The State of Our World Depicted in the Book, Natural Capitalism: Creati

The State of Our World Depicted in the Book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution Each word in the title of the book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution carries powerful undertones. For example â€Å"industrial revolution† carries a negative connotation for me; I picture smoke stacks pouring out pollution and darkening the cities and six year old children working fourteen hours a day in factories for little pay. I simultaneously recognize the remarkable amount of inventions and technologies that were developed during and following the Industrial Revolution and its vast impact on the world and on the United States, which places great value on the idea of capitalism. Considering my preconceptions simply based on the words of the title of the book, I was intrigued to read the first chapter of the book and to see what could be environmentally â€Å"natural† about capitalism and what a new industrial revolution would involve. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins, the authors of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, offer a persuasive and powerful outlook on the state of our world currently and in the future through intertwining logical arguments, emotional appeals, and establishments of personal credibility. The chapter opens with an appeal to emotions. The book describes a scene to imagine - a more peaceful and world with more parks, cleaner air and water, societal harmony, better quality of life, and lack of income taxes (1). This beginning passage is an effective way to draw readers into the book because it intrigues them and causes them to desire the world to which they are being introduced. The opening prepares the readers ... ...pe (regarding a service and flow economy). These and the other examples given in the chapter demonstrate to the reader that changes for the better are possible and have been already taking place and yielding results. I feel that Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution is persuasive and well-written. The progression from a fantasy to how to achieve that fantasy specifically is effective. The use of emotional appeals to back up the logical claims and arguments were balanced and placed in good places. I am persuaded to learn more about how the ideals of this book are being played out in the world, and I want to support proponents of valuing natural capital in their efforts. Works Cited Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revoution. : Little Brown and Company, 1999.

How Can We Say Environment Essay

The world is getting worse day by day. The most significant reasons contributing this non-grata situation are increased CO2 emission ratio, water and soil pollution and so on. Concerned people are always accusing the administers, governments and big companies of destroying nature. To some extent this argument is true; however, every single individual has to recognize the importance of the environment and bear certain responsibilities. We can be the trigger factor of a remarkable change by making small changes in our daily life. The initial step is reducing our energy consumption. Owing the fact that a considerable amount of the electricity need is met by hydroelectric and thermal power plants, the more we use the electricity, the worse the environment is affected. The thermal power plants is mainly run by fossil fuels which make an irrevocable impact on nature by rising the CO2 emissions to dramatic levels. As a concrete instance, since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide concentration on air has doubled. Hence, by taking small steps like switching off the lights, plugging off the devices instead of keeping them on stand-by; we can decrease the energy consumption. 70% of the human body consists of water. This fact explains how crucial is the water for our existence. Due to the fact that only 2.5% of all water in the world is fresh water, water pollution threatens not only the wild life but also the human nature. In addition, if we add the water scarcity issue, the water will cause the conflicts in the future. Thus, this case must be taken into consideration more seriously by governments, companies and people. For example we can contribute to water conversation by doing small things in our houses such as installing environmental-friendly showerheads, using efficient dishwasher instead of washing the dishes by hand and running it when it’s full. These may seem very tiny but who knows, a snowflake may turn into an avalanche. In my point of view, the most important phase is to create a chance for this snowflake to evolve into an avalanche. But how? I think it can be done by informing people. As an outcome of Industrial Revolution, companies and governments has become more greedy. Earning money and protect their reputation have been their only mission and for the sake of these ends, they are killing the environment. Dramatically, there isn’t adequate protest against these circumstances. Furthermore, the existing protests are suppressed or censored. That’s why I support this argument. If we inform people about the seriousness of this issue and encourage them to take responsibility, the hardest part will be passed. Shortly, two are more powerful than one. If this can be achieved, an enormous step will be taken towards a bright future. When one thinks about how huge is the environment and notices the smallness of himself, he may think that â€Å"What I do is already meaningless.† When everyone do some thing for both themselves and nature, it gains a critical meaning. As Neil Armstrong said: â€Å"This is one small step for me but one giant leap for the humankind†. Whatever we do about saving and protecting the nature as individuals, these all have positive effect on better tomorrows, surely.

John Dewey Habits and Will

Would Dewey’s advice for correcting a bad habit work for you? How would you go about reforming one of your habits? According to John Dewey, Habits are inevitable. We are empowered by both good and bad habits. In his essay, â€Å"Habits and Will†, Dewey states that we envision bad habits as such acts of â€Å"foolish idling, gambling, addiction to liquor and drugs†, and we associate good habits with skills such as walking, playing a musical instrument, and typing. We see bad habits as desires and good habits as abilities that â€Å"exist far from our impulsive desires†.Bad habits are not deliberately formed and are also hard to break. Dewey explains that will power alone is not enough; one must follow a specific method to turn habits around. I feel that I, someone who tends to get distracted easily and procrastinate, should benefit from Dewey’s habit-breaking method. Dewey writes that a friend of his remarked that there was a superstition among perso ns that believe that if one is told what to do, if the right end is pointed to them, all that is required in order to bring about the right act is will or wish on the part of the one who is to act.According to them, if a man who slouches is told to stand up straight, all that is needed is an effort by him, and the problem is fixed. Dewey’s main argument in his essay is that this method does not work. Instead, he suggests that in order to fix or undo our bad habits we must replace them with another habit that is of goodness; you must have more than solely will power to defy a habit. I think that I can benefit from Dewey’s method and start a new habit to break my habit of procrastinating.Every day, I feel that I am easily and frequently distracted when doing schoolwork, which causes me to procrastinate. Every day, I try to break this habit and am unsuccessful. Sitting and thinking â€Å"don’t get distracted† does not work because in doing so, I get distract ed by thinking about not getting distracted, instead of actually working. My problem is not struggling to sit down and take my homework out. My problem is getting distracted frequently and taking forever to make progress- especially when I know I have time to spare.When time is running out, I tend to work much more efficiently. My bad habits of getting distracted and procrastinating counteract my good habit of taking out my homework as soon as possible. I am well aware of my habits, and know that I would feel less stressed if I could correct them. Also, every day, I have to listen to my parents tell me constantly to hurry up my work and get to bed, when I obviously want to do just that, but cannot. If I use Dewey’s method, I need to create a flank movement that will form a good habit which will aid me in breaking my bad habits.These flank movements that Dewey speaks of are some action that prevents the bad habit and leads you in the direction of something else. Instead of sol ely relying on willpower alone, I could think of a way to make myself concentrate better and feel an urge to get my work done as soon as possible. One idea I thought of is changing my environment, and instead of sitting at my desk to work, I can move somewhere else, less distracting, such as the library. If I work there, I will feel more rushed and obliged to work efficiently.I will set a goal to get a certain amount of work completed during my time at the library. I do not want to and cannot spend all afternoon and evening at the library, so and I will desire to get my work done speedily, and I will work as if it was late at night. In â€Å"Habits and Will,† John Dewey says, â€Å"[A habit] makes us do things we are ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. † He elaborates on the fact that we are our habit. Dewey forces us to admit that our bad habit is a fundamental part of our self.He insists that a bad habit can’t be overcome by will al one. We need to forget the bad habit and find an alternate activity (a flank movement) that can attract us and that we can focus on. He repeats that a bad habit can’t be overcome by will alone, contrary to popular belief, but only by picking up a flank movement. So in order for me to abolish my procrastination, or at least minimize it, I need to find an act that is different from my usual routine. I have to make the completion of this new action my new goal, and focus on reaching it.If I do not, I will continue to do the same thing over and over again, like I have done for years. All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. Our â€Å"self† is the interpenetration of will and desire and habit and action. Our selfhood isn’t what we think, but what we do; the way we act. we never intend to become an alcoholic or addicted to cigarettes. These habits come from a weakness within us all. We are too self– loved and too stubb orn to face facts which leads us to the excuses of somehow and evil power has overcome our certain abilities.Thirdly, he believes that bad habits are created from our feeling of a lack of purpose and the desires that come shortly after in attempt for immediate solutions. It would take a experience in life that enables something purposeful about us to truly appreciate the importance of ridding of the bad. http://www. alexandercenter. com/jd/johndeweyhabits. html http://www. nashvillegreatbooks. com/2009/11/john-dewey-habit-and-will. html http://www. ljhammond. com/phlit/2005-11c. htm

Amazon Case study Essay

As seen from 2014, Amazon.com is a no brainer of a business proposition. Today you can buy most things from Amazon.com – books, movies, health and beauty products, appliances, sporting goods†¦..online and the company will ship these purchases to your home the same day and often at little or no cost to you. The typical 2014 university student has grown up with the World Wide Web and eCommerce and takes these services for granted. For its part Amazon recorded revenues of $17.09 billion dollars in 2013 but for all that activity, the company did not yield a profit. According to its founder and CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon strives to be the retailer of choice for all things and for all people globally. To this end, Amazon’s profit margins on most products are razor thin and its business practices regarding free shipping and generous return policies erode earnings. Still there is no question that Amazon.com is one of the darlings of the new millennium’s Internet e conomy and a trend-setting retailer in the era of online retailing. In contrast, Amazon’s early history was marked by startling losses and lots of red ink. Why was this so? To understand Amazon’s origins, we must go back to 1994 when Bezos worked for the Shaw grocery store chain and read a study that predicted the Internet would explode in popularity. He figured that before long people would be making money selling over the Web. After considering any number of products to sell online, he settled on books, a standardized product already electronically cataloged, that could be easily managed through an automated supply chain system. Most notably, the typical book store typically managed an inventory of two to three thousand books whereas his imagined online service that would carry them all. In Bezo’s business model, he would disintermediate the retail process, eliminating stores and warehouses. Instead his customers would purchase their books from catalogs on his company’s Web site. Orders would be filled from a new kind of facility, a fulfillment center. In implementing this business model, Bezos quickly discovered that the only way to ensure a positive customer experience was for Amazon to operate their own fulfillment centers, controlling the transaction from start to finish. All of this may sound quite straightforward today but Bezo and his backers were treading in totally unchartered waters in 1995. To compete in this space, Amazon.com required a huge infusion of capital. Those fulfillment centers cost about $50 million apiece. The first of these in Fernley Nevada housed three  million books, CDs, toys, and housewares in a building a quarter-mile long by 200 yards wide. What distinguished this facility from the typical retail warehouse was that it was completely computerized. The associated business processes were largely automated and information intensive. Once customer orders were placed via Amazon.com’s Web site, the company’s information systems would send these orders to fulfillment center â€Å"pickers† who would in turn roam the shelves in a systematic manner assembling customer orders. Along the way, these information systems would capture detailed information on the time and steps involved in filling individual orders, w orker error rates, the flow and turnover of inventory and of course associated cost of operations data. Amazon managers employ this information to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of their processes. For example, as reported by Fred Vogelstein: †¦. by redesigning a bottleneck where workers transfer orders arriving in green plastic bins to a conveyor belt that automatically drops them into the appropriate chutes, Amazon has been able to increase the capacity of the Fernley warehouse by 40%. [In 2003], Amazon’s warehouses handle three times the volume they could in 1999, and in the past three years the cost of operating them has fallen from nearly 20% of Amazon’s revenues to less than 10% percent. The company doesn’t believe it will even have to think about building a new warehouse for another year. The warehouses are so efficient that Amazon turns over its inventory 20 times a year. Virtually every other retailer’s turnover rate is under 15. Indeed, one of the fastest-growing and most profitable parts of Amazon’s business today is its use of its supply chain management processes to service the eCommerce business needs of other retailers, suc h as Toys â€Å"R† Us and Target. All of this helps explain Bezos’s larger point, one he’s been making since he started Amazon but that people are only now starting to believe: â€Å"In the physical world it’s the old saw: location, location, location,† †¦.. â€Å"The three most important things for us are technology, technology, technology.† [But technology is actually the means by which Amazon manages its most valuable asset, its data. Data about products, data about customers, data about supply chain management, data about suppliers†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.] â€Å"There just aren’t other companies that let a consumer order two out of what are millions of products in a warehouse and then quickly and efficiently, at low cost, get those two things into a single box.†. But success was not a  forgone conclusion. Amazon faced a lot of red ink in its first five years. Ultimately its devotion to data paid off. As its competitors disappeared from the scene, Amazon leveraged its data management capabilities to drive error out of operations, personalize the Web experience for its customers, and add value to its relations with suppliers by providing them with deep business intelligence concerning the public’s interest in their various products. To achieve these results, Amazon developed its own methods and built its own Web-enabled information systems from scratch. Fortunately, the company could take advantage of established supply-chain management (SCM) systems for the backend of the business. In the final analysis, it was Am azon’s dedication to collecting and using information to run its business, an effort spearheaded by the company’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels and his MIS team that turned the enterprise profitable. Now that Amazon has mastered both the fulfillment side of eCommerce and the data and information management side of global business management, two major profit centers at Amazon that help feed its bottom line include: back-end fulfillment services for other global retailers and cloud computing services for the likes of iTunes and Netflix.

Report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 2

Report - Essay Example That the educated third world people are the target consumers for use of laptops. Finally, I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to write this report. It gave me the chance to familiarize myself with the third world countries application of laptops, their buying powers and the benefits of Apple Inc. for production of low cost laptops for use in third world countries. Regards Name Table of content Executive summary Report Plan 1. Recipient of the Report 2. Identify the Topic of the Report 3. Identify the Purpose of the Report 4. Identify Potential Resources that will be needed for Support 5. Identify Methods to be used to Gather Information 6. Identify Criteria to be used to evaluate the Information Collected 7. Findings 8. Conclusion 9. Recommendations 10. References 11. Appendices Executive summary This report was commission by the COE of Apple Inc. together with his executive team to seek recommendations for the production of low cost laptops to be used in the wor ld countries and the collected funds to be used in the awareness of American masses on obesity health implications. This report provides an analysis and an evaluation of the prospective production of the low cost laptops by Apple Inc. and the health focus. The methods used for the collection of information include the use of questionnaires and surveys to identify the feasibility of this project. The research draws attention to the fact that there is an extensive use of laptops in the third world counties from education to working class. Low cost laptops will be a viable project in the third world countries as they have a low buying power considering the high current costs of laptops which are mostly priced at over $1000. Further investigation reveal that the money collected from the sale of the low cost laptops will be highly effective in the creation of obesity awareness in America. The report concludes that laptops are highly needed in the third world countries especially in the e ducation sector and the corporate world. Communication and the use of internet will have a high impact on the application of low cost laptops in the third world countries. It is recommended: That Apple should adopt the project of producing low cost laptops in the third world countries. That Apple should conduct a survey to identify the programs which are effectively suitable for the application of laptops. That educators in third world countries should partner with Apple to offer suitable learning experiences for the intended users. Report Plan 1. Recipient of the Report The recipient of the report will be the top management including the CEO of Apple, Inc. the plan will be presented to all those officials who have some role to play in decision making matters. 2. Identify the Topic of the Report The topic of the report will be ‘Recommendation for Production of Low Cost Laptops and Healthcare Focus’. The report will be based on two recommendations for the company. First recommendation will be to manufacture low cost laptops in order to increase the market share of the company in third-world countries. Second recommendation will be to put some efforts for reducing obesity in America, which is one of the most critical health problems and can only be dealt by creating awareness among people

Promoting Positive Health Behaviors Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Promoting Positive Health Behaviors - Article Example Summary of Every Woman Matters Program The Every Woman Matters Program (EWM) was designed to promote preventive healthcare service to females. The specific preventive healthcare strategies aimed at were improved screening of breast and cervical cancer. To this end, the program targeted healthcare providers with an aim of promoting practice change in their operations. Consequently, the EWM program utilized the GAPS model procedure to device interventions within the healthcare provider practice (Backer et al. 2005). These interventions would be targeted at removing obstacles towards preventive breast and cervical cancer. As a result, the achievable goals set were; to increase public awareness pertaining to the risk of breast and cervical cancer. Moreover, it aimed to increase awareness on the benefits of screening. Furthermore, the program aimed at reducing the cost of screening to low income females. The practice based interventions employed were based on case studies conducted with s even individual practices. The core aims of the practice intervention were to; aid the practices identify obstacles pertaining to the delivery of screening services. Second, was to aid the practices in creating plans for mitigation of the barriers. Third was to promote the services of the EWM program to females from low incomes. Despite these well articulated goals, the EWM program fell short of achieving its core objective. Reasons for Ineffectiveness of the EWM Program The overall aim of the EWM program was to increase the level of breast and cervical cancer screening among healthcare practices. However, the program was not effective in achieving its objective due to myriad of reasons. Foremost, the practice change method for promoting EWM program lacked the sufficient support and leadership role by the leaders in the healthcare providers. The successful implementation of the goals for promoting preventive healthcare for women requires the motivational factor and sense of leadersh ip from heads of practices. Consequently, the program was ineffective since the momentum for promoting the program was not spearheaded by some of the leaders across the practices. A second plausible reason for the failure of the program was the insufficient level of teamwork between support staff and leader of the respective practices. Consequently, the lack of synergy in implementing the EWM program resulted in the over burdening of either the support staff or leaders. Third pertains to the issue of disparities in resources among the various healthcare practices. The healthcare practices all had different amounts of resources available to them based on their organizational capacities. Furthermore, the health care practices were operating within the limits of their resources. Consequently, additional resources for the EWM program were not sufficiently explored within the action plans for each healthcare practice. The fourth reason for the ineffectiveness of the EWM program was the i nsufficient public awareness creation mechanism pertaining to the need for screening. The need for successful increase in screening of breast and cervical cancer requires sufficient and mandatory public awareness. Consequently, the program was ineffective owing to insufficient efforts aimed at promoting community outreach through a variety of media such as increased free testing clinics and radio programs. Characteristics of

US HISTORY Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 1

US HISTORY - Essay Example With the beginning of this acute financial crisis, banks failed, companies shut down and the result was unemployment, loss of personal assets like land, house and other valuables. People who were well-off before the Depression lost everything and lived off from begging (Uys). The great depression completely disoriented the lives of the Americans forcing children and teenagers to give up studies and either take to begging or perform menial labour. Lack of fund resources, scarcity of food and water, and homeless existence affected social life resulting in broken homes, battered relationships and wavering convictions. Unemployment was at its peak with a record of 13 million people going jobless and living fringe life. A lot of people started moving down to the West which was not as badly affected. People could not pay fares and travelled illegally which came to be known as hobo. Hoboing and train hopping were common phenomena as more and more people travelled up and down in search of better life. Homelessness was another significant phenomenon of the time and was termed as Hoovervilles to condemn President Hoover. People could not provide to stay in proper houses and lived in shacks made of cardboard boxes, metal sheets, leftover wood, piano boxes, and rusted car bodies (Uys). The Great Depression taught people valuable lessons like self-reliance, compassion, frugality and love for freedom and one’s country (Uys). These values acted as the bedrocks on which developed a stronger and more resilient