs, such as providing better access to water, which would reduce the amount of time women and girls must spend in domestic activities and thus allow them more time for education or employment. There was no questioning why collecting water has been constructed as a female responsibility, or why improved access to water is a need of women and girls only. In the 1980s, the Gender and Development (GAD) approach arose out of the critique of WID. GAD recognised that gender roles and relations are key to improving women’s lives, with the term ‘gender’ suggesting that a focus on both women and men is needed. More recently, the need to understand how gender intersects with other characteristics such as age, ethnicity and sexuality has been noted. The GAD approach recognises that it is not sufficient to add women and girls into existing processes of development but there is also a need to problematise why they are excluded, advocating that the focus should be on addressing the imbalances of power at the basis of that exclusion. GAD also questions the notion of ‘development’ and its benign nature, implying a need to shift from a narrow understanding of development as economic growth, to a more social or human centred development. GAD projects are more holistic and seek to address women’s strategic gender interests by seeking the elimination of institutionalised forms of discrimination for instance around land rights, or ensuring the right of women and girls to live free from violence, for example (Molyneux 1985; Moser 1989). The 1990s witnessed the ‘rise of rights’ as many NGOs and agencies adopted a rights-based approach to development. Rights increase the recognition that women’s demands are 3 legitimate claims. The most notable success for the women’s movement has perhaps been the establishment of sexual and reproductive rights as such. Within this has been recognition of women’s right to live free from violence, and a broadening of understanding of violence against women from ‘domestic’ to ‘gender based’. There was also a shift in understanding development as meaning economic development to a more holistic social development focus, yet economic growth remains the main driver. For the majority of large development organisations and agencies, the WID approach has now largely been replaced by GAD, which has been institutionalised within the notion of gender mainstreaming. Mainstreaming  involves ensuring that a gendered perspective is central to all activities, including planning, implementation and monitoring of all programmes, projects, and legislation. While critiqued if undertaken merely as a ‘tick box’ exercise, gender mainstreaming offers a potential for placing gender at the heart of development. However, women’s ‘rights’, particularly sexual and reproductive health rights, are not universally accepted as rights, and violence against women remains prevalent across the globe, and women still lack full and equal participation in economic and political life. Mainstreaming has yet to succeed and there is a need for a continued prioritisation of integrating women into development. 2. Evidence on the Importance of Women to Economic Development The most influential evidence on the importance of women to economic development has come from research used to support the World Bank’s ‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategy’ launched in 2001 (Dollar and Gatti 1999; Klasen 1999). This research highlighted that societies that discriminate by gender tend to experience less rapid economic growth and poverty reduction than societies that treat males and females more 4 equally, and that social gender disparities produce economically inefficient outcomes (World Bank 2001a). For example, it is shown that if African countries had closed the gender gap in schooling between 1960 and 1992 as quickly as East Asia did, this would have produced close to a doubling of per capita income growth in the region (WBGDG 2003). The primary pathways through which gender systems affect growth are by influencing the productivity of labour and the allocative efficiency of the economy (World Bank 2002). In terms of productivity, for example, if the access of women farmers to productive inputs and human capital were on a par with men’s access, total agricultural output could increase by an estimated 6 to 20 percent (World Bank 2001b). In terms of allocative efficiency, while increases in household income are generally associated with reduced child mortality risks, the marginal impact is almost 20 times as large if the income is in the hands of the mother rather than the father (WBGDG 2003). Identification of women as being a reliable, productive and cheap labour force makes them the preferred workforce for textiles and electronic transnational corporations. Perception of women as ‘good with money,’ including being better at paying back loans, has led them to be targeted in microfinance programmes. Recognition of women as more efficient distributors of goods and services within the household has led to them being targeted with resources aimed at alleviating poverty, such as cash transfer programmes. The above shows how the justification for including women in development in economic growth has been an efficiency argument, with equity concerns being 5  somewhat secondary. Critics suggest this instrumentalist approach to engendering development, while bringing economic growth gains, will not fundamentally change the position and situation of women. It is important to note that while gender equality will help bring economic growth, economic growth will not necessarily bring gender equality. Advancing gender equality requires strengthening different dimensions of women’s autonomy: economic and political autonomy, full citizenship and freedom from all forms of violence, and sexual and reproductive autonomy (Alpà ­zar Durà ¡n 2010). 3. Constraints on Realising the Full Potential of Women in the Process of Economic Development Investment in the human capital, health and education, of women and girls is presented as a key way forward as witnessed by the MDGs. The logic is that ‘educated, healthy women are more able to engage in productive activities, find formal sector employment, earn higher incomes and enjoy greater returns to schooling than are uneducated women†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (WBGDG 2003: 6). Educated women are more likely to invest in the education of their own children, and they are also more likely to have fewer children. Thus investment in human capital has positive short and longer term/inter-generational outcomes and is good for both productivity gains and limiting unsustainable population growth. However, attention has narrowly focussed on ensuring the equal access of girls to primary education. Inequality of access to secondary and higher education persists, as does the limited engagement of girls in the study of science and technology, limiting  the future life and employment options of adolescent girls. Willingness to school, feed, and provide healthcare to girls is far more strongly determined by income and the costs of providing these services than is the case for boys. Sen’s ‘100 million missing women’ is testimony to how girls are discriminated against in terms of the allocation of household resources to the point that it creates a gender imbalance in some societies and countries. Families are often unwilling to invest in the education of girls if this investment is not perceived as bringing them direct economic gains girls are valued only as wives and mothers, and/or marriage transfers any potential future gains from this investment to another family. As 1 in 7 girls marries before the age of 18 in the developing world (UNFPA 2012), early and forced marriage remains a key issue and an important factor limiting young women’s engagement in both education and economic activities. Justice institutions, from the police to the courts, continue to deny women’s right to justice. Women and girls remain unable to access justice, given that in many countries there are still laws that discriminate against women in relation to the family, property, citizenship and employment. Justice systems also do not meet the needs of specific groups of women, such as indigenous women who are discriminated against and face violence in the public and private spheres based on both gender and race (UNPFII 2013). Cultural factors limit women’s rights and engagement in the workplace. Religion still has a key role to play in determining gender norms in many cultures and fundamentalist views across the spectrum of religions threaten or deny women’s rights, including rights related to sex and sexualities, and to mobility and employment. Economic fundamentalism, policies and practices that privilege profits over people, also deny women their rights as workers and to work. While political culture is important for bringing change, women continue to have a limited voice at the local and national levels, and women  are not able to fully participate in formal systems of power. In the majority of cultures unequal gender and generational relations exist within households with the male ‘head’ having a high level of control. A woman going out to work is often read by others as meaning the man is unable to provide for his family, making men reluctant and thus limiting women’s engagement in paid work through violence or the threat of violence. When women do engage in paid work, it can improve their voice in the home and ability to influence household decision-making. It can also lead to conflict in the home, especially if women earn more than men, or women’s employment coincides with men’s under or unemployment. In the last decades, a ‘crisis in masculinity’ has been recognised, relating to the changes in men’s roles and positions through processes of globalisation, suggesting a need to focus attention on men if these changes are to bring transformative progress towards greater equality, rather than further harm women. Women continue to suffer limited mobility and, in some cultures, women are not able to leave the home if not accompanied by a man, effectively negating any type of paid employment. Even when women are allowed to leave, they may face verbal, sexual and physical abuse from unknown males for being in the street and face gossip and stigma within their own communities. The growing levels and extremes of violence against women have been captured in the notion of femicide – the killing of women by men just for being women, including ‘honour killings.’ In Mexico for example, the term femicide has been used to describe female factory workers being killed for going against gender norms and engaging in paid work outside the home. One in three women across the globe will experience violence at some stage in her lifetime. Violence against women and girls, or the threat of violence, be it physical, sexual or emotional, both in the private and public spheres, at the hands of known and unknown men, 8 remains a key limiting factor to women’s mobility and engagement in  processes of development. Women who work at home have limited opportunities. While women are very engaged in agriculture, this is generally subsistence rather than cash crops. It is estimated that women own only 1% of property and lack of rights to inherit or own land, which severely limits women’s engagement in larger scale cash crop production. Even when women can inherit land, the need for male protection or labour may mean they will give the land to male relatives. Lack of land ownership may also stop them participating in schemes to improve agricultural output, while lack of wider assets disallows them from accessing loans. Given their lower asset base, women farmers may be most affected by climate change, and while having knowledge of how to adapt, they may be least able to adopt appropriate adaptation strategies. World Bank research has highlighted how the poor are less likely to engage in higher riskreturn activities and the result is that the return on their assets is 25-50% lower than for wealthier households (Holzmann and Jà ¸rgensen 2000). While not a gendered analysis, women’s relative poverty, lack of assets, and lack of experience might mean they are particularly risk averse keeping them from higher return economic initiatives. However, women have been shown to use micro-finance effectively to develop small enterprises and are recognised as good at paying back loans. When women are in paid employment, they are more likely to be engaged in part time rather than full time work, in the informal rather than the formal sector, and across the globe women earn less than men for comparable work. 9 During the recent financial crisis, measures to protect ‘the poor’ through employment programmes have not considered the gendered dimensions of crisis, yet women may have been more severely affected than men and in more diverse ways. Economic and financial crises cannot be seen in isolation from food, fuel, water, environment, human rights, and care crises (AWID 2012). Women face particular risks during disaster, which climate change may increase, and during conflict. In particular, the risk of physical and sexual violence increases. Agencies not only fail to protect women and girls, but their  reproductive and particularly their productive needs are often overlooked in crisis response and peacebuilding. While remunerated work is important for women, it is important to remember that women still undertake the bulk of unpaid work in the home, household plot, or family business. They have the primary responsibility for caring for children and older people as well responsibility for undertaking activities such as collection of water or firewood. Women play the key role in the ‘care economy’, which not only provides care to the young, old and the sick, but also is vital for ensuring a productive workforce. As this work is not remunerated, it is undervalued and lies outside general conceptualisations of the economy. Women engaged in paid work often face a double work day, since they may only be ‘allowed’ to work as long as their domestic duties are still fulfilled. This means women are time poor and the time burden may impact on their health and wellbeing. To alleviate this burden and free women to enter paid work, daughters may be taken out of school to cover the domestic work, with related negative impacts on their education and ability to seek remunerated work in the future. Women’s continued inability to control their own fertility means that childbirth limits their ability to engage in productive activities. Even when reproductive health services are 10 provided, this is not enough to ensure women’s ability to access them. Men may see the decision over if and when to have children to be their decision, and large numbers of children may be read as a sign of male fertility and power, which becomes more important when masculinity is threatened. In many cultures, discussion of sexualities remains taboo, denying access and rights to those who do not conform to the heterosexual ‘norm’. The sexual and reproductive rights of adolescent girls in particular may be overlooked and they may be denied access to reproductive health services if they are unmarried. Research establishes a link between education and women’s ability to control their fertility. Studies also show that paid work can promote greater understanding of sexual and reproductive rights among women. Women’s socially constructed altruistic behaviour means that economic resources that enter the household via women are more likely to be spent on household and children’s needs. Female-headed households may not be the ‘poorest of the poor’ as popularly constructed, since women who live with men may suffer ‘secondary poverty’ the household overall is not poor but, as the man withholds income for personal consumption, women and children within the household are poor (Chant 2006). When women earn, men may withhold even more of their income, leaving women and children with access to the same level of resources but improving the position of women through greater control of those resources. This ‘irresponsibility’ of men has meant women have been targeted within poverty reduction and social policy initiatives. While the targeting of women with resources is welcome, the associated â€Å"feminisation of obligation and responsibility† (Chant 2008) for delivering policy outcomes may not only marginalise men but add further to women’s existing triple burden of reproductive, productive, and community management work. It may privilege their reproductive over their productive role and reinforce women as mothers rather than workers. Care needs to be taken to ensure that programmes serve women’s needs and women are not merely placed at the service of these policy agendas (Molyneux 2007). It is important to remember that policies to promote economic development that include women but do not tackle the structural inequalities at the basis of their exclusion may bring growth gains, but will not necessarily bring gender equality gains. 4. Priority Areas of Intervention Necessary to Unblock these Constraints Women’s groups and movements across the globe continue to promote as fundamental the need to respect and defend women’s sexual and reproductive health rights. Women’s groups and movements also continue to be fundamental to promoting these rights, but many find themselves under threat for this focus. Sexual and reproductive rights are critical for social and economic development. Without these rights, women and adolescent girls cannot make decisions around fertility, repeated childbirth keeps them from income generating activities and reduces productivity, and early and forced marriage keeps young women from education and employment. Sexual, emotional and physical violence and the threat of violence limits women’s mobility, confines women to the home, and keeps them from engaging fully in processes of social and economic development. Men and boys can have a role to play in the prevention of genderbased violence and the promotion of gender equality. Threats to women’s rights exist on many levels, including those posed by culture, religion, and tradition, as well as processes of globalisation and economic change. A right gained is not a right maintained unless there is constant monitoring of rights. There is a need to strengthen women’s access to both formal and informal justice systems, and ensure these are responsive to advancing all women’s equal rights, opportunity, and participation. Improving women’s political voice is also crucial here. Women’s responsibility for unpaid domestic work makes them time poor as well as more economically dependent on men, yet is vital for ensuring a healthy and productive workforce. While investment in infrastructure such as water, sanitation and electricity is important to ease the time burden associated with these tasks, it does not change how unpaid work and the care economy is conceptualised and valued. Financial, environmental, and health crises intensify the need for care services with the care burden falling disproportionately on women and girls. Policies to provide affordable, quality child care and adequate healthcare services would not only free women to enter paid employment, but also help change care work from being understood as a ‘domestic’ responsibility to a collective responsibility. This change in how care work is conceptualised and valued should be a longer-term goal. In the short term, there is a need to create full, decent productive employment opportunities for women and access to finance, as well as continue to provide social protection, and more importantly promote and value women as ‘good with money’. Key for economic growth is the promotion of women’s economic rights which entails promoting a range of women’s rights: their sexual and reproductive rights and rights to education, to mobility, to voice, to ownership, and to live free from violence. References Alpà ­zar Durà ¡n, L. Keynote speech at High-Level Roundtable â€Å"The implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the outcomes of the 23rd special session of the General Assembly and its contribution to shaping a gender perspective towards the full realization of the MDGs. 54th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, United Nations Headquarters NY, March 2010. AWID. Getting at the Roots: Re-integrating human rights and gender equality in the post2015 development agenda. Association for Women’s Rights in Development, October 2012. Chant, S. Re-thinking the feminization of poverty in relation to aggregate gender indices, Journal of Human Development (7 (2), p.201-220), 2006. Chant, S. The â€Å"feminisation of poverty† and the â€Å"feminisation† of anti-poverty programmes: Room for revision? Journal of Development Studies (44 (2), p.165–197), 2008. Dollar, D and Gatti, R. Gender Inequality, Income, and Growth: Are Good Times Good for Women? Gender and Development Working Papers, No. 1, May 1999. Holzmann, R. and S. Jà ¸rgensen. Social Risk Management: A new conceptual framework for social protection and beyond, Social Protection Discussion Paper Series 0006, Social Protection Unit, Human Development Network, The World Bank, February 2000. Klasen, S. Does Gender Inequality Reduce Growth and Development? Evidence from CrossCountry Regressions, Gender and Development Working Papers No. 7, November 1999. Molyneux, M. Two cheers for conditional cash transfers, IDS Bulletin (38 (3), p.69–75), 2007. Molyneux, M. Mobilization without emancipation? Womens interests, the state, and revolution in Nicaragua, Feminist Studies (11 (2), p.227–254), 1985 Moser, C. Gender planning in the Third World: Meeting  practical and strategic gender needs, World Development (17 (11), p.1799–1825), 1989. Sen, A. More than 100 million women are missing, New York Review of Books (37 (20), 1990. UNFPA, From Childhood to Womanhood: Meeting the Sexual and Reproductive Health Needs of Adolescent Girls. Fact Sheet: Adolescent Girls’ Sexual and Reproductive Health Needs, 2012. UNPFII. Study on the extent of violence against women and girls in terms of article 22(2) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Issues (E/C.19/2013/9), 2013. WBGDG. Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals, World Bank Gender and Development Group, April 2003. World Bank. Social Protection Strategy: From Safety Net to Springboard, Washington DC: World Bank, 2001a. . Engendering Development Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001b . Integrating Gender into the World Bank’s Work: A Strategy for Action. Washington DC: World Bank, 2002. 15

Development Of Geography As An Academic Discipline

Development Of Geography As An Academic Discipline In this essay I will be looking at the development of geography as an academic discipline, and then I will be discussing the role that theory has had in the development of geography. I will research past events and influences, to see how they have affected geography as an idiographic subject and changed the subject into a spatial science and effectively into a core academic discipline. The discipline of geography is among the most ancient of sciences. Geography can be traced back to Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar who lived around 276-196 B.C and who is often called the father of geography. Alexander Von Humboldt was a German geographer from 1769-1859, commonly known as the father of modern geography. As well as Humboldt, Carl Ritter is also considered as one of the founders of modern geography. Both Humboldt and Ritter shared similar views. The naturalist Charles Darwin wrote a book called the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. It proved an inspiration to many geographers, who saw in Darwins idea of natural selection the possibility of a general theory of man-land relationshipsà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ so man needed to adopt modes of living which were consonant with the environment in which he livedà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ (Graves, 1975) Geography branched out as a new light and the thought process was now in place. Yet Darwin never claimed to be a geographer, with his main concentration being botany. Humboldt and Carl Ritter then co-founded a Geographical Society in Germany in 1874, bringing together Humboldts principle of a systematic approach and Ritters regional approach which were key methods of geography at this time. Regional geography is the study of world regions. It looks at key characteristics and how one place is specific and unique compared to another. Another German geography, Freidrich Ratzel was the first person to use the term Lebensraum, which was used by Adolf Hitler. One of Ratzels students Ellen Semple studied under Ratzel and was heavily influenced by his ideas, publishing Influences of Geographic Environment in 1911. Another one of Ratzels students, Ellsworth Huntington also applied Ratzels theory of regional geography to the reasoning behind the rise and fall of civilisation. Despite being one of the oldest disciplines, in todays society, geography struggles to define itself as an academic subject. Over the past few decades, geography has had to forge its way to stand as a fundamental scientific subject. In the early 19th century, many geography scholars believed that environment had a key role on the living marvels. The theory of Environmental Determinism the view that the physical environment sets limits on human environment was being questioned due to claims of its lack in the intellectual relevance and faults in its descriptions of certain locations. This led on to the theory of environmental possibilism. Possibilism states that the environment does have an effect on society, however it is not deterministic and humans can heavily influence the environment around them. By the 1950s environmental determinism was virtually history and environmental possibilism had now taken over as central theory. The first few steps forward for geography were the opening of the first geographical institutions, such as the establishment of the first institution by Humboldt and Ritter in Germany in 1874, The National Geographic Society in 1888 and also the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830 in Britain. The Royal Geographical Society is an institution to encourage the progression of geographical science. The Society also devoted much of its energy to education, and was responsible for both the incorporation of the study of geography in schools at the turn of the 20th century, and for the first university positions in the discipline. (Royal Geographical Society website.) The Society is the largest Geographical Society in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It supports and promotes geographical research, field training, education and teaching. These associations were the grounding for geography to start to grow and develop as the funded key and essential research. They also promot ed geography in schools and universities, leading to the first university lecturer appointed in 1888. In 1919, Geography was the established as a Bachelor of Arts degree, and Cambridge University appointed its first professor in 1933, which was a great step forward for geography being such an influential place of learning. This appointment acted as a catalyst, and after this, many other universities started to follow suit. By the 1930s Britain had 44 University geography departments. However, there was a slump in the early 1940s when geography hit crisis point. Geography departments started to deteriorate as geography as an academic topic struggled to stand as a basic University subject. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦geography as a subject is frequently misunderstood by the non-geographersà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ (Graves, 1975) This meant that other discipline professors and educators questioned the importance of geography. During the eighteenth century, geography began to be taught in certain institutions of higher learning, though the substance of what was being taught varied immensely in quality. (Graves, 1975) This was followed by Harvard University abolishing geography as a subject in 1948. Being such an important and significant place of learning, this eradication had an adverse impact on the way geography was viewed. It lost its place as a highly regarded subject, and was starting to be regarded as overly descriptive w ith no relevance to science, the Greeks named it as a description of the earth. It was at this point that questions were raised about the importance of geography and whether it answers the whys? and hows?. At this time, geography had no documented split between the human and physical side. Also, à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦geography in academic institutions straddled the arts and the sciences. This made it hard for geography to have a true factual definition. Society started to wonder whether it sat as a science or a humanity subject. These questions and queries made it increasingly difficult for geography to have a good platform on which to grow. Essentially, the subject needed to be defined, and this would entail more detailed research. With more advanced research, geography started to branch out with the division of both physical and human geography into contemporary geographies. Henderson (1968) the adjectival geography: agriculture geography, urban geography, social geography, settlement geography and so on. These numerous modern geographies started to make it easier to for geography to be defined. At last there were specialised areas that focused on one particular area of geography. Parallel to this trend towards specialization, there developed a tendency to use quantitative techniques of analysis. (Graves, 1975) The importance for technology to develop in society had increased massively by the end of World War II, which meant there was a gap for geography to grow. This gap led to the quantitative revolution, which was one of the major turning points of modern geography. This revolution began in the 1950s, and marked a swift change in the method behind geographical research making geography into a spatial science and shifting from an idiographic subject to an empirical law making one. It made laws that applied to large groups of people and individuals, and established broad generalisations. It was a turning point, and geography started to grasp attention once again. It brought to light new determinism models and mathematical equations to answer hypotheses that could be used in teaching, and helped to define geography, making it able to answer the more logical questions and respond in more depth. Geography could again stand as a strong scientific discipline in schools and universities. The subject started gaining popularity again and Universities began to recognise the value of geographic study and training this provided more classes and degree opportunities. The use of fieldwork started to be used in schools in the 1950s, as a key method of teaching. Fieldwork is an effective teaching method in geography is an interactive fun way for people to learn and experience what they are learning at first hand. It is an important method of learning as fieldwork teaches things that cannot be taught or learned in class. However, disappointingly the focus on fieldwork started to weaken as it à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ is not promoted in educational institutions because of factors such as time to cover comprehensive curricula, financial constraints, legal issues and commitment by educators. Factors such as these had the effect that the inclusion of fieldwork declined in some schools; however, with the help of funding fieldwork is still a very important and prominent part of teaching geography whenever possible. Geography is unique in that it is not artificial. It is not something that textbook writers had composed for students to study. Geography is alive, and something that is relevant and we use in our daily lives. Fieldwork started to make a real impact in higher education in 1985. It gave people transferrable skills, including Project design, organisational skills, leadership skills, group skills and student participation.(Royal Geographical Society website) This is why fieldwork is vital, it helps pupils understand and picture the subject for them. Fieldwork also put research and findings into practise. In undertaking field work, students are effectively carrying out innovative research over and above what could be achieved in a classroom. The president of the American Geographical Society, Jerome E. Dobson, president of the American Geographical Society argues that geographic tools allow for scientific advancement and therefore geography deserves a place among the fundamental sciences, but more importantly more of a role in education. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦most academics in the United States considered geography a marginal disciplineà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ (Jill Freund Thomas) In May 1993, Roger Down worked towards making research in geography education to be an integral part of work. In his own words, The need for research in geography education: it would be nice to have some data. (Downs, 1994b:57). In the UK, The Geography Education Research Collective is à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦dedicated to the promotion of geography education through research and publication. (http://www.geography.org.uk/gtip/gereco/) 13 teachers come together every four years with the resolution of creating research in geography education. It is a UK based association and was first set up in 1893. The field of geography education is sadly lacking in empirical data that might inform and underpin decisions about standard setting, curriculum design, materials development, teaching strategies, and assessment procedures. Large quantities of high-quality data are necessary if geography is to be successfully implemented in the education systemà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ We need a new attitude towards researchà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ In conclusion I believe that geography will continue to grow and develop with the discoveries of new modern geographies due to the enormous amount of scientific research that is now able to be undertaken. The development of new technologies has helped geography turn into an academic discipline as it supports research making research easier to carry out, and getting results which are far more precise. In the future technology will continue to advance and thus continue to be included and promoted in school curriculums. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦the most important change which has occurred is the realization that any progress in understanding phenomena studied by geographers involves the conscious use of scientific methods and the development of a body of theory to explain such phenomena. (Graves, 1975) With advanced technologies, wider geographical research will also be capable and new discoveries will be made. The role of theory in the development of geography in education is very significant as it is the basis of learning and has helped geography thrive over the last couple of centuries. For, if a theory is to be developed, then some understanding of the nature of theory and of the process of theory building was required. (Graves, 1975) Today geography continues to flourish and expand in education. Nowadays, increasing numbers of students chose to study this subject at university, so the trend is set for the popularity and importance of this discipline to continue to go from strength to strength in the future.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald Essay -- essays research papers

Francis Scott Fitzgerald   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is known as one of the most important American writers of his time. He wrote about the troubling time period in which he lived known as the Jazz Age. During this era people were either rich or dreamt of great wealth. Fitzgerald fell into the trap of wanting to be wealthy, and suffered great personal anguish because of these driving forces. I have chosen to write a term paper on F.Scott Fitzgerald. The goal of this presentation is to show F. Scott Fitzgerald's life through his defeats and triumphs and how these situations affected his life as a writer. Fitzgerald's life started in the Midwestern part of the United States. On September 24, 1896, he was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. F. Scott Fitzgerald was of Irish heritage on both sides and was distantly related to Francis Scott Key, for whom he is named, and to Maryland aristocracy. His parents, Edward Fitzgerald of the Glen Mary Farm near Rockville, Maryland and Mary McQuillan of St. Paul wed February 13, 1890 in Washington, D.C. Fitzgerald' s maternal grandfather was a very successful wholesale merchant. His grandfather's early death and his father's inability to keep a job, forced the family to be extremely dependent on the wealth of his grandfather's estate. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy as a child. In 1911 he entered the Newman School in Hackensack, NJ. Growing up with a father who was out of work and who relied on his wife's inheritance gave Fitzgerald a mixed feeling of guilt and shame and yet he felt love for both his parents. These inner conflicts in his early life could have contributed to his inability to manage his finances, along with his constant obsession of gaining extreme wealth.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Fitzgerald later went to Princeton University, where writing and football were his main interests. It was there that he met friends Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. Fitzgerald was too small to play football so he joined a fraternity called the triangle club, the second most prestigious cliche on campus, football being first. After Princeton, Fitzgerald was quoted as saying to a friend â€Å"I want to be the greatest writer who ever lived don't you (Bruccoli, 1981).† In 1917, Fitzgerald joined the army and prepared to fight in World War I. It was soon after his mobilization that he sold his fir... ... ceaselessly into the past† (Grolier Encyclopedia, 1993). Showing his failed attempts to reach back into the past made him into someone who felt he had no control upon his destiny, because it could never be as successful as his past. He did know that his work would have a permanent claim upon the American Literary World. Fitzgerald's life mirrored his novels. His live was filled love and tragedy. He pursued his dreams, and in real life, often lived those dreams. He longed to capture his youth and its purity. He produced thousands of short stories, often times to support their frivolous lifestyles as well as to tell their stories. Many scholars have critiqued his work and their desire to interpret Fitzgerald's work line the shelves of libraries. The Great Gatsby is a Great American Classic in which hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year to high school and college students every where. Much of his work has been translated into 35 languages. It's ironic that more of Fitzgerald's books are sold every year than were sold during his lifetime. Sometimes it takes more than a lifetime to reach your goals and Fitzgerald found a way to accomplish his goals without living forever.

Technology Ethic: Stem Cells Essay -- Research Science Biology Essays

Technology Ethic: Stem Cells Stem Cell: Stem cells can be thought of as blank slates or cells that have yet to become specialized. They can be transformed to become cells with special functions. History/Background of Stem Cells: In the mid 1960's, R. G. Edwards and colleagues at Cambridge University began studying differentiation of rabbit embryonic cells in an artificial environment. They manipulated these embryonic cells into specific types of form such as connective tissue and muscle neurons. Richard Gardner, a graduate student of R. G. Edwards, had furthered the experiment with mice blastocoels. As a result, human blast cysts became available since R. G. Edwards' laboratory in the early 1980s. In 1986, Peter Hollands, another graduate student of Edwards, demonstrated that mouse embryonic stem cells could colonize and repair damaged tissues of the haematopoietic system in adult mice. In 1998, James Thomson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin successfully isolated and grew human embryonic stem cells. At John Hopkins University, John Gearhart successfully isolated human germ cells. From 1999 to 2000, researchers continued to manipulated cells from adult mouse tissues. Types Of Stem Cells: Stem cells can be classified into tree main types: oEmbryonic Stem (ES) Cells oEmbryonic Germ (EG) Cells oAdult Stem (AS) Cells Embryonic Stem Cell: ES cells are undifferentiated cells derived from the inner cell mass of the blast cyst. They are the original cells of our body tissues. ES cells have the potential to transform into 200 different specialized cell types. Human embryonic stem cells are derived from fertilized embryos which are less than a week old. In November of... ...ind. A young woman paralyzed in a car accident now can move her legs and toes as a result of having her own immune system cells injected into her spinal cord. Two children born without immune systems now have functioning ones because of a bone-marrow stem cell treatment. After analyzing stem cell development, I feel that research on ES cells should be stopped because of the many risks involved. Whereas the research on AS cells should carry on for it opposes no hazard to anyone. References: http://www.nih.gov/news/stemcell/primer.htm#5 http://www.news.wisc.edu/packages/stemcells/ http://bioethics.gov/topics/stemcells_index.html http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/stemcell/ Mahendra S. Rao, Stem Cells and CNS Development (Contemporary Neuroscience) Kursad Turksen, Embryonic Stem Cells: Methods and Protocols Daniel R. Marshak, Stem Cell Biology

International and Strategic Marketing Essay

â€Å"If you stop building stars, which we never do, you wouldn’t be in business. †- (McMahon, 2010) Dreaming of big and successful businesses, would be a convenient task to do but when it comes to fulfill it, troubles, pain, hardships and hurdles are already in attendance to welcome. Starting up a business or even launching it in other countries is not as easy as it may sound. Choosing an industry, that matches ones interests and wants is definitely a thorny job. A slightest decision or choice made if goes wrong affects the whole business and its profitability especially when the purpose is to expand it internationally. Taking a business from bottom to the peak is another tough job that’ can not be possible if proper guidance is not present. Many small organizations became huge after expanding there business internationally and now they are taken in the list of the top and the most successful organizations of the planet. All the success is not achieved in a day or month but wise and effective decisions and appropriate budget is needed to be there not only these but also the proper allocations of the finances help businesses in climbing up the ladder. The expansion of the business is not only obliging to the entrepreneurs but also to those who work for the organization. Every person would desire to be associated with a company that has a name recognized internationally. As we are related to the fast food chain industry, and up till now we have opened up almost one hundred and thirteen franchises all around the country, due to which our organization has been able to make attractive profits and a good will among the general public. This could’ve also be done in another way by increasing the number of food items we serve in our menu but again this way the business will remain to be in a limit of only a single country and on the second thought we already have a menu carrying more than hundred dishes covering almost all cuisines. The idea of launching our business world wide may sound a big and a tough step but it’ll help the organization to expand more and also gain recognition on an international level we have examples present around us like Mc Donald’s, KFC, Coffee Day, Domino’s and others. The business will be able to maintain its good will among the international consumers. This is going to create an image of business success in the minds of people; besides this business expansion is usually seen as a prominent feature of the entrepreneur’s business efforts and also the efforts made by one to fulfill its vision. It’ll also help the business to increase the percentage of its share in the market. Not only will this but also assist our business to gain more capital through making more shareholders in the organization. By expanding our business internationally we’ll be able to produce more customers. Opening up a franchise will result in hiring more employees to take care of the business. This will not only help us but also will create job opportunities for others, causing more interests of other people regarding the business. There will be certain incentives given to the business, like tax exemptions, permit to use of property, granting loans if needed and others. The chances of easily benefiting ourselves from the economies of scale will amplify. To expand our business internationally all the strategies have been under gone. Having appropriate money for the expansion and also depicting the future of the business on an international level or how should we expand our business geographic wise or should the business line be extended? These are some important strategies made for a proper expansion of a business. (K, 2010) Keeping all these advantages in mind the idea is to introduce our fast food franchise in a developed country India. The analysis and studies have shown that fat food industry there is booming at an extreme fast pace that is the fast food industry is flourishing by 40% per year. Studies have shown that today more than 10 million workers are employed only in the food preparation and serving all over the world and the employee turnover can grow up to 200%. (Fast food industry in India, 2009). Moreover our fast food restaurant will get a chance to pioneer in those specific dishes that we provide domestically only. The Indian food industry is expected to generate billions of dollars in the coming years. No wonder the economy of India is growing incredibly giving chances to international business persons like us to expand our business in the lad of India. Fast food industry has been a blessing to Indian economy and is very much successful in financial ways and also in helping the quick service food to gain popularity among the citizens. (Shanker, 2010). We not only see the international organization flourishing there but also some big business tycoon’s have been generated from India like Tata Birla, Ambani and others renowned. India positions second in agriculture yield, like foresting, logging and fishing all of this contributes 17% of the Indian GDP in 2009 a slight decrease in its share in GDP, yet is the largest economic sector and also acts a vital role in the socio economic development in India (CIA-2007) The access supply of raw materials to the fast food industry in this country is present; because of the changing climate its soil holds plant variety with almost 15000 species of higher plants (Paroda and Mal, 1989) because of this reason other international fast food chains are flooding into this country. The home growing competition with other MNCs does have not only helped us in learning a lot of things but has also made us able to figure out our mistakes and improve them. We not only are improving inland but also that we have a number of people that are expertise in product development, quality standards and service levels. We have the best recruiters present in our organization. This way they’ll help in choosing the best management for us internationally. Coming up with a perfect and flawless franchise in another country will prominently give a tough competition to other fast food restraints. In many Indian cities families have an exposure to western media and western cuisine further the trend of increasing trend of women joining the workforce will also help us in creating awareness about the western cuisine amongst others who are unaware. But usually the western media accomplishes its job in making them know about our dishes we serve. This way some of our dishes we offer to our customers will not be seem strange or weird to them and they’ll get easily comfortable with the food. The economy of India has been eased up and most of the tariff and non tariff limitations are either lessened or have been completely removed from the country this has made possible for the international businesses to make their room in the Indian market. (Fast Food Industry in India, 2009) There are number of renowned MNC’s thinking India for their growth, and they are ready to bring upon changes on their menu according to Indian wants. KFC has amazingly increased the number of meals made of vegetables with receiving of 15% of its revenues on selling vegetable items. Mediratta, 2006) Not only this but Domino’s the global leader of pizza delivery, is now repositioning itself in dining out restaurants, as it doesn’t make sense to the staff of Domino’s to limit their business as a convenient delivery service provider (Kaul 2006) Hence it is important for all the big organizations generating successful businesses all over the world to bring up some changes and variations in their businesses according to the needs and desires of their customers. The customers are termed to be a key of success to such business. But these days Indian food industry is on a shortage of food processing infrastructure, that’s why the government is offering the foreign entrepreneurs with tax reduction and subsidies. (Everyone’s invited, 2006) With a lot of advantages challenges are equally important and tough to face and our business too have to face these challenges. Dealing with no challenges there are hardly any business that is tend to flourish. Every business, be it small or big has to face the hardships. Opening up our fast food franchise in India sounds and definitely is productive but at the same time we are loaded with extreme challenges. India is said to be the richest in culture and its traditions. There are many areas in India where eating at home is established centuries ago and the tradition is still carried on by the descendents. Creating the awareness of dining out with families and changing their eating habits is a slow moving procedure. Generally there are a set of people, Hindus and also non- Hindus who do not prefer eating meat or avoid all such meals that slow down the physical and spiritual development of a human body like garlic and onion (Fast Food Industry in India, 2009). Considering their opinions and wants and to show the impact of their opinions is necessary yet will be challenging. As our customers always have been our first priority, maintaining our standards it has to be our responsibility to satisfy and delight them through our services and food of their wants. There are people who are now diverging themselves towards the fast food chains due to the western media’s exposure in Asian countries this is a helping hand t us but not exactly solve all our problems as there are some fundamentalists who turn out to be a difficult barrier to cover. They provoke people to stand against such believes and force them to stick to their old eating habits. Dealing with such people and making them aware about our products will definitely be a difficult job to do. In addition to this, India has some strict labor laws because of which it slows down the creation of formal jobs in industries (BBC, 2005) As India is considered to be a hub of multi cultures there are people who belong to a culture where no dishes made of any kind of meat be it sea food or mutton or beef, their belief prohibits them to eat meals mad up of such meats. Cow slaughter is banned in India where Hindus are in majority, it is because what their religion teaches them. Cow they believe is to be holy and they are found to be worshipping them. They consider the beefing process to be forbidden to them by in their religion not only this but according to them not only untouchables, but Indian Muslims and Christians do eat beef. In India cow-worshipping is said to be a vital part of Indian culture (Harris, 2010). Our franchise shall operate in a distinguish way keeping in mind and taking care of all the barriers and limitations provided by the country. It has already mentioned above that customers are the main key to the success of any business, be it large or small. The franchise shall be opened up through out the day as India has an extreme night life in big cities and in such areas fast food culture prevails immensely. Not only this will the prices menu and location all be according to the expediency of the Indian citizens. The menu like always will be diversified and for all the vegetarian lovers our menu will have a vast number of dishes cooked with vegetables. As some people are largely concerned about their meals, and if on the other hand they are against eating beef, for such people a separate vegetarian staff will be appointed so that they remain contended with the hygiene issues if they would have any.