It’s Time to Eliminate Online Pornographic Magazines :: Argumentative Persuasive Argument Essays

It’s Time to Eliminate Online Pornographic Magazines Dating back to the 1700's, magazines have taken on many forms in which we know and read today. Magazines started to develop in the early 1700's at the same time as newspapers. Few magazines of that time were popular or long-lived. They covered weekly events, politics, and art. During that time magazines were read by the educated elite, and in the 1800's magazines were published for the general public and general interest. Over the years, magazines have evolved to what they are today. Today, there are many forms and kinds of magazines such as digests, newsmagazines, and pictorial magazines. Our world today is predominately run by the Internet and the "Information Superhighway" as we have come to know it. Recent developments suggest that new media may actually be the salvation of old media such as print versions of magazines, books, and newspapers. Online newspapers, webzines, and e-books could preserve and extend the print culture as well as make way for technological advancements. Magazines have developed a strong online presence by reproducing the print version, thus creating both analog and digital form of the same issue. The Internet is a global "network of networks." It is not governed by any entity, thus leave no limits or checks on the kind of information that is maintained by and accessible to Internet users. The Internet also provides us with a wide array of information in all areas. People use the Internet for educational purposes as well as entertainment. When searching the Internet using a search engine, you can access any website imaginable that deals with your topic or has some relevance to what you are searching for. The Internet is a learning tool that has been implemented into all learning institutions as well as homes. Children everyday are accessing sites on the Internet. Many people sit and "surf" the Internet for hours on end each day. Child Pornography and children accessing pornography over the Internet is a big problem facing America today and online magazines enhance this problem. It is extremely important that students today learn how to use the Internet and explore the many educational opportunities it provides. The Internet is turning both adults and children into innocent consumers of pornography. Porn sites routinely use keywords so that safe searches result in X-rated hits. Visitors of non-sexual sites are redirected to porn addresses or have explicit "pop-ups" that are placed on their screens.

Top 10 Risks of Offshore Outsourcing

Top 10 Risks of Offshore Outsourcing Summary:  Offshore outsourcing is growing 20%-25% per annum, with little evidence of slowing. Indeed, while most enterprises experience initial resistance, most technical issues are readily resolved and geopolitical risk is deemed insignificant after careful evaluation. By Dean Davison | December 9, 2003 — 00:00 GMT (16:00 PST) Offshore outsourcing is growing 20%-25% per annum, with little evidence of slowing. Indeed, while most enterprises experience initial resistance, most technical issues are readily resolved and geopolitical risk is deemed insignificant after careful evaluation.Even the current political fervor about jobs being moved offshore via outsourcing is not impacting the demand or strategy of IT organizations. Offshore outsourcing will continue to grow as a â€Å"labor arbitrage† model until 2008/09. META Trend: During 2004/05, outsourcing will divide into commodity and transformational services. Infrastructure service s will mirror grid-computing structures and develop consumption-based pricing (a. k. a. , â€Å"utility services†). Through 2006/07, transformational services (e. g. application development maintenance and business process outsourcing) will segment along horizontal (function commonality) and vertical (specialized) business process/services outsourcing functions. Although vendors will attempt to bundle infrastructure with â€Å"value† services, clients will demand â€Å"line item† pricing by 2008/09. Through 2004/05, IT organizations will outsource discrete projects/functions offshore (e. g. , from application development projects to specific call center support). Growth will continue at 20%+.Offshore strategies by domestic vendors will shift business from large, integrated outsourcing contracts, but most IT organizations will still develop strategies that focus on pure-play offshore vendors. The top 10 risks of offshore outsourcing are as follows. 1. Cost-Reduct ion Expectations The biggest risk with offshore outsourcing has nothing to do with outsourcing – it involves the expectations the internal organization has about how much the savings from offshore will be. Unfortunately, many executives assume that labor arbitrage will yield savings comparable to person-to-person comparison (e. . , a full-time equivalent in India will cost 40% less) without regard for the hidden costs and differences in operating models. In reality, most IT organizations save 15%-25% during the first year; by the third year, cost savings often reach 35%-40% as companies â€Å"go up the learning curve† for offshore outsourcing and modify operations to align to an offshore model. 2. Data Security/Protection IT organizations evaluating any kind of outsourcing question whether vendors have sufficiently robust security practices and if vendors can meet the security requirements they have internally.While most IT organizations find offshore vendor security p ractices impressive (often exceeding internal practices), the risk of security breaks or intellectual property protection is inherently raised when working in international business. Privacy concerns must be completely addressed. Although these issues rarely pose major impediments to outsourcing, the requirements must be documented and the methods and integration with vendors defined. 3. Process Discipline (CMM) The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) becomes an important measure of a company’s readiness to adopt an offshore model.Offshore vendors require a standardized and repeatable model, which is why CMM Level 5 is a common characteristic. META Group observes that approximately 70% of IT organizations are at CMM Level 1 – creating a gap that is compensated for by additional vendor resources on-site (see  Figure 1). Companies lacking internal process model maturity will undermine potential cost savings. 4. Loss of Business Knowledge Most IT organizations have business knowledge that resides within the developers of applications. In some cases, this expertise may be a proprietary or competitive advantage.Companies must carefully assess business knowledge and determine if moving it either outside the company or to an offshore location will compromise company practices. 5. Vendor Failure to Deliver A common oversight for IT organizations is a contingency plan – what happens if the vendor, all best intentions and contracts aside, simply fails to deliver. Although such failures are exceptions, they do occur, even with the superb quality methodologies of offshore vendors. When considering outsourcing, IT organizations should assess the implications of vendor failure (i. . , does failure have significant business performance implications? ). High risk or exposure might deter the organization from outsourcing, it might shift the outsourcing strategy (e. g. , from a single vendor to multiple vendors), or it might drive the company toward outsourci ng (if the vendor has specific skills to reduce risks). The results of risk analysis vary between companies; it is the process of risk analysis that is paramount. 6. Scope Creep There is no such thing as a fixed-price contract.All outsourcing contracts contain baselines and assumptions. If the actual work varies from estimates, the client will pay the difference. This simple fact has become a major obstacle for IT organizations that are surprised that the price was not â€Å"fixed† or that the vendor expects to be paid for incremental scope changes. Most projects change by 10%-15% during the development cycle. 7. Government Oversight/Regulation Utilities, financial services institutions, and healthcare organizations, among others, face various degrees of government oversight.These IT organizations must ensure that the offshore vendor is sensitive to industry-specific requirements and the vendor’s ability to: 1) comply with government regulations; and 2) provide suffici ent â€Å"transparency† showing that it does comply and is thus accountable during audits. The issue of transparency is becoming more significant as requirements such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act place greater burdens of accountability on all American corporations. 8. Culture A representative example: although English is one official language in India, pronunciation and accents can vary tremendously.Many vendors put call center employees through accent training. In addition, cultural differences include religions, modes of dress, social activities, and even the way a question is answered. Most leading vendors have cultural education programs, but executives should not assume that cultural alignment will be insignificant or trivial. 9. Turnover of Key Personnel Rapid growth among outsourcing vendors has created a dynamic labor market, especially in Bangalore, India. Key personnel are usually in demand for new, high-profile projects, or even at risk of bein g recruited by other offshore vendors.While offshore vendors will often quote overall turnover statistics that appear relatively low, the more important statistic to manage is the turnover of key personnel on an account. Common turnover levels are in the 15%-20% range, and creating contractual terms around those levels is a reasonable request. Indeed, META Group has seen recent contracts that place a â€Å"liability† on the vendor for any personnel that must be replaced. The impact of high turnover has an indirect cost on the IT organization, which must increase time spend on knowledge transfer and training new individuals. 0. Knowledge Transfer The time and effort to transfer knowledge to the vendor is a cost rarely accounted for by IT organizations. Indeed, we observe that most IT organizations experience a 20% decline in productivity during the first year of an agreement, largely due to time spent transferring both technical and business knowledge to the vendor. Many offsh ore vendors are deploying video conferencing (avoiding travel) and classroom settings (creating one-to-many transfer) to improve the efficacy of knowledge transfer.In addition, employee turnover often places a burden on the IT organization to provide additional information for new team members. Business Impact: Offshore outsourcing can reduce IT expenditures by 15%-25% within the first year. Longer term, process improvements often make great impacts on both cost savings and the quality of IT services delivered. Bottom Line: As IT organizations consider the vast benefits and allure of offshore outsourcing, they must balance the risks and uncertainties with the potential for labor arbitrage.Strategic Decision Challenges Researchers have applied different perspectives to understand sourcing decision, the key among them being production and transaction cost economics (Ang & Straub, 1998), resource-based views (RBV), and resource-dependence views (Teng et al. , 1995). The Resource-Based View (RBV) argues that a firm’s competitive advantage depends heavily on its resources, as well as how these are used. Resources that are valuable and rare can lead to the creation of competitive advantage (Wade & Hulland, 2004).Competitive advantage can be sustained over longer time periods to the extent that the firm is able to protect against resource imitation, transfer, or substitution. The knowledge-based theory (KBV) of the firm considers knowledge as the most strategically significant resource of the firm. Its proponents argue that, because knowledge-based resources are usually difficult to imitate and socially complex, heterogeneous knowledge bases and capabilities among firms are the major determinants of sustained competitive advantage and superior corporate performance.There is certain level of paradox in outsourcing when viewed from RBV or KBV prisms. Proponents of outsourcing have often used RBV to justify outsourcing decisions. The lack of resources, or resourc e gaps, that a firm has can also be rectified by acquiring resources from outside the firm boundaries by souring arrangement (Teng et al. , 1995). Outsourcing has been considered as a part of the way that firms assemble knowledge from suppliers (Shi et al. , 2005). Thus, information systems (IS) outsourcing can be seen as a mechanism to integrate IS knowledge from IS vendors.Knowledge sharing by both, client and supplier sides, is considered to be a success factor in outsourcing (Lee, 2001). However, some researchers have raised concerns regarding the potential loss of internal know-how through IS outsourcing (Willcocks et al. , 2004) and the potential loss of intellectual property (Chen et al. ,2002; Evaristo et al. , 2005). Outsourcing involves the inherent risk of forgoing the development of the knowledge base of the firm. Hoecht and Trott (2006) argues that innovative capability of the firm is largely dependent on cumulative knowledge built up over many years of experience.Innov ative ability cannot be simply bought and sold. Earl (1996) argues that innovation needs slack resources, organic and fluid organizational processes, and experimental and entrepreneurial competences – all attributes that external sourcing does not guarantee. Aron (2005) describes these risks as the long-term intrinsic risks of atrophy. These risks are an inevitable byproduct of the process of outsourcing. Over time, if a company outsources an activity completely, it loses the core group of people who were familiar with it. They retire, they leave for employment where their skills are more alued, or they simply become less technically competent and out of date. Reliance on outsourcing is problematic, not only because key areas of expertise may be gradually lost to the outsourcing organization but also because outside providers may not have the desired leading edge expertise over the long-term (Earl, 1996) or may spread their expertise among many clients so that it degrades fro m core competency to mere industry standard. Hoecht & Trott (2006) remind senior managers of the harm that may be inflicted on the ability of the organization to survive in the long term if its core competencies are slowly eroded through outsourcing.A related issue is that of the strategic intent (DiRomualdo & Gurbaxani, 1998) behind the offshore outsourcing decision by organizations. Strategic intent in this context can range from an improvement in the IS unit of the organization (which generally provides the lowest degree of benefits), an improvement in the business processes of the overall organization, or a commercial intent to generate profits by developing core expertise in the domain of outsourced IT service (Kishore et al. , 2004–2005).The commercial intent is exemplified in the oft-cited case of American Airlines who established a new subsidiary to sell airline reservation related services commercially to other airlines and travel agents using Sabre, its airline rese rvation system, and to generate new revenues and profits from this line of business. Strategic intent behind outsourcing is an important challenge as it has been shown that stock market reacts favorably and rewards companies when they outsource with an intent of creating the maximum returns for the firm (Agrawal et al. 2006). On the vendor side, vendors can develop their expertise through building knowledge from experiences and holding the knowledge for competitive advantage. Szulanski (Szulanski, 1996) identifies lack of incentives, lack of confidence, turf protection, and the â€Å"not invented here† syndrome as motivational factors potentially influencing knowledge transfer in outsourcing arrangements.This two-sided nature of knowledge transfer is expected to create asymmetric information leading to outsourcing failures. From a client’s view several challenges then arise including deciding what is the right proportion of IT function insourced or outsourced, and what IT application should be outsourced or kept within for strategic reasons.

Government Regulation Essay

Government regulation in business today is vital because it attempts to create a level playing field for companies competing against one another and regulate honest business practices toward the consumers. It is important to for any business to understand how government regulation affects their industry and how they intend to run their company. Industrial regulation is the government regulation of an entire industry. The purpose of industry regulation is for a an entity to watch an industry’s prices and products to make sure that they do not create a monopoly or take advantage of consumers. There are basically two kinds of regulation, price regulation and social regulation. Price regulation is regulation directed towards industries that have tendencies that may produce a monopoly. The industries that price regulation agencies monitor are: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which are basically responsible for monitoring gas and oil pipelines and other energy based industries; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who are supposed to regulate television, telephones, and other areas of communication; and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who regulates financial markets. Social regulation monitors the conditions where goods and services are produced, the safety of those items produced, as well how the production of those good might affect society. The industries that social regulation agencies are worried about are: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The main purpose behind these organizations is; to stop monopolies from being formed and to control the pricing of the products or services because these industries have elements that may potentially create a monopoly. The affect that government industrial regulation has on the market will vary depending on several different variables such as how antitrust laws are interpreted, the administration enforcing the laws, taxation, and how strictly the laws are enforced. The purpose of the government regulation is to ensure monopolies aren’t formed and to make sure  that prices and products aren’t taking advantage of customers. They also want to make sure that oligopolies are not formed to make sure there is not too much power over pricing and also to promote fair and heal thy market competition. Depending how the laws are enforced will help decide how much of an impact there is to a certain market. The idea is to strive for equality and integrity in certain industries. Knowing how courts are interpreting antitrust laws and how they affect a firms specific industry is important to understand when making business decisions for a company along with knowing the boundaries for where regulatory agencies may consider a monopoly or oligopoly could potentially be formed by having too much control. Social regulation is served with monitoring the conditions under which goods and services are produced, the safety of the goods being produced, and any effects production may have on society. The social regulatory agencies are; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Social regulation is different from pricing regulation because social regulation applies to almost all firms and is not designed for the specific purpose of stopping a monopoly. One example would be when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) decide to issue a requirement that all worke rs have periodic break from work, it would apply to all firms in the United States who are under OSHA’s control. On the other hand, pricing regulation would not. People who are opposed to social regulation believe that regulation carries a steep administrative cost and that those costs actually hurt consumers more than the regulation actually helps. They think this happens because the social regulation laws are often poorly written and very difficult to interpret or enforce. Those who back social regulation do agree with some of what the naysayers think but they believe that the benefits of social regulation are worth the high costs and that regulation just needs to be improved. They think that social regulation has made manufacturing a lot safer in the United States and reduced discrimination within the workplace. Both sides have valid arguments however to actually judge between these two views is very difficult because accurately figuring out the costs or benefits is pretty much impossible. (Colander 2010). A natural monopoly is an industry in which significant economies of scale make the existence of more than one firm inefficient. An  e xample of a natural monopoly is AT&T. Up until 1982; AT&T was what was called a regulated monopoly. It had the exclusive right to provide telephone service in the United States. AT&T controlled 90 percent of the telecommunications market: long-distance and local telephone service, and the production of telephones themselves as well as other communication equipment. AT&T was given this right because it was felt that economies of scale made supplying telephone service a natural monopoly. Telephone service required every house to be connected with lines. These lines had to be buried underground or strung overhead on poles so it didn’t make sense to have more than one company installing separate lines. The government also decided that telephone service should to be available to all everyone, even those who live in remote areas, where service costs more to provide. An unregulated company in a similar position probably would have practiced skimming, which in this case would have been to provide service to low-cost areas and avoiding high-cost areas. AT&T was allowed to continue as a monopoly but they were subject to regulatory control by the Federal Communi cations Commission. This government regulation was put in place in order to limit the company’s profit to a fair level and prevent AT&T from abusing its monopoly. AT&T’s business was also limited to telephone service. Under AT&T’s monopoly, phone service in the United States was the best and cheapest in the world at the time. Even if phone service was more expensive than it actually needed to be, most agreed that the system worked well. (Colander 2010). Antitrust policy is essentially the government’s policy towards the competitive process. The United States antitrust laws were put in place by both federal and state governments in order to regulate corporations. These policies intend to keep companies from becoming too large and stop them from fixing prices. These laws also attempt to give businesses an equal opportunity to compete in a market. There are four major parts of legislation that are known as the antitrust laws. In the United States these laws basically began with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Sherman Antitrust Act stopped limits on competitive trade and made it illegal to form a monopoly. The nest next antitrust act was the Clayton Act, which was passed in 1914. The Clayton Act protects against mergers or acquisitions that would either greatly decrease competition or offer the threat of becoming a monopoly. Another major piece of legislation was the  Robinson-Patman Act from 1036, which made it illegal to practice price discrimination by allowing some businesses to purchase products at lower prices than other businesses. The last of the four pieces of legislations to the antitrust laws is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which was formed in 1914. The FTC was created to enforce the country’s antitrust laws. Many of the antitrust laws are not very specific and can be hard to interpret. The FTC’s job is to interpret the laws and enforce them. The three main regulatory commissions of social regulation are: the Food and Drug Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These three commissions watch over social regulation in different ways. The FDA stops drugs from being sold until there is enough information about the effects of the drug can be determined. The FDA often takes a long time to test and go through the approval process. They FDA can take up to five or even ten years to approve a drug and it is a very costly process. Because this is such a lengthy and expensive process it usually means higher priced drugs fo r consumers. The next commission to discuss is the EEOC. This is the commission that regulates discrimination in the workplace. The EEOC investigates discrimination complaints based on criteria such as: individual’s race, color, nationality, religion, sex, age, or disability. The final commission to look at is OSHA. OSHA is essentially responsible for regulating health and safety of workers within the workplace. The five primary federal regulatory commissions that govern social regulation are the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), The Equal Employment Opportunity (EEOC), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The major functions of these agencies are to monitor the conditions under which goods and services are produced, the safety of those goods, and the side effects of production on society. Works Cited Colander, David C. Economics: Eighth Edition San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Irwin 2010.

Nelson Mandelas Struggle for essays

Nelson Mandelas Struggle for essays Nelson Mandelas Struggle for Peace and Equality for All Races I have cherished the ideal of a free society in which all persons live together in harmony and equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for...but if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela spoke these famous words and is known for transforming a model of racial division and oppression into an open democracy. Mandela is one the admired national figures of our age. Nelson says, I am not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances. From Nelsons childhood, as a member of the royal house, being stripped from his indignity in prison, to becoming president of South Africa, his life is an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope and ultimate triumph. Let us begin this journey of a true leader of peace. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in Mvezo, which was the capital of Transkei. Mvezo was a tiny village removed from the world and the western civilization influences. Nelson was from a Thembu Royal house and his birth name, Rolihlahla, was given by his father, which means troublemaker. His English name, Nelson, was given to him by his teacher on the first day of school. Nelsons childhood was peaceful and he spent his time in the field herding cattle, plowing, and tending sheep. Transkei is eight hundred miles east of Cape Town, five hundred fifty miles south of Johannesburg, and lies between the Kei River and the Natal border, between the rugged Drakensberg Mountains to the north and the blue waters, of the Indian Ocean to the east. This land was fertile with hills, valleys and flowing streams. The Thembu people population was 3 Â ½ million and a minority of whites. Nelsons father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a chief of Mvezo by the King of Thembu tribe. Due to some m isfortunes with ...

The Large Hadron Collider and the Frontier of Physics

The Large Hadron Collider and the Frontier of Physics The science of particle physics looks at the very building blocks of matter - the atoms and particles that make up much of the material in the cosmos. Its a complex science that requires painstaking measurements of particles moving at high speeds. This science got a huge boost when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began operations in September 2008. Its name sounds very science-fictiony but the word collider actually explains exactly what it does: send two high-energy particle beams at nearly the speed of light around a 27-kilometer long underground ring. At the right time, the beams are forced to collide. Protons in the beams then smash together and, if all goes well, smaller bits and pieces - called subatomic particles - are created for brief moments in time. Their actions and existence are recorded. From that activity, physicists learn more about the very fundamental constituents of matter. LHC and Particle Physics The LHC was built to answer some incredibly important questions in physics, delving into where mass comes from, why the cosmos is made of matter instead of its opposite stuff called antimatter, and what the mysterious stuff known as dark matter could possibly be. It could also provide important new clues about conditions in the very early  universe when gravity and electromagnetic forces were all combined with the weak and strong forces into one all-encompassing force. That only happened for a short time in the early universe, and physicists want to know why and how it changed.   The science of particle physics is essentially the search for  the very basic building blocks of matter. We know about the atoms and molecules that make up everything we see and feel. The atoms themselves are made up of smaller components: the nucleus and electrons. The nucleus is itself made up of protons and neutrons. Thats not the end of the line, however. The neutrons are made up of subatomic particles called quarks. Are there smaller particles? Thats what particle accelerators are designed to find out. The way they do this is to create conditions similar to what it was like just after the Big Bang - the event that began the universe. At that point, some 13.7 billion years ago, the universe was made only of particles. They were scattered freely through the infant cosmos and roamed constantly. These include mesons, pions, baryons, and hadrons (for which the accelerator is named). Particle physicists (the people who study these particles) suspect that matter is made up of at least twelve kinds of fundamental particles. They are divided into quarks (mentioned above) and leptons. There are six of each type. That only accounts for some of the fundamental particles in nature. The rest are created in super-energetic collisions (either in the Big Bang or in accelerators such as the LHC). Inside those collisions, particle physicists get a very fast glimpse at what conditions were like in the Big Bang, when the fundamental particles were first created. What is the LHC? The LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world, a big sister to Fermilab in Illinois and other smaller accelerators. LHC is located near Geneva, Switzerland, built and operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and used by more than 10,000 scientists from around the world. Along its ring, physicists and technicians have installed extremely strong supercooled magnets that guide and shape the beams of particles through a beam pipe). Once the beams are moving fast enough, specialized magnets guide them to the correct positions where the collisions take place. Specialized detectors record the collisions, the particles, the temperatures and other conditions at the time of the collision, and the particle actions in the billionths of a second during which the smash-ups take place. What Has the LHC Discovered? When particle physicists planned and built the LHC, one thing they hoped to find evidence for is the Higgs Boson. Its a particle named after Peter Higgs, who predicted its existence. In 2012, the LHC consortium announced that experiments had revealed the existence of a boson that matched the expected criteria for the Higgs Boson. In addition to the continued search for the Higgs, scientists using the LHC have created whats called a quark-gluon plasma, which is the densest matter thought to exist outside of a black hole. Other particle experiments are helping physicists understand supersymmetry, which is a spacetime symmetry that involves two related types of particles: bosons and fermions. Each group of particles is thought to have an associated superpartner particle in the other. Understanding such supersymmetry would give scientists further insight into whats called the standard model. Its a theory that explains what the world is, what holds its matter together, and the forces and particles involved. The Future of the LHC Operations at the LHC have included two major observing runs. In between each one, the system is refurbished and upgraded to improve its instrumentation and detectors. The next updates (slated for 2018 and beyond) will include an increase in collisional velocities, and a chance to increase the luminosity of the machine. What that means is that LHC will be able to see ever more rare and fast-occurring processes of particle acceleration and collision. The faster the collisions can occur, the more energy will be released as ever-smaller and harder-to-detect particles are involved. This will give particle physicists an even better look at the very building blocks of matter that make up the stars, galaxies, planets, and life.

5 Tips for Keeping Warm at Work

5 Tips for Keeping Warm at Work It’s freezing. You can’t feel your fingers, and the warmth of summer is but a distant memory. Except you’re not even outside in the elements- you’re at your desk. Your complaints go unheeded by the Facilities team. You’d change the thermostat yourself, except Joe from Accounting sits closer- and he seems to have the blood of a Viking, judging by how often he turns the temperature down. And many offices prohibit space heaters these days due to fire hazards. So what do you do? There are ways to get around the office deep freeze.Put on some fingerless gloves.Keep your delicate mitts warm and flexible while you type those temperature complaint emails or post pictures of your arctic agony on Instagram.Wrap up in a heated scarf.This is totally a thing now! What a time to be alive†¦Bundle up.Just keep adding layers until you’re comfortable. This has the added bonus of coming in handy when the heat gets stuck in tropical mode, and you can peel t hem back off.Find your inner barista.Keep drinking hot tea, coffee, or hot chocolate. Not only will it warm you up, but staying hydrated is pretty key when temperatures are off.Take â€Å"business casual† to a new level.Okay, so wearing a Snuggie in the office is a bit drastic. But if things get to that point, double check your new interpretation of the dress code with HR.Stay warm, office dwellers! Spring will come again†¦uh, someday.

Tourism of Valais Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Tourism of Valais - Research Paper Example This country situated in central Europe keeps pulling a vast number of visitors every year, and this is increasing by the time (Lew, 2008). Various factors have ensured that Switzerland remains as one of Europe’s greatest tourist destinations. The country has a beautiful landscape and scenery comprised of beautiful mountains and undulating valleys. This scenic beauty pulls millions of visitors every year. Apart from the landscape, the country has beautiful lakes and water catchment areas which are a site to behold. Lakes like Lucerne are very beautiful and every year, thousands of people travel there to see this beautiful lake. Apart from this, people are attracted to Switzerland due to winter activities like ice hockey. Such sports are interesting; hence, they pull very many people to Switzerland. The summers are also warm and tourists take part in summer activities like sun bathing and beach activities. Cable cars that connect various mountains in Switzerland are another tou rist attraction site in Switzerland. People who have never been in such cars will want to go and board them so that they can also be part of the experience. Apart from these attractions, Switzerland has very many animal zoos which have various wild animals that have been tamed. As much as these animals are not in their natural habitat, they provide a potent tourism attraction. Therefore, Switzerland has succeeded in its tourist activities due to the fact that it has a diverse range of tourist attractions which have ensured that it receives thousands of visitors every year. This has in turn boosted the economy of the country. Currently, Switzerland is one of the richest countries in Central Europe, and this can be attributed to its noteworthy tourist activities (William, 2008). Factors that have contributed to tourism success in Switzerland Various factors have contributed to the tourism success in Switzerland. For one, Switzerland is strategically located in Central Europe, which ha s ensured that the country receives visitors all round Europe. Visitors are able to transit from the north, south, east and west, and meet at the central zone of Europe. As a result of this, its geographical position has enhanced its tourism capability. Secondly, the people of Switzerland are very friendly and hospitable, which implies that tourists from any part of the world are assured that they will be in good hands. Most tourists long to visit Switzerland as a result of this hospitality. Another advantage that Switzerland has is that it has the policy of neutrality. Banks in Switzerland allow investments from any citizens of the world without any hindrances or conditions. As a result of this, people are able to visit Switzerland without any fears as compared to other countries where there is thorough vetting of documents before one is allowed in. To most people, this is a tedious procedure which discourages one from touring countries. Thirdly, Switzerland has many cultures. Very many cultures and races intermingle in Switzerland. As a result of this, people from various races are encouraged to visit Switzerland which has ensured that tourist numbers have increased every year. This country has cultural intermingling, and as a result of this, it is possible to find various resorts belonging to many cultural backgrounds. For example, Valais is an area in Switzerland that is exclusively French, hence, people of French cultures are attracted to this area so that they are able to experience their