Zora Neale Hurston Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Zora Neale Hurston - Article Example However, much of her work encountered criticism, as what endeavored to be ethnographic authenticity was construed as a perpetuation of black stereotypes made pliant for her white audiences. This combined with her controversial political affiliations in the 1940's led to a rejection of her work for some time. Rather than focus on a chronological review of her literary achievements, this paper will thematically consider portions of her corpus in terms of the various academic realms of analysis to which her work is now subject. Initially, some consideration will be given to the problematics of her presentation of "folk culture and folk language" and the degree those issues have traction in attempting to categorize the work of Hurston. Secondly, a de rigueur explication of how the issues of race and race relations were framed in her work will be given. Finally, the tropes of religion, religious imagery, and spirituality explicitly and implicitly play a significant role in her fiction and as such must be included in any literary analysis of her work. Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, one thematic element which operates consistently in her work is the role of women and her sensitivity to feminist concerns and issues of women's rights. Suffice it to say that many women in her novels and short stories play strong, consistent and even heroic roles and are often concern with other things than finding a husband or having children.

How to Become a Successful Entrepreneur Essay Example for Free

How to Become a Successful Entrepreneur Essay Regardless of your definition of success, there are, oddly enough, a great number of common characteristics that are shared by successful businesspeople. You can place a check beside each characteristic that you feel that you possess. This way, you can see how you stack up. Even if you dont have all of these characteristics, dont fret. Most can be learned with practice and by developing a winning attitude, especially if you set goals and apply yourself, through strategic planning, to reach those goals in incremental and measurable stages. The Home Business Musts Like any activity you pursue, there are certain musts that are required to be successful in a chosen activity. To legally operate a vehicle on public roadways, one must have a drivers license; to excel in sports, one must train and practice; to retire comfortably, one must become an informed investor and actively invest for retirement. If your goal is success in business, then the formula is no different. There are certain musts that have to be fully developed, implemented and managed for your business to succeed. There are many business musts, but this article contains I believe to be some of the more important musts that are required to start, operate and grow a profitable home business. 1. Do what you enjoy. What you get out of your business in the form of personal satisfaction, financial gain, stability and enjoyment will be the sum of what you put into your business. So if you dont enjoy what youre doing, in all likelihood its safe to assume that will be reflected in the success of your businessor subsequent lack of success. In fact, if you dont enjoy what youre doing, chances are you wont succeed. 2. Take what you do seriously. You cannot expect to be effective and successful in business unless you truly believe in your business and in the goods and services that you sell. Far too many home business owners fail to take their own businesses seriously enough, getting easily sidetracked and not staying motivated and keeping their noses to the grindstone. They also fall prey to naysayers who dont ake them seriously because they dont work from an office building, office park, storefront, or factory. Little do these skeptics, who rain on the home business owners parade, know is that the number of people working from home, and making very good annual incomes, has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. 3. Plan everything. Planning every aspect of your home business is not only a must, but also builds habits that every home business owner should develop, implement, and maintain. The act of business planning is so important because it requires you to analyze each business situation, research and compile data, and make conclusions based mainly on the facts as revealed through the research. Business planning also serves a second function, which is having your goals and how you will achieve them, on paper. You can use the plan that you create both as map to take you from point A to Z and as a yardstick to measure the success of each individual plan or segment within the plan. 4. Manage money wisely. The lifeblood of any business enterprise is cash flow. You need it to buy inventory, pay for services, promote and market your business, repair and replace tools and equipment, and pay yourself so that you can continue to work. Therefore, all home business owners must become wise money managers to ensure that the cash keeps flowing and the bills get paid. There are two aspects to wise money management. The money you receive from clients in exchange for your goods and services you provide (income) The money you spend on inventory, supplies, wages and other items required to keep your business operating. (expenses) 5. Ask for the sale. A home business entrepreneur must always remember that marketing, advertising, or promotional activities are completely worthless, regardless of how clever, expensive, or perfectly targeted they are, unless one simple thing is accomplishedask for the sale. This is not to say that being a great salesperson, advertising copywriting whiz or a public relations specialist isnt a tremendous asset to your business. However, all of these skills will be for naught if you do not actively ask people to buy what you are selling. 6. Remember its all about the customer. Your home business is not about the products or services that you sell. Your home business is not about the prices that you charge for your goods and services. Your home business is not about your competition and how to beat them. Your business is all about your customers, or clients, period. After all, your customers are the people that will ultimately decide if your business goes boom or bust. Everything you do in business must be customer focused, including your policies, warranties, payment options, operating hours, presentations, advertising and promotional campaigns and website. In addition, you must know who your customers are inside out and upside down. Become a shameless self-promoter (without becoming obnoxious). One of the greatest myths about personal or business success is that eventually your business, personal abilities, products or services will get discovered and be embraced by the masses that will beat a path to your door to buy what you are selling. But how can this happen if no one knows who you are, what you sell and why they should be buying? Self-promotion is one of the most beneficial, yet most underutilized, marketing tools that the majority of home business owners have at their immediate disposal. 8. Project a positive business image. You have but a passing moment to make a positive and memorable impression on people with whom you intend to do business. Home business owners must go out of their way and make a conscious effort to always project the most professional business image possible. The majority of home business owners do not have the advantage of elaborate offices or elegant storefronts and showrooms to wow prospects and impress customers. Instead, they must rely on imagination, creativity and attention to the smallest detail when creating and maintaining a professional image for their home business.

Evaluate The Usefulness Of The Product Lifecycle To A Firm Essay

In this essay I will look at the advantages and disadvantages of using a product lifecycle, as well as evaluating the usefulness of such a model to a firm. The Product Lifecycle is a part of the portfolio analysis, in which a firm can analyse the stages in a products life. It is a model used to aid with decision making in a firm, and part of the marketing planning process. The shape and length of the lifecycle varies with the different products, as each one is unique. The different stages are launch, growth, maturity, saturation and decline. How useful is the Product Lifecycle?. There are several different uses it holds to a firm. Managers use it because it highlights the need for a firm to change its marketing policies at the different stages of a products life. It then aids them in planning out their marketing strategies. A firm might draw out a Product Lifecycle to identify the stage at which its product is at in the lifecycle, from there they can decide what to do to keep the product alive or to maintain high sales. The Product Lifecycle can be used as an aid to set budgets within a firm as well. For example, if a firm produces a product lifecycle for a product and identifies the stage it is in, this can set budgets for its marketing/promotion department, its production department and its distribution department. For example if a firm sees that its product is still in the growth stages of the lifecycle, they are going to have to invest a lot of money in its development (...

The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations

Research Reports The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations Leaf Van Boven, Thomas Gilovich, and Victoria Husted Medvec The authors examined whether negotiators are prone to an â€Å"illusion of transparency,† or the belief that their private thoughts and feelings are more discernible to their negotiation partners than they actually are. In Study One, negotiators who were trying to conceal their preferences thought that their preferences had â€Å"leaked out† more than they actually did. In Study Two, experienced negotiators who were trying to convey information about some of their preferences overestimated their partners’ ability to discern them. The results of Study Three rule out the possibility that the findings are simply the result of the curse of knowledge, or the projection of one’s own knowledge onto others. Discussion explores how the illusion of transparency might impede negotiators’ success. I most cartoon depictions of negotiators in action (a tiny fraction of the cartoon universe, we admit), negotiators are shown with dialog bubbles depicting their overt comments and thought bubbles revealing their private thoughts. These conventions convey the different levels at which negotiators operate: Some of their wants, wishes, and worries are conveyed to the other side, but some are held back for strategic advantage. Because one task in negotiation is deciding how much information to hold back (Raiffa 1982), Leaf Van Boven is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Campus Box 345, Boulder, Colo. 80309. Email: [email  protected] edu. Thomas Gilovich is a Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, Department of Psychology, Ithaca, N. Y. 15850. Email: [email  protected] edu. Victoria Husted Medvec is the Adeline Barry Davee Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Ill. 60201. Email:[email  protected] orthwestern. edu. 0748-4526/03/0400-0117/0  © 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation Negotiation Journal April 2003 117 it follows that part of the phenomenology of negotiation is monitoring how well one has conveyed what one wants to convey and concealed what one wants to conceal. Do negotiators know how well they have conveyed or concealed their preferences? Typically, negotiators know what they have and have not said, of course, so they may g enerally have a good idea what their partners know about their preferences. But how well calibrated are negotiators’ assessments of what they have conveyed and concealed? We explored one source of potential miscalibration, namely, whether negotiators experience an illusion of transparency, overestimating the extent to which their internal states â€Å"leak out† and are known by others (Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec 1998). Most research on the illusion of transparency shows that people overestimate their ability to conceal private information. But there is also evidence that people experience the illusion when trying to convey private information. Individuals who were asked to convey emotions with facial expressions alone overestimated observers’ ability to discern the expressed emotion (Savitsky 1997). Likewise, participants who were videotaped while exposed to humorous material thought they had been more expressive than observers subsequently rated them as being (Barr and Kleck 1995). These findings suggest that, when trying either to conceal or convey information, negotiators may experience an illusion of transparency, overestimating what their partners know about their preferences. Whether they do so is important, because previous research has shown that the likelihood of (optimal) settlement is often contingent on accurate perceptions of what others know about one’s own preferences (Bazerman and Neale 1992; Raiffa 1982; Thompson 1991). We conducted three different studies to examine whether negotiators experience an illusion of transparency in negotiations. Studies One and Three examined whether novice negotiators trying to conceal their preferences tend to overestimate the likelihood that their negotiation partners would be able to identify those preferences. Study Two investigated whether experienced negotiators attempting to communicate some of their preferences also succumb to an illusion of transparency. Study Three was also designed to distinguish the illusion of transparency from the â€Å"curse of knowledge,† or the tendency to project one’s knowledge onto others (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber 1989; Keysar and Bly 1995; Keysar, Ginzel, and Bazerman 1995). Specifically, we examined whether observers who are â€Å"cursed† with the same knowledge as the negotiators exhibit the same biases as the negotiators themselves. Study One Method Twenty-four previously unacquainted Cornell University undergraduates participated in pairs in exchange for course credit. Participants learned that 118 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations they would complete a negotiation exercise in which they would each represent the provost at one of two campuses of a multi-campus university system. Because of budget constraints, all of the system’s eight social psychologists needed to be consolidated at the two provosts’ universities. The provosts were to negotiate the distribution of the social psychologists between the two campuses. Participants were informed that some social psychologists were more valuable than others, and that some were more valuable to one campus than the other. These differences were summarized in a report describing the strengths and weaknesses of each psychologist and assigning each a specific number of points. The eight psychologists were among the fifteen most frequently cited in social psychology textbooks (Gordon and Vicarii 1992). To familiarize participants with the psychologist and his or her expertise, each psychologist was depicted on a 2- by 4-inch laminated â€Å"trading card† that displayed a picture of the social psychologist, his or her name, and two of his or her better-known publications. Each negotiator’s most and least valuable psychologists were assigned +5 and –5 points, respectively, and the other psychologists were assigned intermediate values. The experimenter said that all psychologists must be employed at one of the two universities because all were tenured. The most and least valuable psychologists were not the same for the two negotiators; the correlation between how much each of the eight psychologists was worth to the two participants was . 79. Participants were told that they should conceal their report, which was somewhat different from the other participant’s report. Because pilot testing indicated that many participants were unsure how to negotiate, we showed them a five-minute videotape of a staged negotiation in which two confederates bartered over who would get (or be forced to acquire) each psychologist. Confederates were shown trading cards actively back and forth. Participants were given as much time as they needed to negotiate, usually about 30 minutes. They were told that several prizes would be awarded at the end of the academic term (e. g. , a $50 gift certificate to the Cornell book store, dinner for two at a local restaurant) and their chance of winning a prize corresponded to the number of points they earned in the negotiation. We asked participants both early in the negotiation (after approximately five minutes) and at the end to name their partner’s most valuable and least valuable psychologists. At both times, we also asked them to estimate the likelihood (expressed as a percentage) that their partner would correctly identify their most and least valuable psychologists. We pointed out that the probability of correct identification by chance alone was 12. 5 percent. Question order was counterbalanced, with no effect of order in any of our analyses. Negotiation Journal April 2003 119 Results and Discussion Our key analysis was a comparison of participants’ mean estimates to a null value derived from the overall accuracy rate. Participants can be said to exhibit an illusion of transparency if their estimates, on average, are higher than the actual accuracy rate. As predicted, negotiators overestimated their partners’ ability to detect their preferences, but only after the negotiation was complete (see Table One). Early in the negotiation, individuals slightly underestimated (by 2 percent) the likelihood that their partners would correctly identify their most valuable psychologist and slightly overestimated (by 8 percent) the likelihood that their partners would identify their least valuable psychologist. Neither of these differences was statistically reliable. 1 Following the negotiation, participants overestimated the probability that their partners would identify correctly their most and least valuable psychologists by 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Both of these differences were statistically reliable. That is, the probability that negotiators overestimated by pure chance how much their partners knew about their preferences is less than . 05 (the t statistics for these two comparisons are 3. 16 and 3. 30, respectively). Negotiators thus experienced an illusion of transparency at the end of the negotiation, overestimating their partners’ ability to discern their preferences. Table One Negotiators’ estimates of the likelihood that their partners would be able to identify their most and least valuable social psychologists, and the corresponding percentages actually able to do so. Estimated % Early negotiation Most valuable Least valuable Post negotiation Most valuable Least valuable 72%* 76%* 58% 63% 69% 58% 71% 50% Actual % Note: * indicates that the estimated percentage is reliably greater than the corresponding actual percentage, p < . 5 120 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations These findings extend earlier research on the illusion of transparency, showing that negotiators believe their inner thoughts and preferences â€Å"leak out† and are more discernible than they really are. This result was obtained only during the second assessment, but we do not wish to make too much of this finding. First, it is hardly surprising because, at the time of the initial assessment, most groups had yet to engage in much discussion of specific candidates, and thus there was little opportunity for participants’ references to have leaked out. Furthermore, it was only participants’ estimates of the detectibility of their least valuable psychologists that rose predictably (from 58 to 76 percent) from early in the negotiation to the end — an increase that was highly statistically reliable (t = 3. 78). Their estimates of the detectibility of their most valuable psychologists stayed largely the same across the course of the negotiation (from 69 to 72 percent) and it was only a decrease in identification accuracy (from 71 to 58 percent) over time that led to the difference in the magnitude of the illusion of transparency. These subsidiary findings may result from the usual dynamics of the negotiation process: Negotiators typically focus initially on the most important issues, postponing a discussion of less important issues or of what they are willing to give up to obtain what they want until later in the negotiation. This would explain why negotiators felt that they had already leaked information about their most important psychologists early in the negotiation, but that a similar feeling of leakage regarding their least important psychologists took longer to develop. This tendency might also explain why it may have been relatively easy for the negotiators to discern one another’s â€Å"top choices† early in the discussion. It may have been harder to do so later on, after the negotiators discussed all of the psychologists and the various tradeoffs between them. Study Two In Study One, participants experienced an illusion of transparency when they were instructed to conceal their preferences from their partners. In many negotiations outside the laboratory, however, negotiators often attempt to communicate rather than conceal their preferences. In fact, negotiation instructors often advise MBAs and other would-be negotiators to communicate information about their preferences. Do negotiators experience an illusion of transparency when they attempt to communicate rather than conceal their preferences? Past research has shown that people experience an illusion of transparency when trying (nonverbally) to convey thoughts and feelings in settings outside negotiations (Barr and Kleck 1995; Savitsky 1997). We therefore examined whether negotiators attempting to communicate some of their preferences, whose efforts at communication are not limited to nonverbal channels, would likewise experience an illusion of transparency. Negotiation Journal April 2003 121 As part of a classroom exercise, MBA students in negotiation courses completed a complex six-party negotiation simulation (Harborco, a teaching tool available from the Clearinghouse of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, www. pon. org). The course emphasized the importance of negotiators communicating some of their preferences to one another in negotiations. Prior to the Harborco negotiation, students had engaged in numerous other exercises in which their failure to convey information resulted in nonoptimal settlements. To verify that the Harborco negotiators were attempting to communicate information about their preferences, we asked 22 Cornell and Northwestern University MBA students (not included in following study) who had just completed the Harborco negotiation to indicate which strategy they engaged in more: an information-sharing strategy (attempting to communicate their preferences to others), or an information-hiding strategy (attempting to conceal their preferences from others). Everyone indicated that they used the information-sharing strategy more. We hypothesized that the same psychological processes that lead novice negotiators trying to conceal their preferences to experience an illusion of transparency would also lead experienced negotiators trying to communicate at least some of their preferences to experience a similar illusion. We thus predicted that participants would overestimate the number of other negotiators who could correctly identify their preferences. Method Two hundred and forty MBA students at Cornell and Northwestern completed the Harborco simulation, negotiating whether, and under what circumstances, a major new seaport would be built off the coast of a fictional city. There were six parties to the negotiation. The negotiator who represented Harborco (a consortium of investors) was most central. A second negotiator, representing the federal agency that oversees the development of such seaports, had to decide whether to subsidize a $3 billion loan Harborco had requested. The other negotiators represented the state governor, the labor unions from surrounding seaports, the owners of other ports that might be affected by a new seaport, and environmentalists concerned about the impact of a new seaport on the local ecology. The negotiation involved five issues, each with several options of varying importance to the six parties. For each negotiator, points were assigned to each option of each issue. Student performance was evaluated according to the number of points accumulated. For example, the most important issue to the Harborco representative was the approval of the subsidized loan (worth 35 points for approval of the full $3 billion, 29 points for approval of a $2 billion loan, etc. ); the second most important issue was the compensation to other ports for their expected losses due to the new seaport (worth 23 points for no compensation, 15 points for compensation of $150 million, 122 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations etc. ). The Harborco negotiator’s preference order for the five issues was somewhat different from the preference order of the other five negotiators. Participants were given approximately one and a half hours to reach an agreement. They were required to vote on a settlement proposed by the Harborco negotiator at three points during the negotiation: after 20 minutes, after one hour, and at the end. A successful agreement required the approval of at least five negotiators. Any agreement that included the subsidized loan required the approval of the federal agency representative. The Harborco negotiator could veto any proposal. The dependent measures, collected after the first and final rounds of voting, concerned the Harborco negotiator’s estimates of the other negotiators’ identification of his or her preference order. The Harborco negotiators estimated how many of the other five negotiators would identify the rank ordering (to the Harborco negotiator) of each issue — for example, how many would identify the approval of the loan as their most important issue? We made clear that one negotiator would guess the exact importance of each issue by chance alone. Meanwhile, each of the other negotiators estimated the issue that was most important to Harborco, second most important, and so on. Figure One Number able to identify each issue 5 4 3 2 1 0 Predicted Number Actual Number ird co nd rth co nd Th ird th Fo ur h Fi rs Fi rs Fi ft Fi rs Th Se Fo u First Round ISSUE IMPORTANCE Predicted and actual number of negotiators able to identify correctly the importance of each issue to the Harborco negotiator after the first and final rounds of voting. Results and Discussion The dashed lines in Figure One indicate that, as predicted, the Harborco negotiators’ estimate of the number of other negotiators who could identify the rank of each issue was greater than the actual number of negotiators able Negotiation Journal April 2003 123 Se Second Round Fi ft h t t t to do so (as indicated by the solid lines). Following the first round of voting, the Harborco negotiators overestimated the number of their fellow negotiators able to identify the importance — to them — of all mid-range issues. All these differences were statistically reliable (all ts > 2. 0). Negotiators did not overestimate the number of negotiators able to identify their most and least important issues. Following the final round of voting, Harborco representatives overestimated the number of negotiators able to identify their four most important issues. This overestimation was statistically reliable for the four most important issues (all t > 2. 25), and was marginally reliable with a probability level of . 14 for the least important issue (t = 1. 5). These findings replicate and extend those of Study One and of previous research on the illusion of transparency. Experienced negotiators who were attempting to convey (rather than conceal) their preferences to other negotiators tended to overestimate the transparency of those preferences. Study Three We contend that negotiators’ overestimation of their partner’s ability to discern their preferences reflects an egocentric illusion whereby negotiators overestimate the transparency of their internal states. An alternative account is that negotiators experience a â€Å"curse of knowledge,† overestimating the knowability of whatever they themselves know (Camerer et al. 989; Keysar and Bly, 1995; Keysar et al. 1995). Negotiators may thus overestimate the discernibility of their preferences because they cannot undo the knowledge of their own preferences, not because they feel like their preferences â€Å"leaked out. † Studies One and Two provide some evidence against this alternative interpretation because participants did not significantly overestimate their partnersâ€⠄¢ ability to discern their preferences early in the negotiation — when they were â€Å"cursed† with the same knowledge, but had little opportunity for their preferences to leak out. To provide a more rigorous test of this alternative interpretation, Study Three employed a paradigm in which observers were yoked to each individual negotiator. The observers were informed of their counterpart’s preferences and thus were â€Å"cursed† with the same abstract knowledge, but not with the phenomenology of having — and possibly leaking — the negotiators’ preferences. After watching a videotaped negotiation between their yoked counterpart and another negotiator, observers estimated the likelihood that their counterpart’s negotiation partner would identify their counterpart’s preferences. We expected that observers’ estimates would be lower than actual negotiators’ estimates because observers would not have the experience of their preferences â€Å"leaking out. † 124 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations Method Twenty-four previously unacquainted Northwestern University undergraduates participated in pairs in exchange for the opportunity to earn between $4 and $13, based on their performance in the negotiation. Negotiators were taken to separate rooms and given instructions for the negotiation. The negotiation was similar to that used in Study One, except that it involved a buyer-seller framework, with which we felt our participants would be familiar. Participants learned that they would act as a provost of one of two campuses of a large university system. Because of budget cuts, the larger of the two campuses (the â€Å"seller†) needed to eliminate fifteen of its 35 psychology department faculty. Because the fifteen faculty were tenured, they could not be fired, but they could be transferred to the smaller of the two campuses (the â€Å"buyer†), which was trying to acquire faculty. Participants were to negotiate over the fifteen psychologists â€Å"in play†; any faculty not acquired by the buyer would remain at the seller’s campus. Participants were given a report that described each psychologist and his or her associated point value. Some of the psychologists had a positive value to buyers and a negative value to sellers, others had a positive value to both, and still others had a negative value to both. Participants were told that they should not show their confidential reports to the other negotiator. Participants earned 25 cents for every positive point and had to pay 25 cents for every negative point they accumulated. To give buyers and sellers an equal chance to make the same amount of money, we endowed sellers with an initial stake of $10 and buyers with an initial stake of $4. If buyers obtained all nine of the beneficial faculty and none of the four costly faculty (two were worth 0 points) they earned an additional $8, for $12 total. Similarly, if the sellers eliminated all eight costly faculty and retained all five beneficial faculty (two were worth 0 points) they earned $2, for $12 total. If no agreement was reached, sellers retained all faculty, losing $6, and buyers acquired no psychologists, leaving both with $4. As in Study One, we gave participants laminated trading cards with a picture of each psychologist and two of that psychologist’s better-known works on the back. The fifteen faculty members, although in reality all social psychologists, were arbitrarily divided into the three subdisciplines of social, clinical, and human-experimental psychology. We designed the payoffs so that the sychologist within each discipline who the buyer most wanted to obtain was not the psychologist the seller most wanted to eliminate. To encourage participants to obtain or retain psychologists across the three disciplines, sellers were offered an additional two points if they eliminated at least one faculty member from each discipline, and an additional four points if they eliminated at least two from each discipline. Similarly, buyers were offered an additional two points if they acquired at least one faculty Negotiation Journal April 2003 125 member from each discipline, and an additional four points if they acquired at least two from each discipline. Thus, maximum earnings for buyers and sellers were $13 (the $12 earned by accumulating all possible positive points, no negative points, plus the $1 bonus). After negotiators understood their task, they were brought together and given as long as they needed to negotiate a division of the fifteen psychologists, usually about 20 minutes. Afterward, buyers estimated the likelihood (expressed as a percentage) that the seller would correctly identify the psychologists from each subdiscipline who were the most and least important for the buyer to obtain; sellers estimated the likelihood that the buyer would correctly identify the psychologists from each subdiscipline who were the most and least important for the seller to eliminate. Participants were told that the chance accuracy rate was 20% percent. Buyers were also asked to identify the psychologists from each subdiscipline who were the most and least important for the seller to eliminate, and sellers were asked to make analogous judgments about the buyers’ incentive structure. Control Condition. Twelve pairs of previously unacquainted Northwestern undergraduates were paid $6 and â€Å"yoked† to one of the 12 pairs from the negotiation condition — one student matched to the buyer and one to the seller. Participants read the instructions given to t heir yoked counterpart (either the buyer or seller) in the actual negotiation before viewing their counterpart’s videotaped negotiation. Participants then made the same estimates as their counterparts in the negotiation condition, identifying the psychologists from each subdiscipline who were most and least important for their counterpart’s negotiation partner to acquire (or eliminate), and estimating the likelihood that their counterpart’s negotiation partner would be able to guess the psychologists in each subdiscipline who were most and least important for their counterpart to obtain (or eliminate). Results Negotiators. As anticipated, negotiators exhibited an illusion of transparency. As can be see in the left and right columns of Table Two, buyers and sellers overestimated their partners’ ability to identify their most important psychologists by 20 percent — both statistically reliable differences (ts= 3. 58 and 3. 45, respectively). Buyers and sellers also overestimated the likelihood that their partner would be able to identify their least important psychologists by 4 percent and 25 percent, respectively, with only the latter result statistically reliable (t = 4. 34). Control participants. Control participants displayed a â€Å"curse of knowledge,† overestimating the likelihood that their counterpart’s negotiation partner would correctly identify their counterpart’s preferences (compare the center and right columns of Table Two). This was particularly true for 126 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations those yoked to sellers: They reliably overestimated the likelihood that their yoked counterparts’ negotiation partners would identify their counterparts’ most and least important psychologists by 12 percent and 19 percent, respectively (ts = 2. 58 and 4. 9). Control participants who were yoked to buyers, in contrast, did not overestimate the likelihood that their yoked counterparts’ negotiation partners would overestimate their counterparts’ preferences. Table Two Participants’ estimates of the likelihood that their negotiators’ partners were able to identify the negotiat ors’ most and least important psychologists, and the corresponding percentages actually able to do so. Negotiators’ Estimates Control Estimates Actual Accuracy Most Important Buyers Sellers Least Important Buyers Sellers 62% 68%* 56% 63%* 58% 42% 70%* 59%* 53% 51%* 50% 39% Note: * indicates that the estimated percentage is reliably greater than the corresponding actual percentage, p < . 05 More important, in every case the control participants’ estimates (overall M = 56 percent) were lower than the actual negotiators’ estimates (overall M = 64 percent) — a statistically reliable difference (t = 2. 53). Thus, negotiators overestimated the transparency of their preferences more than yoked observers who were â€Å"cursed† with the same knowledge, but did not have the same subjective experience as negotiators themselves. Discussion The results of Study Three indicate that negotiators’ overestimation of their partners’ ability to discern their preferences stems from both a curse of knowledge and an illusion of transparency. Observers who were provided with the same abstract knowledge as the negotiators — those provided with Negotiation Journal April 2003 127 abstract information about sellers’ preferences at any rate — overestimated the likelihood that those preferences would be detected. However, this effect was not as strong as that found for actual negotiators’ estimates. Those participants, possessing more detailed knowledge about how it felt to want to obtain some psychologists and avoid others, apparently thought that some of those feelings had leaked out to their partners because they made significantly higher estimates of the likelihood of detection than the observers did. Negotiators experience an illusion of transparency over and above any curse of knowledge to which they are subject. What Does it All Mean? These three studies provide consistent support for an illusion of transparency in negotiations. Undergraduate students who were instructed to conceal their preferences thought that they had â€Å"tipped their hand† more than they actually had (Studies One and Three). Likewise, business students experienced in negotiation who were attempting to communicate information about some of their preferences overestimated how successfully they had done so (Study Three). These results are not due to an abstract â€Å"curse of knowledge† because observers who were cursed with the same knowledge as the negotiators did not overestimate the detectibility of the negotiators’ preferences to the same extent as the negotiators did (Study Three). The illusion of transparency is thus due to the sense that one’s specific actions and reactions that arise in the give-and-take of negotiation — a blush here, an averted gaze there — are more telling than they actually are. These results complement and extend findings by Vorauer and Claude (1998) who examined participants’ ability to estimate how well others could discern their general approach to a joint problem-solving exercise — i. e. , whether they were most interested in being assertive, being fair, being accommodating, and so on. They found that participants thought their goals would be more readily discerned than they actually were. Their findings, however, appear to reflect a curse of knowledge rather than an illusion of transparency because their participants’ estimates of the detectibility of their own goals were just the same as those made by observers who were simply informed of the participants’ goals. The Vorauer and Claude findings should not be surprising since their participants did not actually engage in face-to-face interaction. Instead, each participant exchanged notes with a â€Å"phantom† other, whose responses were crafted by the experimenters. Without interaction, it is difficult see how an illusory sense of transparency could emerge. Vorauer and Claude’s studies, along with the results of Study Three, suggest that the curse of knowledge can likewise lead to exaggerated estimates of how readily one’s negotiation partner can discern one’s own perspective on the negotiation (Keysar et al. 1995). 128 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations It is important to note that both the illusion of transparency and the curse of knowledge reflect people’s difficulty in getting beyond their privileged information. In the curse of knowledge, this information is abstract knowledge of one’s beliefs, preferences, or goals; in the illusion of transparency, this information is more detailed, phenomenological knowledge of how one feels or how difficult it was to suppress a particular reaction. At one level, then, it may be fair to characterize the illusion of transparency as a special case of knowledge — more detailed and affect-laden — with which one is cursed. At another level, however, the differences between the two phenomena may be sufficiently pronounced that there is more to be gained by viewing them as distinct. Ultimately, a more complete understanding of the relationship between the curse of knowledge and illusion of transparency must await the outcome of further research. Future research might also further examine the underlying mechanism proposed for the illusion of transparency. Gilovich et al. (1998) attribute the phenomenon to a process much like Tversky and Kahneman’s (1974) anchoring and adjustment heuristic. When attempting to ascertain how apparent their internal states are to others, people are likely to begin the process of judgment from their own subjective experience. Because people know that others are not as privy to their internal states as they are themselves, they adjust from their own perspective to capture others’ perspective. Because such adjustments tend to be insufficient (Tversky and Kahneman 1974; Epley and Gilovich 2001), the net result is a residual effect of one’s own phenomenology, and the feeling that one is more transparent than is actually the case. This account suggests that the illusion of transparency should be particularly pronounced when the internal state being assessed is one that is strongly and clearly felt, such as when negotiating especially important issues. In addition, future research might examine the impact of the illusion of transparency on negotiation processes and outcomes. Thompson (1991) has shown that when negotiators have different priorities, negotiators who provide information about their priorities to their partners fare better than those who do not. The illusion of transparency may lead negotiators to hold back information about their priorities in the mistaken belief that one has conveyed too much information already. By leading negotiators to believe that their own preferences are more apparent than they really are, the illusion of transparency may give rise to the belief that the other side is being less open and cooperative than they are themselves — which may lead each negotiator to hold back even more. The process can thus spiral in the wrong direction toward greater secrecy. Negotiation Journal April 2003 129 It may be advantageous, then, for negotiators to be aware of the illusion of transparency. If negotiators know they tend to conceal less than they think they do, they may open up a bit more and increase their chances of reaching optimal agreements. In other words, knowing that one’s own â€Å"thought bubbles† are invisible to others can lead to more successful negotiations. NOTES This research was supported by Research Grant SBR9319558 from the National Science Foundation. We thank Tina Rackitt her help in collecting data and Dennis Regan for his comments on an earlier draft. 1. Because the data for each pair of negotiators are interdependent, all analyses in this and subsequent studies used the dyad (or group) as the unit of analysis. 2. A t statistic is a measure of how extreme a statistical estimate is. Specifically, a t is the ratio of the difference between a hypothesized value and an observed value, divided by the standard error of the sampled distribution. Consider negotiators’ estimates, following the negotiation, that their negotiation partner had a 72 percent chance of correctly identifying their most valuable psychologist. Because, in actuality, egotiators identified their partners’ most valuable psychologist only 58 percent of the time, the difference between the hypothesized value (58 percent) and the observed value (72 percent) is 14 percent. The standard error, in this case, is the standard deviation of the difference between a negotiators’ predicted likelihood and the actual likelihood (the average squared difference betw een these two scores), divided by the square root of the sample size. In general, t statistics more extreme than 1. 96 are statistically reliable — that is, the probability that the observed difference is due to chance alone is less than . 5. 3. We also asked negotiators to estimate which subdiscipline was most important to their partner, and to estimate the likelihood that their partner would discern correctly their own preference order vis-a-vis the three subdisciplines. During debriefing, however, participants said they found these questions confusing because they did not parse the 15 faculty according to their subdiscipline, but instead focused on the value of each individual faculty. These responses are therefore not discussed further. REFERENCES Barr, C. L. and R. E. Kleck. 1995. Self-other perception of the intensity of facial expressions of emotion: Do we know what we show? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68: 608-618. Bazerman, M. H. and M. Neale. 1992. Negotiating rationality. New York: Free Press. Camerer, C. , G. Loewenstein, and M. Weber. 1989. The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy 97: 1232-1253. Epley, N. and T. Gilovich. 2001. Putting adjustment back in the anchoring and adjustment heuristic: An examination of self-generated and experimenter-provided anchors. Psychological Science 12: 391-396. Gilovich, T. D. , K. K. Savitsky, and V. H. Medvec. 1998. The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read our emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 332-346. Gordon, R. A. and P. J. Vicarii. 1992. Eminence in social psychology: A comparison of textbook citation, social science citation index, and research productivity rankings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18: 26-38. Keysar, B. and B. Bly. 1995. Intuitions about the transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text. Cognitive Psychology 26: 165-208. Keysar, B. , L. E. Ginzel, and M. H. Bazerman. 1995. States of affairs and states of mind: The effect of knowledge on beliefs. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 64: 283293. Raiffa, H. 1982. The art and science of negotiation. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. 130 Van Boven, Gilovich, and Medvec The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations Savitsky, K. 1997. Perceived transparency of and the leakage of emotional states: Do we know how little we show? Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University. Thompson, L. 1990. An examination of naive and experienced negotiators. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 26: 528-544. ———. 1991. Information exchange in negotiation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 27: 161-179. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman. 1974. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124-1131. Vorauer, J. D. and S. Claude. 1998. Perceived versus actual transparency of goals in negotiation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24: 371-385. Negotiation Journal April 2003 131

Justification of Human Violence Through Fight Club Essay

Throughout the history of the Human Race, violence and destruction is a reoccurring theme. In modern society we view ourselves as socially and economically evolved people when comparing ourselves to our ancestors, who were barbaric and uncivilized in comparison. However, our society has not evolved very far from this. There remains an instinct and desire for chaos and destruction in humans. I will not say this applies to all people, but it cannot be agued that the Human species is the single most destructive creature on the planet Earth. We have created war amongst each other, creating weapons and advancing our sciences for the sake of finding new and better ways of killing each other. The violence is not only contained in war, but in our entertainment as well. Romans used to watch gladiators kill each other in the coliseum, and we today watch action movies of men blowing each other up with guns and dynamite. Video games themselves allow you to kill and maim people, but why would someone want to play a game where you kill someone? Why does a violent and gory movie become so popular? What is it about aggression, destruction, and violence that attracts people? Sigmund Freud developed many theories and ideas about the human mind and explores society and its effects on people. This, as well as the movie and book â€Å"Fight Club†, will help to give insight into the minds of violent people and will give reasoning to their destructiveness. The majority of the world is made up of people who have an urge for violence and corruption, even if they don’t consider themselves to be, and the book â€Å"Fight Club† gives examples of this. Fight Club† is a book that was first written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996 and was later transitioned into a film in 1999 starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. In this story, the narrator, who is never named in neither the film nor the book, but has been referred to as jack, is an office worker who lost his view on life and has one bad thing happen to him after another. He has insomnia, his condo was blown up by a gas leak, and he is overwhelmed by work, finding himself in different places after he falls asleep. To cure his insomnia, he goes to cancer meetings and other such help group. It is her where he is allowed to cry and have everyone around him assume the worst. This helps him to sleep until his lie is reflected by a woman who starts to do the same thing. Her name is Marla and keeps Jack from being able to cry. They agree to different days so that he can be alone and they ironically become close by the end of the book, due to the fact that Jack is constantly bitter towards her while she is at the self help meetings. He eventually meets a character named Tyler Durden on a business trip and finds himself living with him. Tyler is much more outgoing and adventurous than Jack, and soon becomes his mentor and teacher. After one night of some drinks, Tyler starts a fight with Jack for fun. They continue to do this every few nights and eventually gather a crowd of other men that want to fight as well. They then create fight club, a weekly gathering where two men are put together to brawl against each other in a circle of shouting man. Tyler leads this whole thing, with Jack at his side, but Fight Club grows more and more into a cult, and Tyler creates his own personal army which he call project mayhem, which has the sole purpose of bringing chaos and madness on the buttoned down society that shunned them away and led them to believe that they could be something they’re not. What Tyler tries to teach Jack throughout the story is that he needs to â€Å"hit bottom† meaning that he must detach himself from everything in his life. He says â€Å"It is only when we have nothing that we are free to do anything. With nothing to lose, no one can threaten you and you can do whatever you want. Tyler wanted to teach the world this and planned on using his followers to accomplish this. His big plan was to destroy all the major credit card company buildings and their records, putting everyone’s credit to zero. What Jack eventually finds out is that Tyler is his own split personality. Tyler is an extension of Jack, and only he sees him, but whatever Tyler has ever said to anyone or done, it was really Jack. Fight Club helps to evaluate the reasoning and deduction of violence and the need for chaos. Tyler tells his followers that they have been promises by industry that they could become movie gods and rock stars, but they’re not, and â€Å"we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off. † Fight Club was created because of the first night with Jack and Tyler, and Tyler says â€Å"How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight. I don’t want to die without any scares. † This means to say that a man is considered to show his true worth and self in a fight. It can show that he is either brave or a coward, or strong or weak. Most people cannot say that they’ve actually been in a fight before, but there is much to be learned about ones self if they are ever to encounter one. However, there are some that have actually started real fight clubs and follow the teachings of the fictional character of Tyler Durden. There do exist real fight clubs. USA Today wrote an online news article about software engineers near the age of 30 to 40, who hold fight clubs in a garage every two weeks. This is inspired by the movie, and these people that fight do it to exert their anger and frustration into something physical. They meet up and have full fledged fights with each other, two at a time and sometimes with weapons to. They took the movie and book quite literally, and many parallels can be seen. The article quotes one of the men who say â€Å"I have fantasies about it† compared to the movie where the narrator says â€Å"You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. † Another man says â€Å"You get to be a superhero for a night. We have to go to work every day. We’re constantly told to buy things we don’t need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do. This is near to what Tyler Durden teaches about losing touch with personal possessions and going back to the hunter gatherer sense and also being able to do what you want. These technical engineers joined a fight club and enjoy it. They say they feel powerful and â€Å"macho†. It can therefore be dismissed that only unintelligent people would have the sense to be in a fight, seeing as we have software engineers doing it. There are other fight club that are started by teens, but they are unfortunate in the fact that sometimes a person is unwilling to fight and is beaten by his attacker. These teenagers get caught and arrested after they make DVD’s of the fight to sell online. This is the ignorant side of fighting. The tech engineers only fight with each other and organize it together, but these teenagers choose to turn it into an act of bullying by prying on the weak and taking advantage of them. It is dishonourable and untrue to the true nature and message of Fight Club. Many people can see the reasoning behind these fighting engineers, but others only see the teenager side of fight club and see it as grotesque, violent, and meaningless. The main idea though, is to put more meaning to your life than that new T. V you want, or the sofa you saw in an Ikea magazine that you think matches your curtains. There is a quote that depicts the meaning Tyler’s lesson very well. It’s from a kid named Lester in a book called â€Å"The Brimstone Journals†. He is talking about his mother working days and his dad working nights, saying â€Å"All so they can buy more crap. Man, it reminds me way too much of this movie on TV where a bunch of slaves were moving some big statue of a god. They had it on these logs that were like rollers and most of the laves pushed this god while the rest picked up the last log and hustled it around to the front. They did this all day. † The meaning behind this is that most people are stuck in the social loop of working hours like a drone, only to buy something you don’t really need. Society has everyone working hard so we can take our money and put it into the system we’re working for. The point is to drive yourself to become more than that and learn more about yourself through fight club. The other people of the fight clubs mentioned could defend to this. The movie has a scene where Jack is mad about his condo being destroyed and the amount of stuff he had in it, saying its ok, his insurance will cover it. This is when Tyler laughs and say â€Å"The things you own, end up owning you. † Meaning we become dependant and needy for material possessions. Fight Club certainly promotes violence, but it does it in a way so others don’t have to become involved if they choose so. It is a good way to get ride of anger and frustration compared to how others have done it before. As long as others have an outlet to express these feelings, others are safe. Some people choose to express their anger with a different violence witch targets others. Husbands sometime hit their wives, a student may bring a gun to school, or maybe even an office worker. These things have happened and are very unfortunate to have done so. In the book , â€Å"The Brimstone Journals† which depict poems of student in high school and their thoughts, Lester is holding his dad’s gun saying he wouldn’t hurt anyone with it, but if he did he would do it naked in the gym saying â€Å"They wouldn’t laugh then, would they? The jocks would crap their pants. The girls’d kiss my fat feet. † These people became unhappy and were mistreated and decided to act back. With fight club, anger is not contained and built up; it is exerted with friends in a brawl. As stated previously, Fight Club remains to be about finding happiness and disconnecting from society. Sigmund Freud has a writing titled, â€Å"Civilization and its Discontents† and in one chapter, he evaluates how men find it difficult to become happy and that the source of our misery is our civilization and the comfort that we as humans have made for ourselves. He says (pg38) â€Å"What we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. † This is the main goal of Tyler Durden in â€Å"Fight Club†. He wants to bring civilization back to its primitive roots because it’s better than the narrowed society and community that we have worked so hard to make for ourselves. He says in the movie â€Å"In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway. † This is the world that Tyler wants to create. A world where skyscrapers and highways are but remnants of an old life, and civilization has downgraded into a society of those who only perform what they need to, and are not bound by industries. Freud goes on to say that (pg38) â€Å"It is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization. † Mean that society that we have created for ourselves has also created the source of our suffering. Buddhism is known to have said that the source of all suffering comes from wanting something. However, we have created an economy of â€Å"want†, surrounded by advertisements, TV commercials and supermarkets. If wanting something is suffering, then we have created it ourselves and surrounded ourselves with it. Later in this text, he states that â€Å"It was discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would result in a return to possibilities of happiness. † (pg39) This means that the idea of happiness in our society is reliant on the basis of a lack of work. Our lives are clustered and overwhelmed by housework, jobs, food shopping, and the idea of not doing any of that is the only thing we know as happiness and yet we are stuck in a paradoxical loop. We want to be happy, we have to buy a new coffee table, if we want that then we have to work, if we have to do that, we have to be unhappy. Being happy should not be based on the sheer contrast of unhappiness. Freud changes his subject to man’s view of God. He goes on to say â€Å"To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that these gods were cultural ideals. To-day he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become god himself. †(pg44). What he means by this is that gods used to be beings of unforeseen knowledge with the ability to control the element and do as they please, but we have reached an age where we can control our own world and our knowledge has gone beyond what we could have ever imagined. Freud goes on to say â€Å"Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more†¦. an does not feel happy in his Godlike character. †(pg45) This merely re-emphasises what is being said. That our technological and scientific advances allow us to become the God that man has always praised. We are able to alter DNA, remove and fertilise embryos, and the list goes on. In â€Å"Fight Club†, the father figure is what is expected to be seen as a person’s view of god. The narrator says† What you end up doing, is you spend your life searching for a father and God. What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that could happen. Getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than His indifference. † The brings a religious aspect to the subject. It can be questioned as to weather or not God is the reason people act violently. This is true, seeing as there are cases where people commit murder in the claim that God â€Å"told them† to do it. And yet, an entire war happened all in the name of God, it was also known as the Crusades. Could the only way to get God’s recognition is to be bad? I can’t be argued that religion has in fact created war, hatred towards other beliefs and murder. Violence is clearly an innate part of the human race as far as history and as a society. â€Å"Fight Club† helps to give a view that gives a justification for fighting and violent actions. With the help of â€Å"Fight Club† and the theories of Sigmund Freud, we have developed a better understanding as to the reasoning of actual fight clubs. We can see that they are not events where the innocent are beaten, but rather gatherings where men can exhort their anger and frustration into a physical manifestation of punches and kicks. We can see now that this type of violence among other people who want it, is better than the type of violence where others are dragged into it unwillingly. â€Å"Fight Club† says a lot of things about society and civilization being the source of our misery, as well as contains parallels with the work of Sigmund Freud. The book â€Å"Fight Club† has influenced many lives and has changed the ideals and views of many. The majority of the world is made up of people who have an urge for violence and corruption, even if they don’t consider themselves to be, and the book â€Å"Fight Club† gives examples of this.

buy custom Empowering Women essay

buy custom Empowering Women essay Introduction The bildungsroman is a literary genre derived from a German word which roughly translates to mean a novel of personal development that basically follows the journey of the protagonist covering the personal, emotional and or the spiritual development right from childhood to stages of maturity. Bildungsromans serve both cultural as well as political functions for the modernist women writers and this is attributed to the fact that women use this type of literary genre for self creations and for self understanding as opposed to claims by male writers of modernism that they use it to escape the real world. Women writers of modernist use the genre as a means by which they can approach experience with the hope if changing it and therefore acts a model by which women metaphorically accommodates womens efforts at self expression. Book reviews The term coming-of age is sometimes used interchangeably with the word bildungsroman and often such use is less technical and wider. Generally, in this genre change is very fundamental and is characterized by various formal, topical as well as thematic features. The genre of bildungsroman comprise of a person coming of age by looking for answers as well as experience starting with lose of emotion making the protagonist leave on the journey. More often this genre targets at maturity where the protagonists achieves it on gradual but with difficult. Most novels falling under bildungsroman features a conflict between the main character and the society where values are gradually accepted by the protagonist leading to his acceptance in the society when his mistakes or disappointed are over or equally same the protagonist is able to reach out and offer help to others after achieving the level of maturity. Bildungsroman used by female writers use a more innovative approach through use of iro nic elements of tradition. The female bildungsroman follows the growth of a young woman towards social and emotional maturity as variation of type with more focuses laid on achieving inner devilment and maturation in a patriarchal society. The bildungsroman is exemplified by novels written by various female artists for instance the novel entitled The Color Purple by Alice Walker published in 1983 targets at empowering women by committing itself to revealing the victimization of black who are in abusive relationships. The author of this book empowers women by giving a voice to her female protagonist as well as to other female characters to put them in a position where they are able to articulate their suffering. In addition to that Walker gives her female characters a chance to survive through their tribulations while providing them with avenue of breaking themselves free of such abusive relationships. In the color purple walke narrates a story of a woman by the name Cecile who is leading a persecuted life. Cecile is forced to stay with her father Pa, who repeatedly rapes her and takes her illegitimate babies away from her. She is then forced by circumstance to separate from her small sister Neetie consequently leading her to be trapped in a loveless marriage with an older man MR.-. She is forced to raise his children, cook for him, work in his field, to endure his violence and humiliation, his sexual assault as well as even taking care of his mistress Shug Avery. Walker work utilizes the genre of bildungsroman as in the beginning of the story Cecile is portrayed as a weaker being unable to defend her own rights mainly because of her religious belief. While she matures she is able to break herself free from her enslaved life leading her to happiness in the end of story characteristic of her attaining maturity stage. Surprising her success in setting herself free from her tribulations in life is fostered by Mr.- mistress Shug Avery which enable the author to celebrate the significance of blues women thus employing the blues theme characteristic of bildungsroman genre. Walker therefore empowers women by making Shug Avery her strongest character as well as the most assertive female charter making her the role model as well as a catalyst fro change in her community and this makes the protagonist to reach out and help others in the society making her acceptable in the society despite her initial behaviors that contradict the societal norms in this case Shug was initially a mistress which most societies consider abnormal. Walkers book the color purple also employs the bildungsroman genre where she employs feature of confessions which is characteristic of female bildungsroman and this is evident when she uses confession to empower her female characters to attain maturity in the social and emotional; development. For example in the novel, walker utilizes the epistolary or letter writing making the book to resemble a diary as Cecile is able to tell her story through her writing of private letters addressing to God. Considering the fact that Cecile is portrayed as a poor Africa-American woman living in rural Georgia in the years of 1930s and a victim of an abusive relationship she is almost voiceless as well as disenfranchised in every day society. She narrates the story of her life with complete honesty and condor through her letters which ultimately enables her to break the silence normally imposed to her in a private manner. Ceciles confession narrative empowers her to free herself from her tribulation s and this is evident by the fact that the author uses Ceciles own voice to tell the account of institutions racism and sexism in first person account. E.g. Cecils own words my momma dead. She die screaming and cussing. She screaam at me. She cuss at me manages to bring the readers into her world filled with pain and numbness. Woman's Ways of Knowing by Mary Field Belenky, the Color Purple by Alice Walker, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson all use the style of female bildungsroman as all of them portrayed the female protagonists as heroines who have a tendency t grow down as opposed to growing up and this is characteristic of Fuderers bildungsroman .for example in the book Womens ways of knowing by Mary Field Belenky, a woman starting to know things by first being aware through either formal a or informal education that is carried out in a male dominated society where the voice and experience of a woman is largely absent (Belenky,78). Women start knowing through various stage with each stage being more advanced than the previous one e.g. the author shows that women advance through five ways of knowing which starts with silence which implies the state of voiceless, stage of received knowledge, the subjective knowers, procedural knower, and finally the constructed knowers. This female way of knowing empowers wo men to discover themselves in a better way thus making them to advance themselves from the state of voiceless to create of greater personal sense of self thus constructing meaning for themselves through finding of their voices essential for both teaching and learning. In her book possessing the secret of joy, Alice walker illustrate t hat violence begets violence through her female protagonist character Tashi who marries Ceciles son Adam and submits to female circumcision out of loyalty to the threatened community customs of her community, the Olinka. She is then force to endure physical pain as well as long lasting emotional trauma making her to stretch across two continents while attempting to get answers why women have to undergo such suffering for the sake of men. She eventually succumbs to madness but still manage to get joy take possession of secret of joy. In her novel the author empower Tashi by following her right from her childhood of innocence right to her adulthood where is matures emotionally and socially and able to understand the reasons why women undergo immense suffering for men even in the guard of their mothers. Walker portrays the strength that comes with empowering women when she introduces the phrase at the beginning of her n ovel "When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us." To illustrate this, Mlisa and Tashi are both portrayed as victims of the society that has perfected its art in mutilating women, leaving them to deal with the consequences of the traditions alone making them hurt each other instead of joining hands together in understanding of each others pain. Buy custom Empowering Women essay

How to Use the Versatile French Word Même

How to Use the Versatile French Word Mà ªme The French word mà ªme is a handy one to know. Loosely translated as same or even, the words meaning changes based on how it is used in a sentence. Mà ªme  may function as an indefinite adjective, an indefinite pronoun, or an adverb. Indefinite Adjective When used as an indefinite adjective, mà ªmes meaning differs according to whether it precedes or follows the noun it modifies:1) Before a noun, mà ªme means same. Cest la mà ªme chose!   Its the same thing!Jai lu le mà ªme livre.   I read the same book.Il aime les mà ªmes programmes.   He likes the same programs.Il a le mà ªme à ¢ge que moi. Hes the same age as me. 2) After a noun or pronoun, mà ªme emphasizes that thing and means (one)self or personified.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Il a perdu la bague mà ªme.   He lost the ring itself.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Je veux le faire moi-mà ªme. (stressed pronoun)   I want to do it myself.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Elle est la gentillesse mà ªme.   She is the epitome of kindness. / She is kindness itself. Indefinite Pronoun Le mà ªme as an indefinite pronoun means the same and may be singular or plural.   Cest le mà ªme.   Its the same.Elles sont toujours les mà ªmes.   Theyre always the same.Cela / à §a revient (strictement) au mà ªme. It comes / amounts to (exactly) the same thing. Adverb As an adverb, mà ªme is invariable, emphasizes the word it modifies, and means even, (to go) so far as to.   Mà ªme Jacques est venu.   Even Jacques came.  Il avait mà ªme achetà © un billet.   He even went so far as to buy a ticket.  Ils sont tous partis, mà ªme le bà ©bà ©.   They all left, even the baby.  Je lai vu ici mà ªme.   I saw him in this very spot. Personal Pronoun Personal pronouns with  mà ªme  form the -self pronouns, which are personal pronouns of emphasis. moi-mà ªme   myselftoi-mà ªme   yourself (singular and  familiar)elle-mà ªme  Ã‚  herselflui-mà ªme  Ã‚  himselfsoi-mà ªme   oneself, yourselfvous-mà ªme   yourself (plural and formal)elles-mà ªmes  Ã‚  themselves (feminine)eux-mà ªmes  Ã‚  themselves  (masculine) Expressions mà ªme   right on, in, from; in position mà ªme que   capable ofde mà ªme que   just / right as (something happened)mà ªme que (familiar) moreoverquand mà ªme  Ã‚  even so, anywaytout de mà ªme   even soÇa revient au mà ªme.   That amounts to the same thing.Cest du pareil au mà ªme.  (informal)   Its always the same.en mà ªme temps at the same timeIl na mà ªme pas pleurà ©.   He didnt even cry.   mà ªme la peau  Ã‚  next to the skin mà ªme le sol  Ã‚  on the bare ground  Ã‚  Je suis parti et lui de mà ªme.   I left and so did he.  Ã‚   mà ªme:  dormir mà ªme le sol   to sleep on the floor mà ªme de   able to,  in a position tode mà ªme:  faire de mà ªme   to do likewise  or  the samede mà ªme que just asmà ªme que  (familiar) so much so thatmà ªme si   even if

Police Technology - Forensic Science History

Police Technology - Forensic Science History Forensic science is a scientific method of gathering and examining the evidence. Crimes are solved with the use of pathological examinations that gather fingerprints, palm prints, footprints, tooth bite prints, blood, hair and fiber samples. Handwriting and typewriting samples are studied, including all ink, paper, and typography. Ballistics techniques are used to identify weapons, as well as voice identification techniques, are used to identify criminals. History of Forensic Science The first recorded application of medical knowledge to the solution of crime was in the 1248 Chinese book Hsi DuanYu or the Washing Away of Wrongs, and it described ways to distinguish between death by drowning or death by strangulation. Italian doctor, Fortunatus Fidelis is recognized as being the first person to practice modern forensic medicine, beginning in 1598. Forensic medicine is the application of medical knowledge to legal questions. It became a recognized branch of medicine in the early 19th century. The  Lie Detector An earlier and less successful lie detector or polygraph machine was invented by James Mackenzie in 1902. However, the modern polygraph machine was invented by John Larson in 1921. John Larson, a University of California medical student, invented the modern lie detector (polygraph) in 1921. Used in police interrogation and investigation since 1924, the lie detector is still controversial among psychologists and is not always judicially acceptable. The name polygraph comes from the fact that the machine records several different body responses simultaneously as the individual is questioned. The theory is that when a person lies, the lying causes a certain amount of stress that produces changes in several involuntary physiological reactions. A series of different sensors are attached to the body, and as the polygraph measures changes in breathing, blood pressure, pulse and perspiration, pens record the data on graph paper. During a lie detector test, the operator asks a series of control questions that set the pattern of how an individual responds when giving true and false answers. Then the actual questions are asked, mixed in with filler questions. The examination lasts about 2 hours, after which the expert interprets the data. Fingerprinting In the 19th century, it was observed that contact between someones hands and a surface left barely visible and marks called fingerprints. Fine powder (dusting) was used to make the marks more visible. Modern fingerprint identification dates from 1880 when the British scientific journal Nature published letters by the Englishmen Henry Faulds and William James Herschel describing the uniqueness and permanence of fingerprints. Their observations were verified by the English scientist Sir Francis Galton, who designed the first elementary system for classifying fingerprints based on grouping the patterns into arches, loops, and whorls. Galtons system was improved upon by London police commissioner, Sir Edward R. Henry. The Galton-Henry system of fingerprint classification was published in June 1900, and officially introduced at Scotland Yard in 1901. It is the most widely used method of fingerprinting to date. Police Cars In 1899, the first police car was used in Akron, Ohio. Police cars became the basis of police transportation in the 20th century. Timeline 1850s The first multi-shot pistol, introduced by Samuel Colt, goes into mass production. The weapon is adopted by the Texas Rangers and, thereafter, by police departments nationwide. 1854 to 59 San Francisco is the site of one of the earliest uses of systematic photography for criminal identification. 1862 On June 17, 1862, inventor W. V. Adams patented handcuffs that used adjustable ratchets - the first modern handcuffs. 1877 The use of the telegraph by fire and police departments begins in Albany, New York in 1877. 1878 The telephone comes into use in police precinct houses in Washington, D.C. 1888 Chicago is the first U.S. city to adopt the Bertillon system of identification. Alphonse Bertillon, a French criminologist, applies techniques of human body measurement used in anthropological classification to the identification of criminals. His system remains in vogue in North America and Europe until it is replaced at the turn of the century by the fingerprint method of identification. 1901 Scotland Yard adopts a fingerprint classification system devised by Sir Edward Richard Henry. Subsequent fingerprint classification systems are generally extensions of Henrys system. 1910 Edmund Locard establishes the first police department crime laboratory in Lyon, France. 1923 The Los Angeles Police Department establishes the first police department crime laboratory in the United States. 1923 The use of the teletype is inaugurated by the Pennsylvania State Police. 1928 Detroit police begin using the one-way radio. 1934 Boston Police begin using the two-way radio. 1930s American police begin the widespread use of the automobile. 1930 The prototype of the present-day polygraph is developed for use in police stations. 1932 The FBI inaugurates its crime laboratory which, over the years, comes to be world-renowned. 1948 Radar is introduced to traffic law enforcement. 1948 The American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) meets for the first time. 1955 The New Orleans Police Department installs an electronic data processing machine, possibly the first department in the country to do so. The machine is not a computer, but a vacuum-tube operated calculator with a punch-card sorter and collator. It summarizes arrests and warrants. 1958 A former marine invents the side-handle baton, a baton with a handle attached at a 90-degree angle near the gripping end. Its versatility and effectiveness eventually make the side-handle baton standard issue in many U.S. police agencies. Introduction: What is Forensic Science History?Polygraph MachinesOther Equipment: Fingerprinting, Police CarsTimeline of Police Technology 1850 - 1960, 1960 - 1996

Assignment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 97

Assignment - Essay Example It also leads to an increase in annual crop yields by approximately 30 to 135 million metric tons as well as reduction in projected global mean warming by 0.5Â °C by year 2050 as a result of reductions in ozone in 2030 and beyond. On the other hand BC measures are able to provide significant global climate benefits; however, uncertainties are much larger. In addition, it leads to a reduction in disruptions in regional hydrological cycle, improved agriculture yields and large regional human health benefits. The fact that these policies helps in the protection of food supplies and public health as well as mitigation of climate change may aid in motivating policies to be implemented on the same. Methane and BC measures are complimentary to and distinct from CO2 measures. Early adoption of CH4 and BC measures has little impact on long term temperatures but provides much larger short-term benefits. Mechanisms such as the Prototype Methane Financing Facility and the Clean Development Mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reduces CH4 emissions. Because such measures can provide agricultural benefit, improve health, slow the rate of climate change and enhanced warming mitigation necessitates their early and widespread implementation in order to realize such

Interpersonal communication paper Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Interpersonal communication paper - Assignment Example This makes the process difficult and complicated no matter how simple it appears to someone who is looking at a situation. Many conflicts arise during communications and the resolution or its becoming worse all depend on how the players act and react during the process. With the simplicity of communication that usually brings people in various complicated situations, many scholars are getting interested to the study of communication and propose concepts about the subject matter, supplement the information with suggestions on understanding and improving verbal and non-verbal communication to improve relationships. For instance, one of the foci of studies is the communication between husband and wife, which is very relevant to today’s world because of the seemingly dying image of marriages which are even more magnified with the news of celebrities marrying today and getting divorced tomorrow. However, saving marriages is not just the only reason for the intensive researches performed and being performed for further studies but also looks into other relationships like employers to their employees, businessmen to their customers, doctors to patients and the list goes on. The point is, communication does not just affect the rich, famous or a chos en few but largely impacts all ages regardless of sex and status and the effect could either be damaging or constructive and no one would like the former. Instead, everyone would like the constructive effect of communication that is why studies are given priority on communication to find what seems to be a secret only a few are able to find. With the rise in the number of researches, people are coming to a better understanding of the process and indeed, knowledge could become a powerful tool to a person if it is used wisely. A lot of people are now encouraged to work further on their communication skills and are trying their best to purposefully make the process a good experience

Polymerization Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Polymerization - Coursework Example The Tg decreases with the increasing temperature within the system of the reaction (Agnes 2010). The polymerization rate is also very strongly influenced by the size of the monomer side reactions which are of importance to the Tg of the copolymers. The Tg can be decreased through an increase in the reaction temperature. This is through increasing the rate of decomposition in the reaction leading to achieving the temperature that is high. This will facilitate the Tg whether its increase or decrease because this will be through regulation of the temperature. This is easy to achieve because regulation of temperature can be achieved easily. Optimum conditions should be achieved for any polymerization reaction that is the temperatures and the time due to the high value to the rate of polymerization and other properties of the final products for the reaction. Therefore in the copolymers given in order to achieve the Tg the temperature and the other conditions required in order to get the desired product in the copolymerization there must be an increase in the temperature of the reaction (Agnes 2010). But in case the Tg very high and it need lowered then this will be facilitated the decrease temperature order acquire the desired Tg This is a very important factor in any copolymerization that will ensure that the products reached are of the desired size and shape.

Legal Skills Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Legal Skills - Essay Example In the United States alone, they take up 24% of the total number of attorneys. This volume continues to grow especially with the fact that the current number of women law students today is 40% of total. Furthermore, it is forecasted that by 2010, 40% of the legal profession will be made up of women1,2. Despite these fact however, it is regrettable to note that some sectors in society remain reluctant in accepting the legitimacy of women as barristers and solicitors and their eventual appointment to judicial office. No less than the media is participatory in such discriminatory actions towards women. This is evident in many of the articles written about women in the legal profession such as â€Å"Justice Wears a Skirt† and that which talked about the law being â€Å"feminized†.3 This paper will be focusing on the women in law profession and their role as barristers and solicitors. It will make mention of several of the most famous of them and how they got to where they a re. II. The Role of Solicitors and Barristers Solicitors refer to lawyers who have complied with the educational demands and other prerequisites of the Law Society and have worked for two years under the supervision of a practicing solicitor. They have restricted authorization to plead before a court but in general, do not. Solicitors act as professional middlepersons between clients and barristers. They spend majority of their time in the office to plan strategies for the case and to write comprehensive guidelines for the barristers to follow. Barristers, on the other hand, are the legal experts who actually appear in court, and present the case compliant with the guidelines provided by the solicitors. Unlike solicitors, they do not interact with the clients; rather, they function as highly-trained and well-experienced specialists in legal procedure and points of law. Unlike solicitors also, they have direct access to court. However, the restriction on the right of solicitors to ap pear before the court has been removed by the Court and Legal Services Act. Also, the clients are given more direct access to barristers who have complied with the Bar Council prerequisites and have informed the council that they plan on doing direct access work. III. Statistics on Women Solicitors and Barristers Women make up 24% of the lawyers of the country. This amount is almost twice higher since 1985, when the percentage was just 13%, and higher by eight times than in 1971, when the percentage was just 3%. The place of women in the legal profession continues to rise. Women comprise 44% of all law students. However, despite making up over 50% of the population, the present projections indicate that the percentage of women in the profession will never reach 50%. Women are instituting themselves as leaders in the legal profession. By 1997, women made up 32% of the ABA Board of Governors, 22% of the members of the American Bar Association House of Delegates, 20% of state civil jud ges, 19% of federal judges, 8% of deans of law school, 19% of law school professors, and 14% of law firm partners4. Since the early part of the 1970s, the portion of female law students has increased by over four times, from 9.4% in 1972/1973 to 44% in 1996/19975. In response to reports by members of the faculty and female law students in law schools regarding gender discrimination, a sequence of hearings were carried out in 1994 and 1995 by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession for the purpose of

Financial Analysis for Managers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Financial Analysis for Managers - Essay Example The WACC takes into consideration the relative weights of each element of the capital structure and presents the predicted cost of new capital for an organization. In this way the WACC is important for any firm or organization operating as it not only helps them identify the minimum returns they need to earn but also helps them maintain a constant stock price. The WACC also provides greater accuracy and stabilizes fluctuations (Robert Libby, Patricia Libby, 2005). The WACC is also an important decision variable in investment appraisal and capital budgeting. Every company or firm wants to increase its wealth and earn profits hence it invests wherever it sees an opportunity. To find the profits that would be earned in the future through the investment at present WACC is a very effective tool. WACC helps a firm take on greater range of projects, because with a lower WACC, more projects will have a positive NPV plus it provides greater firm value, and therefore, greater Stock Price, beca use you discount cash flows by a smaller number. Capital expenditures are the allotment of resources to huge, long-term projects. The capital budget is a declaration of the intended capital expenditures. It is far more than a straightforward listing, and is not the "budget" in the common sense. Provided the nature of capital expenditures, the capital budget is thought of as a declaration of the goals and strategy of the firm. Formation of the capital budget is an essential assignment that affects and is affected by all other areas of decision-making in a firm. Current and future business situations are the opportunities and constraints through which the goals of the firm are formulated. The goals force the strategic decisions of capital budget and financing but likelihood and uniformity with the mutually dependent financing and capital budget decisions must be measured in situating the goals. For projects that are similar to the normal operations of the firm and have a similar risk profile the opportunity cost can be estimated by the firm's weighted average cost of capital (WACC) (Paul D. Kimmel, Jerry J. Weygandt, Donald E. Kieso. 2006). The WACC is the rate of return that just meets investor expectations, leaving the worth of the shares of the firm unaffected. WACC is computed by initially approximating the rate of return compulsory to meet the obligations for each basis of capital. These obligatory rates are then weighted according to the objective capital structure of the firm to attain the in general rate of return required to meet the mutual obligations. This is the return that could be achieved by reinvesting the finances within the company. What are the risks and uncertainty related to capital budgeting There are plenty of risks and uncertainty associated with capital budgeting, Capital budgeting involves a lot of analyzing and studying because a wrong decision can be fatal for a firm. Mostly projects that have a positive NPV are selected to be undertaken. Capital Budgeting involves the risk of losing the invested money. As capital budgeting involves future investing decisions hence constraints such as

Legal Skills Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Legal Skills - Essay Example In the United States alone, they take up 24% of the total number of attorneys. This volume continues to grow especially with the fact that the current number of women law students today is 40% of total. Furthermore, it is forecasted that by 2010, 40% of the legal profession will be made up of women1,2. Despite these fact however, it is regrettable to note that some sectors in society remain reluctant in accepting the legitimacy of women as barristers and solicitors and their eventual appointment to judicial office. No less than the media is participatory in such discriminatory actions towards women. This is evident in many of the articles written about women in the legal profession such as â€Å"Justice Wears a Skirt† and that which talked about the law being â€Å"feminized†.3 This paper will be focusing on the women in law profession and their role as barristers and solicitors. It will make mention of several of the most famous of them and how they got to where they a re. II. The Role of Solicitors and Barristers Solicitors refer to lawyers who have complied with the educational demands and other prerequisites of the Law Society and have worked for two years under the supervision of a practicing solicitor. They have restricted authorization to plead before a court but in general, do not. Solicitors act as professional middlepersons between clients and barristers. They spend majority of their time in the office to plan strategies for the case and to write comprehensive guidelines for the barristers to follow. Barristers, on the other hand, are the legal experts who actually appear in court, and present the case compliant with the guidelines provided by the solicitors. Unlike solicitors, they do not interact with the clients; rather, they function as highly-trained and well-experienced specialists in legal procedure and points of law. Unlike solicitors also, they have direct access to court. However, the restriction on the right of solicitors to ap pear before the court has been removed by the Court and Legal Services Act. Also, the clients are given more direct access to barristers who have complied with the Bar Council prerequisites and have informed the council that they plan on doing direct access work. III. Statistics on Women Solicitors and Barristers Women make up 24% of the lawyers of the country. This amount is almost twice higher since 1985, when the percentage was just 13%, and higher by eight times than in 1971, when the percentage was just 3%. The place of women in the legal profession continues to rise. Women comprise 44% of all law students. However, despite making up over 50% of the population, the present projections indicate that the percentage of women in the profession will never reach 50%. Women are instituting themselves as leaders in the legal profession. By 1997, women made up 32% of the ABA Board of Governors, 22% of the members of the American Bar Association House of Delegates, 20% of state civil jud ges, 19% of federal judges, 8% of deans of law school, 19% of law school professors, and 14% of law firm partners4. Since the early part of the 1970s, the portion of female law students has increased by over four times, from 9.4% in 1972/1973 to 44% in 1996/19975. In response to reports by members of the faculty and female law students in law schools regarding gender discrimination, a sequence of hearings were carried out in 1994 and 1995 by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession for the purpose of

Women Roles in Near and Middle Eastern, African and European Societies Research Paper

Women Roles in Near and Middle Eastern, African and European Societies - Research Paper Example Prior to the advent of Islam, the role and status of women was dependent on the tribe and area they belonged to or e.g. the Bedouin, the tribes of the south of the Arabian Peninsula, the tribes of Mecca etc. But the overall condition was still very bad because of the prevalence of customs like infanticide and unlimited polygamy. Women had virtually no legal status and no right to either inheritance or to divorce. V. M. Moghadam studied their situation and argues that the position of women was mostly influenced by the extent of urbanization, industrialization, and the political ploys of the management (Moghadam 4-9). Women had no role in the politics and had no suffrage rights. They were good only for producing male babies; female babies were even buried alive out of shame. Women were sold into marriages by their guardians and the suitor could end the marriage whenever he liked. Hatoon al Fassi, a Saudi historian, studied much earlier historical origins of Arab women's rights by using evidence from the ancient Arabian kingdom of Nabataea. Her findings indicate that Arab women in Nabataea had independent legal personalities but they lost many of their rights through ancient Greek and Roman law prior to the arrival of Islam. Many of these constraints became the part of the culture and were retained even after the advent of Islam (al-Fassi 12-18).The advent of Islam brought a lot of betterment for the condition of the women. They were given the right of inheritance and their consent was made necessary in marriage according to the edicts of Islam. Female infanticide was strictly prohibited. Quran, the Holy Book of Islam, carried the instructions that made elevated the status of women in the society. Where women were previously not allowed to get a formal education, its acquirement was made mandatory for both men and women in Islam. Women were seen in many roles after the arrival of Islam, as educators, teachers, and scholars and even as businesswomen. Women were fou nd working in a wide range of commercial activities and diverse occupations, for e.g. as farmers construction workers, lenders, dyers, spinners, investors, doctors and nurses, presidents of guilds, peddlers, brokers, scholars, etc. Muslim women also had domination over certain branches of the textile industry which was the largest and most specialized and market-oriented industry at the time, involving them in occupations such as dyeing, spinning and embroidery. In comparison and stark contrast, the property rights and wage labor for females were relatively uncommon in Europe until the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Similarly, women started playing an important role in the foundations of Islamic educational institutions, such as Fatima al-Fihri's founding of the University of Al Karaouine in 859. This positive trend continued through to the 12th and 13th centuries, when one hundred and sixty mosques and madrasahs were established in Damascus out of which twent y six were funded by women through the Waqf (charitable trust or trust law) system (Lindsay 191-196). Women of the contemporary Arab world