Political Issues with the Current Immigration Essay

â€Å"In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1965. This new law abolished the national origins quota system and barred racial considerations from expressly entering into decisions about immigrant visas; it also imposed for the first time a ceiling (120,000) on migration from the Western Hemisphere.† (Johnson, 2006). Historical Framework for the Issue of Illegal Immigration Towards the end of the 19th century, Congress passed the first immigrant exclusion law restricting criminal and prostitutes, and followed up with the Japanese, Asian and Chinese. Even with this law in place the immigration still reached a record high of 1.3 million personnel in 1907. In 1965, Congress then passed the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments that ended the quota and initiated the concept of family sponsored immigration. In 1987, Congress enacted the Immigration Reform Control Act (IRCA) which authorized two programs to identify and legalize illegal immigrants who are able to document their entry into the U.S. prior to 1 January 1982 (America.gov Archive, 2003). The immigration migration is a phenomenon of crucial importance to the United States as long as the immigration guidelines and procedures are followed, but with the vast number of amendments being reconstructed and enacted by Congress, on almost a daily basis this put additional strain on our border patrol, g overnment agencies, and our military forces who have been tasked to assist in the protection of the U.S./Mexico border alongside the local police officers. On October 1, 2004, Mr. Jim Gilchrist, U.S Vietnam Marine veteran, founded the multi-ethnic Minuteman Project after he had been frustrated dealing with the United States Government to enforce the immigration laws. The Minutemen, who formed the name from militiamen who fought in the American Revolution, has described themselves as â€Å"a citizen’s neighborhood watch on our border†,  and have continued to get the media attention on dealing with the illegal immigration issue plaguing the United States. The Minutemen organization has portrayed more of a negative connotation rather than the positive that they had initially strived for. On May 25, 2005 there was the Garden Grove Incident dealing with protestors. On October 4, 2006 they had the Columbia University incident where their stage was stormed by student protestors. The T-Shirt incident on April 6, 2005 in which minutemen had an old man poses with a racial discrimination T-shirt, and in August 2007 there was a fake murder video published by the organization (Sanchez, 2011). Even with this negativity, on April 28, 2005, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the Minutemen Project on a Los Angeles radio station KFI. The issues of the constant illegal immigration border crossings, violence and murders on the borders of the immigrants and law enforcements officers, the immigration laws will continue to be pushed through Congress in order to keep our borders safe and ensure the diverse cultures visiting the United States are entering with the appropriate documentation instead of through the desert with a backpack, bottles of water, and for some, with bags of drugs. Is the Media Portrayal of biased or unbiased Illegal Immigration? On October 6, 2010, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that record numbers of deportations of criminal aliens, declaring that these figures have demonstrated that President Obama’s administration is focused on enforcing our immigration laws that prioritizes public safety a nd national security. One of the political issues on July 7, 2011, according to Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (2011), a memorandum was published entitled â€Å"Individuals Who Are Not Authorized to Work in the United States Were Paid $4.2 Billion in Refundable Credits† which is also the entire product of the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC) for the 2010 tax processing year (Impact on Taxpayers). Illegal immigration laws that are in place are not only bottlenecking the system, becoming costly to taxpayers and increasing the deficit, but the ranchers along the border are either having the illegals trespassing onto their land, destroying their fence line along the property, and on a few occasions ranchers have been killed. Mr. John Ladd, a rancher on the Southern border of Arizona, has a ranch sprawling over 14,000 acres between Mexico border and state highway 92. His ranch is the major corridor  for the smuggling of drugs and human beings into the United States. The border pat rol makes frequent arrests on the ranch, but most of those are released back into Mexico where they regroup and try again until they are successful (Gisorg, 2010). On average, one mile of border fence costs US taxpayers $4 million. Is it worth the expense? The measurements of this fence is 21 feet (6.4m) tall and 6 feet (1.8m) embedded into the ground, and cemented in a 3 foot (.91m) wide trench. With all of this material, manpower, monetary cost and security, on December 16, 2010, a video was shot showing two young American students visiting the border and on their first try, these girls made it to the top of the fence in less than eighteen seconds. How much time do you think it will take if you visit the beach of Tijuana and just swim out to the fence line and cross over? Does the public’s perception encourage or discourage prejudice, labeling or stereotyping? There are media commentaries that intentionally sensationalize the story being reported; it all depends on where their station ratings stand. Even unintentional biased reporting can be portrayed depending on what the listener’s views are on immigration. I cannot justify what their true intentions are, but as a viewer there are times when my perception is that they are not telling the full story, or the story is biased to the side of the populace majority. One of the best media outlets I’ve come across depicting the conflict between bordering countries was by the Coca-Cola Corporation. Two guards who are patrolling their border, walking back and forth along a stretch of about 15 feet with hatred and discontent showing on their faces not uttering a word. What brought these two cultures to a brief truce was a 16oz bottle of Coca-Cola (Gisorg, 2010). Even In the portrayal of the movie ‘Borders’ which depict the immigration issues with Mexico and the United States. Chris Burgard’s award winning television series takes an impartial look at the agonizing and complex issue of our southern U.S. border. This film fosters debate, open discussion, and hopefully a more balanced outlook towards a national problem that has polarized our nation.† (Rick Dixon, Star Tribune, 2011). During the viewing, you may perceive that all Hispanics are probably in this country illegally, drug runners or coyotes. This actually encourages hatred of most Hispanics because they are perceived the same as terrorist in this land. This show demonstrates how individuals should be fighting again crime and illegal immigration of all  types, and the question you should be asking yourself is if you believe in your government, and what is the true border between justice and crime. Does this issue affect the U.S. economy and labor force? Presently illegal immigrants arriving into country are taking advantage of the job workforce that average Americans deem beneath them. They are willing to take on those jobs that we perceive as demeaning, and underpaid. Due to this immigration issue, the United States, as paid over $4.2 billion dollars towards labor for the illegal immigrants and over $100 billion each year on medical, housing and education. According to the Arizona state treasurer Dean Martin, they are losing between $1.3 and $2.5 billion each year on illegal immigrant on incarceration, education and their families. This does not account for the legal services that are provided through the court system. As a manager, what inclusion strategies would be implemented? When dealing with the issues of illegal immigration and the media coverage as a manager, there are strategies that can be utilized to foster a collaborative working environment for employees. Coordinate with Human Resources to schedule diversity and equal opportunity training, plan a quarterly cultural luncheon/potluck, and during each holiday ensure there are decorations representing every culture in your organization and allow those individuals to explain what each trinket means. When dealing with stereotyping, encourage employees to ask questions concerning that cultural difference they don’t understand or have perceptions about. Most organizations will have a media device placed in the office, and employees will hear of negative connotations dealing with the diverse groups around the United States. If listening to these stories makes you stop and think, then it will also make you wonder about that culture. Not all individuals in are the same, and not all cultures are radical, illegal immigrants or a threat. Conclusion The media is the media is the media. As long as there is conflict it will be reported to the masses. Illegal immigrants and immigration laws are tied to the hip and will always be part of society and culture. Unless the United takes a lesson from the 1981 television show called ‘Escape from New York’,  produced by John Carpenter, place a twenty-five foot solid cement wall that is fifteen feet thick around the state. There will always be illegal immigrants either from Mexico, Cuba, and other countries seeking domicile in the United States. References America.gov Archive. (2003). The Immigration Act of 1965. Retrieved from http://www.america.gov/st/educ-english/2008/April/20080423214226eaifas0.9637982.html Canoy, M., Beutin, R., Horath, A., Hubert, A., Lerais, F., Smith, P., & Sochacki, M. (2006, September 10). Migration and public perception. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/policy_advisers/publications/docs/bepa_migration_final_09_10_006_en.pdf Gemano, R. P. (2010, December 16). 2 Girls Undermine US Border Strategy in Under 18 Seconds [Video file]. Retrieved from YouTube website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHjKBjM1ngw&feature=related Gisorg. (2010, August 9). Gaming the Border: A Report from Cochise County, Arizona [Video file]. Retrieved from YouTube website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRof_dizXH4 Johnson, K. R. (2006). The History of Racial Exclusion in the US Immigration Laws. Retrieved from http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/immigr09.htm Morgenstern, M. (2011). TheBlaze. Retrieved from http://www.theblaz e.com/stories/govt-audit-illegal-immigrants-received-4-2-billion-in-tax-credits-last-year/ Pemberton, J. S. (2011, February 3). Coca-Cola Border [Video file]. Retrieved from YouTube website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-STkFCCrus Sanchez, C. (2011). HATEWATCH. Retrieved from http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2007/08/13/new-video-appears-to-show-vigilante-border-murder/ Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. (2011). Individuals Who Are Not Authorized to Work in the United States Were Paid $4.2 Billion in Refundable Credits. Retrieved from http://Individuals Who Are Not Authorized to Work in the United States Were Paid $4.2 Billion in Refundable Credits

Impact of Project Investments on Firm Value Essay

Generally in all decisions concerning investments in capital projects, the management selects only those projects that are expected to contribute a positive net present value. Further the project should be capable of providing an internal rate of return which should be greater than the hurdle rate. (Ross et al 2005) These criteria for the selection of capital projects are considered valuable from the perspective of the evaluation of the capital projects. However the phenomenon of value maximization of the firm is not being focused by these evaluation methods. It may be noted that a project will be considered financially viable only when it satisfies the condition of meeting the evaluation criteria and should also be in a position to provide super-normal returns on the investments to add value to the business proposing the investment. Several avenues can be cited which could be used by the project to result in super normal profits to the firm which results in the enhancement in the value of the firm. To cite a few avenues; by ensuring better economies of scale, by providing other cost advantages, by enabling the firm to offer better quality products that are distinct in the market, by improving production efficiency, by providing better access to distribution channels and by ensuring increased brand recognition the new project investments would be able to add value to the firm. Project Investment and Stock Valuation  The potential for growth and improvement in sales of the company will significantly be impacted by the proposed expansion of the company into new markets and new product lines and this will improve the position of the company in terms of profitability and return on equity. As a natural consequence the expansion by achieving the projected financial expectations will impact the value of the company’s stock. The market value of the stock is likely to go up once the expansion pays off the results by way of increased profits. Further the internal valuation of the shares will also get increased or decreased depending on the financial decision for sourcing the additional funds required for investing in the capital projects. Based on the changes in the leverage the book value of the shares will be affected. When the company decides to finance the expansion through issue of new common stocks the equity will get diluted to the extent of the stocks issued for public subscription. This in turn will have its impact on the free cash flow to the equity, since there will be increase in the number of shares and therefore the valuation of shares will get impacted. (Discussion Issues and Derivations) Strategic Considerations Normally the execution of any project investment decisions can be influenced by the governmental regulations on which the management does not have any control. But there are certain other factors, the course of which can be altered by taking some strategic decisions by the management. By selecting those projects which offer the best return on investment through better economies of scale the management can strategically increase the returns and value of the firm. The other alternative is to look for avenues that will enable the company to enlarge the economies of scale on the existing operations of the firm Improving the quality of customer service and timely deliveries to the customers has been found to be proven strategies for improving the reputation of the firm and thereby improving the value of the firm. Establishment of unique and efficient distribution channels much above the ability of the competitors to achieve can be looked at as another strategic move. In making any project successful an important factor is the quality of the management and the ability to take strategic and tactful decisions. It is essential that the quality of management must be related to the quality of projects the firm is contemplating to invest in.

Global disaster management Essay

Disaster management became global; financial resources together with the establishment of several associate and group organizations sprang up. Mass media took up the root with each major and minor disaster reported universally. Disaster tradition were formed and disseminated by the mass media. Until this global agenda was affirmed, environmental issues were still in their infancy and the number of research or consulting organizations focused on disasters was exceptionally small. The concern of disaster research units (mainly university-affiliated) and disaster management units in public administrations only became noticeable in the second half of the century in the late fifties. By the start of new millennium, the number of disaster-related organizations had grown exponentially. The U. S. government alone has no fewer than twenty-six major agencies as well as dozens of regional offices dealing with disasters. There are a further ninety-five specialized units established for contradictory disaster situations. To this can be added eighty U. S. domestic non-govermental organizations (NGOs). This number can be used as a rough suggestion of the same process occurring all through the Western world. The sharing of disaster-related global-based agencies likewise grew, comprising over ninety major public agencies with offices all through the world. This guide of the globalization of disaster management also supported the hold of public administration on the area of disasters. It has also led to interagency divergences and problems of management, as well as protective imperatives, turf wars, and competition (International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, 1996). What was evident at the national or state level-at which public administrations subjugated the definition of disaster, who was capable to be a disaster victim, what help would be afforded, and so on-was now extensive at the global level by other forms of public administration in diverse guises. As some critical reports have noted, the results have been at the similar mediocre levels of disaster management (on a larger scale), where in several cases such â€Å"assistance† was more unfavourable than supportive. The most observable of these have been linked with the droughts in Africa, where NGOs and international aid have in fact harmed more people than they have helped.

To what extent is the Catholic Church central to Rome's status as a Essay

To what extent is the Catholic Church central to Rome's status as a contemporary World City - Essay Example Other factors such as economic activities, politics, and geographical location have also shaped the city into its current status. The history and development of Rome City can be traced back during the Roman Empire. The influences of the tradition of the Roman Empire are evident in the architecture of the city’s buildings and other structures. Architecture was necessary in the growth and success of Rome. Formal architecture like basilicas and temples, and their related structures such as aqueducts and bridges have played significant roles in shaping Rome into its current status. Although there are several factors that led to the development and success of Rome City, this paper mainly focuses on the influence of the Catholic Church on Rome’s current claims to World City status. Introduction Rome, or particularly Vatican City, is the center of the Roman Catholic religion. It was pronounced a sovereign nation in 1929 as a result of Lateran Accords (Giorgi, 2008 p223). Earli er, before it was designated as a sovereign state, Vatican comprised of smaller Papal States. Vatican City exists as a walled-enclave in Rome, and it is the world’s smallest country. The Lateran Accord of 1929 pronounced Roman Catholicism the official religion of Italy (Davies & Nichols, 2006 p5). It is, therefore, obvious that most of the county’s development and success has been cultural. Roman Catholicism beliefs and architectures are deeply rooted in Rome’s landscape. Being a Roman Catholicism Empire, the Vatican City is ruled by Pope, whose office is the highest in Catholic Church, and serves as the headquarter s of the Roman Catholic Church (Davies & Nichols, 2006 p6). Vatican City is situated on the Vatican Hill surrounded by Rome, which is Italy’s Capital City, and it covers an area of 44 hectares (Nicolet, 1991 p13). The city is surrounded by Renaissance and medieval walls, constructed using the ancient roman architectural designs, which separate s it from other cities except St. Peters Square. Within the city, there are a number of magnificent gardens, buildings, complex of courtyards, and a well organized network of roads and walking paths (Nicolet, 1991 p13). History of the Vatican City The first foundation, basilica, in the city was laid down by Emperor Constantine the Great in the 14th Century AD. This foundation is what is believed to be the tomb of St. Peter, who the Catholics claim to be the first Pope. The vast regions of the Vatican Valley and Hill, was anciently used for chariot races and other sports, and as a burial ground (Bonechi Books, 2000 p4). As time passed by, this region became a sacred ground where the Roman Catholic used to perform most of their functions. In the following century, Popes who returned from France established themselves, and took official residence in the Vatican City, and reconstructed the Vatican Palace and the St. Peter basilica to expand its size, beautify its gardens, and add more b uildings to accommodate their governmental offices (Lanciani, 2009 p123). In the late 16th Century, the government of the Vatican and Popes officially occupied Quirinal Palace, located in the outcasts of the Vatican City. The government of Italy, in 1870, confiscated Papal States, and the Popes lived in Vatican as self imposed prisoners for over fifty years (Lanciani, 2009

Explain the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism Essay

Explain the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism - Essay Example According to the essay "Rise and fall of Keynesianism" findings, Keynesianism suggests that often private sector decisions cause inverse macroeconomic outcomes and hence it is suggestible for the public sector to deliver active policy responses which mainly include central bank’s monetary policy actions and government’s fiscal policy actions. Keynes argues that these activities would assist the economic sector to stabilize output over the business cycle. Although Keynesian theory can be stated thus in simple terms, it comprises larger ideas. To illustrate, Keynesianism has a close similarity with the concept of ‘General Glut’ proposed by classical economists. However, it is identified that classical economists had the disagreement regarding the conditions of the general glut as some of them believed in Say’s law â€Å"supply creates its own demand† (Best, n.d.). In contrast, Keynes argues that insufficiency in aggregate demand for goods can be featured as the direct cause of general glut which would lead to economic decline and subsequent unemployment difficulties. In this situation, Keynesianism recommends (as cited in Blinder) that thoughtful governmental policies can easily overcome such crises if these policies are effectively employed to increase the aggregate demand. This, in turn, would mitigate the adverse impacts of unemployment and deflation. Similarly, Keynesian economics brings some theoretical basis for a crucial distinction between involuntary unemployment and voluntary unemployment. ... This in turn would mitigate the adverse impacts of unemployment and deflation. Similarly, Keynesian economics brings some theoretical basis for a crucial distinction between involuntary unemployment and voluntary unemployment. From the Keynesian point of view (as cited in Knoop, 2010, p.40), the individuals who seek jobs at the existing wage rates can be grouped into involuntary unemployed. Corry (n.d.) reflects that Keynes’ innovative concepts produced some revolutionary changes in the economic sector since the traditional economists believed that unemployment was resulted from certain labour market rigidities such as ‘excessive wage claim, trade union activities, and unemployment pay’ (ibid). According to Keynesianism, the increasing unemployment rate can be directly attributed to the failure in total spending caused by the inefficient business decisions of private firms. Therefore, it is obvious that government has to play a crucial role in formulating efficien t growth policies which would facilitate sustainable economic growth of the country. In short, Keynesian economics constitutes a demand based economy (Reference for Business). Limitations The Keynesian economics gave greater emphasis on employees’ wage rates without considering the profitability of the firm. Although, it had aided the nation to ensure employee welfare, the constancy of this system was always subject to change. For instance, sometimes, international competition adversely affected the capital requirements and public expenditure of the nation. In such difficult situations, the government failed to meet adequate funds for wage distribution. As

Grow and development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Grow and development - Essay Example The relationship between a parent and child is essential during this period because as an individual shifts from the role of dependent to assume the role of an adult, the dynamics of the family changes. Therefore, parents should accept the status of their child as an adult. Another important feature of this period is that young adults normally develop the feeling of self-definition and lost-identity (Arnett, 2006). Due to this, majority of young adult tend to obtain their self-identity and worth via external success. Emerging adulthood is characterized by age of many possibilities in that they have a conviction that they have good opportunities to live good lives than their parents did. Emerging adulthood is different from adolescent stage in the sense that during adolescence phase, teenagers need to develop personal identity. In this phase, success will always lead to the capability to stay true to oneself while failure is feared because it is linked with lack of self-identity and role confusion. Contrary, emerging adults have a strong sense of self-identity in that they need to establish loving and intimate relationships with those people around them. Further, success in their careers leads to feeling of hope of bright future while failure is associated with isolation and loneliness (Arnett, 2006). During physical development, young and emerging adults face shift in the shape of their bodies and brain structure that is responsible for roles such as planning, self-control, and judgment. Physical changes that take place affect major changes in cognitive and social attainment. The main tasks during the physical developmental stage are how to manage the changes that occur and their influence on subsequent social relationships and behaviors (Arnett, 2006). Cognitive development helps young adults to develop into responsible people in managing their lives. For instance, they are in a position to manage their problems and education

Conflict of Religion and Slavery in the Frederick Douglass Narrative Essay

Conflict of Religion and Slavery in the Frederick Douglass Narrative - Essay Example Religion is not the domain of the dermatologist. The arguments of the whites to view religion from the perspective of color needs to be dismissed without further arguments, as only lunatics can forward such a point of view. Those who justify slavery quoting scriptures are like Satan quoting the Bible. They just do not possess an elementary knowledge about the revelation. Douglass encounters with the so-called Christians, who treat slaves in the most inhuman style, shake his belief in religion. Mr. Severe, overseer in charge at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, is one of such individuals. As the divinity intervenes he dies as soon as Douglass arrives there. The gullible and innocent slaves take it as a blessing from God. The replacement for his place, Mr. Hopkins, is a good person. The love-hate tussles as for religion in his mind continue, and he thinks that it is a good fortune that he is not one of the slavery victims when he is selected and shifted to the Great House Farm, where life is comfortable. The cruel strokes of destiny fallen on his grandmother who is left to die alone shake his faith in God, and he puts his judgment to test by asking questions about His style of functioning. What deeply pains Douglass is the hypocrites donning the garb of preachers as guardians of religion. Some of them are Master Thomas, the Methodist who holds the sla ves on the plea that he takes care of them, but in reality he does not spare even a crippled girl named Henny from his practices of cruelty. At St. Michael’s, a Sabbath school for slaves established by Whiteman is closed under the violent threats by white religious zealots. Religion, as it is practiced, never helps the cause of blacks, and Douglass mentions Mr. Rigby Hopkins, one of the sterling religious hypocrites, who derives sadistic pleasure in beating his slave on silly pretexts. Such religious leaders quote from the Bible selectively, and their assertions are out of the context. Douglass writes, â€Å"I have said my master found religious sanction for his cruelty. I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cow skin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip; and, in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture ? ‘He that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it, not shall be beaten wi th many stripes.’ † (Douglass 52). This is the highest form of insult to Christianity. Thus, in the mid-1800s, religion is used as the tool to destroy the emotional world of the slaves and break their psyche. Severe whipping is normal which often causes bodily harm to the slaves. Their working hours are long, from the sun-rise to the sun-set in the open farms, in all kinds of weather. With no educational facilities and no scope for personal empowerment possible for the slaves, the doors to the knowledge world remain shut for them from the cradle to the grave and from the womb to the tomb! In Douglass’ time, slavery is being practiced at its worst. The majority of the religious clusters in America barring the Society of Friends support slavery. That is the period when the North and South are vertically divided by the issue of slavery. The Christians of the North favor the abolition of slavery, but the Southerners are adamant about retaining it and thoroughly convi nced that it has the religious sanctity. The worst part is the condemnation and appreciation of slavery is done in the name of Christianity. So, the politics of religion dominates the issue of slavery. Douglass does not condemn Christianity as such, but his strong resentment is

Evaluation of a Career Development Resource Assignment

Evaluation of a Career Development Resource - Assignment Example Quintessential Careers has provided the information for career counselors to help jobseekers and students find employment opportunities by posting current jobs and career information at no costs. The website has mainly focused on career guide and college guide but provides few employment opportunities for jobseekers. Society Human Resource Management (SHRM) provides career information, education requirements, and job networking for Human Resource jobs. This career website contains profound information and data about HR disciplines, legal issues, career toolkits, publications on Human Resource Management, Conferences, online community of HR professionals and current news and statistics about Human Resource Management. The career website is only created for one major career which is Human Resource crippling career counselors to limit their services to jobseekers who have different skills and experience in other disciplines. National Career Development Association (NCDA) is a database of career information from different websites for students, job seekers, military veterans and volunteer workers among others. It has a list of detailed information with regard to career development conference, facilitator, guidelines, online community in social networks and personal motivation among others. NCDA contains all the information career counselors would require to enable jobseekers acquire the best jobs, maintain a high emotional intelligence and assess competence and confidence in careers (Para 14). This career website does not post current jobs for jobseekers or students. Quintessential Careers should balance the content on how to acquire the best education and career with job opportunities. This will be of great value to career counseling directed to people who are unemployed because they will have the skills, experience and a tool to get and keep a good career while also applying for the career that suits them. Society Human Resource Management career website has

Health & Safety Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Health & Safety Management - Essay Example Examples of chemical hazards include benzene, hydrogen sulphide, etc. Ergonomic hazards arise when there is a mismatch between the task being performed and the human abilities. Examples of ergonomic hazards include lifting or pushing heavy objects. Physical hazards are forms of energy that can adversely affect the health and safety of an employee by their interaction with the human body. Examples of physical hazards include noise, radiation, etc. Psychosocial hazards arise by interaction of employees with peers or other people. Examples of psychosocial hazards include stress. Occupational health hazards, such as the ones described above have chronic effects and symptoms often take long time to develop or become apparent. Examples of adverse health effects arising from such hazards include asbestosis; a form or lung cancer that develops from inhalation of asbestos fibres, noise induced hearing loss; a permanent form of loss in hearing caused by prolonged exposure to noise, repetitive strain injuries; a form of musculoskeletal disorders caused by repetition of strenuous work, stress; caused by social interaction, or illness caused by E. coli infection. Some health effects, such as asbestosis or noise induced hearing loss take long time to become apparent and are often late for remedial action. Other risks exist in the working environments that have acute effects on the health and safety of employees. These hazards arise from unsafe conditions that exist in the working environment. Examples of such hazards include trips and falls, accidents, etc. Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has reported cases of adverse health effects from virtually every hazard that exists in the working environment. These hazards not only adversely affect the health and safety of employees, but also cause lost time to employers and costs in terms of compensation or treatment. Many of these hazards have caused fatalities and permanent disabilities. Such losses affect the

WA 7 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

WA 7 - Essay Example The J- curve increases exponentially, reaches a maximum and then suddenly crashes to zero. J- curves are commonly seen in organisms that have very short life spans, and after laying eggs they die. The next generation of organisms that hatch from these eggs again follow a J- curve trend. Flies, mosquitoes are examples that exhibit this behavior. S- curves are seen in bigger animals such as mammals. The population grows steadily until it reaches stability. At this point the ecosystem is said to be in its carrying capacity. The environmental resistance hinders uncontrolled growth in these animals. A. Competitive exclusion principle states that two species cannot exist together when they compete for the same resource. When this happens, either the more dominating species pushes out the other species, or the docile species undergoes a shift and moves onto some other resource. A. Owls are predators on the top of the food chain in the ecosystems where they thrive. Hence any distress in the bottom of the food chain is reflected in the owl’s population. The majority of ecosystem which includes grasses, rodents and other small animals on which owls depend upon can be effectively studied by monitoring owls. A. Mutualism and commensalism are forms of symbiosis, where two organisms live in association with each other. In mutualism both the organisms are benefitted by associating, whereas in commensalism, one organism is benefited while the other is nether neither harmed nor benefitted A. Zero population growth rate is virtually impossible because, to achieve it the birth and death rates have to be exactly the same. However the growth rate can be close to zero over a long period of time. A. The age structure diagram is affected by the birth and death rates of a population. Also the relative proportion of males and females in the population shapes it. The mortality rates at different cohorts affect the abundance of population in that cohort. 11. Is the clapper

Have the benefits that immigrants have brought to British society Essay - 1

Have the benefits that immigrants have brought to British society outweighed the problems they have caused - Essay Example According to mail online report, Britain plans to ban wives brought to the UK, mainly from India and Pakistan (Crackdown on 80,000 immigrants for abusing benefits system, 2009). This paper compares the benefits and problems of immigration in Britain Chart (2003) has argued that if someone is sufficiently motivated to travel thousands of miles in search of a better life, they are sufficiently motivated to get out of the damp bedsit and look for work in search of one that is better yet (Chart, 2003). People are immigrating to other countries on the lookout of better living conditions. In their home country, they may not have enough opportunities to utilize their expertise. For example, India is a country which is blessed with immense educated and skilled manpower resources. The problem with India is that because of the immense population size, it is unable to provide enough opportunities to the unemployed and thus failed to capitalise on the huge manpower resources they have. On the other hand UK is a country which is blessed with enough opportunities, but less manpower resources. Thus immigration helped UK to utilize the overseas manpower resources for their economic development. The immigrant community will work hard for better living conditions which will be beneficial to Britain. In fact, most of Indians are not working hard if they work in their home country whereas in immigrant countries like Middle East, America or UK, they have a good reputation as far as hardworking is concerned. â€Å"Immigration will add substantial numbers of economically productive individuals, and given the chance, many of them will be more economically productive than average† (Chart, 2003). Another biggest contribution of the immigrant community is the enrichment of British culture. A culture is a living thing, and it is always growing and changing. Cultures which feed on nothing but themselves tend to become

Statement of Purpose Essay Example for Free

Statement of Purpose Essay This was the lesson I learnt from my father, an unceasing learner and a person who would never give up no matter how many and how difficult the obstacles may be. Having understood from him that success is a moving target, the years of my life with my family have inculcated in me a desire to achieve perfection. I propose to read myself starting from childhood to school days to college days to the vestibule of my career. In a few months’ time, I will be completing my B. Pharm prestigious University namely Acharya Nagarjuna University, A.P, India. I am now in the next stage of building my career. I am aware of the influence that the decision will have on my life and I find that I have no hesitation in progressing along a path I had been planning over the last four years. It is my firm conviction that, that one should apply one’s creativity and talent to contribute something original in science and technology. This calls for a specialization in the field of one’s interest. It is in this respect that, I feel undergraduate education is lacking in depth. A graduate education at a reputed university would be invaluable in honing my skills and knowledge, which are very vital for shaping my career. After a careful consideration of my academic background, abilities and career goals, I have decided to pursue my graduate studies in the field of Chemistry. While my graduate study has helped me develop an insight into my intended area of specialization and the ability to relate developments in fundamental concepts to analytical chemistry, it still cannot support my desire for research and design. I therefore strongly believe that a detailed research chemistry from your university will be a step forward in achieving my objective of launching a career in research and designing. My final year project â€Å"Anti-diabetic activity of Passiflora edulis†, was an attempt to identify various chemical constituents present in Passiflora fruit and establishing their activities. The project done offered great insight into Chemistry of Natural Products, Chemical tests and Pharmacological principles. Team spirit and leadership traits were brought to the fore and honed. I was admitted under the merit seat category into Chalapathi Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences College. During my undergraduate studies at CIPS , I learnt subjects like Organic Chemistry ,Inorganic Chemistry,Medicinal Chemistry,Chemistry of natural Products, Physical Pharmacy,Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology,Pharmaceutical analysis subjects as a part of my course curriculum. I have a strong desire to learn whatever I can, and self-reliance to face challenges put forth. A master’s degree from your university will be a deciding factor in shaping my future. I’m confident that the technical knowledge that I gain in the United States of America will help me in playing a constructive role in the progress of mankind. Through the brochure, my friends and also by browsing the web, I came to know that WVU is one of the leading and prestigious institutions for research and the curriculum matches my study objectives. It would be an invaluable opportunity for me to work with the renowned faculty at WVU for my graduate study. I assure you that if I am admitted, I shall strive to contribute significantly to live up to your expectations. I hope that my credentials and background rise up to the standards expected and look forward to pursue my graduate studies there. I request you to consider me for admission with full financial assistance to the Department of Chemistry..

Constructing Social Knowledge Graph from Twitter Data

Constructing Social Knowledge Graph from Twitter Data   Yue Han Loke 1.1 Introduction The current era of technology allows its users to post and share their thoughts, images, and content via networks through different forms of applications and websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. With the emerging of social media in our daily lives and it is becoming a norm for the current generation to share data, researchers are starting to perform studies on the data that could be collected from social media [1] [2].The context of this research will be solely dedicated to Twitter data due to its publicly available wealth of data and its public Stream API. Twitters tweets can be used to discover new knowledge, such as recommendations, and relationships for data analysis. Tweets in general are short microblogs consisting of maximum 140 characters that can consists of normal sentences to hashtags and tags with @, other short abbreviation of words (gtg, 2night), and different form of a word (yup, nope). Observing how tweets are posted shows the noisy and short lexical natu re of these texts. This presents a challenge to the flexibility of Twitter data analysis. On the other hand, the availability of existing research conducted on entity extraction and entity linking has decreased the gap between entities extracted and the relationships that could be discovered. Since 2014, the introduction of the Named Entity rEcognition and Linking (NEEL) Challenge [3] has proved the significance of automated entity extraction, entity linking and classification appearing in different event streams of English tweets in the research and commercial communities to design and develop systems that could solve the challenging nature in tweets and to mine semantics from them. 1.2 Project Aim The focus of this research aims to construct a social knowledge graph (Knowledge Base) from Twitter data. A knowledge graph is a technique to analyse social media networks using the method of mapping and measurement for both relationships and information flows among group, organizations, and other connected entities in social networks [4]. A few tasks are required to successfully create a knowledge graph based on Twitter data A method to aid in the construction of knowledge graph is by extracting named entitiessuch as persons, organizations, locations, or brands from the tweets [5]. In the domain of this research, the named entity to be referenced in the tweet is defined as a proper noun or acronym if it is found in the NEEL Taxonomy in the Appendix A of [3], and is linked to an English DBpedia [6] referent and a NIL referent. The second component in creating a social knowledge graph is to utilize those extracted entities and link them to their respective entities in a knowledge base. For example, Tweet: The ITEE department is organizing a pizza gettogether at UQ. #awesome ITEE refers to an organization and UQ refers to an organization as well. The annotation for this is [ITEE, organization, NIL1], where NIL1 refers to the unique NIL referent describing the real-world entity ITEE that does not have the equivalent entry in DBpedia and [UQ, Organization, dbp:University_of_Queensland] which represents the RDF triple (subject, predicate, object). 1.3 Project Goals Firstly, getting the Twitter tweets. This can be achieved by crawling Twitter data using Public Stream API[1] available in the Twitter developer website. The Public Stream API allows extraction of Twitter data in real time. Next, entity extraction and typing with the aid of a specifically chosen information extraction pipeline called TwitIE[2] open-source and specific to social media and has been tested most extensively on microblog sentences. This pipeline receives the tweets as input and recognises the entities in the same tweet. The third task is to link those entities mined from tweets to the entities in the available knowledge base. The knowledge base that has been selected for the context of this project is DBpedia. If there is a referent in DBpedia, the entity extracted will be linked to that referent. Thus, the entity type is retrieved based on the category received from the knowledge base. In the event of the unavailability of a referent, a NIL identifier is given as shown in section 1.2. The selection of an entity linking system with the appropriate entity disambiguation and candidate entity generation that receives the extracted entities from the same Tweet and produce a list with all the candidate entities in the knowledge base. The task is to accurately link the correct entity extracted to one of the candidates. The social knowledge graph is an entity-entity graph combining two extracted sources of entities. The first is the analysis of the co-occurrence of those entities in same tweet or same sentence. Besides that, the existing relationships or categories extracted from DBpedia. Thus, the project aims to combine the extraction of co-occurrence of extracted entities and the extracted relationships to create a social knowledge graph to unlock new knowledge from the fusion of the two data sources. Named Entity Recognition (NER), Information Extraction (IE) are generally well researched in the domain of longer text such as newswire. However, overall, microblogs are possibly the hardest kind of content to process. For Twitter, some methods have been proposed by the research community such as [7] that uses a pipeline approach to perform the first tokenisation and POS tagging and topic models were used to find named entities. [8] propose a gradient-descent graph-based method for doing joint text normalisation and recognition, reaching 83.6% F1 measure. Besides that, entity linking in knowledge graphs have been studied in [9] using graph-based method by collectively gather the referent entities of all named entities in the same document and by modelling and exploiting the global interdependence between Entity Linking decisions. However, the combination of NER, and Entity Linking in Twitter tweets is still a new area of research since the NEEL challenge was first established in 2013 . Based on the evaluation conducted in [10] on the NEEL challenge, lexical similarity mention detection strategy that exploit the popularity of the entities and apply a distance similarity functions to rank entities efficiently, and n-gram [11] features are used. Besides that, Conditional Random Forest (CRF) [12] is another mentioned entity extraction strategy. In the entity detection context, graph distances and various ranking features were used. 2.1. Twitter crawling [13] defined the public Twitter Streaming API provides the ability of collecting a sample of user tweets. Using the statuses/filter API provides a constant stream of public Tweets. Multiple optional parameters may be specified such as language and locations. Applying the method CreateStreamingConnection,a POST request to the API has the capability of returning the public statuses as a stream. The rate limit of the Streaming API allows each application to submit up to 5,000 Twitter. [13] Based on the documentation, Twitter currently allows the public to retrieve at most a 1% sample of their data posted on Twitter at a specific time. Twitter will begin to return the sample data to the user when the number of tweets reaches 1% of all tweets on Twitter. According to [14] research comparing Twitter Streaming API and Twitter Firehouse, the final results of the Streaming API depends strongly on the coverage and the type of analysis that the researcher wishes to perform. For example, the researchers found that if given a set of parameters and the number of tweets matching them increases, the coverage of the Streaming API is reduced. Thus, if the research is concerning a filtered content, the Twitter Firehose would be a better choice with regards to its drawback of restrictive cost. However, since our project requires random sampling of Twitter data without filters except for English language, Twitter Streaming API would be an appropriate choice since it is freely available. 2.2. Entity Extraction [15] suggested an open-source pipeline, called TwitIE which is solely dedicated for social media components in GATE [16]. TwitIE consists for 7 parts: tweet import, language identification, tokenisation, gazetteer, sentence splitter, normalisation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recogniser. Twitter data is delivered from the Twitter Streaming API in JSON format. TwitIE included a new Format_Twitter plugin in the most recent GATE codebase which converts the tweets in JSON format automatically into GATE documents. This converter is automatically associated with documents names that end in .json, if not text/x-json-twitter should be specified. The TwitIE system uses TextCat a language processing and identification algorithm for its language identification. It has the capability to provide reliable tweet language identification for tweets written in English using the English POS tagger and named entity recogniser. Tokenisation oversees different characters, class sequence and rules. Since the TwitIE system is dealing with microblogs, it treats abbreviations and URLs as one token each by following the Ritters tokenisation scheme. Hashtags and user mentions are considered as two tokens and is covered by a separate annotation hashtags. Normalisation in TwitIE system is divided into two task: the identification of orthographic errors and correction of the errors found. The TwitIE Normaliser is designed specific to social media. TwitIE reuses the ANNIE gazetteer lists which contain lists such as cities, organisations, days of the week, etc. TwiTie uses the adapted version of the Stanford Part-of speech tagger which is tweets tagged with Penn TreeBank(PTB) tagset trained. The results of using the combination of normalisation, gazetteer name lookup, and POS tagger, the performance was increased to 86.93%. It was further increased to 90.54% token accuracy when the PTB tagset was used. Named entity recognition in TwitIE has a +30% absolute precision and +20% abso lute performance increase as compare to ANNIE, mainly respect to date, Organizations and Person. [7] proposed an innovative approach to distant supervision using topic models that pulls large amount of entities gathered from Freebase, and large amount of unlabelled data. Using those entities gathered, the approach combines information about an entitys context across its mentions. T-NER POS Tagging system called T-POS has added new tags for Twitter specific phenomenal retweets such as usernames, urls and hashtags. The system uses clustering to group together distributionally similar words for lexical variations and OOV words. T-POS utilizes the Brown Clusters and Conditional Random Fields. The combination of both features results in the ability to model strong dependencies between adjacent POS tags and make use of highly correlated features. The results of the T-POS are shown on a 4-fold cross validation over 800 tweets. It is proved that T-POS outperforms the Standford tagger, obtaining a 26% reduction in error. Besides that, when trained on 102K tokens, there is an error reduct ion of 41%. The system includes shallow parsing which can identify non-recursive phrases such as noun, verb and prepositional phrases in text. T-NERs shallow parsing component called T-CHUNK, obtained a better performance at shallow parsing of tweets as compared against the off the shelf OpenNLP chunker. As reported, a 22% reduction in error. Another component of the T-NER is the capitalization classifier, T-CAP, which analyse a tweet to predict capitalization. Named entity recognition in T-NER is divided into two components: Named Entity Segmentation using T-SEG, and classifying named entities by applying LabeledLDA. T-SEG uses IOB encoding on sequence-labelling task to represent segmentations. Furthermore, Conditional Random Fields is used for learning and inference. Contextual, dictionary and orthographic features: a set of type lists is included in the in-house dictionaries gathered from Freebase. Additionally, outputs of T-POS, T-CHUNK and T-CAP, and the Brown clusters are used to generate features. The outcome of the T-SEG as stated in the research paper, Compared with the state-of-the-art news-trained Stanford Named Entity Recognizer. T-SEG obtains a 52% increase in F1 score. To address the issues of lack of context in tweets to identify the types of entities they contain and excessive distinctive named entity types present in tweets, the research paper presented and assessed a distantly supervised approach based on LabeledLD. This approach utilizes modelling of every entity as a combination of types. This allows information about an entitys distribution over types to be shared across mentions, naturally handling ambiguous entity strings whose mentions could refer to different types. Based on the empirical experiments conducted, there is a 25% increase in F1 score over the co-training approach to Named Entity Classification suggested by Collins and Singer (1999) when applie d to Twitter. [17] proposed a Twitter adapted version of Kanopy called Kanopy4Tweets that uses the approach of interlinking text documents with a knowledge base by using the relations between concepts and their neighbouring graph structure. The system consists of four parts: Name Entity Recogniser (NER), Named Entity Linking (NEL), Named Entity Disambiguation(NED) and Nil Resources Clustering(NRC). The NER of Kanopy4Tweets uses a TwitIE a Twitter information extraction pipeline mentioned above. For the Named Entity Linking. For NEL, a DBpedia index is build using a selection of datasets to search for suitable DBpedia resource candidates for each extracted entity. The datasets are store in a single binary file using HDT RDF format. This format has compact structures due to its binary representation of RDF data. It allows for faster search functionality without the need of decompression. The datasets can be quickly browse and scan through for a specific object, subject or predicate at glance. For e ach named entity found by NER component, a list of resource candidates retrieved from DBpedia can be obtain using the top-down strategy. One of the challenges found is the large volume of found resource candidates impacts negatively on the processing time for disambiguation process. However, this problem can be resolved by reducing the number of candidates using a ranking method. The proposed ranking method ranks the candidates according to the document score assigned by the indexing engine and selects the top-x elements. The NED takes an input of a list of named entities which are candidate DBpedia resources after the previous NEL process. The best candidate resource for each named entity is selected as output. A relatedness score is calculated based on the number of paths between the resources weighted by the exclusivity of the edges of these paths which is applied to candidates with respect to the candidate resources of all other entities. The input named entities are jointly dis ambiguated and linked to the candidate resources with the highest combined relatedness. NRC is a stage whereby if there are no resource in the knowledge base that can be linked to a named entity extracted. Using the Monge-Elkan similarity measure, the first NIL element is assign into a new cluster, then the next element is used to differentiate from the previous ones. An element is added to a cluster when the similarity between an element and the present clusters is above a fixed threshold, the element is added to that particular cluster, whereas a new cluster is formed if there are no current cluster with a similarity above the threshold is found. 2.3. Entity Extraction and Entity Linking [18]proposed a lexicon-based joint Entity Extraction and Entity Linking approach, where n-grams from tweets are mapped to DBpedia entities. A pre-processing stage cleans and classifies the part-of-speech tags, and normalises the initial tweets converting alphabetic, numeric, and symbolic Unicode characters to ASCII equivalents. Tokenisation is performed on non-characters except special characters joining compound words. The resulting list of tokens is fed into a shingle filter to construct token n-grams from the token stream. In the candidate mapping component, a gazetteer is used to map each token that is compiled from DBpedia redirect labels, disambiguation labels and entities labels that is linked to their own DBpedia entities. All labels are lowercase indexed and linked by exact matches only to the list of candidate entities in the form of tokens. The researcher used a method of prioritizing longer tokens than shorter ones to remove possible overlaps of tokens. For each entity ca ndidate, it considers both local and context-related features via a pipeline of analysis scorers. Examples of local features included are string distance between the candidate labels and the n-gram, the origin of the label, its DBpedia type, the candidates link graph popularity, the level of uncertainty of the token, and the surface form that matches best. On the other hand, the relation between a candidate entity and other candidates with a given context is accessed by the context-related features. Examples of mentioned context-related features are direct links to other context candidates in the DBpedia link graph, co-occurrence of other tokens surface forms in the corresponding Wikipedia article of the candidate under consideration, co-references in Wikipedia article, and further graph based feature of the link graph induced by all candidates of the context graph which includes graph distance measurements, connected component analysis, or centrality and density observations. Besid es that, the candidates are sorted per their confidence score based on how an entity describes a mention. If the confidence score is lower than the threshold chosen, a NIL referent is annotated. [19] proposed a lexical based and n-grams features to look up resources in DBpedia. The role of the entity type was assigned by a Conditional Random Forest (CRF) classifier, that is specifically trained using DBpedia related feature (local features), word embedding (contextual features), temporal popularity knowledge of an entity extracted from Wikipedia page view data, string similarity measures to measure the similarity between the title of the entity and the mention (string distance), and linguistic features, with additional pruning stage to increase the precision of Entity Linking. The whole process of the system is split into five stages: pre-processing, mention candidate generation, mention detection and disambiguation (candidate selection), NIL detection and entity mention typing prediction. In the pre-processing stage, tweet tokenisation and part-of-speech tags were used based on ARK Twitter Part-of-Speech Tagger, together with the tweet timestamps extracted from tweet ID. Th e researchers used an in-house mention-entity dictionary of acronyms. This dictionary computes the n-grams (n [20] research paper proposed an entity linking technique to link named entity mentions appearing in Web text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. The solution mentioned is by employing a knowledge base. Due to the vast knowledge shared among communities and the development of information extraction techniques, the existence of automated large scale knowledge bases has been ensured. Thus, this rich information about the worlds entities, their relationships, and their semantic classes which are all possibly populated into a knowledge base, the method of relation extraction techniques is vital to obtain those web data that promotes discovery of useful relationships between entities extracted from text and their extracted relation. Once possible way is to map those entities extracted and associated them to a knowledge base before it could be populated into a knowledge base. The goal of entity linking is to map ever textual entity mention m à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã‹â€  M to its corres ponding entry e à ¢Ã‹â€ Ã‹â€  E in the knowledge base. In some cases, when the entity mentioned in text does not have its corresponding entity record in the given knowledge base, a NIL referent is given to indicate a special label of un-linkable. It is mentioned in the paper that named entity recognition and entity linking o be jointly perform for both processes to strengthen one another. A method proposed in this paper is candidate entity generation. The objective of the entity linking system is to filter out irrelevant entities in the knowledge base that for each entity extracted. A list of candidates which might be the possible entities that the extracted entity is referring to is retrieved. The paper suggested three techniques to handle this goal such as name based dictionary techniques entity pages, redirect pages, disambiguation pages, bold phrases from the first paragraphs, and hyperlinks in Wikipedia articles. Another method proposed is the surface form expansion from the local document that consists of heuristics based methods and supervised learning methods, and methods based on search engine. In the context of candidate entity ranking method, five categories of methods are advised. The supervised ranking methods, unsupervised ranking methods, independent ranking methods, collective ranking methods and collaborative ranking methods. Lastly, the research paper mentioned ways to evaluate entity linking systems using precision, recall, F1-measure and accuracy. Despite all these methods used in the three main approaches is proposed to handle entity linking system, the paper clarified that it is still unclear which are the best techniques and systems. This is since different entity linking system react or perform differently according to datasets and domains. [21] proposed a new versatile algorithm based on multiple addictive regression trees called S-MART (Structured Multiple Additive Regression Trees) which emphasized on non-linear tree-based models and structured learning. The framework is a generalized Multiple Addictive Regression Trees (MART) but is adapted for structured learning. This proposed algorithm was tested on entity linking primarily focused on tweet entity linking. The evaluation of the algorithm is based on both IE and IR situations. It is shown that non-linear performs better than linear during IE. However, for the IR setting, the results are similar except for LambdaRank, a neural network based model. The adoption of polynomial kernel further improves the performance of entity linking by non-LINEAR SSVM. The paper proved that entity linking of tweets perform better using tree-based non-linear models rather than the alternative linear and non-linear methods in IE and IR driven evaluations. Based on the experiments condu cted, the S-MART framework outperforms the current up-to-date entity linking systems. 2.4. Entity Linking and Knowledge Base Based on [22], an approach to free text relation extraction was proposed. The system was trained to extract the entities from the text from existing large scale knowledge base in a cooperatively manner. Furthermore, it utilizes the learning of low-dimensional embedding of words, entities and relationships from a knowledge base with regards to score functions. Built upon the norm of employing weakly labelled text mention data but with a modified version which extract triples from the existing knowledge bases. Thus, by generalizing from knowledge base, it can learn the plausibility of new triples (h, r, t); h is the left-hand side entity (or head), the right-hand side entity (or tail) and r the relationship linking them, even though this specific triple does not exist. By using all knowledge base triples rather than training only on (mention, relationship), the precision on relation extraction was proved to be significantly improved. [1] presented a novel system for named entity linking over microblog posts by leveraging the linked nature of DBpedia as knowledge base and using graph centrality scoring as disambiguation methods to overcome polysemy and synonymy problems. The motivation for the authors to create this method is because linked entities tend to appear in the same tweets because tweets are topic specific and together with the assumption since tweets are topic specific, related entities tend to appear in the same tweet. Since the system is tackling noisy tweets acronyms handling and Hashtags in the process of entity linking were integrated. The system was compared with TAGME, a state-of-the-art system for named entity linking designed for short text. The results shown that it outperformed TAGME in Precision, Recall and F1 metrics with 68.3%, 70.8% and 69.5%. [23] presented an automated method to populate a Web-scale probabilistic knowledge base called Knowledge Vault (KV) that uses the combination of extractions from the Web such as text documents (TXT), HTML trees (DOM), Html tables (TBL), and Human Annotated pages (ANO). By using RDF triples (subject, predicate, object) with association to a confidence score that represents the probability that KV believes the triple is correct. In addition, all 4 extractors are merged together to form one system called FUSED-EX by constructing a feature vector for each extracted triple. Next, a binary classifier is applied to compute the formula. The advantages of using this fusion extractor is that it can learn the relative reliabilities of each system as well as creating a model of the reliabilities. The benefits of combining multiple extractors include 7% higher confidence triples and a high AUC score (the higher probability that a classifier will choose a randomly chosen positive instance to be ra nked) of 0.927. To overcome the unreliability of facts extracted from the Web, prior knowledge is used. In the domain of this paper, Freebase is used to fit the existing models. Two ways were proposed in the paper which are Path ranking algorithm with AUC scores of 0.884 and the Neural network model with a AUC score of 0.882. A fusion of both methods stated was conducted to increase performance with an increased AUC score of 0.911. With the evidence of the benefits of fusion quantitatively, the authors of the paper proposed another fusion of the prior methods and the extractors to gain additional performance boost. The result of the fusion is a generation of 271M high confidence facts with 33% new facts that are unavailable in Freebase. [24]proposed TremenRank, a graph based model to tackle the target entity disambiguation challenge, task of identifying target entities of the same domain. The motivation of this system is due to the challenges and unreliability of current methods that relies on knowledge resources, the shortness of the context which a target word occurs, and the large scale of the document collected. To overcome these challenges, first TremenRank was built upon the notion of collectively identity target entities in short texts. This reduces memory storage because the graph is constructed locally and is continuously scale-up linearly as per the number of target entities. This graph was created locally via inverted index technology. There are two types of indexes used: the document-to-word index and the word-to-document index. Next, the collection of documents (the shorts texts) are modelled as a multi-layer directed graph that holds various trust scores via propagation. This trust score provided an in dication of the possibility of a true mention in a short text. A series of experiments was conducted on TremenRank and the model is more superior than the current advanced methods with a difference of 24.8% increase in accuracy and 15.2% increase in F1. [25]introduced a probabilistic fusion system called SIGMAKB that integrates strong, high precision knowledge base and weaker, and nosier knowledge bases into a single monolithic knowledge base. The system uses the Consensus Maximization Fusion algorithm to validate, aggregate, and ensemble knowledge extracted from web-scale knowledge bases such as YAGO and NELL and 69 Knowledge Base Population. The algorithm combines multiple supervised classifiers (high-quality and clean KBs), motivated by distant supervision and unsupervised classifiers (noisy KBs) Using this algorithm, a probabilistic interpretation of the results from complementary and conflicting data values can be shown in a singular response to its user. Thus, using a consensus maximization component, the supervised and unsupervised data collected from the method stated above produces a final combined probability for each triple. The standardization of string named entities and alignment of different ontologies is done in the pre-processing stage. Project plan Semester 1 Task Start End Duration(days) Milestone Research: 23/03/2017 Twitter Call 27/02/2017 02/03/2017 4 Entity Recognition 27/02/2017 02/03/2017 4 Entity Extraction 02/03/2017 02/03/2017 7 Entity Linking 09/03/2017 16/03/2017 7 Knowledge Base Fusion 16/03/2017 23/03/2017 7 Proposal 27/02/2017 30/03/2017 30 30/03/2017 Crawling Twitter data using Public Stream API 31/03/2017 15/04/2017 15 15/04/2017 Collect Twitter data for training purp

How employee motivation and productivity get effected by gender

How employee motivation and productivity get effected by gender My selected thesis topic basically lays emphasis on how employee motivation and productivity get effected by gender discrimination in workplace and how different variables effects under different envirnoment. Now I shall move to explaining the topic in detail. OVERVIEW: My research interest is in this field because I know the gravity of the situation and how important it is for both genders to treat each other equally. As we move towards development an integrated effort is needed and everyone has to do his/her bit. Women need to be looked upon as equals by men from the very start so that they can get good education and pursue good careers in the future. Gender discrimination is a very real and actual problem that is being faced by firms and more importantly women in our society. It is important to note that gender discrimination takes place not only at the workplace but in every walk of life for a common Pakistani woman. When being faced by pressure from all sides, it is very tough for the woman to carry out her day to day activities and work at her full Most of us wake up in the morning, go to college or our respective job and act in ways that are more or less our own. We respond to the atmosphere around and the people in it with little thought as to why what makes us do such things e.g. why we enjoy some activities more than others and why we fine some recreational activities better than others. All these actions are motivated by something. Motivation is defined as the forces either within or external to a person that arouse persistence and want towards completing a given course of action. Employee motivation affects productivity and part of a managers task is to channel motivation towards the accomplishment of organizational goals. Thus, a manager has to study that what motivates his employees and what influences their choice of action furthermore why they persist in that action over time. So the way people are treated deeply affects how they will perform at the workplace. Gender discrimination against someone will obviously affect his/her productivity; this study is intended to prove how deeply the two are connected to each other. Discrimination is treating of employees based on criteria that are not job related, these may include race, color, gender, ethnicity and religion. Organizations these days are moving towards diversity which means women and minorities will play a larger role in the workplace than in the past and it will be more important to keep them working at their optimum level if success is intended in the future. MANGERIAL CONCERNS: When someone in the workplace is judged, appraised, promoted or given a pay based on criteria which are not job related, discrimination occurs. This discrimination leads to the employee being demotivated because he/she knows that no matter what amount of work they put in, they will be reward on the basis of criteria which are not job related. My study is not entirely based on the wage differentials but also deals with motivational effects of discrimination at the workplace on the whole. The main motivating factor for employees has always been pay. There has used a huge gender gap in pay in Pakistan but has now decreased over time but still exists. This gap in motivation is mainly because of differences in characteristics of the jobs carried out, the labor market experience they bring to the job and discriminatory treatment of women by employers or co-workers (which will be my area of study). All these factors interact in many complex and different ways. Thus making it difficult to determine precisely how much of the difference can be attributed to discrimination. Women and men do differ greatly in their preference of jobs and the roles they play in families. Still, the skill set of a woman has now come much closer to a mans. As my thesis shall suggest, there is continuing discrimination against women in the labor market w hich leads to demotivation because there is loss of confidence for the worker. Confidence in self abilities and in the firm one is working for account as a great motivating factor. According to Maslows hierarchy of needs one of the pillars of motivation is to get appreciation for doing a certain task. Many women are raped, sexually harassed and given unfair treatment by the society leading to high rates of female illiteracy and prostitution. In my view, it is very important for the woman to be soundly educated because in our society the responsibility of raising children mainly lies with the mother. When the mother herself is not educated she can not possibly give her child the support and basic fundamental training needed to become a good human being. Moving to gender discrimination in the workplace regarding Pakistan, most of the women are house wives in our country and there are very few double income families. Although the gender gap in the workplace has reduced significantly over the past decade it still remains high with most of the working women mainly pursuing very low paid jobs e.g. teaching, nursing, receptionists and many of them work in houses as maids and helpers etc Term Working Definition Motivation [a] Motivation refers to the forces either within or external to a person that arouses enthusiasm and persistence to pursue a certain course of action. Discrimination [b] To discriminate socially is to make a distinction between people on the basis of class or category without regard to individual merit. Gender Discrimination at the workplace [c] Promoting/Rejecting or treating one person differently to another based on a criterion which is not job related. In this case mainly gender Workforce Diversity [d] Hiring people with different human qualities who belong to various cultural or sub cultural groups. Glass Ceiling [e] Invisible barriers that separate women and minorities from top management positions. Disparate Treatment Gender Discrimination [f] This is also called direct discrimination. To put it simple, it is treating an employee a different manner because of their gender. Harassment [g] Harassment refers to a wide spectrum of offensive behavior. When the term is used in a legal sense it refers to behaviors that are found threatening or disturbing, and beyond those that are sanctioned by society. Verbal Harassment [h] Verbal harassment refers to persistent and unwanted verbal advances, typically in the workplace, where the consequences of refusing are potentially very disadvantaging to the victim. Also casually known as flirting. Sources: (Daft, Richard, (2000), Management 4th Edition, p. 526) (Stokes, DaShanne. (In Press) Legalized Segregation and the Denial of Religious Freedom) (Daft, Richard, (2000), Management 4th Edition, p. 524) (Daft, Richard, (2000), Management 4th Edition, p. 453) (Daft, Richard, (2000), Management 4th Edition, p. 462) (Taylor, Allison, (2005). Wrongful Termination) (Taylor, Allison, (2005). Wrongful Termination) (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harassment) Study Objectives To study wage differences between men and women working on equal level in the banking sector. To conduct questionnaire surveys from employees to find out differences in treatment for males and females. Study how difficult it is for a woman to get promoted in a workplace How treatment of supervisors differs from males to females Is the working environment psychologically suitable for a woman to work in on a long-term basis. The ways harassment takes place for a women in her workplace and who is the main harasser LITREATURE REVIEW Gender discrimination and harassment are topic of immense importance as they have been under discussion for over more than a decade, many studies and researches have been conducted to investigate on the different aspects of this topic, to correlate and identify the various variables from within the studies to contribute to the society in a direct or an indirect way. All the studies point out to a healthy working environment for both Men and Women so that they are more motivated producing better results for the companies as a whole. The areas of research on this topic in the past focuses on Law, job satisfaction, employee turnover, organizational costs, social responsibility and corporate culture providing insights into many factors influenced by gender discrimination and harassment. Almost all the studies focuses on problem faced by women from within the organization and social external factors involving discrimination and effecting productivity. Relationship between the variables dr awn in the previous studies shows the direction of the research and how the factors interrelate with each other. Studies show that people have protection against this menace of discrimination and harassment but its effectiveness is always challenged and debated for over some time. Law and justice are always closely looked upon when it comes to harassment at work place. A study Gender-Based Harassment and the Hostile Work Environment (Joshua F. Thrope) tests whether non-sexually motivated gender discrimination is as serious a factor in creating a hostile working environment as sexually motivated gender discrimination. Although Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to all gender-motivated discrimination, in practice many lower federal courts make a distinction between sexually motivated gender discrimination and non-sexually motivated gender discrimination (gender-based harassment) in a work environment. This study illustrates a court case of Dwyer v. Smith in which a police officer alleged that her co-workers and supervisors engaged in a pattern of abusive conduct that created a hostile working environment. (Thorpe). The failure of the plaintiff to allege a case of sexual harassment proved to be fatal to her case. Sexual harassment is only a part of gender discrimination that female employees face in a hostile work employment. Ridicule, rudeness or insults directed at working women may not be sexually motivated but may still create a hostile working environment. The failure of courts to view gender-based harassment claims as actionable has reduced the availability and deterred the effectiveness of Title VII. The study claims that in order to recognise gender-based discrimination as actionable it must be severe or pervasive or it could be misinterpreted. Impacts and consequences have been explored in many previous findings and emphasis have been given on the nature and reason of harassment, but from within harassment sexual harassment is the concept which is quite highlighted factor discussed in findings as in, Recent Thinking about Sexual Harassment: A Review Essay (Elizabeth Anderson) discusses the wrongs of sexual harassment and presents three theories that capture a different aspect of sexual harassment. Dignity theory explains the offensiveness of harassment; autonomy theory deals with the coercive nature of sexual conduct whereas equality theory highlights the group based harms of sexual harassment. This article also gives an example of airlines that expect female flight attendants tolerate customers anger, rudeness or ogling without any objection and hence, make it difficult for them to perform their jobs satisfactorily. The essay also tries to provide remedies and explains that antidiscrimination law has been quite useful in helping people understand their rights and combat sexual harassment in the workplace. Most people perceive harassment and gender discrimination as a mentally or physically induced trauma but very few people measure it on the basis of the high costs involved by this practice of harassment and its deeply routed and ever growing cost is often ignored. One such article: The study Estimating the Organizational Costs of Sexual Harassment: The Case of U.S. Army (Robert H. Faley, Deborah Erdos Knapp, Gary A, Kustis, Cathy L. Z. Dubois) tested the implication of sexual harassment on the organizational costs. The increasing costs of sexual harassment encouraged organizations to give attention to the issue of sexual harassment. These costs initially included litigation and associated settlements. However, with further research it was found that harassment can lead to an overall decrease in employee motivation towards the job resulting in increases in absentees, turnover, and requests for transfers, and use of mental health services, as well as decreases in productivity (Gutek Koss, 1993; Martindale, 1990; U. S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1981 and 1987). This study states that results indicate that the total annual cost of sexual harassment in the U.S. Army in 1988 was over $250,000,000. This not only brought attention to the organizational costs of s exual harassment and also to the seriousness of the problem as well. However, this study concludes that increase in the proportion of females in the military would increase that part of the total costs of harassment associated with females and as a result the cost of sexual harassment may grow even more. Furthermore it implies that losing a higher rank female in the army due to sexual harassment would cost a staggering amount. Hence sexual harassment continues to be a threat not only to the working individuals but also harms the companies financially. Gender Mainstreaming and Corporate Social Responsibility: Reporting Workplace Issues (Kate Grosser, Jeremy Moon 2005) focuses on the potential of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to gender equality. The paper states that women are provided equal opportunity in the workplace by the combination of legal compliance, business care and social regulation (Dickens 1999) and the theory of CSR combines all these three notions. This study suggests that a reason for slow progress in reporting gender issues is the lack of platform for gender issues to be discusses. The study has highlights the under-representation of womens issues and has stressed on the need of women representation in company practices, as employees, community members, consumers and investors among other things. The impact of sexual harassment in a legal profession on job satisfaction is examined in The Effects of Sexual Harassment on Job Satisfaction, Earnings, and Turnover among Female Lawyers (David N. Laband and Bernard F. Lentz). The results from American Bar Associations National Survey of Career Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction (1990) show that nearly two-thirds of female lawyers in private practice and nearly half of those in corporate or public agency settings reported either experiencing or observing sexual harassment by male superiors, colleagues, or clients during the two years prior to the survey. The study shows that overall job satisfaction is significantly lower among female lawyers who experienced or witnessed sexual harassment by male superiors and colleagues than among those who did not experience or witness such harassment. According to statistics shown in the study, job satisfaction among female employees is affected more than twice as strongly by sexual harassment than by t heir annual income. The study also implies that there is a direct relation between sexual harassment and intention to quit current employment. However, the study was limited by the fact that the survey did not refer to the degree of harassment. Implementation Mechanism (Shamreeza Riaz) discusses the provision of law related to sexual harassment at workplace and the effectiveness of its implementation. This study was conducted in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Interviews were conducted with the work force of organizations, women activists, NGO workers and educational institutions. The writer argues that women participation in the making policies and in decision making can lead to a prosperous nation. However, the true potential of women is hindered due to the difficulties that they face at the work place. The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2010 provides the definition and kinds of harassment at the workplace. According to the study, in 20-30% sexual harassment cases, women remain silent because of their dignity and self respect. 70% of the women are victims of physical harassment and verbal and other kinds of harassment. The writer lists the causes of harassment as lack of awareness, misuse of authori ty, lack of organizational policy and a male dominant society. The study shows that sexual harassment has very serious consequences resulting in the loss of job, a hostile environment and physical and psychological breakdown while some women are forced to quit their jobs. The International Labour Organization, United Nation on Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, Beijing program for action Declaration, European Union Legislation and Organization of American State all provide laws aiming to prevent gender discrimination. The study Branded: Corporate Image, Sexual Stereotyping, and the New Face of Capitalism (Dianne Avery, Marion G. Crain) aims to show how the adoption of sophisticated forms of marketing are distinct from the workers physical and mental labour. The study reveals the case of Jespersen v. Harrahs Operating Co. in which the court rejected a female bartenders Title VII challenge to the workplaces policy that women wear makeup, which she found sexually demeaning. Employers sophisticated marketing techniques sometimes create a property like interest and employers take advantage of their employees outside of their usual work by forcing them to propagate company brands outside of the workplace. Transforming discriminatory corporate cultures (Cheryl L. Wade) discusses gender equality in corporate environment. The writer argues that companies can only change if men change. She states that even if men witness discriminatory behaviour or harassment in their workplace, they fail to take necessary action that could promote gender equality. Many male managers may seem to support gender equality but still ignore gender conflicts in the work place. If the CEO of a company strives to bring a culture of gender equality then the workers will follow his example. Moreover, the writer states that sometimes women allow sexist comments and jokes to go unnoticed in an attempt to show that they belong to the right workplace. The corporate workplace also seems to work on the expectation that women of colour can be given jobs that are not valued in the corporate context. Hence, such negative stereotypes adversely affect the performance of women in the workplace. As the relationship between mana gement and its employees plays a central role in a companies success, it is necessary that problems of workplace discrimination be dealt with. The study Gender Justice and Its Critics focuses on the judicial practices and laws on gender discrimination. The article underlines the traditional treatment of women and the current condition of women. Women were victimized by the laws made to protect them by giving decision making powers to the male members. The writer states that in contrast to these laws, the remedial laws such as prohibition of sex-based discrimination in workplace have empowered women to make their own decisions. Laws which tried to prevent discriminatory practices have created distinct profession for men and women. Furthermore, Gender Justice claims that it is not opposed to the needs of working mothers but offers that parental benefits be given to both males and females. The study The Price of Man and Women: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World (Edward Castronova 2003) investigates the demand of physical attributes and qualities of the social world. The study examines the computer generated avatars which are both male and female. However, the hedonic price analysis suggests that the female avatars are available at a discount and that there is less preference to have a female avatar. As this physical difference is not real in the synthetic world, this reluctance can be explained by the general assumption about the effectiveness of the female avatar. However, the study does not indicate whether this is arises from a prejudice on behalf of the population or simply the numbers indicate that more male players choose male avatars. This article was chosen because of the importance it holds in outside world other than corporate sector to give out an overview on the gender based difference one holds in his mind. They were shortcomings and left out concerns in those previous studies which can be looked upon on the basis of variables and introducing more measurable models which could relate and interlink the variables in appropriate and a strong way. Theoretical Framework DEMOGRAPHICS Characteristics of a human population Age Income Gender Race Experience Gender diversity Unfair treameant Promotion Placement Moral fairness Sexual orientation Female employee turnover Hiring firing. Work envirnoment Healthy Motivating Safety Stress Frequency of Women Promotion Number of times women get promoted at workplace More promotions to male or female? Productivity Equal treatment in terms of salary and promotion Drive Increased desire Encouragement Inspiration Motivated to work Level of satisfaction What one wants from a job and what one perceives it as offering Overall satisfaction Satisfaction with the job Satisfaction with the work Sense of achievement Scope of using own initiative Influence over the job Harrasment Offensive behaviour Intent to disturb or upset Unwanted sexual advances Bases of colour, race religion and sex Financial and recognition rewards Wages Salary Empower-ment Fringe benefits SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE TO ANALYZE THE CORRELATES OF GENDER DISCRIMINATION AND IT IMPACT ON MOTIVATION This questionnaire is being exclusively used for research purpose; all the information provided by respondents would be kept confidential. Your co-operation would be highly appreciated. Personal info: Name Age Experience in this organization Education Marital status Single Married Divorced Gender Male Female Income bracket 10,000-20,000 20,000- 50,000 50,000 above Section A Levels of Satisfaction Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree I enjoy at my workplace 1 2 3 4 5 Factors can be added to improve employee motivation at your workplace 1 2 3 4 5 Would you like to stay at your workplace for long 1 2 3 4 5 I am over all satisfied by the attitude of my boss and workplace 1 2 3 4 5 Do you feel as an important part of your organization 1 2 3 4 5 Are you satisfied by your designated authority 1 2 3 4 5 GENDER DIVERSITY: Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree Mostly the supervisors are male 1 2 3 4 5 Majority of Co-workers are Male 1 2 3 4 5 I belive that I have equal opportunities and potential for growth as my other colleagues have 1 2 3 4 5 In my view discrimination does take place at workplace. 1 2 3 4 5 At times I have been judged/mistreated on criteria which is not merit based 1 2 3 4 5 You have been treated and judged on the basis of Gender 1 2 3 4 5 1)Race 1 2 3 4 5 2)Physical appearance 1 2 3 4 5 3)Religion 1 2 3 4 5 Working enviornement and Harassment: Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree My company is strict on the laws of harassment. 1 2 3 4 5 In majority of workplace harassment cases the harasser is 1) immediate boss 1 2 3 4 5 2) Subordinates 1 2 3 4 5 3)Colleagues 1 2 3 4 5 Verbal harassment takes place 1)openly 1 2 3 4 5 Equal gender treatment creates a healthy environment at workplace. 1 2 3 4 5 If harassment occurs verbally my response would be 1)to react to the harasser the first time 1 2 3 4 5 2)Report the harassment to my boss 1 2 3 4 5 3) I would bear with it because there is no other choice. 1 2 3 4 5 Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree I have been mistreated in an offensive manner because of my Gender. 1 2 3 4 5 Offensive treatment harm your ability to work. 1 2 3 4 5 I have switched my job because of unequal treatment 1 2 3 4 5 Harassment results in increased stress and anxiety 1 2 3 4 5 Frequency of promotions: Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree I have been quickly promoted to the post I am today. 1 2 3 4 5 Male workers get frequent promotions 1 2 3 4 5 Female have more chances of getting hired for a job at first place when the interviewee is Male 1 2 3 4 5 Male have more chances of getting hired for a job at first place when the interview is Female. 1 2 3 4 5 Female workers most get in house assignment as compared to traveling assignment 1 2 3 4 5 Female get more sexually harassed than men 1 2 3 4 5 MOTIVATION: Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree Discrimination affects my productivity 1 2 3 4 5 Male workers are paid more salary/wage as compared to female for the same job description 1 2 3 4 5 Male workers are more empowered to take decisions 1 2 3 4 5 Male and Female workers get same Fringe benefits 1 2 3 4 5 Low percentage of female getting promoted than men works as a less motivating factor. 1 2 3 4 5 Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly Agree Men feel more superior than women which affects motivation for women in negative way 1 2 3 4 5 Some people get desperate things to get promoted 1 2 3 4 5 Women get more limited opportunities than Men contributing negatively towards motivation 1 2 3 4 5 General training has been given to staff a your workplace in connection with general duty to promote equality between Men and Women 1 2 3 4 5 Men and Women are treated equally when it comes to performance Appraisals and analysis. 1 2 3 4 5

The Practice of Religion in Public Schools Essay -- Prayer in Public Sc

The Practice of Religion in Public Schools The â€Å"establishment† or â€Å"religion† clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution reads: â€Å"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof† (Education Week, 2003, para. 2). It is from this clause that the idea of separation of church and state comes. It is also the basis for much of the debate regarding the practice of religion in public schools (Education Week, 2003). One of the big questions regarding the religion issue is where to draw the line between separation of church and state and religious freedom. The practice of religion in public schools can balance these two ends by allowing students to individually exercise their religious freedom, so long as they do not interfere with that of other students. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court has protected students’ rights to practice their religious beliefs, so long as they are not â€Å"disruptive, discriminatory, or coercive to peers who may not share those same beliefs† (Education Weekly, 2003, para. 3). In 1943, the Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette stated that students could not be â€Å"forced to salute the flag or say the pledge of allegiance if it violates the individual’s conscience† (First Amendment Cyber Tribune, 2002). The 1963 decision in Engel v. Vitale made school prayer unconstitutional, and similarly found school prayer at graduation ceremonies in its 1992 Lee v. Weisman decision (First Amendment Cyber Tribune, 2002). Student-led prayer at public school football games was found unconstitutional in 2000 with the Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (First Amendment C... ...il). Religion in Schools. Retrieved April 30, 2003, from http://www.educationweek.org/context/topics/issuespage.cfm?id=60. This website provided a summary of the issue of religion in schools and reviewed several Supreme Court decisions related to the issue. First Amendment Cyber Tribune. (2002, July). Freedom of Religion: An Overall View of Religious Liberty as Defined by U.S. Supreme Court Cases. Retrieved May 3, 2003, from http://w3.trib.com/FACT/1st.religion.html. This website listed several Supreme Court cases dealing with the issue of religion in schools and provided short explanations of each opinion. Riley R. Religious Expression in Public Schools. Retrieved May 3, 2003, from http://www.ed.gov/Speeches/08-1995/religion.html. This website provided a copy of the U.S. Secretary of Education’s guidelines on religious expression in public schools.