Monday, January 27, 2020

Imaginative Journeys in The Tempest

Imaginative Journeys in The Tempest Imaginative Journeys in The Tempest by William Shakespeare The Tempest by William Shakespeare develops the notions of power, control, authority and moral order through the representation of imaginative journeys. Responders must suspend their disbeliefs in order to proceed on this speculative journey. An imaginative journey that provokes exploration, challenges our thinking and advances our understanding of ourselves. In the first scene of the play responders learned from Miranda of Prospero’s magical powers and embarked on an imaginative journey to a place of wonder and magic. Ariel and Prospero’s great Art and magic is first seen in the opening scenes, when they create a storm; a theatrical coup, in which he seeks vengeance on those who usurped him from his dukedom. He shipwrecks them, placing them on a distinctly sensory journey. It is a dramatic device used by Shakespeare to illustrate Prospero’s deceptive nature and evil intent as well as his powers of manipulation and perceived ability to control the events around him. Prospero’s magic books and cape are a symbol of his obsession to power, but also a symbol of his dangerous desire to seek revenge. However, the mock banquet scene makes it evident that Prospero only wanted them to repent and acknowledge their wrong doings. His good powers were to work on the audience and the sinner’s mind, leading them toward s personal virtue. It is also to restore the corrupted society through the use of his authority; â€Å"the ordination of civility, the control of appetite, the transformation of nature and the means of Grace.† In contrast to good powers, Antonio and Alonzo are considered villains for their past treachery and bad powers. Prospero was exiles from Milan and Antonio seized his great power through underhanded acquisitions and unnatural means. However, this undesirable exercise of power is viewed as dark because of its disruption to social and moral order. Thus both characters’ enactment of powers in order to gain authority was wrong and malevolent. The notion of bad power is also reflected when Sebastian becomes enticed by the power of Antonio’s words in convincing him of the plot to kill Alonzo and becoming King of Naples. The power of his persuasive language in causing a bad outcome to social and moral order, it reinforces Antonio’s deceitful character. A parody of stupidity towards power exists within Stephano and Trinculo, as they have such absurd ambitions of being king of the island. However, with the â€Å"celestial liquor† they bear and their state of drunkenness, they do go on an imaginative journey thinking they were the rulers. This is also similar to Gonzalo, who is the loyal and optimistic mediator; the thoughtful male who dreams of a utopia where all are equal, harmonious and order exist. The power of the imagination gives them the opportunity to believe they were of a higher power and status, able to control nature. Lastly, the Ariel’s creation of the mock-banquet and his appearance as an avenging harpy, exemplifies Prospero’s power and that he is the controller of the island; this also reminding the audience the sorts of power he conjures. Ariel is clearly showing a reflection of God, confronting sinners with their misdeeds and convicting them. Although, he is able to implement such powers, both Ariel and Prospero have no control over their true repentance. Alonzo does show signs of regret and sorrow but Antonio and Sebastian are still ignorant and believe they are right. Control and authority is another apparent notion that is evident with the powers Prospero attains. Prosperos power is not as justly attained as he keeps Ariel in unwilling bondage, like Sycorax did. Ariel is under Prospero’s absolute rule and he has full authority over him. He must beg for liberty and freedom, but it doesn’t succeed as Prospero continuously repeats Ariels past and embedding it in their mutual history; â€Å"Dost thou forget/ From what a torment I did free thee†. As a result, Ariel feels indebted to Prospero even though he deserves the freedom.   Prospero even threatens him, â€Å"If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak/ and peg thee in his knotty entrails, till/ Thou hast howl’d away twelve winters.†Ã‚   Thus, Prospero uses Ariel’s memory/history and induces guilt and fear of physical torment to manipulate and have authority/control over the spirit. Although, Ariel and Caliban are both subjected to Prospero’s servitude, they are different. Ariel calls him â€Å"noble master† out of fear and loyalty, Caliban curses Prospero, saying, All the infections that the sun sucks up/ From bogs, fens, flats, on Proper fall.† Prospero respected and treated him favourably, to gain his loyalty. But once Caliban tried to rape Miranda, Prospero took tyrannical methods of punishment; threatened his authority on the island and imprisoned him. Even though, condemned to a life of slavery and misery, he is able to disobey his orders and challenge his authority with the history of his life. He is able to attest his own story and curse Prospero to be the tyrannical oppressor like his mother, Sycorax. Nevertheless, Caliban and Ariel are clearly inferior to Prospero but ironically both their histories are similar to Prospero’s. Ariel was captured by Sycorax who then was freed by Prospero, but only to become enslaved again. Caliban was an offspring of Sycorax, and was the rightful ruler of the island. He lost his realm by Prospero, who was also ironically overthrown by Antonio. Shakespeare has used a system of mirrors to parody the same themes/situation. Prospero through his powers has Ferdinand and Miranda under his control. Using them as commodities, in order to attain and solidify his position. Ferdinand’s servitude to Prospero was like â€Å"wooden slavery†, but for Miranda’s sake he is this â€Å"patient log-man.† Miranda and Ferdinand believe each other were destined to meet, when in fact Prospero orchestrated their falling in love from the start.   Prospero catalyses a rebellion against himself with the purpose of bringing the couple together, and in the end being able to gain his position back as King of Milan. The conflict between moral order and chaos is an important notion that shows the social hierarchy and civilisation. In the opening scene with the chaos of the storm, it foreshadows upheaval and chaos. It also reinforces the idea of corruption of moral/social order, with which it must be inverted to harmony, peace, restitution and forgiveness. The shipwreck in Act 1 shows how the Boatswain rejects the social authority order and commands the King and Noblemen, as if of higher power/status. This change of power foreshadows trouble yet it also shows the control he has over the ship. It is a time whereby, social rank does not exist and that despite their rank they are still subjected to nature. This also brings up the themes of Art versus Nature and the transitions of two different worlds. Trinculo and Stephano may be constructed as fools but they are still constantly endeavouring to change their fate, wishing to take over the island and initiating actions that will bring this about. But as Caliban sought to retain his individuality and freedom he again falls into the same mistake and reorients himself into this new hierarchy. Stephano and Trinculo seem to grow in power and authority by reducing Caliban to their state of drunkenness. His mock-kingship is a shadow of his former sovereignty on the island, and it proves Prosperos view of him correct; a natural servant. This inversion of moral order seems places Stephano and Trinculo on the top of the social hierarchy, being â€Å"king o’th’isle†. Throughout The Tempest, notions and themes are presented through Shakespeare’s representation of imaginative journeys. It shows the true nature of humanity and Art; the need for control and authority in order to maintain peace and harmony; and the social and political hierarchy. Ultimately, it is true that Prospero is all-powerful, having the authority to control all events on the island with the purpose of restoration and order.

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Project Management Plan Essay

Projects in a business are always set up to bring some beneficial change or add value to what the business already have (Knutson and Bitz, 1991). They are therefore set with goals that have to be accomplished. In a business organization, there are staff members given responsibility by the manager or the human resource manager based on their qualification and experience, on the kind of job they are assigned. Project management is always given to a project manager. A project manager has the responsibility to ensure that the planning, organizing and management of the project resources, comes to an end with the successful completion of the objectives (Knutson and Bitz, 1991). One of the roles of a project manager as has been noted is planning of the resources available for a specific project. Project Management Plan A project management plan answers the four W’s. Why, what, when and who (Kimmons, 1990). LRH product company (who), intends to present a trade show (what), in Kansas City as a marketing strategy for the benefit of the company (why), in the quest to increase company sales. The project is due in ten weeks (when) from the start of preparations to the show. The project manager has been provided with all the resources required. This paper aims at giving the rest of the steps needed in a work breakdown structure of a project management plan, that the objectives and the requirements of its completion, are already provided. Completing the Project Management plan The first steps of the project management plan have been done. They are, identification of the project goal, which is to participate in a trade show for marketing purposes and what the project requires to ensure that the goal is met, which is already done. The next steps in a project management plan that have not been completed and need to be done are scheduling and development of support plans (Spinner, 1992). Scheduling: What the project needs to deliver, should be accomplished in order to consider the project as a successful one. For delivery purposes, tasks on the appropriate selected deliverables have to be identified and written down on a list to guide the planner. The tasks are identified while considering the amount of time or effort needed to complete the task and the qualified person to complete the task (Spinner, 1992). In the description given, these tasks and the relevant people needed for the project to deliver had already been identified, but the next steps in scheduling had not been done . The next step is to calculate the effort required for each deliverable plus the delivery date. It is important for the project manager to select an appropriate software for this kind of calculation. Normally it is PERT that is used, which is a software used to evaluate the total time the project will take to be completed and the total time the tasks will take to complete the project (Spinner, 1992). If in any case the project manager finds out that the provided time for project completion is not enough, he/she has to inform the sponsor/manager to get more time. In the case of this assignment, the project manager could ask to start the project earlier if the time allocated is found not to be enough. Support plans: The next step in the management plan is to develop support plans. These include plans that should be involved in the project management plan either included in it or not. They are such as, the human resource plan, communication plans, that indicate who should be informed about the issues of the project and risk management plans, that give identified risks to the project and how to deal with each. When preparing a project plan, a project manager can decide to select a tool of project planning that he/she feels appropriate for formulating the plan. This is where the Gantt charts, which gives a project schedule from the start to the end, showing the terminal and the summary elements as well as the structure used for the work breakdown, is used (Spinner, 1992).

Friday, January 10, 2020

Tobacco tax

Tobacco tax: good for health, government finances Tobacco use kills over 5 million people each year and is the largest single preventable cause of premature death. l Tobacco is very costly to society through high costs to treat tobacco-induced disease or through loss of productivity as a result of the premature deaths. But governments have a tool to combat the costs of tobacco use † tobacco taxation.Higher tobacco prices decrease consumption and encourage people to quit Increasing the price of tobacco products Is the single most effective way to reduce consumption-2 Ralslng prices discourages uptake of tobacco se by young people and motivates people to quit tobacco use, while raising government revenues. 3 Numerous studies in high income countries have shown that a 10% increase in cigarette price decreases consumption by about 4%. 4 Available data indicate that consumption in low and middle income countries is even more responsive to price.For example, the estimated decreases w ould be about 5. 5% in China, 5. 2% in Mexico and 5. 4% in South Africa. 5,6,7 For tobacco products other than manufactured cigarettes, studies are comparatively rare, although similar effects have been found. 8 Price (SA rand) Packs 100 25 Real Cigarette prices (2008 base) Packs sold per capita 15 10 5 20 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2009 Year Inflation-adjusted cigarette prices and cigarette consumption, South Africa, 1980-2009 Higher tobacco prices save lives Decreasing consumption would translate into lives saved.The World Bank has estimated that tax increases to raise the price of cigarettes by 10% would: 00 Cut the number of smokers in the world by 42 million † 38 million of them in low to middle income countries; 00 Save 10 million lives † 9 million of them in low to middle income countries. 9 PHOTO: WBB Trust WWW. NCDALLIANCE. ORG How many lives could tobacco tax increases save? Recent economic analyses for countries with large numbers of smokers found that: in China: in Russia: Increasing tax from 40% to 68% of the retail price would: Increasing tax from 37% to 70% Increasing tax from 33% to 70% OOGenerate IJS$16. billion a year in additional tax revenue OOGenerate IJS$6. 5 billion a year in OOGenerate IJS$4. 9 billion a year in OOHelp 54. 6 million smokers to quit OOHelp 10 million smokers to quit OOHelp 5. 4 million smokers to quit oosave 13. 7 million lives12 OOSave 3. 5 million lives OOSave 1. 3 million lives14 Tobacco and poverty Those living on lower incomes are more likely to smoke, and policy makers are sometimes concerned that increasing tobacco tax will penalise people who are already living in reduced circumstances.But it is important to note that poorer smokers are also the most price sensitive † in other words, they are the most likely to quit or reduce their consumption of tobacco when taxes are increased. This has been confirmed in multiple studies. For example, when tobacco excise was increased in South Africa over s everal years in the mid to late 1990s, the largest reductions in smoking prevalence were seen among young people and low-income earners. When smokers quit, their families benefit in two ways: through improved health and through improved finances † money previously spent on tobacco products can be spent on food, education and other necessities. If policy makers are concerned about the economic impact of tobacco tax increases on low-income smokers who do not reduce their consumption, they can invest part of the added tobacco tax revenue in social spending. 13 In addition to savings to the public sector, business can also benefit from a healthier workforce, with lower absenteeism and fewer losses of skilled workers through early retirement due to illness or early death.A cost-benefit analysis in the I-JK showed that a 5% tobacco tax increase over the rate of inflation would increase government tax revenues by over IJS$814 million a year and result in wider economic benefits of ov er $440 million per year in the first five years of the policy. 18 Tobacco use is the one risk factor common to the main groups of NCDs. Accelerated implementation of the FCTC is an essential way to tackle NCDs and save lives. 1 World Health Organization (2009) WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic 2008.Geneva: World Health Organization. 2 World Health Organization (2004) Building blocks for tobacco control: a handbook. Geneva: World Health Organization. 3 Jha P Chaloupka F. (1999) Curbing the epidemic: governments and the economics of tobacco control. Washington, DC: World Bank. 4 World Health Organization (2010) WHO technical manual on tobacco tax administration. Geneva: World Health Organization. 5 Hu T-w, Mao Z, Shi J, Chen W (2008) Tobacco taxation and its potential impact in China.Paris: International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. Tobacco tax increases benefit the economy Governments benefit directly from tobacco tax increases. Increased revenue can pay for tobacco control interventions, combating infectious isease or other priority national programmes. Countries with efficient tax systems have benefitted from substantial tax increases.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

The Soldier by Rupert Brooke Text and Analysis

The poem The Soldier is one of English poet Rupert Brookes (1887–1915) most evocative and poignant poems—and an example of the dangers of romanticizing World War I, comforting the survivors but downplaying the grim reality. Written in 1914, the lines are still used in military memorials today. If I should die, think only this of me:That theres some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of Englands, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. Rupert Brooke, 1914 About the Poem The Soldier was the last of five poems of Brookes War Sonnets about the start of World War I. As Brooke reached the end of his series, he turned to what happened when the soldier died, while abroad, in the middle of the conflict. When The Soldier was written, the bodies of servicemen were not regularly brought back to their homeland but buried nearby where they had died. In World War I,  this produced vast graveyards of British soldiers in foreign fields, and allows Brooke to portray these graves as representing a piece of the world that will be forever England. Writing at the start of the war, Brooke prefigured the vast numbers of soldiers whose bodies, torn to shreds or buried by shellfire, would remain buried and unknown as a result of the methods of fighting that war. For a nation desperate to turn the senseless loss of its soldiers into something that could be coped with, even celebrated, Brooke’s poem became a cornerstone of the remembrance process and is still in heavy use today. It has been accused, not without merit, of idealizing and romanticizing war, and stands in stark contrast to the poetry of Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). Religion is central to the second half of The Soldier, expressing the idea that the soldier will awake in a heaven as a redeeming feature for his death in war. The poem also makes great use of patriotic language: it is not any dead soldier, but an English one, written at a time when to be English was considered (by the English) as the greatest thing to be. The soldier in the poem is considering his own death but is neither horrified nor regretful. Rather, religion, patriotism, and romanticism are central to distracting him. Some people regard Brooke’s poem as among the last great ideals before the true horror of modern mechanized warfare was made clear to the world, but Brooke had seen action and knew well of a history where soldiers had been dying on English adventures in foreign countries for centuries and still wrote it. About the Poet An established poet before the outbreak of World War I, Rupert Brooke had traveled, written, fallen in and out of love, joined great literary movements, and recovered from a mental collapse all before the declaration of war, when he volunteered for the Royal Naval Division. He saw combat action in the fight for Antwerp in 1914, as well as a retreat. As he awaited a new deployment, he wrote the short set of five 1914 War Sonnets, which concluded with one called The Soldier. Soon after he was sent to the Dardanelles, where he refused an offer to be moved away from the front lines—an offer sent because his poetry was so well-loved and good for recruiting—but died on April 23rd, 1915 of blood poisoning from an insect bite that weakened a body already ravaged by dysentery.