Literature review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 2

Literature review - Essay Example In this regard, this book has discussed and analyzed different perspectives of learning that can be implemented in the organizations. One of the major breakthroughs has been the systems thinking that has given a number of opportunities to the organizations to increase their capacity and performance in the marketplace, which has been discussed in this book in a simple manner. The author has been able to introduce and integrate the basic components of systems thinking in this book, which has played a vital and crucial role in the significant performance of an organization. In addition, different principles of indifferences, dimensional analysis, and systems theory with relation to the systems thinking have been included in this abovementioned book. A working concept of systems theory has been developed and discussed in this book. Different methodologies related to the systems thinking have been dealt in this book, which has provided a detailed analysis of the topic to the readers. Different characteristics of socio-cultural systems have also been evaluated in this book. Topics related to the human resource, as well as, organizational development have been showcased in this book. Different practices and theories related to the organizational performance have been displayed by the author. In specific, systems thinking has been given due consideration in this course, as it has been one of the most effective measures for the continued and sustained growth of an organization. The term of systems have been incorporated with the existence of organizations in this book. The author has tried to explain the relationship of organizational performance with the characteristic of a system, which can be very beneficial for an organization. Performance based on the objectives can be facilitated by the provision of instructions based on the systems thinking. Management and Systems thinking have been analyzed and compared

Athletic programs Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Athletic programs - Essay Example As I reflect upon my experiences from these sports programs, I believe that the lessons I have imbibed greatly contributed to my overall development as an individual. I reckon that the benefits I have derived from joining these programs make be better equipped in facing the challenges of high school life. As a part of the athletic programs, I have greatly appreciated the concept of teamwork. These programs have made me realize that through team effort goals would achieved more efficiently. Instead of working or playing on my own, I have grown to become a team player. In my high school years, this characteristic would help me relate with my group mates or peers both inside and outside the classroom. Moreover, participating in athletic programs has assisted me in gaining self-confidence. Through the guidance of trainers, I developed my belief in my skills as a soccer player, student and individual who is part of a team. This trait also enabled me to easily accept rejections and failures. As a high school student, this is vital because such gives me the courage to try various pursuits. Should I fail in these endeavors, I could easily inspire myself to improve and find ways to further hone my skills to succeed. The athletic programs have also molded me to embody sportsmanship.

Importance of understanding personality in psychology

Importance of understanding personality in psychology In the field of psychology it is most important to understand the personality of an individual. Personality helps sum up the values, actions, perceptions and behaviour, these can differ from person to person. There are a number of theories that are being used to understand people and have been around for many years, the five Psychological concepts used are Behaviourist, Humanistic, Cognitive, Psychodynamic and the Biological psychology. This assignment will cover two of the five approaches; they are the Behaviourist and Humanistic approach. Behaviourists primarily focus on peoples observable behaviour, experiences and their learning process to understand individuals. According to behaviourists ones behaviour does not depend on what goes on inside the mind and also believe if asked about their feelings it is very likely they could be providing misleading information. They also trust that behaviour is learnt either by imitation of others or repeating behaviour that has brought an award or a punishment; peoples interaction with the environment. Operant and Classical conditioning is two theories within the behaviourist theory. Operant conditioning according B.F Skinner (1936) is a learning method that arises through rewarding or punishing one for their behaviour. Classical conditioning which was discovered by Ivan Pavlov (1903) is said to be a learning procedure that is raised by a natural stimulus and an environmental stimulus. Watson and Rayner (1920) did a controlled experiment and recorded on videotapes. Watson wanted to take Pavlovs research from animals and test it on humans. This experiment was called Little Albert. Albert was 9 months old when he was tested for reactions towards various stimulis that were presented to him. Albert was shown white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, with masks, cotton wool, and burning newspapers. It was said he showed no fear towards the three animals. What Albert did respond negatively to was the loud noise that came from the hammer being struck against a steel bar, Albert cried when he heard it. When Albert was a little over 11months he was tested again in another controlled experiment, he was presented with a white rat and the steel bar was stuck by a hammer, this experiment was carried out 7 times over 7 weeks. When Albert was presented with a white rat, he would burst into tears not only that but Albert only had to see the white rat and he would show every sign of fear towards the white rat. Albert grew to fear the white rat, he also grew a fear for all fury things and the hammer was no longer needed to get Albert crying. (Watson, John B. Rayner, Rosalie. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 3, 1-14). This classically conditioned experiment was a great success as it proved to be right. Some may agree believe that the behaviourist approach is more accurate than the Humanistic approach as it is considered scientific, and there is data that is collected by the researchers that prove to be a success. This approach being classed as scientific tells us that many experiments have been carried out to prove the accuracy of the approach and it has a backbone and isnt just assumptions of what might be going on in the mind and how if influences our everyday behaviour. Pavlov showed existence of the behaviourist approach when he by accidently discovered that the dog produced more saliva when he saw the lab assistant because he had learnt to associate the lab assistant with food. Watson approved of Pavlovs observations and wanted to connect it to human psychology and did so by performing the Little Albert experiment (1920). This experiment being done successfully, may be classed as double confirmation to some as they may believe that human and animals are alike in some sense because they adapt to their environment and learn to behave according to that environment. The behaviourist theory could be classed as biased. For example Watson and Pavlov conducted their experiment in laboratory conditions which means the Independent variable (IV) was controlled and manipulated by the experimenter to measure the dependent variable (DV). The dependent variable may be accurately measured but its sense of realism has been taken away and very little free will is left. Humanistic psychology could also be referred to as the third force in psychology, its theories that conflict the Behaviourist theories. The humanistic perspectives are more concerned and are interested in how peoples behaviours can be influenced by a persons emotions and thoughts. How one feels and how others see an individual is what they believe shapes peoples behaviour, interested in what goes on internally rather than the external factors. Humanistic approach believes that personality is what shapes human behaviour and comparing it to animals is dehumanising as each individual is unique and does not go by animalistic urges. Each social interaction helps develop ones personality. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are the main theorists who portray the Humanistic approach. Carl Rogers (1959) has claimed that the meaning of behaviour basically, is personal. One needs to feel appreciated and accepted by their environment and not only that but needs to be surround by people who they can talk to and would listen and understand them, he believed that if people arent surrounded by these social factors then relationships and healthy personalities will not develop. Satisfying yourself by achieving your personal goals, personal wishes and personal desires in life is where self-actualization takes place. He believes that a person can only do this when their ideal self and self imagine is congruent; the humanistic term for this is a fully functioning person. Abraham Maslow (1970) created a Hierarchy of needs pyramid which starts off with one needing to satisfy the lower needs before being able to achieve self actualization. The pyramid starts off with the basic needs such as physiological needs, safety needs, love and belongingness, Esteem needs, then goes on to the growth needs such as cognitive needs, aesthetic needs. Once these needs are seen to a person is able to realise the full potential and become everyone one can become. Behaviourist and humanist approach both recognise that humans nature to respond to whatever the situation whether it is internally or externally. Another similarity with the two approaches is they both take note of other individuals and ones experience and relation with them. They have more difference than similarities On one hand the Behaviourist approach does not see peoples ability to think but believe they have the ability to react, just like an animal. On the other hand, for the humanistic, peoples behaviour is believed to relay on being able to fulfil their needs and responsibilities, development of ones self and their self awareness. The behaviourists believe what shapes behaviour is ones response to natural stimulis and behaviour can be reshaped using Operant and Classical conditioning. As for the Humanistic beliefs ones behaviour is developed by their social interactions (Family, friends, environment and etc) Humanistic see an individual as unique, every person is unique and have their internal reasons for the behaviour, and do not believe that all behaviour is shaped by external factors; comes from within the mind.

Snowcrash :: Technology Electronics Cyberspace Essays

Snowcrash The day was finally here, the day to pick our novels to read for the semester. Being Nick I hadnt even looked at the reading list and the time was here to pick my novel. My friend in the class Maygan let me look at the reading list for a brief second. I skimmed through the list looking for an interesting book title and maybe a title that I could relate something in my life to. I picked the novel SnowCrash, by Neal Stephenson. SnowCrash, sounded like a fun snowboarding novel or winter novel that would be fun to read. Maybe something about a snow mobile crash. This book has no snow at all in it. . I was way off. This book has a more optimistic look on our future, and the outcome of our present technology. The book turns out to have a typical underdog vs. the world theme, but the plot is so intriguing that this should not dissuade you of the quality. One of the most distinctive features of cyberpunk is the technological aspect. Traditional science fiction dealt with things that were pos sible, but not probable. Cyberpunk not only deals possible, not just the probable, but technology that man already has. This is not to say that cyberpunks do not have there fair share of far flung imaginative human interface hookups and so forth, but they are talking about technology that if it were to be developed, it would be within the writers life time or so. The other difference in the technology that is described in cyberpunk is how it is used. Almost every person in the stories has access to the technology. More importantly, the technology involved normally allows for extreme human inter-action with it. The writer will make computers and humans connect, and allow the computer to alter the mind, human social behaviors, and/or society itself. Cyberpunk futures make computers not only become a part of everyday life, but a integral element for survival and prosperity. This aspect is the main plot in Gibson's novel. His main character, Chase, needs to find a way to reverse the damage in a chip in his head for him to do the type of work he wanted to do. Before cyberpunk, humans had control over their technology, and it was a separate entity, but now the distinction over how much a person is human and how much of them are machine is not so clear.

Movie and Book Comparison Essay

Tuesdays With Morrie is both a book and a movie. They are alike and different in so many different ways. The movie is never going to have as much detail as the book did, but they did a good job making the movie as close as possible to the book. The book covered a lot more aspects of the story than the movie did, and the book focused on the bigger more important parts. There were a lot of main points that the book and movie were alike. In both Morrie dies the same way with the same people around him. At the beginning of this story Mitch is so consumed in his job that he doesn’t give any attention to anything else but his column. As the story progresses Morrie starts to lighten up on the job and work towards a relationship with Morrie. By having this relationship with Morrie helps his relationship back home with his girlfriend who is getting tired of Mitch not giving her the attention she deserves. Janine and Morrie both play huge parts in Mitch’s life in both the movie and the book. The movie used a lot of the same lines used in the book such as Morrie’s aphorisms. One last thing that the book and movie had in common was that each time Mitch went to visit Morrie he could tell Morrie was getting worse and worse. Even though the movie did a great job making the book come to life, the movie and book had a couple differences. The movie never brought up Mitch’s brother like they did in the book. Another thing is in the movie they didn’t talk about Mitch as child like they did in the book. In the movie they show Janine giving the proposal ring back to Mitch in the airport, but in the book they never mentioned that. Also in the book they never talked about Mitch’s breakup with Janine and how he went to her studio and tried to fix it. Mitch’s relationship with Janine was way more a part of the movie than the book. The book focused more on the relationship between Morrie and Mitch when the movie focused on both. Some movies that are made from a book are most of the time completely different, but this movie resembled the book perfectly. The movie covered the most important parts of the book, which made it a success.

Baldwin Norman

The profundity of silence is a theme that plays a significant role in the works â€Å"Sonny’s Blues† by James Baldwin and â€Å" ’night, Mother† by Marsha Norman. The two tales represent confessions by family members that uncover the profound effect that each person’s communication method has had on the other. In particular, one identifies a lack of communication within both family relationships that demonstrates itself in an overabundance of silence.Baldwin’s tale recounts the woes of a certain brother who feels himself somehow responsible for the tragic events that have faced his younger sibling, and it portrays a relationship that lacks effective communication. Likewise, Norman portrays a family that has spent its usefulness in the avoidance of conversation. She eventually reveals the inadequacies of the mother who is at last unable to rescue her child from the pressures that cause her to contemplate death as the only acceptable option.The protagonists of each story find themselves in family relationships that fall short of the support necessary to prevent each from receding beyond the point of recovery. The tale rehashed in Marsha Norman’s play â€Å" ‘night, Mother† explores the hopelessness that leads to suicide, and in so doing, closely maps the psychological condition of the character Jessie (Whited 65). It takes the analysis of the situation into the realm of the family and considers that cocoon to be the engine that generates and exacerbates the problem Jessie faces. The â€Å"problem† is given its lineage in the relationships experienced by the members of the family.The relationships appear to be filled with action and devoid of communication. Of her own culpability, Mama says, â€Å"I didn’t tell you things or I married you off to the wrong man or I took you in and let your life get away from you or all of it put together† (lines 611-613). This circumstance points tow ard an overemphasizing of action and the downplaying of the type of conversation that allows true feelings to come to the fore. Jessie also recalls the silence of her father, and Norman hints that this silence has for the past decades stabilized or subdued the appearance of Jessie’s mental condition.Yet, this same silence has perhaps created the environment in which her mental or psychological illness has been allowed to germinate (Whited, 67). The idea that Jessie breaks her silence precisely at that hour in which her mental condition has become overwhelming and irreparable gives the idea that the lack of communication within her family setting may actually have been to her detriment. The exploration of the relationship between the narrator and his brother Sonny in James Baldwin’s â€Å"Sonny’s Blues† also represents a crisis of silence and suffocation within a family setting.This family in which Sonny resides also betrays a tendency toward continual act ion that precludes the kind of conversation which might have allowed the brothers to truly understand each other. Without understanding Sonny, the narrator (his brother) and their mother make plans to protect him for the rest of his life. They encourage him to live in situations that are not conducive to his spirited nature, such as his residence with Isabel while his brother goes off to war. Yet the silence Sonny endures, like that of Jessie, has the appearance of being his preferred mode of existence.The narrator says, â€Å"Sonny has never been talkative,† yet he goes on to say something more insightful that hints at the true desires that Sonny has always had. He continues, â€Å"So I don’t know why I was sure he’d be dying to talk to me when supper was over the first night† (Baldwin, 8). This hints at the underlying idea that though silence prevailed within the family, probing by his brother and mother might have dispelled both the silence and the dis mal circumstances that later defined Sonny’s life.Literary analyst Tracey Sherard writes: â€Å"the narrator comes to understand his brother Sonny through the latter’s apparent struggle to strike out into the deep, unexplored waters of jazz improvisation† (691). Therefore, it is only through the music that Sonny’s brother is able to communicate with and understand him in the end. Comparisons between the two tragic characters of the stories, Sonny and Jessie, can be made in regard to their life choices. The two characters can be seen to choose silence during the early years of their lives, and this might be connected to another form of silence throughout the later stages of their lives.Sonny’s choice of life has led him to heroin, and this dangerous drug might be considered one that paves a path to death in a manner that is very similar to the suicide that Jessie contemplates. Both characters, therefore, choose suicide as the only means of silencing the worries and discontent of their lives. Jessie expresses a desire to sleep â€Å"whenever she wanted to, just by closing her eyes† (line 637), and this she has not been able to do since she was a â€Å"pink and fat† baby (639-40). This choice to commit suicide is therefore an extension of the idea of closing one’s eyes to problems of life.Sonny, in a similar way, chooses to close his eyes to his problems via his use of heroin. And likewise, the extension of this action (continued heroin use) is precisely concurrent with the death that Jessie so openly craves. Jessie’s mother, who desires not death, says â€Å"I’m not like you, Jessie. I hate the quiet and I don’t want to die† (lines 626-27) and this juxtaposition of death and quietness underscores the idea that the death desired by Jessie and Sonny can be seen also to be a form of silence.The motif of silence can be carried through even further within the analysis of the stories t old by these authors. During the few short moments before her death, Jessie takes a break from her silence to explain the essence of it to her mother. Within this time she uncovers all the pain that her silence has embodied for the years preceding (Whited, 67). She also enumerates the problems that her ensuing death will hope to silence within her. This moment of conversation can be compared to (and in fact prefigures) the bullet that breaks for a split second the silence that has defined Jessie’s life.It also effects the reconstruction of that silence by guaranteeing its continuation in death. Death guarantees not only that the disappointments and fears in Jessie’s psyche will be quieted, but also that the events that have generated or exacerbated these problems will also cease to trouble her. The forms of silence to which Sonny subscribes are heroin (as has been uncovered above) and music. While heroin promises to lead him toward that final and inexorable death of th e body, music provides a spiritual release for him that also provides an effective (if temporary) silence from his turmoil.Sonny’s escape to music as a means of silencing his demons can be compared to the way his brother describes their father as being â€Å"on the lookout for ‘something a little better. ’† Yet he goes on to say that his father â€Å"died before he found it† (Baldwin, 8). Sonny, too, looks to music as a form of escape—a means of quieting his dissatisfaction with his circumstances, a way of searching for something better. While as a youth he annoyed Isabel’s family with his constant piano playing, everyone was able to sense that â€Å"Sonny was at that piano playing for his life† (16).The piano’s music silenced not only the troubles that haunted his mind, but also the voices of hoodlums and vagrants on the street that would have called him into a life of crime and dissipation. It was, in fact, the eventual silencing of the piano by the screams of Isabel’s family that precipitated the demise that his music had been holding at bay. This re-establishes and supports the idea that music was a means of silencing the call of the inner city life and pressures that threatened to overtake Sonny in his youth.The lives and relationships explored within â€Å"’Night, Mother† and â€Å"Sonny’s Blues,† as told by Marsha Norman and James Baldwin respectively, speak loudly and portray vividly a distinct and almost impenetrable silence that enveloped the main characters. For Jessie, silence has been the defining characteristic of her relationship between her father during both his life and his death. During his life, he demonstrated his love with actions, and while Jessie appeared to be comfortable in that silence, the very essence of it provided the environment in which her psychological demise germinated and matured.Her mother, though disliking silence, has rarely been able penetrate Jessie’s, and this proves to facilitate the more permanent form of silence to which she graduates: that of death. Sonny too experiences silence within his relationships—a silence that becomes extended and embodies by the activities of his life. He refuses to speak to his family, silencing the discomfiture with music or heroin. Like Jessie, Sonny’s major life decisions place him on a path toward the ultimate silence: death. Works Cited Baldwin, James. â€Å"Sonny’s Blues. † Wright State University.1957. Online Text. http://www. wright. edu/~alex. macleod/winter06/blues. pdf Norman, Marsha. â€Å"’Night, Mother. † Literature: Reading, Writing, Reacting. Laurie G. Kirzner & Stephen Mandell (Eds). 4th Ed. New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001. 1708-1743. Sherard, Tracey. â€Å"Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s ‘Blues Text’ as Intracultural Critique. † African American Review. Vol. 32, Iss ue 4. (Winter 1998): 691-705. Whited, Lana A. â€Å"Suicide in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Marsha Norman's ‘night, Mother. † Southern Quarterly 36 (Fall 1997): 65-74.