Forum Discussion Activities Essay

Please post your response to ONE of the following questions in the Forum by Wednesday, midnight, of Week 3. Then please post at least three responses to other student’s postings by Saturday, midnight, of Week 3. * You are the Vice President of a US based software company. You have been tasked with exploring the possibility of setting up a software development operation in India. You have heard that the rigid caste systems can affect business operations. Do you think it is possible to use a typical US management style in India or should you adjust to the local Indian managerial style and employment practices? Explain. Forum Discussion Week 3 – Question #2 Businesses create strategies for setting up relationships with other countries based upon the type of product involved and whether their entry is in the product market or the resource market. â€Å"Strategy† within this global framework most closely resembles a ‘marketing strategy’ that addresses target markets, segmentation, positioning and allocation of resources. Discuss the various strategies outlined within the text reading and which one or two seem to fit your final project country and product best. Provide a glimpse of your final paper by discussing the product and country you have selected and post and respond to students related to what product you have chosen and whether you are entering in the product or resource markets. Written Assignments Case Study 2 Write a 2-3 page analysis of the Case Study entitled, â€Å"Argentina’s Monetary Crisis† located in Chapter 10 of the text. Upload the paper to the Assignments Drop Box by Saturday, midnight, of Week 3. Course Project: Market Entry Analysis You should have by selected your country and product and begun your environmental research. A learning objective this week is to move from environment to strategy. Outlining your country and product choice, begin a thread on the Forum related to entry strategies as outlined in the text. Elicit comments from your classmates on your choices and begin to formulate your strategy. Learning from this milestone can be incorporated into the final paper due Week 5. * You are the Vice President of a pharmaceutical company that makes anti-malarial drugs. You are looking at the possibility of opening up a factory as a JV with the local government in an African country with high levels of malaria. At present, the majority of people in this country cannot afford the high prices of anti-malarial drugs from outside the country, but by building the plant locally, you would not only provide jobs but also your company could supply anti-malarial drugs to the local population at half the current price. In a meeting with a local government official, you are told that the plant can go forward if you pay the official $100,000 in cash. What are your options and what would you do? My options are to pay the $100,000 or not to pay it based on the company policy. Facilitation payments are still permitted by some countries. We would give the $100,000 to the officials in cash, and then we would also try to negotiate a 5 year tax break. And to recover the $100,000 given to officials, we would charge an extra 15 cents per vaccine sold to recoup the $100,000. We would say the fund is just the price of doing business and setting up relationships outside the US. This bribery is similar to what some city inspectors do when they want to give you a hard time. There has been times where if you didn’t have a nice hot cup of coffee with a $100 bill under it that the inspector would fail you just so you would have to pay another $250 for another inspection. The $100,000 that we would pay as a company could negotiate a vast amount of things per the article below. Interestingly, when the FCPA was initially passed in 1977, the facilitating payment exception was found under the definition of foreign official. However, with the 1988 Amendments, a more explicit exception was written into the statute making it clear that the anti-bribery provisions â€Å"shall not apply to any facilitating or expediting payment to a foreign official, political party, or party official the purpose of which is to expedite or to secure the performance of a routine governmental action . . .† The statute itself provided a list of examples of facilitation payments in the definition of routine governmental actions. It included the following: * Obtaining permits, licenses, or other official documents; * Processing governmental papers such as visas and work orders; * Providing police protection, mail services, scheduling inspections; * Providing utilities, cargo handling; or * Actions of a similar nature. http://tfoxlaw.wordpress.com/tag/facilitation-payments/ You are the Vice President of a US based software company. You have been tasked with exploring the possibility of setting up a software development operation in India. You have heard that the rigid caste systems can affect business operations. Do you think it is possible to use a typical US management style in India or should you adjust to the local Indian managerial style and employment practices? Explain. I would say yes I would use a typical US management style in India. I agree that adapting to India’s culture, managerial style and employment practices are great and would probably be best. But for the very same reason we are expanding aboard and going to India is because our business model has already been accepted by the culture. You only expand to markets if they are the right fit for the company. Bringing something new, innovative and showing India the way that our US company does business may just be intriguing to the country and accepted in ways never seen before; the only thing that matter is if the product sells. McDonalds is a great example; McDonalds is everywhere and consumers shop with McDonalds because the golden arches are known globally, and the business model is a cookie cutter from store to store, nothing changes. Understanding how cultural differences can affect the way in which a business is practiced, Employing local citizens, mixing managerial staff ,educating ourselves about the culture are great and must do’s, but keeping the company’s business model intact and adjusting to the environment is the key to protecting ourselves from the danger of being ill-informed. Business and money are both universal languages and there are more ways to make it work within a proven system than not. Businesses create strategies for setting up relationships with other countries based upon the type of product involved and whether their entry is in the product market or the resource market. â€Å"Strategy† within this global framework most closely resembles a ‘marketing strategy’ that addresses target markets, segmentation, positioning and allocation of resources. Discuss the various strategies outlined within the text reading and which one or two seem to fit your final project country and product best. Provide a glimpse of your final paper by discussing the product and country you have selected and post and respond to students My product selection is infection prevention, innovative sterilization, disinfection and hand hygiene products that will be sold in Canada. * The â€Å"International Strategy† I think would work the best for my product. Medical products and medical technical equipment accounts for $8.8 billion in US export revenue which is ranked number 6 on the list of top exports to Canada from the US. Infection prevention, innovative sterilization, disinfection and hand hygiene products are produced in the US but, are needed worldwide. Currently the US is the major exporter Medical products, medical technical equipment to Canada; also Leading US pharmaceutical companies have production, R&D facilities, and distribution offices in many locations across Canada. Among them are Abbott Point-of-Care, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, and others. The medical devices industry in Canada is also among the largest in the world. Medical device companies operating in Canada incorporate advanced technologies and the newest discoveries. Our main focus is on helping to ensure the safest possible environments for patients and their families, healthcare workers, providers and communities. Our quality infection prevention products help care for both the people and the world we live in. * The Global Standardization stratedgy is great because the pro that will be sold are all relatively standard, and will be distributed the same way. Customization is not needed to the products themselves, the only thing that will need adjustments is the language, all sterilization equipment, solutions, and products are manufactured the same and have the same technology. http://www.jnj.com/connect/about-jnj/company-structure/medical-devices/ http://www.aspjj.com/us/about/asp-mission-vision http://www.jnj.com/connect/about-jnj/company-structure/medical-devices/ http://www.worldsrichestcountries.com/top_us_exports.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson http://www.canadafaq.ca/what+are+the+top+industries+in+canada/ I am selling a pacemaker in Australia. The â€Å"International Strategy† would be the best for my product. It is produced in the US currently and does not need customization to sell in Australia. Pacemakers fulfill a universal need. Australia imports 85-90% of medical devices. Currently the US is the major exporter of medical supplies to Australia followed by Germany, Japan and the EU. There is no pressure to reduce costs. A strategic alliance may be needed down the road if a strong competitor does start to emerge. It is important that the pacemaker evolves over time or competitors will develop a better product. â€Å"Global Standardization† may be an option because customization of the pacemaker is not needed. It is a universal product. Costs will be low. Aggressive pricing can be used. The drawback is a competitor may create a better product through evolution. â€Å"Localization† would not work because customization is not needed. Consumer tastes and preferences do not come into play for this product. â€Å"Transnational† is also not needed at this time because cost is not a factor and customization for local demands do not exist. This is a complex strategy that I will not need to apply. Because of local culture, I will need to find a local agent to work with in Australia. The aging population, demands for a higher quality of life and increasing affluence have created a demand for quality medical devices. Reference: Global Business Today My project is to import car care and weather resistant equipment into Canada. This is not a new idea and it is not a product that cannot be found really anywhere in the world. The strategy that seems to fit my project best is the international strategy. The reason is that it is not unique in idea. The vital importance is expanding the market for the product. There will be minimal change to the product and with the non existent trade barriers of NAFTA importation will go smoothly. Since the majority of the Canadian population lives so close to the US borer transportation costs will not extend far beyond deliveries to the NorthEast/NorthWest. The other option would be a Localization strategy as we could focus on specific markets such and alternative transportation vehicles equipment that are used in the snowbound areas. The Localization strategy is the most important in the marketing aspect.The localization and transnational strategies are the best matches for my proposed product which is a UK-based channel on YouTube that is mostly ran from the United States. My product is based on my current occupation and we have several international channels that have launched with steady success. There are four major international business strategies: globalization, transnational, international, and localization. Globalization strategy occurs when a firm focuses on profit by utilizing economies of scale, localization, and learning efforts. This strategy is the most helpful when firms are pressured to reduce costs and local responsiveness is low. International strategy occurs when a firm creates value by selling products internationally that were created domestically and do not require significant customization. Transnational strategy occurs when a firm tries to achieve lower costs by economies of scale, localization, and learning efforts and also focusing on products that are tailored to local markets. Economies of scale and learning efforts will not be factors within my strategy, however localization plays a large role. Because some of the content on the channel will be created in the UK to create a sense of community, creative contractors will create the content which lends itself to a more identifiable relationship with consumers. Expanding a content-based business from the United States to the UK benefits best from concise localization strategy. Content that is tailored for a consumer in the UK adheres to high local responsibility. Because both countries are English-speaking, content can be shared by both venues and avoid translation costs or and also reduce cost of creating content. This may help alleviate the localization strategy’s characteristic struggle to lower the high pressure for cost reductions. References: Hill, C. W. (2011). Global Business Today (7th Edition ed.). New York, NY, USA: McGraw-Hill. I am selling a pacemaker in Australia. The â€Å"International Strategy† would be the best for my product. It is produced in the US currently and does not need customization to sell in Australia. Pacemakers fulfill a universal need. Australia imports 85-90% of medical devices. Currently the US is the major exporter of medical supplies to Australia followed by Germany, Japan and the EU. There is no pressure to reduce costs. A strategic alliance may be needed down the road if a strong competitor does start to emerge. It is important that the pacemaker evolves over time or competitors will develop a better product. â€Å"Global Standardization† may be an option because customization of the pacemaker is not needed. It is a universal product. Costs will be low. Aggressive pricing can be used. The drawback is a competitor may create a better product through evolution. â€Å"Localization† would not work because customization is not needed. Consumer tastes and preferences do not come into play for this product. â€Å"Transnational† is also not needed at this time because cost is not a factor and customization for local demands do not exist. This is a complex strategy that I will not need to apply. Because of local culture, I will need to find a local agent to work with in Australia. The aging population, demands for a higher quality of life and increasing affluence have created a demand for quality medical devices.

ECCB & Property Development in Malaysia Essay

Marketers are either directly or indirectly involved in the efforts to promote environmentally conscious behavior amongst the consumers with a view to addressing the global concerns about the global warming (Rauschelbach, 2002). Governments have come up with various policies on climate change that companies and corporations, both national and multinational, must comply with. Consumers in Malaysia and other countries have started being environment conscious by consuming environmentally friendly products (Woolley & Kimmins). The environmentally conscious consumer behavior is a way the consumers ensure that environment around them is preserved, especially in view of escalating challenges of garbage disposal and depletion of the available natural resources. It is important to note that consumers are involved in environmentally conscious consumption because they have acknowledged personal responsibility for the environmental pollution problem (Hoyer, 2008). The influence on consumers to adopt the approach of environmentally friendly consumption has been enhanced by media campaigns organized by various stakeholders in collaboration with relevant government institutions. Producing and supplying environmentally friendly products is one of the effective selling points for most corporations all over the world. This paper will therefore discuss ways in which property development companies can target and then position themselves into the growing market arising from Environmentally Conscious Consumer Behavior in Malaysia. How property development companies can target and then, position themselves into the growing market arising from the ECCB in Malaysia Producing eco-friendly products is one of the most important promotional points for the 21st century corporations. This is facilitated by the fact that most product consumers in Malaysia are increasingly becoming aware of the need to conserve the environment, especially with respect to climate change; and the trend is the same all over the world. Consequently, this has resulted into a market where consumers are more drawn to environmentally friendly products than ever. Going by the statistics provided by the United Nations Environmental Programme (2007) property developments industry contributes approximately 30%-40% of the total global carbon dioxide emission arising from energy consumption. Coupled with the market arising from Environmentally Conscious Consumer Behavior, the property development sector is forced to reconsider the products it avails to the consumers in the property market. There are arrange of options available to the property developers in Malaysia that can enable them to target and position themselves in the Malaysian market arising from Environmentally Conscious Consumer Behavior. It is important to note that consumers are increasingly becoming concerned about global warming and one way through which they can effective participate is by holding producers accountable to global warming paying attention to whether the production process leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions (Fischer & Black, 1995). One of the ways through which the property development companies in Malaysia can use to target and position themselves in Malaysian market is reducing energy usage for the property in offer. The companies can ensure the lighting systems in their property utilize more environmental friendly energy sources. For instance, they can face out the use of traditional incandescent bulbs and replace them with compact fluorescent lighting tubes (Kelly, 2009). It is also crucial to note that a larger percentage of energy consumptions take place during the period buildings are in use than during the construction process. The energy usage during the life time of a building, energy usage may include heating, ventilation, cooling and lighting amongst other energy using appliances. In order to target and position themselves in the Malaysian property market, the companies can adopt the use of the most advanced technologies like thermal insulation, utilize solar shading and also fit their property with energy efficient appliances (Kelly, 2009). The Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM) came up with a labeling program in which products are verified as environmentally friendly. The property companies ensure that they purchase their fittings from such suppliers whose products are genuinely labeled as environment friendly; this should be informed by the fact that as many of Malaysian consumers as possible are becoming aware of the labeling programme and hence are cautious with their consumption behavior. Besides, this can be reinforced by engaging more in environmental campaigns to convince the consumers that they seriously committed to the conservation of environment and its resources (Abdullah, 1999). The materials used in constructing property are very crucial in terms of environmental concerns. The property companies should use non-toxic construction materials that do not contain chemicals and substances like mercury and the in the process of marketing they should emphasize on such characteristics. Moreover, it is important to note that environment conservation groups are slowly increasing in number; these groups have attracted the attention of the advertising firms. It is of great benefit for property companies in Malaysia to use these groups and or advertise through the firms that have strong link with such groups (Wells, 2007). Disposal of household wastes are an important component of environmental conservation. Property companies should ensure that their buildings are equipped with safe, efficient and eco-friendly means of disposing wastes. This may include mobile waste bins which can be emptied in a track and waste transported to appropriate places. In addition to this, the sewerage systems should also encourage hygiene and have no health risks which are some of the major concerns for most consumers (Snyder, 2000). There are also a number of activities that companies can initiate and support amongst the Malaysian communities. They can fund eco-friendly initiatives like planting of trees and facilitating research towards finding alternative energy sources. Again, the companies can ensure that their property is located in a clean neighborhood. This has the potential to attract more of the Environmentally Conscious Consumers (ECC). Conclusion Environmentally Conscious Consumer Behavior has had significant effects on how property companies strategize on penetrating the market. The companies have to ensure their products are environmentally friendly so as to attract the Malaysian property buyers. However, there are range strategies that can assist the companies in targeting and positioning themselves in the Malaysian property market where consumers are increasing getting concerned with the conservation of environment. When the buildings are constructed with harmless materials which do not contain chemicals and substances like mercury, the companies are highly likely to get more buyers. Moreover, with label identity policy for eco-friendly products in Malaysia, most consumers will check on such labels before finally making purchase. It is therefore imperative that property companies should partner with such suppliers whose products meet the labeling standards (Abdullah, 1999). The companies can also ensure that lighting systems in their property are energy efficient. Instead of using the traditional lighting bulbs like incandescent, the companies can fit their buildings with energy efficient fluorescent tubes (Kelly, 2009). Besides, they can also support environment conservation initiatives in communities; this can also include using advertising firms that have strong links with environment conservation groups. References Abdullah, M. (1999). Small and medium enterprises in Malaysia: policy issues and challenges. Malaysia: Ashgate. Fischer, F. & Black, M. (1995). Greening environmental policy: the politics of a sustainable future. United States: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoyer, D. , et al. (2008). Consumer Behavior. London: Cengage Learning. Kelly, D. (2009). Community planning: an introduction to the comprehensive plan. U. S: Island Press. Rauschelbach, B. (2002). Cooperating for sustainable tourism: proceedings of the Forum International at the Reisepavillon, 2002. U. S: Kasparek Verlag. Snyder, C. (2000). Union County, Pennsylvania: a celebration of history. U. S: Penn State Press. United Ntaions Environmental Programme. (March 2007). Environment for development. Retrieved from: http://www. unep. org/Documents. Multilingual/Default. asp? DocumentID=502&ArticleID=5545&l=en[Accessed August 24, 2010]. Wells, W. (2007). Blueprint for greening affordable housing. United States: Island Press. Woolley, T. & Kimmins, S. (2000). Green building handbook: a guide to building products and their impact on the environment, Volume 2. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Coach Incorporated Security Analysis Paper Essay

Abstract Coach Incorporated is a company established in 1941in Manhattan. Coach is in the fashion industry and this accessories manufacturer is one of the best known brands in North America. Coach was bought out by the Sara Lee Corporation in 1985 and started being publicly traded in 2000 on the New York Stock Exchange. Coach Incorporated prides it selves off of being one of the most dependable, unique, desirable, and fashionable brands in their industry. Coach has a disadvantage with its competition, being the only one publicly traded. It does not have access to the others financial records. Coach Incorporated likes to stick to tradition, whether it is in their designs or their Executive officers. Coach has a very diverse and experienced Executive team. Coach also just started a litigation campaign in 2009 called â€Å"Operation turnlock† to try and help with the counterfeit problem. They were recently award a large sum of money from one of the lawsuits the campaign filled for online counterfeit merchandise. Coach recently just gave $2 million to the Hurricane Sandy Relief Fund to help rebuild the community where Coach got its own start. Coach’s financial records are in order and are continuing to grow steadily even through the rough economy. Coach Incorporated (Coach) is a company that designs and manufactures leather goods as well as other accessories. It was founded in a Manhattan loft in 1941 as a family-run workshop. This family used skill passed down from each generation to create a unique style that became quite desirable to consumers. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) In 1985 Coach was purchased by Sara Lee Corporation. Also, in 2000, Coach as Incorporated in the state of Maryland and listed on the New York Stock Exchange for approximately 68 million shares. Their mission statement is â€Å"Coach seeks to be the leading brand of quality lifestyle accessories offering classic, modern American styling.† In today’s world, Coach is large company that still retains high standards and craftsmanship for their leather goods. They manufacture items such as purses, suit cases, wallets, watches, accessories, shoes, jewelry, sunglasses and etc. Some of these items are manufactured through their licensing partners. Such as Estee Lauder Companies Incorporated is Coach’s fragrance licensing partner. (â€Å"Reuters: Profile, coach,† 2012) The Coach brand has ‘established a signature style and distinctive identity’ (â€Å"Coach Est. 1941,† 2010) that almost everyone can recognize, which is why their prices reflect more of the name than the quality of the items. Coach is in the fashion industry and enough people are willing to pay for the name brand of Coach to keep them in business and to keep the prices high. The market the Coach is in is the fashion market, and their customers are middle to upper class men and women. Because their prices are high the market for their items has to be to a household that has extra money to spend and even though they sell mostly women related items they do sell men’s’ as well. Their competition includes Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Gucci Incorperated, Dooney and Bourke Incorporated, Katie Spade LLC, and Michael Kors Incorporated which are all privately owned companies. (â€Å"Yahoo finance,† 2012) Coach operates in two different ways, direct to customers and indirect. Indirect is where Coach sells their products to other retail stores and direct to customers is selling out of their own stores. Coach has over 500 stores in the United States and Canada as of June 30, 2012. They also have over 300 locations in Japan, China, Singapore and Taiwan. They have recently acquired new locations in Malaysia and South Korea in July and August. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Coach not only has their own retail stores, but also sells their merchandise through department stores and specialty retailer locations. With these locations, Coach is also present in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. As of 1999 Coach launched their first on-line store available to customers in the United States, Canada, and Japan. They also have informational websites in twenty other countries. In the future, Coach plans to increase international distribution and target international consumers, especially in Asia. They also plan on staying one of the most popular name brand accessory companies in North America. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Coach also has very high standards for their brand. Coach states that â€Å"The Coach brand represents a unique synthesis of magic and logic that stands for quality, authenticity, value and a truly aspirational, distinctive American style.† (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) They hold accountability to their customers. They also guarantee great service and that their customers’ needs are always met. Coach seeks long term relationships with all their costumers by treating them this way. This is one reason Coach is still around and doing well as a company even with their high prices. They are dedicated to their honesty, trust, satisfaction, and fairness to their consumers, business, and community. They strive to increase consumer and shareholder value. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) They have a small number of executive officers with only seven. First on the list is Lew Frankfort the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Frankfort joined the Coach company is 1979 as Vice President of New Business Development. Mr. Frankfort has appointed President of Coach in 1985 and named Chairman and CEO in 1995. When Mr. Frankfort started at Coach, Coach’s sales were about $6 million. Today Coach’s sales are $4.8 billion. He has seen many changes with this company, such as seeing it go to a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. Before joining Coach, Mr. Frankfort held positions in the public sector in New York City. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College, and a MBA in Marketing from Columbia University. He also holds a spot on the Board of Overseers of Columbia’s Business School. Mr. Frankfort was recognized by Barron’s from 2005-2008 as one of 30 â€Å"Most Respected CEO’s† globally. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Having someone that has been in the same company for 33 years now running it, says wonders about Coach. Coach is a brand that sticks to what it knows and does not change something that is working for them. Just like their products, Coach’s president is what they seek in their mission of keeping everything classic. Next, is Reed Krakoff, the President, Executive Creative Director of Coach and has been employed at Coach since December 1996. He was initially hired as the Vice President and Executive Creative Director, but advanced to his current position just two and a half years later. Mr. Krakoff has a degree in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design. Prior to Coach, Mr. Krakoff held various positions at Anne Klein, Ralph Lauren and other design houses. In 2007 Mr. Krakoff was elected vice president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and in 2001and 2004 he was awarded the honor of Accessories Designer of the Year. To this day Mr. Krakoff styles and photographs the campaigns for Coach. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Having a man like Reed Krakoff on the Coach team ensures that they will have some of the most elegant designs in the industry today. His ability to create pieces that Coach would gladly put their name on ensures him a long career at Coach. Following is Jerry Stritzke, the President and Chief Operating Officer as of March 2008. Prior to Coach he joined Best, Sharp, Sheridan, & Shritzke in 1985 as a partner. In 1992 he practiced law at Stritzke Law Office. From 1993 to 1999 Mr. Stritzke was a consultant for Webb and Shirley. Lastly, Mr. Stritzke held several senior executive positions within limited Brand Incorporation, from 1999 to 2007. Jerry Stritzke has a Bachelors of Science from Oklahoma State University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Oklahoma. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Next is Michael Tucci the President, Retail Division in North America. Mr. Tucci joined Coach in 2003 with over twenty years of experience. Before Coach, he was the Executive Vice President of Gap Incorporated and held various senior leadership positions from 1994-2002. Michael Tucci also held executive positions at R.H. Mary Corporations from 1982-1992. Mr. Tucci has a Bachelors of Arts in English from Trinity College. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Next, is Todd Kahn the Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary since he joined Coach in 2008. Prior to joining Coach Todd Kahn held multiple positions for Calypso Christian Celle, Sean John, Accessory Network, InternetCash Corporation, Salant Corporation, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson. Mr. Todd has a Bachelors of Science from Touro College and a Juris Doctor from Boston University Law School. He also serves on the board of Directors of the Fashion Institute of Technology Educational Foundation the Fashion Delivers Charitable Foundation Incorporated, and the National Father’s Day Committee. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Next is Sarah Dunn the Executive Vice President, Human Recourses since 2008. Previously Ms. Dunn held several executive positions with Thomson Financial, including Executive Vice President, Human Resources and Organizational Development. Ms. Dunn is also a consulting Advisory Board member of Youth, I.N.C. She also has a Bachelors of Science Degree in Human Sciences from University College, London, U.K. and a Masters Degree in Information Science from City University, London. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Lastly, we have Jane Nielsen the executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer since 2011. Jane Nielsen joined Coach after working at PepsiCo, Incorporated and the Global Nutrition Group as their Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer since 2009. Prior to this Ms. Nielsen held senior positions in a financial role with PepsiCo, Incorporated, and Pepsi Bottling Group from 1996-2009. From 1990-1996 Ms. Nielsen worked for Marakon Associates and from 1986-1990 she worked at Credit Suisse First Boston. Ms. Nielsen has a BA in Economics from Smith College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Coach has recently been awarded $257 million in a lawsuit against counterfeit Coach merchandise. Coach obtained a default judgment in Illinois Federal Court against individuals and businesses that operate websites selling counterfeit Coach merchandise. The judgment granted Coach 573 internet domain names from which the counterfeit merchandise was sold from. Coach started a litigation campaign called â€Å"Operation Turnlock† in May 2009. Since then, Coach has filed lawsuits to stop counterfeit items from being sold. From these lawsuits, Coach has gain a significant amount of monetary value from them. (Chaudhuri , 2012) Coach also just donated $2 million to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. The gift was made to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund for rebuilding efforts in the Tri-State area. Coach as also made its employee matching program available, so however much its employees contribute to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund or to other qualified funds, Coach will match the donation Lew Frankfort made a public address saying â€Å"Our hearts go out to the countless number of people affected by the storm.† Since Coach was established in Manhattan, they feel they need to help rebuild their community where they started. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) In 2011 Coach’s Inventory broke down to 63% handbags, 27% accessories, and 10% all other products. This is just a little change from the previous year, where the only difference is 1% moved from accessories to all other products. Currently Coach pays quarterly cash dividends of $0.225 per share. Coach’s cash flow statement shows Net Income for 2011 to be $880,800,000 and the net cash flows provided by operating activities in 2011to be $1,033,271,000. Also, the cash flow statement shows the net cash used in investing activities to be -$59,631,000 and the net cash used in financing activities to be -$875,126,000 in 2011. For the Cash and cash equivalents at end of year 2011 were $699,782,000 with the cash paid for income taxes for 2011 to be $364,493,000 and cash paid for interest for 2011 to be $1,233,000. Lastly, the cash flow statement has for 2011 is the noncash investing activity-property and equipment obligations to be $23,173,000 and $0 for the noncash financing ac tivity-mortgage debt assumed.(â€Å"http://www.annualreports.com/company/2246 ,† 2011) Coach just reported its first quarter earnings per share in 2012 to be $0.77. Compared to the previous year, same quarter, the earnings per shares was $0.73. Their sales reported for 2012 first quarter, which ended September 29, 2012, was $1.16 billion. Compared to the previous year where Coach’s sales for the same quarter was only $1.05 billion. This is an 11% increase in sales in just one year. Coach also announced that its Board of Directors has just authorized the repurchase of up to $1.5 billion of its outstanding common stock by June 30,2015. This will make Coach’s earnings per share increase since there will be less outstanding stock. Since we now know the earning per share for Coach we can calculate the price earnings ratio. Coach’s current stock price $57.87. So, Coach’s price earnings ratio is 75.156. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) Stockholder’s equity is total assets minus total liabilities. For Coach, in 2011 the total assets are $2,635,116,000 and the total liabilities are $1,022,547,000. So, the total stockholder’s equity for the year ended July 2, 2011 is $1,612,569,000. For the total liabilities of Coach being $1,022,547,000 only $593,017,000 are current liabilities. Of the current liabilities $118,612,000 is accounts payable, $473,610,000 is accrued liabilities, and $795,000 is current portion of the long term debt. As for the rest of the liabilities $23,360,000 is long term debt and $406,170,000 is other liabilities. (â€Å"Coach est. 1941,† 2010) These numbers first mean that Coach is a continuously growing company that would be labeled at a value company. Which means it doesn’t grow fast, but instead it grows consistently. Also, since its assets and equities make up the majority of Coach’s finances the company appears to be in good standings. Coach is a company that has been around for over 70 years and has been traded publicly for 12 years now, and it seems to have all its finances in order and look like what you would expect for a high-end retail company. There is a bright future for Coach with its experienced executives leading the company to expand its market and try to bet out the competition. The volatility of Coach stock price is reasonable. Obviously people are willing to pay for Coach products even through hard times. Coach’s stock price continues to go up and from past records it has always steadily increased. Coach has a rich history and has been around for a long time so I do not see it crashing anytime in the near future, so I would say the stock price is valid and a good steady long term investment. References Coach est. 1941. (2010, February 3). Retrieved from http://www.coach.com/online/handbags/Home-10551-10051-en?isCollapse=true Reuters: Profile, coach inc.. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyProfile?symbol=COH Yahoo finance. (2012). Retrieved from http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=COH Competitors Chaudhuri , S. (2012, November 02). Coach gets $257 million, 573 domain names in counterfeiting lawsuits. Dow Jones Newswires. Retrieved from http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2012/11/02/coach-gets-257-million-573-domain-names-in-counterfeiting-lawsuit/ http://www.annualreports.com/company/2246. (2011).

Managerial Finance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4750 words

Managerial Finance - Essay Example This has led to a fall in the prices of products sold by Titanic Plc. Consequently, due to a fall in volumetric sales and price of beer; Titanic Plc’s sales have plunged by 30%. The above table shows that the margins of the company have also eroded due to fall in selling prices but no subsequent reduction in the costs. The gross margin fell from 46.4% in 2010 to 39.4% in 2012, which can be attributed to the fall in selling prices due to increase in competition in the industry. The operating profit margin and net margin fell drastically as the company could not control its distribution and administration expenses in the period of falling sales revenue. The directors of the company feel that the company is experiencing financial distress. A company is in a financial distress when it faces liquidity issues and has difficulties in paying off its obligations when they are due. Financial distress increases when a company’s revenues move with the economy. Such cyclical companies are prone to fall in profitability due to an economic downturn. The above table shows the liquidity ratios of the company. Company’s liquidity has improved from 2010 to 2012 as shown by an increase in the current ratio as well as the quick ratio of the company. Although the cash of the company fell from  £10.6M from 2010 to  £9.8M in 2012, the decrease was offset by an increase in inventory and receivables of the company. However, the current liabilities of the company fell drastically by 46% from  £19.9M in 2010 to  £10.8M in 2012 owing to lower trade payables and dividend payable. The ratios indicate that the company’s liquidity position is adequate. The above table shows the asset efficiency ratios for Titanic Plc. Days in inventory has increased substantially from 89 days in 2010 to 122 days in 2012 indicating that the company’s inventory is piling up. This piling up of inventory is due to the fall in sales of the company. Titanic Plc has to take steps to

Geography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 12

Geography - Essay Example Early days lay down a foundation for a future and I think I have laid down a foundation to pursue a career in the field of geography. A geographical analyst can review the conditions of this world and evaluate as to if they are deteriorating over time or not. This can help to enlighten the world about the problems that may be unknown to them previously. I believe that I can bring a change into the world by founding a career in this field and researching on the geographical patterns that occur all around the world. The different calamities that are happening all over the world are invariably due to some changes in the geographical patterns of this world. I can thus use the power of knowledge to find out the real reasons behind the changes in the geography of this world (Sopher, 2015). Similarly during this vocation, I have gained an understanding of the deeper aspects of the subject. I believe that these deeper aspects would help me to understand geography more in the future. It can help me to build a community that is aware of the problems which might affect them as a whole. Moreover, I can use this knowledge at my workplace in the larger benefit of the whole organization. In order to succeed in life, I believe that one should be dedicated to the vocation that he is pursuing in life and I think that I have this dedication to the field of geography. I can help my family understand the deeper meanings of geography and can encourage them to create awareness about the minor things such as the use of deodorants which can get trapped in the outer layer of this earth and cause green house gases to accumulate. The reason behind choosing my vocation revolves around the betterment of this world as a whole and a success that would bring about a change in the whole world (S opher, 2015). It can be said that one needs to be focused on any vocation that he has chosen so that he can be successful in life. I believe that I have enough focus on the vocation that I

Poetry & Response Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Poetry & Response - Essay Example The third part is the animated segments which is the illustration of the poem itself. I appreciated how the movie was structured. At first I thought that it was just a simple biography of Ginsberg but after watching the movie, I realized it was not a biopic but it actually focused on the poem â€Å"Howl†. I find the film entertaining with its crossing of different time periods and animation techniques. I think the animation is quite traditional but very imaginative. I am impressed with the contrast presented by the monochrome flashbacks as against the colorful courtroom scenes. I admired the interesting courtroom scenes especially since I learned that the dialogue used was derived from the actual courtroom transcripts. That is important to me because I know that the movie was faithful to facts. However, I think that the courtroom scenes would have been more meaningful if Ginsberg was present Bravo to James Franco’s portrayal of the young Ginsberg which fits him to a â€Å"T†. I consider his performance as outstanding and convincing. I appreciate Franco’s intonation and inflection since it was an accurate depiction of Ginsberg’s way of speaking. Kudos too to Jon Hamm and David Strathairn who played their roles perfectly as warring lawyers. In conclusion, I think that â€Å"Howl† was effective in bringing a radical literary piece to the movies and making it come alive. The performance of the actors contributed much to the boldness and worthiness of this film. The movie’s value is in its innovativeness in interspersing the courtroom drama with the elaborate animation and the rendition of the key moments of Ginsberg’s youth. I would gladly watch this movie again and recommend it to my

Ethics and Values in Social work (National policy to promote equality, Essay

Ethics and Values in Social work (National policy to promote equality, enclusion independance) - Essay Example This paper delves in illustrating how the free meals policy in school has brought equality, independence, and inclusion among the pupils in pre-primary schools and students in post primary schools (Cross 2009) It is noted that this policy has however not stopped those pupils that are able to carry packed meals. The report found that providing hot lunches is more nutritious than bringing in a packed lunch, of which only 1 per cent meet the nutritional standards that currently apply to school food. This development in the England schools improved performance – students in pilot areas were two months ahead of their peers elsewhere. Chris Hazzard retaliated the importance of the free school meals when he said, â€Å"Many children were going to school without a proper lunch due to families being unable to either supply a packed lunch or pay for school meals.† (Gordon 2013) Free school Meals are services that are provided to school going children living in England that meet c urrent criteria as set out by the government. Universal free school meals will help give every child the chance in life that they deserve, building a stronger economy and fairer society. â€Å"Free School Meals are a crucial entitlement for families living in poverty† (children society). ... This has been emphasized and stressed by Nick Clegg, former prime minister when he said that, "A healthy hot meal gives children the ability to concentrate and do well in the classroom" (Cross 2009) â€Å"Healthy eating can stabilize children’s energy, sharpen their minds, and even out their moods,† Nutrition for Children. I wish to retaliate from the above that School meals for the children from poor families help them develop good and healthy eating habits. This is because their parents may not be able to provide proper and healthy diets at home due to insufficient income. A balanced healthy eating habit is required for every child developmental needs in biological, physical and psychological advancements. However, it must be brought to attention that the FSM as earlier stated is only available under certain criterion, which is available only if the parent of the child is in receipt of income support, income based jobseekers allowance, income related employment, any f orm of revenue and support allowance under part V1 of the Immigration Act of 1999 (Gordon 2013) The guaranteed element of state pension credit, and Child Tax Credits were also key factors put into consideration by the Government of United Kingdom before they dispatched the free school meals to the pupils. However, it must be stressed and vividly put into consideration that families in receipt of the Working Tax element of Tax credits are excluded and do not qualify under this policy for the free school meals. †Giving people something for nothing is rarely unpopular, even when they are paying for it through their taxes.† as it was said by Ross Hawkins .Based on this evidence it could be suggested that the government made an

Firm's Operating Cycle vs Cash Conversion Cycle Essay

Firm's Operating Cycle vs Cash Conversion Cycle - Essay Example duration of the cycle by adding together each of these elements.† An greater operating cycle implies that the business will need more working capital and with high working capital will lead to high inventory-carrying cost, this is inclusive of interest payments, thus the firm has greater opportunity cost because it is incapable to invest its funds in high fund investments projects. It is thus advisable to have low operating cycles because there will be more completed cycles in a year, this will lead the business to make greater gross and net profits annually. This is the time (number of days) interval between the time a firm purchases an inventory until the inventory is sold and cash is received from the buyer (accounts recoverable). In other words it is the total time taken by a firm or a business to covert purchases into cash from consumers of the product. Cash conversion process gives imminent into the financial stability of a company, this is because it gives time period during which assets are committed to business processes and therefore are not available to invest to achieve even greater returns. The little the time period to collect cash from sales made in credit the better for the firm, this is because; for a shorter cycle gives the business quick asses to cash, the cash can be used by the business to purchase additional stock or may be used to pay debt to suppliers of the firm. It is therefore of great significance for a firm to have systems that facilitates shorter conversation cycles. This is achieved by speeding the customers to pay up their debts while the firm slows down payments to its suppliers. Cash conversation cycle can also be negatively used by large organization that have a huge market command share whereby they change the payment days to supplies anyhow. The model that a firm’s management adopts is very crucial for achievement of the firm’s final profits. When an organization allows short interval of its operating cycle it means

Small Scale Digital Device Forensics Lab Project Essay

Small Scale Digital Device Forensics Lab Project - Essay Example With all the talks about advancement in phone technology, security remains an integral part of daily requirements as far as the end user is concerned. The smart phone enables this function and allows backups on an external source. Most of the data on your BlackBerry smart phone, including email messages, organizer data, fonts, saved searches, and browser bookmarks, can be backed up and restored using the BlackBerry Desktop Software and your computer. That way you have total access to your files during a failure of the system or theft. To carry out the backup, you ensure your smart phone is connected to the computer using the USB Port. When this is done follower the simple steps: In the applications folder of the computer, select blackberry desktop software. Select the backup icon displayed at the top of the screen. Perform one of the following: 1. Select ‘all data’ to backup all the data on the smart phone 2. ... Finally, select the backup command button Note: With the encryption, you may be prompted to include a password. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Lotus Domino is capable of influencing the performance of the Lotus Domino Server. The leverage ability causes a minimal increase in server versatility as a result of its addition to an existing enterprise. The load associated with enabling mail users in a BlackBerry solution is centralized on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server, using the Domino application programming interface (API), maintains cached sessions with each mail server on which BlackBerry users reside. Because of the nature of the polling model, in which the BlackBerry Enterprise Server opens each user's mailbox to check for new messages at a regular interval, session caching avoids the overhead associated with creating and tearing down a session at each interval. From the Domino mail server's perspective, the activity generated by the BlackB erry Enterprise Server is similar to the activity of an active user or another Domino server accessing it for replication; it is just another Notes Remote Procedures Call (NRPC) session. At each polling interval, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server performs the following steps to check for new messages and, if required, deliver them to the BlackBerry handheld: 1. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server verifies that the mail database has changed since the last polling interval. Using a lightweight API call, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server quickly determines if further analysis of the mail file is required. 2. If the database has changed, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server uses another API call to enumerate all new or modified documents in

Nursing Research Class Notes Essay Example for Free

Nursing Research Class Notes Essay Nursing research is the process that underpins all the other things we have talked about. How was it determined that one particular way of carrying out nursing care was better than another way? How was it decided that a particular framework of understanding will explain certain behaviors better than another? When we discussed frameworks of understanding or conceptual models earlier in the course you learnt that there are various ways of viewing mental illness were discussed and the treatments were based upon eradicating or fixing the cause. This can be described as ways of knowing and ways of intervening. These beliefs came about as the result of research. That is asking, and trying to answer such questions as Why does this occur?, Does this treatment work better than that treatment?, How do we know?, Do more people improve if we do this rather than that?. Research is a way of gaining knowledge about concerns that psychiatric nurses have. What is the best way to help this client with this particular distress? Is there any evidence that suggests that this way of caring is better than that? Nursing research is relatively new in some ways but in other ways gathering-nursing knowledge has been going on since the early days of nursing. Women learned through watching and observing what treatments worked best. This is one particular kind of knowledge. Potter and Perry discuss this in Chapter 5 â€Å"Nurses Ways of Knowing†. Ethical, personal, esthetic knowledge was identified and scientific became one more way of knowing. In terms of nursing research we can return to Florence Nightingale who of course made the observation that there we re more deaths closer to the open sewer than there were for men whose beds were further away. This is an excellent example of drawing a conclusion by making observations thereby developing new knowledge. Research itself is a way of developing knowledge but there are other ways of developing knowledge. They are differentially respected and acknowledged but each is a way of `knowing. When you take your research course in fourth year you will learn more about the various kinds of research. For now I just want to highlight the major ways of gathering knowledge. This is Chapter 5 in Potter and Perry and there is also reference to research in Stuart and Laraia under Evidenced Based Practice p 76-83. The opening section of the chapter in Potter and Perry gives a little background on the emergence of nursing practice and theory. Nursing science came into its own: no longer a discipline applying the knowledge of other disciplines but a unique body of knowledge. A good activity for you to consider doing is to go onto the Library website and click on journal holdings, once there search psychiatric nursing. Journals that publish the results of nursing research and in particular psychiatric nursing are a very important part of your reading and learning how to read a research article is an important skill to develop. We will discuss this further momentarily, for now I want now to review ways of gaining knowledge. 1. Tradition certain beliefs are accepted sometimes without too much enquiry. Its weve always done it that way. This may be good but sometimes it is appropriate to question these traditions. 2. Expert Authority: Asking an expert or authority is a very common way of gathering information. All of us ask for information from time to time but we also have to be somewhat cautious about confusing information and knowledge. But certainly we do seek out knowledge and assistance from others. There are, of course, some limitations since not all authorities are always right and like tradition, we do not always challenge this knowledge. 3. Experience A lot of what we know we have learned ourselves. Children certainly do this all the time. Sometimes through unfortunate experience like putting their little hand on a hot stove: Learning is also part of knowledge acquisition. But we also solve problems from experience. Like, if I turn off the alarm and dont get out of bed in the morning, I am late for work. So we learn not to do that. The ability to generalize and recognize patterns and make predictions is one of the hallmarks of the human mind and has been a large part of how our ancestors developed knowledge. It is always rains every time there are black clouds, then the next time you see black clouds, rain is predicted.. But there are limitations, first each persons experience may be too limited to generalize all the time. Maybe black clouds predicting rain only occurs in your part of the world for some environmental reason. Secondly your personal experiences may be colored by biases. 4. Investigating Ideas: Where would we be if no one pursued their ideas for instance, testing molds for their antibiotic value That the earth is not flat but round 5. Reasoning or Problem Solving Thinking through problems and finding solutions. There are two intellectual methods used in reasoning. Inductive reasoning is the process of drawing conclusions and generalizations from specific observation. For example a nurse may observe anxious behavior in children who are removed from their parents and conclude that separation is a stressful event.. Deductive reasoning. This is the process of developing specific predictions from general principles. For example, if you assume that separation anxiety occurs in children removed from their parents then you may predict that children, in your hospital will show signs of anxiety. So we have gone from a general assumption to a specific situation. So, induction is to make or develop a theory from actual observation or grounded in observation. Deduction is to have a hypothesis or a theory and then test it. These terms will become important when you are considering qualitative and quantitative research. Both of these reasoning systems are important for you to think about. They are both useful. But errors can also occur or faulty reasoning. However it may lead to the development of questions 6. The scientific method, which is considered the most objective and accurate way of developing knowledge. However, it, too, can certainly be questioned as you may discover but it is also considered one of the primary ways of developing knowledge. Beginning on p. 85 of Potter and Perry they describe the characteristics of research with a number of definitions you need to study. The sooner you grasp these concepts the better off you will be in future courses. To understand the research process and for your future endeavors I like to begin with the components of a research article in a journal. I have briefly described these below: Title: A succinct description of key elements of the study Running head: Usually a two to three word description of the key elements of the study, which runs at the top of each page. Abstract: A succinct paragraph describing key features of the study, the population studied, the variables manipulated; the findings and discussion point. Usually of 150 words or so. Literature Review: A summary of key research findings from other studies, which lead into your study. If you are studying in a new emerging field this may be short; if in a well established area it may be lengthy or, it might focus on one key area for instance of child development (i.e. there are numerous areas of child development-your study may be focused on cognitive development so it is not required to review all areas of child development within the literature review). The review should provide the reader with an understanding of the area, without missing key studies and without losing the audience with obscurely related information. The literature review should cover research related to your key variables of interest and should draw the reader into your hypotheses. Hypothesis: what you think the relationship between variables is. Depending on the level of research one might have an exploratory hypothesis or you may have predictive hypotheses suggesting the results are going to be in the direction of (one way or the other). This might be a good time to review any of the terms used thus far in Potter and Perry and especially look at table 6-2 which describes levels of research. It is difficult to keep a complex topic simple. Method: The method contains subsections. It usually begins with a description of the sample (who did you interview, who comprised your sample (children, parents, university students etc). One would also find how the sample was selected (was it randomized, was it a captured audience, was it every blonde haired blue eyed left handed boy) Detail is expected. The method section will also describe the research design and procedures. Both are essential for someone else who might say I don’t believe these results. I want to try and replicate the study. Which has been done with interesting results in many areas. Research designs are very complex and influence the type of statistical analysis that can be done. I refer you back to table 6-2 for a beginning understanding of this. Test in struments and their reliability and validity are also expected in the methodology section. Identification of independent and dependent variables would also be described here. The independent variable is that variable you are manipulating i.e. temperature of the room; the dependent variable are the observations you are making i.e. number of complaints of room temperature in a given interval of time. Results: This section will go through sample characteristics, main findings described pictorially sometimes in graphs or may be tables. Results are described matter of factly with little interpretation. Limitations of the study: these become important to the conclusions one can draw. For example if I were studying teen pregnancy and the needs of young mothers and my group ended up being older teens would this be representative of younger teens. Conclusions: This is where results can be interpreted and tied back to the literature review. Were findings supportive to the hypothesis or not and if not what might explain the findings. Implications for nursing practice: it would be found in nursing research studies, not often in other research. The application of nurs ing research is an important area for future discussion. As psychiatric nurses we must however be able to critique research. Sometimes it is conducted under ideal conditions where there is control over a number of variables and there may be difficulty applying it in the real world. That is perhaps why observations of a patients behavior may be better to understand their experience in the real world. Research is the use of a series of steps to gather objective knowledge and nursing research of course is the study of phenomenon of interest to nurses, which is often the patients response to illness and nursing interventions. The second point there is control but we have to understand what scientific research is attempting to state. It is the relationships between 2 variables. That is, if I do one thing will it influence another? So just to take a simple nursing example, we might theorize or predict that a patient who lies on their back for long periods will develop pressure sores. So if the patient is turned frequently and does not develop pressure sores we might conclude that turning is related to unbroken skin. Say, however, at the same time as turning the patients skin is gently massaged; now we cant tell if it is the turning or the massage that resulted in the unbroken and healthy skin. So this is what is meant by control of external factors. Sometimes you may hear this referred to as level of control over the variables of interest. If you are using the scientific method then you probably have a hypothesis you want to test and you would set up your experiment to either prove or disprove. This would be quantitative research. But if you are observing a phenomenon and want to study it in its natural state then you are more likely doing qualitative research. Qualitative research is particularly well suited to psychiatric nursing because it. involves gathering information about people’s experiences which we could use an instrument to assess which would give us a quantitative measure i.e., how traumatized were you 0-10. Asking a person to tell their story gives us significantly more information. Methods can be combined. The ethnographic qualitative research method tends to look at humans in their natural environment. This research always takes place in the field often over a long time. Collection and analysis of data takes place concurrently, as insights are gained new questions may emerge. Often the opinions of the people under study are sought which is very different from quantitative research where opinions and feelings are not considered valid. You will become m ore proficient at reading, understanding and critiquing research but there is no reason why you should not be locating and reading nursing research journals now. Research Principles and terms The practice of Psychiatric Nursing is guided by nursing knowledge. As a profession nursing has developed a unique body of knowledge, which guides the practice of nursing. There is a number of ways in which knowledge is developed and disseminated. They are listed in Potter Perry. Question: State 6 ways of acquiring knowledge. Polit and Hungler (1997) use these terms to describe the scientific research method: Disciplined Research. Research conducted within a disciplined format is the most sophisticated method of acquiring knowledge that humans have developed. Nursing research combines aspects of logical reasoning with other features to create systems of problem solving that, although fallible, tend to be more reliable than tradition, authority, personal experience, intuition, or inductive or deductive reasoning alone. (P.11) The scientific method does have its drawbacks however, it is conducted under ideal conditions and sometimes there may be difficulties in applying it to the real world. There are however two main categories of research Quantitative and Qualitative. Quantitative research follows the scientific model and has a series of clearly defined steps. Quantitative research Process Identify an issue Gather information? State the hypothesis? Review the literature? Design the study? Gather the data? Evaluate the findings Qualitative Research Qualitative research differs from quantitative in that it is a less linear process. It more often involves gathering information about individuals by observing them in their natural environment or through interviews. This type of research takes place in the field rather than the laboratory. The information is rich and varied and subject to the interpretation of the researcher. This is one of its limitations. Nurse researchers can be involved in either quantitative or qualitative research, but most importantly, nursing research should be able to be applied to psychiatric nursing practice. Here is a list of some research projects of psychiatric nurses: Examples of research studies conducted by nurses in Psychiatric Nursing and Mental Health topics: Client expectation and perception of the nurse’s role in relationship to client satisfaction. A comparative study of widows’ and widowers’ perceived social support during the first year of bereavement. The effects of cognitive-behavioral nursing intervention for depressed patients and their families. Factors affecting staff nurses’ use of limit setting with disruptive patients. Nurses’ attitudes toward the suicidal patient. Nursing interventions with long-term patients in regard to their physical appearance: An evaluation study. The nurse’s therapeutic use of touch as related to withdrawn patients. Observable signs of anxiety or distress during psychiatric interviews conducted by nurses. Patient and situational factors that affect nursing students’ like or dislike of caring for patients A study of alcoholic patients’ perception of the role of the nurse. A study of the confidence level of nurses in caring for patients with depression. A study of psychiatric patients’ knowledge about their prescribed medications. Question: What do you think would be a good research topic for psychiatric nurses? Some terms to Learn in Relation to Research

Challenges In Web Information Retrieval Computer Science Essay

Challenges In Web Information Retrieval Computer Science Essay An overview of Information Retrieval is presented in this chapter. This defines the need of information retrieval. This discusses how the IR problem can be handled. It discusses about the model for efficient and intelligent retrieval. It briefly defines the major issues in information retrieval. It also discusses about the necessity of retrieval and the basis of the study for the motivation of the selection of search topic for dissertation requirements of information retrieval and how it can be used in the web searching. This discusses the user involvement in the retrieval model. This chapter also defines the numbers of approaches are proposed for the user, system and data for the efficient and intelligent retrieval. The different models are focuses on the organization and storing of the data/documents. This chapter defines the need of the retrieval system and also the proposed study in the direction of efficient and intelligent retrieval. The observations are properly explored with the particular emphasis on the necessities of the information retrieval. It is very surprising in a way the information is available in the world today. This leads to the explosion of information soon. The explosion is due to the availability of data and documents online. At the same time while searching and accessing a data/document is a problem. The digitalization is a basis where the ordinary man is involve in storing a huge amount of electronic data. An electronic data can be easily transmitted via email and easily disseminated on the web. The search can be applied on the stored text to require the relevant information on any topic and reuse it. The information explosion means there is too much relevant information readily available to meet the cognitive capacity, for that we will be finding a difficulty in defining the document relevant. Now it becomes necessary for information retrieval (IR) systems to employ intelligent techniques to provide effective access to such a huge amount of available information. Particularly with the emergence of the Worl d Wide Web, users have an access to such huge amount of documents. More and more information services such as new services; library and electronic mail etc are easily available. Things are becoming online in order to provide with a prompt access to the users. The, more textual information is available on web, due to increasing size of information sources has made it difficult for the people to find relevant textual documents. The information that reaches to the user does not match with his/her interest and merely end up with the overloading him/her. The users have to select manually the relevant information from the huge bundle of information. This makes an urge demand for more effective retrieval systems to perform the efficient and intelligent retrieval of data/documents. This research effort will capture the semantics and also integrate it in IR systems. This study will explore this idea by considering in two directions. Firstly, the efficiency of search results, that can be focu sed on the statistical methods. Secondly, the need to improve upon the relevance (in semantic sense and relevant technique) has to be satisfied. This will motivate you in the direction of attempt to improve upon the document storing and query representation. Also natural language processing (NLP) technique can help to segregate/classifies the data for the best use. A relevancy technique is used not only for the efficiency of retrieval but also judge intelligently for capturing the semantics in representation of matching and representation process. The research mainly in this area has to be focus broadly in two directions. Firstly, expanding the query entered in the better representation as per used needs and secondly, determining the relevant in the document urge to representation for improved the results. If the information of any document is lost then that can be recovered by using relevance assessment technique. The relevance cannot be judge only on the on the basis of term occurrence but it depends on the existing retrieval system lie on basic retrieval models such as boolean, standard vector and probabilistic that treat both documents and queries as a set of unrelated terms. These classical models have the advantage of being simple, scalable and computationally feasible, but they do not offer accurate and complete representation. Due to this ignorance in the present classical model, the role of semantic and relative information about the document in the retrieval process is important. It is difficult to identify useful do cuments simply on the basis of words used by the author of the document, as words may mean differently in different context, as pointed out in [Zrehen S, 2000]. It is impossible to retrieve all documents pertaining to a particular subject, because such documents do not share a common set of keywords and because current search engines may or may not address semantics or context. The work focuses mainly on the semantic techniques. However, building a complete semantic understanding of the text requires human-like processing of text and is beyond the scope of this work. The objective of this work is to classify documents as relevant and non-relevant with respect to a standing query with more accuracy and less overhead. A detailed and accurate semantic interpretation is not needed for this classification [Evans David A. Zhai C.,1996]. This fact distinguishes IR application from other NLP applications. The semantic knowledge needed to define the relevance of the document and that can be easily extracted from the text with respect to the author or user. This can be implemented by approach to the overlaying facility, which helps in dealing with the relationships issue, which is one of the most important factors in the design of information retrieval systems. These techniques allow the search and retrieval systems to involve in the improve document and/or query representation. It involves into the address document semantics .It not only improved the ranking of retrieved documents, further adapt queries based on relevance feedback and improve retrieval performance. Finally, producing the relationship between the fact that so much information is being produced and at such a rate that no single technique can offer remedy to all problems, we propose hybrid approach to information retrieval and also evaluate one such model. This will explore to both directions for the efficiency and intelligent retrieval. The realization of inadequacy of the current approaches of information retrieval, work focuses on investigating intelligent techniques t hat will help in retrieving information effectively. IR enables the programs for representation, comparison, and interaction methods to implement in the system result in effective performance. The techniques that improve these aspects i.e., the representation, comparison, or interaction, will lead to intelligent retrieval. The use of overlaying facility will be capturing the relationships between the different layers of data. This will cultivate to a hybrid model by applying the efficient and intelligent technique using hierarchical and semantics approach. To improve the efficacy of an IR system, we need a better understanding of the issues involved in information retrieval and problems associated with existing traditional information retrieval systems. The algorithm/application of these techniques can provide significant benefit. This exactly defines the scope of the work. In the rest of the chapter, we first discuss the issues involved and the problems associated with current approaches to information retrieval. And the motivation behind the retrieval is discussed. The proposed work for the information retrieval is studied thoroughly. This overview also serves as a summary of the core technical contributions of this work. It briefly reviews some of the previous research aiming at necessity of the work. Lastly, it describes the organization of the dissertation 1.2. Major issues in information retrieval There are a number of issues that are involved in the design and evaluation of IR systems some of them are discussed. The first important issue to address is to choose a representation of the document. Most of the human knowledge is coded in natural language. However, it is difficult to use natural language as knowledge representation language for computer systems. The current retrieval models are based on either keywords for search or author. This keyword representation creates problem during retrieval due to polysemy, homonymy and synonymy. Polysemy involves the phenomenon of a lexeme with multiple meaning. Keyword matching may not always include word sense matching [Justin Picard Jacques Savoy ,2000]. Homonymy is an ambiguity in which words that appear the same have unrelated meanings. Ambiguity makes it difficult for a computer to automatically determine the conceptual content of documents. Synonymy creates problem when a document is indexed with one term and the query contains a different term, and the two terms share a common meaning. The previous studies indicate that human beings tend to use different expressions to convey the same meaning [Blair D., Maron M., 1990]. The recent work in developing extensive lexicon is an attempt to improve the situation [Mittendorf E. ed. Al, 2000]. Traditional retrieval models ignore semantic and contextual information in the retrieval process [Judith P. Dick, 1992], [Ounis I. Huibers T,W.C. 1997]. This information is lost in the extraction of keywords from the text and can not be recovered by the retrieval algorithms. The improving IR demands an improved representation of text, which is very important. The related issue can look forward in characterization of queries by users. This is inappropriate in this case because of v agueness and inaccuracy of the users queries, say for instance, their lack of knowledge of the subject or the inherent vagueness of the natural language itself. The users may fail to include relevant terms in the query or may include irrelevant terms. Inappropriate or inaccurate query leads to poor retrieval performance. The problem of ill-specified query can be dealt with by modifying or expanding queries. An effective technique based on users interaction is the relevance feedback. This will Improve the representation of documents and/or queries is thus central to improving IR. In order to satisfy users request an IR system matches document representation with the query representation. How to match the representation of a query with that of the document is another issue. A number of similarity measures have been proposed to quantify the similarity between a query and the document to produce a ranked list of results. The selection of the appropriate similarity measure is a very cruc ial issue in the IR system design. The evaluation of the performance of IR systems is also one of the major issues in IR. There are many aspects of evaluation; most important being the effectiveness of an IR system. Recall and precision are the most widely used measures of effectiveness in IR community. As improving effectiveness in IR is the underlying theme for evaluating any technique and is one of the core issues in this work. The evaluation of the performance of IR systems relies on the notion of relevance. The relevance is subjective in nature [Saracevic T., 1991]. Only the user can tell the true relevance. This cannot be measure as it is based on user perception. However, it is not possible to measure this true relevance. One may define the degree of relevance. The relevance has been considered as a binary concept, whereas it is a continuous function (a document may be exactly what the user wants or it may be closely related). The current evaluation techniques do not support this continuity. The number of relevance frameworks has been proposed in [Saracevic T., 1996]. This includes the system, communication, psychological and situational frameworks. The most inclusive is the situational framework, which is based on the cognitive view of the information seeking process and considers the importance of situation, context, multi-dimensionality and time. A survey of relevance studies can be found in [Mizzaro S. ,1997]. Most of the evaluations of IR systems so far have been done on document test collections with known relevance judgments. The large size of document collections also complicates text retrieval. Further, users may have varying in need of documents. Some users require answers of limited scope, while others require documents having wide scope. These different needs can require that different and specialized retrieval methods be employed. The work attempts to handle some of these problems by proposing techniques. To improve representation of docume nts and queries and by incorporating new similarity measures. Information retrieval models based on these representations and similarity measures have been proposed and evaluated in this work. The another factor that decreases search engine usefulness is the dynamic nature of the Web, resulting in many dead links and out of date pages that have changed since indexed. But even accepting these factors, finding relevant information using Web search engines often fails. The document retrieval systems typically present search results in a ranked list, ordered by their estimated relevance to the query. The relevancy is estimated based on the similarity between the text of a document and the query. Such ranking schemes work well when users can formulate a well-defined query for their searches. However, users of Web search engines often formulate very short queries (70% are single word queries [Motro, 98]) that often retrieve large numbers of documents. Based on such a condensed representat ion of the users search interests, it is impossible for the search engine to identify the specific documents that are of interest to the users. Moreover, many webmasters now actively work to influence rankings. These problems are intensify when the users are unfamiliar with the topic they are querying about, when they are novices at performing searches, or when the search engines database contains a large number of documents. All these conditions commonly exist for Web search engine users. Therefore the vast majority of the retrieved documents are often of no interest to the user; such searches are termed low precision searches. The low precision of the Web search engines coupled with the ranked list presentation force users to examine through a large number of documents and make it hard for them to find the information they are looking for. As low precision Web searches are inevitable, tools must be provided to help users cope with (and make use of) these large document sets. Such tools should include means to easily browse through large sets of retrieved documents. 1.3 Necessity of present work The motivation for this research is to make search engine results easy to browse. The document classification algorithms attempt to group similar documents together. The Classification / Grouping the results of Web search engines can provide a powerful browsing tool. The automatic grouping of similar documents (document groups) a feasible method of presenting the results of Web search engines. 1.3.1 Classification: The document groups have initially been investigated in Information Retrieval mainly as a means of improving the performance of search engines by pre-clustering the entire corpus [Jardine and van Rijsbergen, 71]. The cluster hypothesis [van Rijsbergen, 79] stated that similar documents will tend to be relevant to the same queries, thus the automatic detection of clusters of similar documents can improve recall by effectively broadening a search request. However we are investigating classification as a means of browsing large retrieved document sets. We therefore need to slightly modify the group classification which suit to the domain. This can be attempted for user-class hypothesis is that users have a mental model of the topics and subtopics of the documents present in the result set; similar documents will tend to belong to the same category in the users model. Thus the automatic detection of clusters of similar documents can help the user in browsing the res ult set. The classification and the groups of the documents with respect to the author can help users in three ways: (1) it can allow them to find the information they are looking for more easily, (2) it can help them to realize faster that a query is poorly formulated (e.g., too general) and to reformulate it, and (3) it can reduces the fraction of the queries on which the user gives up before reaching the desired information. For example, if a user wishes to find salsa recipes on the Web, and performs a search using the query apple, only 10% of the returned documents will be related to apple recipes (the rest will relate to apple music, apple products that can be bought on the web and a software product called apple; many documents will have no apparent connection to apple at all). If we were to cluster the results, the user could find the group relating to apple recipes and thus save valuable browsing time. We have identified some key requirements for document clustering of searc h engine results. The support vector machine is used to implement such types of cluster techniques: 1) Coherent Clusters is the clustering algorithm should group similar documents together. 2) Efficiently browsable that the user needs to determine at a glance whether the contents of a cluster are of interest. Therefore, the system has to provide concise and accurate cluster descriptions. 3) Speed of the system should not introduce a substantial delay before displaying the results. 4) In preliminary experimentation carried out at the beginning of this study we found Web documents, and especially search engine snippets, to be poor candidates for classification because they are short and often poorly formatted. This led us to consider the use of phrases in the classification of search engine results, as they contain more information than simple words (information regarding proximity and order of words). The phrases have the equally important advantage of having a higher descriptive pow er (compared to single words). This is very important when attempting to describe the contents of a group to the user in a concise manner. The groups can be making with the keyword in respect to the subject and sub-subject or it can be in respect to the author or user. 1.3.2 Relevancy in documents: With respect to the clustering of the documents or users, they important study that is made for the retrieval is as follows. The search engines are extremely important to help users to find relevant retrieval of information on the World Wide Web. In order to give the best according to the needs of users, a search engine must find and filter the most relevant information matching a users query, and then present that information in a manner that makes the information most readily presentable to the user. The system is used to apply the technique and also work in between the user and the document to efficient retrieval the relevant document. Moreover, the task of information retrieval and presentation must be done in a scalable fashion to serve the hundreds of millions of user queries that are issued every day to a popular web search engines (Tomlin, 2003). In addressing the problem of Information Retrieval (IR) on the web, there are a number of challenges researchers are involved. Some of these challenges are dealt with and identified additional problems that may motivate future work in the IR research community. It also describes some work in these areas that has been conducted at various search engines. It begins by briefly outlining some of the issues or factors that arise in web information retrieval. The people/User relates to the system directly for the Information retrieval as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1.1 IR System Components. They are easy to compare fields with well-defined semantics to queries in order to find matches. For example the Records are easy to find-for example, bank database query. The semantics of the keywords also plays an important role, which is, send through the interface. System includes the interface of search engine servers, the databases and the indexing mechanism, which include the stemming techniques. The User defines the search strategy and also gives the requirement for searching .The documents available in www apply subject indexing, ranking and clustering (Herbach, 2001).The relevant matches are easily found. There are three major components such as data, user and system. These three components are interlinked with each other with two-way relationship. The system is a computer system and the software application loaded. The interfaces of search engine servers, the databases and the indexing mechanism, which include the stemming techniques etc, are associated in the system and i ts linked components. Similarly, user defines the search strategy (Herbach, 2001) and also gives the requirement for searching .The documents available in www apply subject indexing, ranking and clustering (Kleinberg,1999). The relevant matches easily found by comparison with field values of records. The involvement of relevance feedback technique can also be incorporated for efficient searching. And the data are a simple as documents in different formats use database, it terms of maintenance and retrieval of records but for the unstructured documents, it is difficult where we use text. Search engine developments are based primarily on the indexing range, which is assisted by www users in performing information retrieval task. The evaluation of efficient and intelligent studies have considered and an impact can be seen on system features (Kunchukuttan,2006), in particular those with which the user interacts for search assistance. The information retrieval system evaluation the compl ex environment, which measures of the utility and the usability of the search results of the system are required from a user perspective layout. The proposed model for a user-centered evaluation is based on a conceptual framework in which user-satisfaction is characterized on the variable dependent on system features and system functions. It will be simple for the database it terms of maintenance and retrieval of records but for the unstructured documents it is difficult where we use text. The same criteria for searching will give better matches and also better results. The different dimensions of IR have become vast because of different media, different types of search applications, and different tasks, which is not only a text, but also a web search as a central. The IR approaches to search and evaluation are appropriate in all media is an emerging issues of IR. The information retrieval is involved in the following tasks and sub tasks: 1) Ad-hoc search involve with the process where it generalizes the criteria and searches for all the records, which finds all the relevant documents for an arbitrary text query; 2) Filtering is an important process where the users identify the relevant user profiles for a new document. The user profile is maintained where the user can be identified with a profile and accordingly the relevant documents are categorized and displayed; 3) Classification is involved with respect to the identification and lies in the relevant list of the cl assification. This works in identifying the relevant labels for documents; 4) Question Answering Technique involves for the better judgment of the classification with the relevant questions automatically frames to generate the focus of the individuals. The tasks are described in the Figure 2. Figure 1.2: Proposed Model of Search Engine. The field of IR deals with the relevance, evaluation and interacts with the user to provide them according to their needs/query. IR involves in the effective ranking and testing. Also it measures of the data available for the retrieval. The relevant document contains the information that a person was looking for when they submitted a query to the search engine. There are many factors influence a persons to take the decision about the relevancy that may be task, context, novelty, and style. The topical relevance (same topic) and user relevance (everything else) are the dimensions, which help in the IR modeling. The retrieval models define a view of relevance. The user provides information that the system can use to modify its next search or next display. The relevance feedback is as to how much system understands the user in terms of what is the need, and also to know about the concept and terms related to the information needs. The retrieval uses the different techniques such as the web pages contains links to other pages and by analyzing this web graph structure it is possible to determine a more global notion of page quality. The remarkable successes in this area include the Page Rank algorithm (Tomlin, 2003), which globally analyzes the entire web graph and provided the original basis for ranking in the various search engines, and Kleinbergs hyperlink algorithm (Herbach, 2001, Kleinberg,1999), which analyzes a local neighborhood of the web graph containing an initial set of web pages matching the users query. Since that time, several other linked-based methods for ranking web pages have been proposed including variants of both PageRank and HITS (Kleinberg, 1999, Joachims, 2003), and this remains an active research area in which there is still much fertile research ground to be explored. This may refer to the recent work on Hub and researchers from where it identifies in the form of equilibrium for WWW sources on a common theme/topic in which we explicitly build into the model by taking care of the diversity of roles between the different types of pages (Herbach,2001) .Some pages are the prominent sources of primary data/content and are considered to be the authorities on the topic; other pages, equally essential to the structure, accumulate high-quality guides and resource lists that act as focused hubs, directing users to suggested authorities. The nature of the linkage in this framework is highly asymmetric. Hubs link heavily to authorities, and they may have very few incoming links linked to them, and the authorities are not link to other authorities. This is completely a suggested model (Herbach,2001), is completely natural; relatively anonymous individuals are creating many good hubs on the Web. A formal type of equilibrium consistent model can be defined only by assigning the weights to the two numbers called as a hub weight and an authority weight .The weights to each page are assigned in such a way that a pages authority weight is proportional to the sum of the hub weights of pages that link to it to maintain the balance and a pages hub weight is proportional to the sum of the authority weights of pages that it links to. The adversarial Classification (Sahami et al.,1998) may be dealing with Spam on the Web. One particularly interesting problem in web IR arises from the attempt by some commercial interests to excessively heighten the ranking of their web pages by engaging in various forms of spamming (Joachims, 2003). The SPAM methods can be effective against traditional IR ranking schemes that do not make use of link structure, but have more limited utility in the context of global link analysis. Realizing this, spammers now also utilize link spam where they will create large numbers of web pages that contain links to other pages whose rankings they wish to rise. The interesting technique applied will continually to the automatic filters. The spam filtering in email is very popular. This technique with concurrently involved the applying the indexes the documents. The current study will propose a hybrid semantic model where is a combination algorithm and the application used for the efficient and intelligent retrieval model. This will involve the different practices for the retrieval the system will be playing an important role. Further the tri-sectional considering system, document and user are identified by applying the Analytical Hierarchal process (AHP) model. This study will help to you carry out the algorithm, application and the models associated with them with respect to these components. 1.5. Organization of the thesis The thesis is organized into seven chapters including the present chapter which introduced IR problem, presented a brief review of the work done in the field and provided an overview of our work. An outline of the remaining chapters follows. The intelligent and efficient Information Retrieval needs to explain the data organization, the user prospects and also the user interface system study and its importance. The different tests for the present theoretical investigations are reported in the thesis, have been organized as follows: The understanding of the theoretical analysis of proposed methods to explain the various intelligent and efficient structural algorithm and application based approach; the techniques have been discussed in further consecutive chapters. Also, it is adequate to take a real scenario that the interaction mechanism between the layers of user and data are important to define the model with their properties. Briefly the remarkable success achieved from the present models has been given below. The understanding of basic parameters for efficient and intelligent retrieval needs the formulation of an effective and intelligent retrieval and this is outlined in Chapter II. To make information retrieval study successful, there is the need to prioritize their efforts in terms of user, system and data centric aspects, because of the range interactions they are effective up to the second-hierarchy. The forces occur between the layer itself and also by joining to the upper/lower layer within the system. A straightforward extension is possible since; these systems are open-ended and allow data and user to join them with internal requirements and for a complete collection of document/data etc. The effective parameters as relevancy, ranking and layout have been incorporated in the implementation of analytical hierarchical process (AHP) for analysis. In order to make the proposed work more revealing, the applicability of these parameters has been explored for the further focus on the proposed model to describe the interaction and interrelation between the data and user as presented in Chapter II. The research study provides a theoretical background of IR techniques, which helps in designing the retrieval model. The detailed study will be defined on the basic concept in establishing the relationship between the system and data primarily. There are different techniques that are based on this relationship/link to define the efficient data retrieval, which has been investigated, and results presented in Chapter III. The later part of this chapter explores Intelligent Data processing and analysis with respect to the intelligent data retrieval by using different techniques used for designing the retrieval model. The detailed study will define the basic concept in establishing the relationship between the system, user and data primarily. There are different techniques that are based on this relationship/link to define the intelligent data retrieval. This is very much dependent on the semantics of the individual layer as per user interest or taste. The links between the two objects is to change the strength of the object. The objects are powerful, based on incoming and outgoing link i.e. the popularity of the object. Based on strength, this object can be considered as highest ranked object and also relevant one. Effective interrelation is successful in explaining popularity of object with consistent behavior. Semantics annotation framework helps in intelligent retrieval by using natural semantics. The Vector Space Model and Latent Semantic Indexing techniques are theoretically analyzed in Chapter IV. The research used an effective inte