Family Assessment and Nursing Diagnoses Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Family Assessment and Nursing Diagnoses - Essay Example Family Assessment and Nursing Diagnoses Value/belief-this family’s greatest value was the health of its members. According to Mr. Jacobs, nothing matters in this life like the good health of his kids. The second value was education. For this matter, Jacobs made sure that his children went to school. He wanted these kids to have a bright future, I suppose. The family also had a strong belief in their religion. They never miss a single church service. Analytically, the morals of this family were shaped by their religious beliefs. Health perception- this family perceived health and life as a God given gift. Jacobs argued that good and bad health is determined by God. However, he admitted that one had to take good care of his health. He answered that the main cause of health problems was poor eating habits and bad lifestyle. When asked how his culture had influenced his perception on health, he said that his conservative nature had helped him avoid the modern lifestyle that lead to many diseases such as obesity. He argued that doctors cannot provide effective treatment without the help of God. Nutrition- Jacobs mentioned whole grain rice as the main staple food in the community and as the family’s favorite. He had raised the kids with this particular food. On the question of food quantity, he said that they were eating just enough. No meals were skipped. However, the daughter does not like to finish up her food from the plate. Rice was not the only meal in the family. They balance it with some red meat and potatoes.

Marketing plan for Milk Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Marketing plan for Milk - Essay Example A marketing plan is prepared for assisting the business in integrating the total marketing efforts. The planning process begins with an attempt by the company to size up its present market situation and the factors responsible for it. Such a plan ensures a systematic approach to developing products and services to meet and satisfy the consumer's needs. An established milk beverage manufacturer is introducing a completely new product - flavored milk beverages for the segment 6-12 years old. The marketing plan for this product will be as follows;Current marketing situation: Flavoured milk also known as value added milk is being placed by British companies for different segments of the market. are increasingly targeting the value-added milk for growth opportunities as they re-align their businesses and move away from commodity products. Current competing cost/profit ratio: In view of the stiff competition and presence of big players in the market place, the cost/profit ratio is likely to remain high with higher cost inputs and lower returns. We cannot put a higher price tag to recover all the costs involved.Opportunity and issue analysis: So far in particular the flavoured milk market has managed to compete as some sectors of the milk and cream market still suffer from a lack of innovation and marketing support. Healthy eating trends are having an impact on the market which has started favouring semi-skimmed and skimmed milk.Entry/exit barriers: White milk accounts for 96% of the market share. Well established branded products are also in the market. ... Flavoured milk is facing increased competion in the chilled segment from functional yogurt drink. Benefiting from current Milk campaign: An increased awareness amongst the consumers about the benefits of flavoured milk. Objectives: To create a niche for itself in the existing market and mainly amongst the targeted segment. Money Goals: To start with the company is ready to bear some losses for the initial period but the efforts will continue with renewed vigour for attaining the breakeven point as soon as possible. Sales goals: In the first year of operation, company can target to lure away at least 2-3% of the existing market. The company will try to gain as many new customers as possible. Profit goals: Company is not looking for profits from the word go. It plans to go ahead with a longer perspective. But at the same time it is worth pondering that business needs to payback to financers, investors, employees and other stakeholders. Market Goals: The market will be 6-12 yrs old kids. That means we'll have to target the schools, schools administrators and other faculty so that they inform the students about the arrival of a new quality flavoured milk in the market. Market Share: Since we are a new entrant, that means we'll have to be realistic in our approach. We must understand that we'll be able to create the marketing space for our product only when we take good care of the consumer needs and quality. Consumer loyalty: Let us not expect the tiny tots to be our loyal consumers overnight, as they are the one's who are very difficult to divert enblock towards a new product. Their consumption pattern will be affected with the influence of their parents and teachers. Marketing communication and promotional strategies are

Contemporary Issues in Leadership

Contemporary Issues in Leadership Leadership is the process of influencing the behavior of others to work willingly and enthusiastically for achieving predetermined goals. It may be seen in terms of relationship between a leader and his followers (individuals / groups) which arises out of their functioning for common goals. The followers work willingly to achieve goal, thus there is no coercive force which induces the followers to work. LEADERS AS Shapers of Meaning Framing Issues. Framing is a way to use language to manage meaning. Its a way for leaders to influence how events are seen and understood. Contemporary roles relating to lead team as managing the conflicts; coaching to improve team member performance; used to serve as troubleshooters. It seems to respond in a group in which they have to participate with the leader. It involves mentor who is a senior employee who sponsors and supports a less experienced employee. Leadership can be taught online as it builds trust in the working environment of the organization. Challenges facing to leadership can be on the basis of qualities attributed as leaders are intelligent, ongoing, have strong verbal skills, understanding, are aggressive and industrious. Actually they perceive or project the appearance of being a leader. Many people today are seeking to understand and many people are writing about the concept and practices of leadership.. The concept of leadership is relevant to any aspect of ensuring effectiveness in organizations and in managing change. There has been an explosion of literature about leadership lately. Leading is a very human activity were all human so there are many people who consider themselves experts on leadership. There are a great many reasons for the popularity of the topic, including that organizations are faced with changes like never before. Understanding the concept of leadership requires more than reading a few articles or fantasizing about what great leaders should be. Contemporary issues includes [1] out of the box thinking; [2]leading by example; [3]globalization;[ 4]changing group dynamics; [5]technology; [6]quick decision making; [7]dealing with change and uncertainty; [8]mentoring; [9]ethical behavior; [10] recruiting and retaining quality workers. Now, managerial and leadership effectiveness depends on the ability to gain the trust of the followers. A recent survey in U.S. employees found that only half trusted their senior manager. Also the bad practices of corporations in the U.S. like the leaders of ENRON, WORLDCOM, etc that were accused of engaging in activities like secret loans, insider trading, manipulating profit figures, evading taxes all these has lost the confidence and trust of employees and investors, supplier, customers in senior executives. Unfortunately, many people make strong assertions about leadership without ever really understanding a great deal about leadership. Leaders need basic intelligence and job related knowledge but this is not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient. It is emotional intelligence that makes him a star performer. These are: Self-awareness exhibited by self confidence, realistic self assessment and a sense of humor. Self management. Exhibited by trustworthiness, integrity, and comfort with ambiguity, openness to change. Self motivation: exhibited by strong drive to achieve, optimism, and high organizational commitment. Empathy cross cultural sensitivity, expertise in building talents. ABSTRACT: However, subsequent scientific studies find that leaders are not exceptionally brilliant, splendid speakers or highly energetic. Instead, leaders know how to forge relationships and accomplish tasks. In fact, analysts find that leaders ability to accomplish tasks is even more important than their interpersonal skills. Leadership Personalities Academic studies achieve varied results when they try to isolate the characteristics of effective leaders. In work done in 1948 that is still well-regarded, scholar Ralph Stogdill proposed that leaders have five clusters of characteristics that make them good at leading. The five are: capacity (intelligence, judgment); achievement (knowledge, scholarship); responsibility (dependability, aggressiveness, self control, and desire to excel); participation (activity, sociability, cooperation, adaptability) and status (position, popularity). In 1990, subsequent research identified five more factors that leaders have in common: they are reliable, agreeable, extroverted, and emotionally stable and open to new experiences. Current theory proposes that anyone can become a leader to some degree if he or she can: Be confident about taking action, and controlling his or her life. Use power in pro-social ways that extend beyond personal gain or narcissism. Develop personal vision by seeing the future impact of todays actions. Leaders must have vision, a future view of events. Good leaders have the ability to convey their visions and make the future unfold as they hope it will. This generally begins with writing a vision statement, a process that often goes badly. Commonly, vision statements are confusing. They tend to cite goals that are really associated with strategies and objectives, not vision. To craft an effective vision statement, write a brief, memorable declaration. Then share your vision; make it more tangible by telling stories and using metaphors. Good leaders consistently align their actions with their verbal messages. They see their followers in a positive light, and care about their well being. Strong leaders provide the proper support to help their followers accept new challenges. Leaders assist others in finding meaning in their work and in their lives. Emotional Intelligence Leaders forge relationships with groups or individuals. The individual relationships tend to be more intellectual but, in both cases, good leaders exhibit highly developed emotional or social intelligence. They are self-aware, socially skilled, disciplined and able to deal capably with other people. People with emotional intelligence think before they act, focus on their goals, understand other peoples emotions and have the skill to establish common grounds for discussion. In this instance, scholars concluded that even the most talented executive cannot succeed without emotional intelligence. Some major corporations that wanted to encourage future leaders in their ranks hired psychologists to sort out leadership characteristics. The psychologists found that leaders are smart and have solid, long-term vision, but that their emotional intelligence is twice as important as either intellect or vision. One study shows that companies where the employees have high emotional intelligence earn higher profits. The reverse is also demonstrably true. A workforce marked by a lack of emotional intelligence can mean lower profits. Leaders can learn emotional intelligence. People who know their limitations can plan to avoid stressful situations or to work around events that tug at their weaknesses. One-on-one training is the best way to learn how to improve your emotional intelligence. Such training focuses on correcting undesirable social habits, such as acting impulsively or being a bad listener. Because this process requires people to correct brain-based emotional drives, it is time-consuming. Theory of Leadership Leadership has been described as the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task. Definitions more inclusive of followers have also emerged. Alan Keith of Genentech states that, Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen. According to Ken Ogbonnia effective leadership is the ability to successfully integrate and maximize available resources within the internal and external environment for the attainment of organizational or societal goals. Leadership remains one of the most relevant aspects of the organizational context. However, defining leadership has been challenging and definitions can vary depending on the situation. According to Ann Marie E. McSwain, Assistant Professor at Lincoln University, leadership is about capacity: the capacity of leaders to listen and observe, to use their expertise as a starting point to encourage dialogue between all levels of decision-making, to establish processes and transparency in decision-making, to articulate their own values and visions clearly but not impose them. Leadership is about setting and not just reacting to agendas, identifying problems, and initiating change that makes for substantive improvement rather than managing change. The following sections discuss several important aspects of leadership including a description of what leadership is and a description of several popular theories and styles of leadership. This article also discusses topics such as the role of emotions and vision, as well as leadership effectiveness and performance, leadership in different contexts, how it may differ from related concepts (i.e., management), and some critiques of leadership as generally conceived. Trait Theory Trait theory tries to describe the types of behavior and personality tendencies associated with effective leadership. In modern times, Thomas Carlyle (1841) can be considered one of the forerunners of trait theory, seeking to identify the talents, skills and physical characteristics of men who rose to power Although trait theory has an intuitive appeal, difficulties may arise in proving its tenets, and opponents frequently challenge this approach. The strongest versions of trait theory see these leadership characteristics as innate, and accordingly label some people as born leaders due to their psychological makeup. On this reading of the theory, leadership development involves identifying and measuring leadership qualities, screening potential leaders from non-leaders, then training those with potential. In response to criticisms of the trait approach, researchers have begun to assess leader attributes using the leadership attribute pattern approach. Behavioral and style Theories In response to the criticism of the trait approach, theorists began to research leadership as a set of behaviors, evaluating the behavior of successful leaders, determining behavior taxonomy and identifying broad leadership styles. David McClelland, for example, saw leadership skills, not so much as a set of traits, but as a pattern of motives. He claimed that successful leaders will tend to have a high need for power, a low need for affiliation, and a high level of what he called activity inhibition (one might call it self-control The researchers evaluated the performance of groups of eleven-year-old boys under different types of work climate. In each, the leader exercised his influence regarding the type of group decision making, praise and criticism (feedback), and the management of the group tasks (project management) Situational and contingency Theories Situational theory also appeared as a reaction to the trait theory of leadership. This theory assumes that different situations call for different characteristics; according to this group of theories, no single optimal psychographic profile of a leader exists. According to the theory, what an individual actually does when acting as a leader is in large part dependent upon characteristics of the situation in which he functions. Some theorists started to synthesize the trait and situational approaches. The descriptive models of leadership climates, defining three leadership styles and identifying in which situations each style works better. The authoritarian leadership style, for example, is approved in periods of crisis but fails to win the hearts and minds of their followers in the day-to-day management; the democratic leadership style is more adequate in situations that require consensus building; finally, the laissez faire leadership style is appreciated by the degree of freedom it provides, but as the leader does not take charge, he can be perceived as a failure in protracted or thorny organizational problems. Thus, theorists defined the style of leadership as contingent to the situation, which is sometimes classified as contingency theory. Four contingency leadership theories appear more prominently in the recent years: Fiedler contingency model, Vroom-Yetton decision model, the path-goal theory, and t he Hersey-Blanchard situational theory. Functional Theory Functional leadership theory is a particularly useful theory for addressing specific leader behaviors expected to contribute to organizational or unit effectiveness. This theory argues that the leaders main job is to see that whatever is necessary to group needs is taken care of; thus, a leader can be said to have done their job well when they have contributed to group effectiveness and cohesion (Fleishman et al., 1991; Hackman Wageman, 2005; Hackman Walton, 1986). While functional leadership theory has most often been applied to team leadership (Zaccaro, Rittman, Marks, 2001), it has also been effectively applied to broader organizational leadership as well (Zaccaro, 2001). In summarizing literature on functional leadership (see Kozlowski et al. (1996), Zaccaro et al. (2001), Hackman and Walton (1986), Hackman Wageman (2005), Morgeson (2005)), Klein, Zeigert, Knight, and Xiao (2006) observed five broad functions a leader performs when promoting organisations effectiveness. These functions include: (1) environmental monitoring, (2) organizing subordinate activities, (3) teaching and coaching subordinates, (4) motivating others, and (5) intervening actively in the groups work. Leader as a communicator the framing Framing is a way of communicating to shape meaning. Its a way for leaders to influence how others see and understand events. Selecting and highlighting one or more events while excluding others. It is the ability of the leader to influence others to act beyond their self interests Two contemporary theories of leadership with a common theme. Charismatic leadership Transformational leadership Charismatic Leadership The Charismatic Leader gathers followers through dint of personality and charm, rather than any form of external power or authority. The searchlight of attention It is interesting to watch a Charismatic Leader working the room as they move from person to person. They pay much attention to the person they are talking to at any one moment, making that person feel like they are, for that time, the most important person in the world. Charismatic Leaders pay a great deal of attention in scanning and reading their environment, and are good at picking up the moods and concerns of both individuals and larger audiences. They then will hone their actions and words to suit the situation. Pulling all of the strings Charismatic Leaders use a wide range of methods to manage their image and, if they are not naturally charismatic, may practice assiduously at developing their skills. They may engender trust through visible self-sacrifice and taking personal risks in the name of their beliefs. They will show great confidence in their followers. They are very persuasive and make very effective use of body language as well as verbal language. Deliberate charisma is played out in a theatrical sense, where the leader is playing to the house to create a desired effect. They also make effective use of storytelling, including the use of symbolism and metaphor. Many politicians use a charismatic style, as they need to gather a large number of followers. If you want to increase your charisma, studying videos of their speeches and the way they interact with others is a great source of learning. Religious leaders, too, may well use charisma, as do cult leaders. Leading the team Charismatic Leaders, who are building a group, whether it is a political party, a cult or a business team, will often focus strongly on making the group very clear and distinct, separating it from other groups. They will then build the image of the group, in particular in the minds of their followers, as being far superior to all others. The Charismatic Leader will typically attach themselves firmly to the identify of the group, such that to join the group is to become one with the leader. In doing so, they create an unchallengeable position for themselves. Key characteristics of charismatic leadership Vision and articulation; Sensitivity to the environment; Sensitivity to member needs; Personal risk taking; Performing unconventional behavior Vision and articulations Has a vision Expressed as an idealized goal The goal proposes a future better than the status quo Is able to clarify the importance of the vision in terms that are understandable to others. Personal risk Willing to take on high personal risk Incur high costs Engage in self sacrifice to achieve the vision Sensitivity to followers needs Perspective of others abilities Responsive to others needs and feelings. Unconventional behavior Engages in behaviors in behaviors that are novel and counter to norms. Personality of charismatic leaders Extraverted Self confident Achievement oriented Articulate an over arching goal Communicate high performance expectations Empathize the needs of their followers Project a powerful confident and dynamic presence Captivating and engaging voice tone Three step process of becoming a charismatic leader An individual needs to develop an aura of charisma by maintaining an optimistic view, using passion as a catalyst for generating enthusiasm and communicating with the whole body, not just with words. .An individual draws others in by creating a bond that inspires others to follows. . An individual brings out the potential in followers by tapping into their emotions. Charismatic Leadership Issues People following these leaders will be exerting extra effort, express greater satisfaction. Charismatic effectiveness and situation Charisma works best when: The followers task has an ideological component There is a lot of stress and uncertainty in the environment The leader is at the upper level of the organization Followers have low self-esteem and self-worth Dark Side of Charisma Ego-driven charismatic allow their self-interest and personal goals to override the organizations goals Very effective leaders who possess the four typical leadership traits: Individual competency Team skills Managerial competence Ability to stimulate others to high performance Plus one critical new trait A blend of personal humility and professional will Personal ego-needs are focused toward building a great company Take responsibility for failures and give credit to others for successes Prided them on developing strong leaders inside the firm who could direct the company to greater heights after they were gone. Transactional and transformational Theories The transactional leader (Burns, 1978) is given power to perform certain tasks and reward or punish for the teams performance. It gives the opportunity to the manager to lead the group and the group agrees to follow his lead to accomplish a predetermined goal in exchange for something else. Power is given to the leader to evaluate, correct and train subordinates when productivity is not up to the desired level and reward effectiveness when expected outcome is reached. The transformational leader (Burns, 1978) motivates its team to be effective and efficient. Communication is the base for goal achievement focusing the group on the final desired outcome or goal attainment. This leader is highly visible and uses chain of command to get the job done. Transformational leaders focus on the big picture, needing to be surrounded by people who take care of the details. The leader is always looking for ideas that move the organization to reach the companys vision. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: Ten Lessons for Leaders and Leadership Developers In the early 1980s we set upon a quest to discover what it took to become a leader. We wanted to know the common practices of ordinary men and women when they were at their leadership bestwhen they were able to take people to places they had never been before. Strategies, tactics, skills, and practices are empty (or worse yet, manipulative and exploitative) unless we understand the fundamental human aspirations that connect leaders and constituents. Leadership is certainly not conveyed in a gene, and its most definitely not a secret code that cant be understood by ordinary folks. Our analysis of thousands of cases and surveys from over a dozen years of research has revealed a consistent pattern of exemplary leader- ship practices and fundamental constituent expectations. But knowing that the portrait emerging from the study of personal-best leadership experiences was only a partial picture, we also explored the expectations that the constituents have of people they would be willing to follow. What weve learned from studies specifically with college student leaders over the past five years has only strengthened our fundamental appreciation that Leadership is not a mysterious, mystical, or ethereal conceptone that is somehow beyond the scope and imagination of the vast majority of people. Our research has shown us that leadership is an observable, learnable set of practices. Indeed, the belief that leadership cant be learned is a far more powerful deterrent to development than is the nature of the leadership. Where Are Our Future Leaders? Who will lead us into the twenty-first century? It is time for us to decide. A generation ago the objective of African-American activists was to destroy racial segregation and integrate mainstream political and economic institutions. Instead we must recognize that one of the root causes of our divisions and social unrest is an absence of creative, dynamic leadership. Oppressed people need leaders to liberate them. Many of us accomplished these goals. But despite examples of individual success, there remains a simmering leadership crisis that can split our community apart. This common experience of racial oppression gave us a sense of solidarity and interdependence. Black physicians depended on Black patients; Black lawyers and accountants served Black clients. With desegregation, many affluent African-Americans moved from the ghetto into integrated suburbs. Graduates of Howard and Spelman now end their children to Harvard and Swarthmore. In the cities, our sense of community has gradually deteriorated. Millions of our young people are trapped in a destructive web of inferior schools, violence, drugs, and unemployment. Historically the social classes in the Black community were bound together by Jim Crow segregation laws. Blacks on welfare and Black Ph.D.s alike were ordered to the back of the bus or denied work because of their race. We cant depend on the political systemthe Democrats or Republicansor the corporate world to solve our problems; all too often their policies have contributed to them. These leaders must be women and men with vision who have the capacity to articulate the common grievances and goals of the community. How Women Can Find Mentors in a World with Few Role Models Do women have a tougher time finding mentors than men? Thats what women managers tell me, time and again. The rest must find their own mentors. Heres some advice. (Minorities and others who have trouble finding role models in upper management can learn about creative ways to build mentoring relationships, as well.) Few women hold positions of power, the story goes. Meanwhile, members of the predominant mentoring classwhite malesare too busy seeking clones of themselves. And this serves as an effective barrier to top-level jobs. So whats to be done? A number of local and even national programs are increasing mentoring opportunities for women, but they only reach a handful of those needing guidance. Wanted: Company Change Agents The most sought-after person in todays workplace is someone known as a change leader, a new breed of middle manager whos in short supply. Very different from your run-of-the-mill general managers, these mavericks get big results when you need them. They are focused, determined, willing to break rules, and great at motivating their troops. But how do you identify these people in your organization? How do you build a cadre of such quirky but essential agents of change? McKinsey Co. director Jon R. Katzenbach has some answers. For the past three years he and a team of six McKinsey partners have been studying middle-manager change agents at organizations from Compaq Computer to Mobil to the New York City Transit. The fruit of this research is the forthcoming book Real Change Leaders. Katzenbach recently sat down with Stratford Sherman, a member of Fortunes board of editors, to discuss what he learned. Why are midlevel change leaders so important to todays organizations? For some time now companies have wanted to change the behaviors and skills of large numbers of their employees. Theyre not, however, very good at that yet. I dont see many victories; I dont think even GE would claim complete victory. You can create a good program-like [former CEO] John Akerss plan in the early 1990s to transform IBMbut it doesnt work. Something goes wrong in the middle ranks of the company, and all the admonitions from the top dont get through. For large-scale transformations, you need a critical mass of change leaders in the middle of the organization. DATA TOOLS: Leadership and emotions Leadership can be perceived as a particularly emotion-laden process, with emotions entwined with the social influence process. In an organization, the leaders mood has some effects on his/her group. These effects can be described in following method: The mood of individual group members. The leaders transmit their moods to other group members through the mechanism of emotional contagion. Mood contagion may be one of the psychological mechanisms by which charismatic leaders influence followers. Group members with leaders in a positive mood experience more positive mood than do group members with leaders in a negative mood. The affective tone of the group. Group affective tone is an aggregate of the moods of the individual members of the group and refers to mood at the group level of analysis. Groups with leaders in a positive mood have a more positive affective tone than do groups with leaders in a negative mood. Group affective tone represents the consistent or homogeneous affective reactions within a group. Group processes like coordination, effort expenditure, and task strategy. Public expressions of mood impact how group members think and act. For example, expressions of positive moods by leaders signal that leaders deem progress toward goals to be good. The group members respond to those signals cognitively and behaviorally in ways that are reflected in the group processes. When people experience and express mood, they send signals to others. Leaders signal their goals, intentions, and attitudes through their expressions of moods. In research about client service, it was found that expressions of positive mood by the leader improve the performance of the group, although in other sectors there were other findings. Beyond the leaders mood, his behavior is a source for employee positive and negative emotions at work. Examples feedback giving, allocating tasks, resource distribution. Since employee behavior and productivity are directly affected by their emotional states, it is imperative to consider employee emotional responses to organizational leaders Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage moods and emotions in the self and others, contributes to effective leadership in organizations. Leadership is about being responsible. The leader creates situations and events that lead to emotional response. Certain leader behaviors displayed during interactions with their employees are the sources of these affective events. Leaders shape workplace affective events. Leadership styles Leadership styles refer to a leaders behavior. It is the result of the philosophy, personality and experience of the leader. Dictator Autocratic Participative Laissez Fair Dictator Leaders A leader who uses fear and threats to get the jobs done. As similar with a leader who uses an autocratic style of leadership, this style of leader also makes all the decisions. Autocratic or Authoritarian Leaders Under the autocratic leadership styles, all decision-making powers are centralized in the leader as shown such leaders are dictators. They do not entertain any suggestions or initiative from subordinates. The autocratic management has been successful as it provides strong motivation to the manger. It permits quick decision-making as only one person decides for the whole group, and keeps it to them until they feel it is needed by the rest of the group. An autocratic leader does not trust anybody. Participative or Democratic Leaders The democratic leadership style favors decision-making by the group as shown, such as leader gives instruction after consulting the group. He can win the cooperation of his group and can motivate them effectively and positively. The decisions of the democratic leader are not unilateral as with the autocrat because they arise from consultation with the group members and participation by them. Laissez Faire or Free Rein Leaders A free rein leader does not lead, but leaves the group entirely to itself as shown; such a leader allows maximum freedom to subordinates. They are given a freehand in deciding their own policies and methods. Free rein leadership style is considered better than the authoritarian style. But it is not as effective as the democratic style. Transactional and Transformational Leadership Transactional Leaders Leaders who guide or motivate their followers in the direction of established goals by clarifying role and task requirements Transformational Leaders Inspire followers to transcend their own self-interests for the good of the organization; they can have a profound and extraordinary effect on followers Not opposing, but complementary, approaches to leadership Great transformational leaders must also be transactional; only one type is not enough for success Characteristics of the Two Types of Leaders Transactional Contingent Reward: Contracts exchange of rewards for effort, promises rewards for good performance, recognizes accomplishments Management by Exception: Active: Watches and searches for deviations from rules and standards, takes corrective action Passive: Intervenes only if standards are not met Laissez-Faire: Abdi

Additional Aircraft Feasibility Study :: Essays Papers

Additional Aircraft Feasibility Study Preface I have been the head aviation department manager of First North Bank since 1985. This bank has branches in Waterloo, IA; Springfield, MO; Fayetteville, AK; and Colorado Springs, CO. For the past 12 years the company has been operating an eight passenger King Air B-200 that currently has 2500 flying hours on the frame. First North Bank has recently acquired Banks R Us (probably because of the horrible name) and will be expanding their operations considerably. They will be changing the name of Banks R Us to the First North Bank name at the following locations: Madison, WI; Wilmington, NC; Lakeland, FL; Amarillo, TX; and Medford, OR. I have now been assigned by my CEO to do a feasibility study to determine if the addition of an aircraft will benefit the company. Introduction The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility of adding additional aircraft to the corporations aviation department. This study will introduce what aircraft the company is currently using, how it is being used, and the current structure of the aviation department. A detailed analysis will be presented on the prices and costs of each aircraft as well as a recommendation of what aircraft should be purchased or leased. A newly developed structure of the aviation department will be presented along with a new recommended plan for the usage of the aircraft. The study will then conclude with a sum up of all the recommendations. Current Aircraft The company is currently operating a 1985 Beechcraft King Air B-200. This aircraft is a propeller jet aircraft. The definition of a propeller jet aircraft is that the engine is a jet that drives a propeller. The propellers spin at a constant rate and speed changes are made by adjusting the angle of the propeller. The aircraft seats eight passengers to include the pilot’s seat. The entire aircraft is in very good condition with only 2500 flight hours on it and has the potential of supplying many more years of trouble free service with proper maintainace. The performance charteristiccs of this aircraft is as follows: Beech King Air B200 Characteristics PERFORMANCE U.S. METRIC Max Cruise Speed (336 mph) 292 kt 541 kph Certified Ceiling 35,000 ft 10,668 m

Friedrich Nietzsche Essay

I chose to write on Freidrich Nietzsche . He was criticized for all of his writing because they were so controversial. He was mostly known for his statement â€Å"the Death of God†. It was said that a lot of his philosophies were misunderstood by most of his readers. He was commonly classified as a German philosopher. He believed in life, creativity, health, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. His key ideas were the death of god, perspectivism, the Ubermensch, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence. His philosophy was highly innovative and revolutionary but was also indebted to the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Heraclitus. Nietzsche frequently criticized Christianity in offensive and the most blasphemous ways possible. His views on morality were what got the most attention by other scholars. In his Daybreak he called himself an â€Å"immoralist† and often criticized the morality of his day. He wanted to create a new more naturalistic source of value in the fundamental impulses of life itself. He claims that Christianity had more of a master-slave morality than anything else. He associated the master-slave morality to that of the Jewish and Christian traditions. He associates good morals with charity, piety, restraint, meekness and submission and evil one’s being cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. He saw slave morality was mainly born out of the resentment slaves held toward their masters. It worked to give the slaves their own sense of inferiority over the wealthy or better off masters. His beliefs made it seem as if the slaves had chosen to be enslaved because they were believed to have the good morals. Their refusal to stand up for themselves was relabeled as meekness to further prove this point. Nietzsche argued that slave morality is essentially the morality of effectiveness since moral goodness involves anything that is helpful to whom is weak and poor. Nietzsche saw modern day Europe and its Christianity existing only as a hypocritical state due to the tension created by the master-slave morality. He made it clear that although he didn’t believe that morality was bad, it was just portrayed wrongfully. He believed that each individual should be responsible for their own morality and how they wanted to portray it. One of his favorite mottos was taken from Pindar was â€Å"Become what you are. † In Nietzsche’s view recent development in modern science and the increasing of secularization of European society had effectively â€Å"killed† the Christian God who served as a meaning and value in the west for more than a thousand years. He claimed that the death of god would eventually lead to the loss of any if not all universal perspective on things. The death of god would also cause people to hang on to their own multiple, diverse, fluid perspectives. This thought was eventually named perspectivism. But instead it was believed that the death of god would eventually go from perspectivism to nihilism or the belief that nothing had natural importance and that life itself lacked purpose. Nietzsche then said in The Spoke Zarathustra that an Ubermensch would be brought upon the people. He believed that only after a long twilight period with no God and nihilism Zarathustr’s gift of the superman would be given to mankind. Any problem that shall arise could be solved by the superman. An important element form his philosophical attitude was â€Å"will to power† which was a foundation for understanding motivation in human behavior. He held that the will to power was much more important than the force for adaptation or survival. According to him, it was only in limited situations where the drive for conservation was higher than the will to power, primarily when life was reduced to a state of poverty and limitation. He claimed that the natural condition of life was one of abundance. Later in his works he claimed that the will to power applied to all living things not just mankind. He suggested that adaptation and the struggle to survive came secondary in the evolution of animals and was less important than their desire to expand their power. He eventually took it even further claiming that even inorganic nature also followed the same rules. Nietzsche will to power was often compared to Schopenhauer’s will to live theory. Schopenhauer work was written an entire generation before Nietzsche and was believed to be borrowed. Schopenhauer’s belief was that the entire universe and everything in it was driven by a primordial will to live, resulting in all creatures’ desire to avoid death and procreate. Nietzsche however challenged this belief stating that people and animals really just want power and living in itself is only a subsidiary aim necessary to promote one’s own power. He backed up this belief by using competitive fighting as an example. He stated that people as well as animals were willing to risk their lives to gain power or higher ranking within their groups. Nietzsche was compared to other writers before him along with their views and beliefs on motivation of the human behavior, each time Nietzsche argued that in the end the will to power provided the most useful and general explanation. One of Nietzsche’s articles Eternal Return, was also known as the eternal recurrence, and was used as an answer to nihilism. In it he states that the wish for eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life. To comprehend the eternal recurrence in his thought and not to purely come to peace with it but to embrace it required the love of fate. Some people had stated that the Eternal Return was a crucial part of Nietzsche’s work and was central to his entire philosophy but was not widely discussed felt as though a large part of his philosophy was left untouched and unexplored. The basic explanation was that the universe was limited in extent and contained a finite amount of matter; time was viewed as being infinite. The universe however had no starting or ending state and matter comprised its constant changing state. The number of possible changes was infinite so sooner or later the same state would eventually occur. This concept was one of his most difficult to understand, he used it as an existential thought experiment. His most famous quote on eternal recurrence was called â€Å"the heaviest burden† and the best way to comprehend it was to let it be read by the reader. What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: â€Å"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but ever pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and his moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust! † Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently that this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? -Nietzsche

Influence Business Continuity Essay

Working for Riordan Mfg., we have been tasked with either overseeing the company’s initiative, or advising an initiative to implement a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). Although there are scores of ways to do this on this topic, which also includes the concepts of â€Å" Disaster Recovery Planning† and â€Å"Business Resumption Planning,† the reality is that we need to start somewhere. And it is best that we think of this as a process, with distinct phases that provide measureable outcomes. There are two sayings one is â€Å"Rome was not built in a day† and another one is â€Å"You have to eat an elephant one bite at a time† The BCP takes time to work and things will not happen overnight. Some businesses are satisfied with just doing a data backup and are not concerned about other ramifications of an unplanned disaster, which of course, is an irresponsible approach. Riordan Mfg, however, will use their BCP efforts on what matters most to them — planning and addressing how they would manage significant, yet more â€Å"realistic† disasters. Either way, they’ll want to consider the questions below and how they influence how they will go about doing the BCP exercise: How long can we be â€Å"down† before our business is affected in such a way that we may not be able to recover (and what does â€Å"down† mean to us) How much does it cost us to be down? How long of an outage can our customers/clients accept before they go elsewhere for services? How much business can we conduct if our computers are down, if our paper files are water soaked from a pipe that exploded in the wall, if access to our building is being denied for safety reasons, or if our operations manager or IT leader goes missing for an extended period of time for any reason? Are there any regulatory requirements from local or federal government that require us to have a plan like this, and how do we know if we are staying within those requirements? Before this plan can work Riordan has to put a team together to implement the plan should the need ever arise. Assessment and Feedback Riordan Manufacturing has come across some concerns and issues with the employees. Employee motivation and retention has become an issue within the company. Riordan’s human resources processes are prohibiting the empowerment of employees, delaying potential growth due to unbalanced profits, and a decrease in sales. The human resources department needs to address these concerns because if they do not address these current issues, the company will not be able to continue their business strategy. The issues preventing logical human capital management is lack of employee motivation, a high turnover rate in strategic areas, the pay levels are below industry standards, and there is a lack of structure in the performance review process throughout the company. Riordan Manufacturing can work these issues out by creating a coaching and feedback process, planning career development programs, and updating pay for performance reward systems. The forms of communication from the management to the employees will be by e-mail, meetings and newsletters. Meetings will be held weekly as needed and more often if warranted. The newsletter will be published once a month, and the e-mails will be sent as needed. If a problem occurs a meeting wil management, team leaders and employees will be held immediately. Riordan Manufacturing’s reward system is out dated and it is based on how long an employee has been with the company and cost of living rises as well as seniority and position. The reward system does not reflect the company’s current strategy. Riordan has the opportunity to evaluate the structure of their pay scale and have their pay scale to reflect the corporate vision. The greater the alignment, or fit, between the organization and the compensation system, the more effective the organization (Milkovich & Newman, 2004). Riordan acknowledged there was a large group of employees that were not performing at top level while conducting a review of performance data. In order for the company to exceed, human capital must perform at its highest capacities. Riordan has the opportunity to identify motivators in Assessment and Feedback Existing talent pools to increase productivity. Employees must be motivated if they are to perform, behaviors such as high task performance, job seeking, attendance, or cooperation with others (Dreher & Dougherty, 2001). Motivation Theories (expectancy and equity). As soon as something is seen to be going in the wrong direction the so called brakes would have to be applied. And since Riordan Manufacturing is a publicly-owned corporations they have the primary goal of maximizing shareholder wealth, strategic planning centers on the long-term growth in a company’s financial position. Also, Riordan Manufacturing must constantly keep abreast of local, state, federal, and international laws, since a simple legislative act could affect them in any number of ways. Another primary concern is that of competition. This also suggests that Riordan Manufacturing should construct much of its budget based upon its economic forecast. The research concludes that Riordan Manufacturing seems well-poised to continue its growth in the plastic injection molding industry, and appears to adhere to sound financial planning strategies, leaving little doubt that its shareholders are being appropriately represented. Once Riordan Manufacturing clears all of the hurdles and is on the road to making everyone money things will look good for them and all.

Sample of Personal Statement Essay Example

Sample of Personal Statement Essay Example Sample of Personal Statement Essay Sample of Personal Statement Essay To Whom It May Concern: Re: Application of Student Visa to study in RMIT University In additional to all my documents provided, I would like to take this opportunity to write a personal statement to clarify the main reasons that drive me to study in Australia. I was born in 1981, the starting period of Chinas economy reform designed and implemented under the leadership of Mr. De Xiaoping. I have witnessed the dramatic changes in the continuous infrastructure construction, observable improvement of living standards, greater enrichment of social life, gradual deregulation of policies and strong growth of local economy. All the positive sides make everybody fond of the market economy, especially my parents, both of who are managers of property development companies. My parents have great influence on me, so when I was young, I start to learn how to keep abreast of the modern society by learning the new knowledge and skills. The world is already heading toward the new economy, although there are still some turmoil in certain fields and period. The explosive information technology changed the world in such quick and significant manners that many economists cant explain well. Meanwhile, China is joining WTO, the economy at this moment is growing at 8% annually, by further eliminating non-tariff barriers and reduce tariff rates, Chinas market will experience huge structural changes and countless opportunities will emerge to make China the hottest spot in the world economy. As a Chinese student, I am living in a new age that China is in shortage of personnel with proficient English skills, overseas education background and capability to merge east and west cultures. By choosing to study in RMIT University in Melbourne Australia, there are a few advantages that I can achieve my goal: Australia is a multicultural country, and RMIT university is a well-known multicultural university. I can learn how to interact within different cultures to improve my interpersonal skills. I also can build up a network that comprises friends from different countries and areas. Australia enjoys vast land, abundant resources, mild weather and well-managed security, it is the best destination to study. Australia has the world class educational systems, and RMIT university is well-know for its practical mission and provident objectives. By learning its IT courses, I can become an IT professional recognised in Australia and China and other places as I will have obtained professional IT skills. Australia has good relationship with China and Australia is also changing its old economy image by actively engaged into cooperation between APEC countries and regions. China is certainly the biggest potential market for Australia. With my multicultual background and Australian experience and skills, when I have completed study in Australia and returns China, I can participate into the development of business cooperation or any other relationship In short, by choosing to study in RMIT University in Australia, I will benefit greatly from the extraordinary experience for building up my professional career, and I will help to build China, my motherland, into a well-managed market economy country. I look forward that my application can be assessed and approved at your earliest convenience! Regards! xxxx

Event and Occasion

Event and Occasion Event and Occasion Event and Occasion By Maeve Maddox Karen writes: Wondering if you can do a post on the use of event and occasion are they interchangeable terms, or does one imply more significance than the other? To me, an occasion is more special than an event. The twins birthday is always a special occasion for the family. However, many speakers would use the word event in this example. The words are so close in meaning and have so many different applications that it is difficult to formulate a hard and fast distinction between them. Wikipedia lists 20 different senses for event: nine general meanings and eleven specialized meanings. Context is everything. The word event is common in writing about sports and entertainment. Fox and DirecTV hosting charity event for family of the late Will Flannery Apple announces special event for January 27 A rematch of top rivals Darrion Caldwell and Brent Metcalf is the Main Event of a seven-match card of wrestling bouts†¦ Conventions and conferences are events. Graduations and jazz festivals are events. Plain old parties are often called events. One distinction that can be drawn is that occasion carries the sense of a falling together of events to produce an opportunity for something. Let me take the occasion of this interview as the opportunity to question one of the received ideas about contemporary poetry. An event, on the other hand, is usually scheduled. Indeed, an event may be scheduled to celebrate an occasion: A conference will be held †¦ on the occasion of Richard Vargas 80th birthday The expression on occasion means from time to time: On occasion I have misspoken about my service and I regret that and I take full responsibility. An occasional poem is a poem written to celebrate a special occasion such as a coronation or a royal birthday. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:50 Handy Expressions About Handsâ€Å"As Well As† Does Not Mean â€Å"And†Drama vs. Melodrama

Sample Business Recommendation Letter From an Employer

Sample Business Recommendation Letter From an Employer Students who are applying to a business, management, or entrepreneur program will need to have at least one recommendation letter that demonstrates your leadership ability. This sample recommendation letter is the perfect example of what a business school wants to see from both undergraduate and graduate program applicants.It has been reprinted (with permission) from EssayEdge.com. Named ​one of the best essay services on the Internet by The Washington Post, EssayEdge has helped more applicants write successful personal statements than any other company in the world.Though EssayEdge did not write or edit this sample recommendation letter, it is a good example of how a recommendation should be formatted. See more sample recommendation letters. Sample Letter of Recommendation Dear Sir: Esti worked for me as my assistant for one year. I recommend her without qualification for your entrepreneur program. While working in commercial production, I often relied on Esti to put together creative presentations, for which she described and outlined the artistic approach to the project, researching illustrations and photographic reference materials. Her creativity, resourcefulness, and ability to see a project through really made these presentations distinctive and successful. When we went into production on the feature film Hotcha, Esti was able to observe every step of the process, sitting in on meetings and working with people in all areas of the production from the moment the production was set in motion through the release of the film ten months later. During this time, she was an effective communicator, often serving as my liaison to scattered members of the crew. She also coordinated projects involving numerous people, and her ability to work collaboratively while guiding the project quickly and effectively was outstanding. For example, when we suddenly needed to reconceive several action sequences that had already been storyboarded, Esti quickly found a new storyboard artist on location and worked with him, the stunt coordinator and the cinematographer through several drafts to make sure the new sequences worked, and then communicated with crew members from all departments, making sure everyone was up-to-date on the changes that were relevant to them. She even jumped in to draw a few last-minute storyboard changes herself. Estis sensitivity, diligence, energy, and sense of humor made working with her a joy. I highly recommend her as a welcome addition to the program. Sincerely,Jeff Jones

Venture Screening Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Venture Screening - Assignment Example It also requires the skills and ingenuity to search and manage resources, which are often owned by other people. In any way, entrepreneurship requires considerable thought, planning and preparation. To certain extent, the modern world with its highly dynamic and changing character of technology, markets and competition among them, plays into the hands to entrepreneurship. Thus far, there is a great exertion in trying to model and see the future, as while business plan of a certain venture is designed, it can simply become obsolete (Timmons, 1999). When an entrepreneur discovers the potential of a new venture, one should reply the question if the new venture idea is able to make money. A feasibility study will help to answer such question and to assist in changing one’s new venture idea into a successful business. Such feasibility study is a certain comprehensive plan, which consists of a systematic gathering, recording and analysis of information concerning the potential succe ss of a new venture idea. In other words, it is a process screening that is used to find out business opportunities. Business plan will be worked out on its basis. Such feasibility study includes the preliminary assessment, new venture concept, market assessment, analysis of cost- profit and plans for the future actions (Bates, 2003). A feasibility study of screening is aimed to help one to screen out the ideas that have limited opportunity and allow the entrepreneur to invest one’s time, money and efforts into ideas with a potential for success.   The phase of preliminary assessment evolves evaluation and choosing of the idea of new venture and potentially generates the desired level of outcome in the desired time period. During this period personal and professional considerations are assessed in order to evaluate the needs of one entrepreneur and financial feasibility of the business idea. Here the entrepreneur figures out whether he or she wants to start a

Is this unlawful discrimination Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Is this unlawful discrimination - Essay Example All employees have equal rights to religion at the workplace. The right to religion should be free and open to all such that one can choose the religion they want to be associated with. The equal employment opportunity act states that no employee should be discriminated based on national origin, sex, race, color, religion, or an employee acting according to his or her rights (Nkomo, Fottler, & McAfee, 2011). Yes Elaine was fired because of religious discrimination as she refused to convert to be a Baptist like other employees and the supervisor. Elaine has the burden of proof I would convict the defendant who is the human resource manager on claims of unlawful discrimination. The plaintiff can show that she was fired based on religious discrimination. The plaintiff can also confirm that she had all the necessary qualification for the job as she had worked for the last six years. And above all Elaine was protected by the equal employee opportunity act of 1972 (Nkomo, Fottler, & McAfee, 2011). This is unlawful discrimination because everyone has a right to freedom of

French Discussion (Choosing a cadidate for a job) Essay

French Discussion (Choosing a cadidate for a job) - Essay Example et culturels, comme  «Ã‚  Communautà © et Diversità ©Ã‚  !  Ã‚ », un grand projet annuel qui rà ©unit des politiciens, hommes daffaires, des personnalità ©s culturelles et des reprà ©sentants des plusieurs organisations non-gouvernementales pour un dialogue sur les problà ¨mes plus importants de la socià ©tà © comme la pauvretà ©, la violence et la discrimination, en proposant des solutions concrà ¨tes pour ces problà ¨mes et en donnant des fonds matà ©riels pour les solutionner. Il a des bonnes recommandations et il nous a laissà © une bonne impression aprà ¨s l’interview, parce qu’il est enthousiaste, à ©nergique, il dit qu’il aime le travail, en plus, il n’est pas marià © et il affirme qu’il peut donner tous son temps pour accomplir sa tà ¢che. En plus, ses connaissances d’anglais sont bonnes, il a prix des courses pendant trois ans. Le deuxià ¨me candidat est Mademoiselle Annette Girard, 22 ans, licencià © en gestion à ©conomique, spà ©cialisation entreprise, mais elle a fait des cours parallà ¨les pendant deux annà ©es pour obtenir une diplà ´me en administration touristique. Elle a fait parti de diffà ©rents projets culturels, parmi lesquels le projet europà ©en  «Ã‚  Discover the Culture  Ã‚ » (Dà ©couvre la Culture), qui a eu lieu en Lituanie pour deux semaines. En plus, elle a gagne le premià ¨re place dans le concours international  «Ã‚  The People Speak  Ã‚ » (Les Gens Parle), en consà ©quence elle a participe dans la confà ©rence internationale organise dans le sià ¨ge des Nations Unis à   New York- un dialogue sociale et culturel entre les jeunes reprà ©sentants de 13 pays. Elle est une personne dynamique et captivante et elle n’est pas marià ©e, donc elle peut consacrer tout son temps à   diriger le projet. Elle a travaille comme organisateur des à ©và ©nements dâ₠¬â„¢entreprise, mais elle a beaucoup d’expà ©rience en travaillant avec des personnes qui viennent des pays diffà ©rents. Ses connaissances d’anglaise sont trà ¨s bonnes, elle a le premier certificat Cambridge et des trà ¨s

Andy Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Andy Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura - Essay Example The essay "Andy Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura" discusses Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych and Yasumasa Morimura’s Self-Portrait (Actress)/ White Marilyn. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych and Yasumasa Morimura’s Self-Portrait (Actress)/ White Marilyn depict the cult infatuation with Marilyn Monroe. This infatuation goes deeper than Monroe’s physical beauty. Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych and Morimura’s Self-Portrait (Actress)/ White Marilyn have the same subject; Marilyn Monroe. The works were done thirty-four years apart, Marilyn Diptych in 1962 and Self-Portrait (Actress)/ White Marilyn in 1996. Yet both have the same theme. Both are about Marilyn Monroe, but not about her as a whole person. The person portrayed in Warhol’s piece is â€Å"more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara† (Tate Collection). Hollywood publicity photographs are airbrushed. They wanted to present the best makeup and hairstyle possible on Monroe. This was not the real Monroe. She did not always look perfect, because like everyone else, Monroe was human. Similarly Morimura’s photograph of three figures did not portray the real Monroe. His figures are posed like Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, where her white dress is following up at an air vent. This is once more a movie posed. Monroe had wardrobe, makeup, lighting, and other Hollywood magic. So the Monroe both artists wanted to capture were not realistic, but based on her Hollywood image.

Aspects of a particular culture Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Aspects of a particular culture - Research Paper Example This paper will focus on just two aspects of Indian culture, namely religion and marriage. More than 80% of Indians would regard themselves as adherents of the Hindu religion, while some 12% are Muslim and there are small minorities of Christian, Sikh and other religions each numbering between 2 and 3%. These numbers may appear small, but when one considers that the population of India is over 1.15 billion people, it is clear that they also are significant in size. The focus here will be the Hindu majority, though it should be remembered that the other religions also have their place in Indian society. One of the first things that strike a visitor to India is the pervasive influence of the caste system. Fuller (1992, p.3) points out that the Indian form of greeting is a symbolic act which reflects this main tenet of the Hindu world view. The hands are placed together, fingers pointing upwards, and the head is bowed, while the person says â€Å"namaste† which is the word for this gesture of respect. There are more elaborate forms, such as bowing low, or even lying prostrated on the ground, and more cursory forms, such as a mere flick of the head and hand. People use this gesture to greet people, and also to show respect to the many gods and goddesses that abound in their temples across the land. What this gesture reveals is that the Hindu religion is based upon a hierarchical inequality. Unlike a European handshake, the Hindu greeting expresses a fundamental asymmetry of rank in which both parties are aware of their own and the other’s place. So, for example, a wife s hows this respect to her husband, and so does a child to his or her parents, and an employee to his or her employer. This hierarchical structure is evident all across the society, and whole groups, or castes of people are classified with a particular position above and below other castes. A second

Lessons 13-16 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Lessons 13-16 - Essay Example The winds should also be a light wind with an approximate of under 15 knots. Additionally, the water needs to be of lower temperatures, which are some of the ideal conditions for surfing. The 9.0 Japan earthquake of March 11, 2011 was indeed a surprise to many. Scientists, despite having predicted the earthquakes occurrence, never expected its large size. Additionally, the earthquake resulted in the death of approximately 18,000 people, even though warnings were issued especially in people’s cell phones. The earthquake also shifted the earth from its normal axis of rotation through the redistribution of mass. Question 2: Looking at the Ring of Fire, name 8 other countries, besides Japan, that are familiar with frequent earthquakes. Tell me about 1 of them that made headlines in the news within the past year. In the ring of fire, other countries familiar with frequent earthquakes besides Japan include Canada, United States, Costa Rica, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, and Russia. One of the nations that has made headlines in the past year is Costa Rica, in which a powerful earthquake of a magnitude of up to7.6 shook the nation and a wide swath of Central America early in the morning in mid-2013, making substantive news headlines. Pacific Ring of Fire refers to an area with frequent occurrences of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, contributed to by tectonic shifts in the earth’s plates. Because of such factors, the pacific ring of fire experiences an increased number of tsunamis considering the frequent movement of the earth’s plates. There exist three major types of tides, semidiurnal tides, mixed tides, and diurnal tides. Semidiurnal tides involve the existence of two high tides of equal heights and two low tides of equal heights. Mixed tides on the other side have two periods of high water and two periods of low water each day; however, the tidal heights are not equal.

Aspects of a particular culture Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Aspects of a particular culture - Research Paper Example This paper will focus on just two aspects of Indian culture, namely religion and marriage. More than 80% of Indians would regard themselves as adherents of the Hindu religion, while some 12% are Muslim and there are small minorities of Christian, Sikh and other religions each numbering between 2 and 3%. These numbers may appear small, but when one considers that the population of India is over 1.15 billion people, it is clear that they also are significant in size. The focus here will be the Hindu majority, though it should be remembered that the other religions also have their place in Indian society. One of the first things that strike a visitor to India is the pervasive influence of the caste system. Fuller (1992, p.3) points out that the Indian form of greeting is a symbolic act which reflects this main tenet of the Hindu world view. The hands are placed together, fingers pointing upwards, and the head is bowed, while the person says â€Å"namaste† which is the word for this gesture of respect. There are more elaborate forms, such as bowing low, or even lying prostrated on the ground, and more cursory forms, such as a mere flick of the head and hand. People use this gesture to greet people, and also to show respect to the many gods and goddesses that abound in their temples across the land. What this gesture reveals is that the Hindu religion is based upon a hierarchical inequality. Unlike a European handshake, the Hindu greeting expresses a fundamental asymmetry of rank in which both parties are aware of their own and the other’s place. So, for example, a wife s hows this respect to her husband, and so does a child to his or her parents, and an employee to his or her employer. This hierarchical structure is evident all across the society, and whole groups, or castes of people are classified with a particular position above and below other castes. A second

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Essay Example for Free

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston Essay A proficient U S journalist and author of the 1994 bestseller The Hot Zone, A Terrifying True Story, Richard Preston’s creative capabilities revolve around alarming disease epidemics and bio- terrorism. The research by Preston for his 1992 New Yorker article, â€Å"Crisis in the Hot Zone† forms the basis of this non-fiction bio-thriller. The Hot Zone delineates a dramatic, chilling and realistic tale of an Ebola virus outbreak, which occurs in a monkey storage warehouse in a suburban Washington D. C. laboratory in 1989. In this laboratory, monkeys being used in scientific experiments quickly sicken and die due to a filovirus. It tells about an explosive chain of lethal transmissions begins far from Washington, D.C. laboratory and allows the lab to become a ‘hot zone’. Preston goes on meticulously about how these viruses work and the symptoms that appear in human beings. He traces the history of these viruses from their discovery and examines their first known index cases in detail. He also delves deeply into tales of previous lethal outbreaks in Africa out of these filoviruses. The Hot Zone employs a four fold structure. The first section of this non- fiction, â€Å"The Shadow of Mount Elgon† acts as the exposition of the story. It zeroes- in on the history of the infective agents and speculation about the origin of AIDS. The reader is introduced to the Marburg Virus, via people who have contracted it. This section narrates the story of Charles Monet who caught Marburg from Kitum Cave in Central Africa. It analyses in detail the progress of the disease, from the initial headache and backache, to the last stage in which Monet’s internal organs bleed out and fail in Nairobi hospital. The second part of the book entitled â€Å"The Monkey House† portrays the discovery of Ebola Reston Virus among imported monkeys in Reston, Virginia. This also includes tidbits on what steps have been taken to decontaminate the infected beings. The third section, â€Å"Smashdown† serves as the climax of the story. Here, the major characters like Major Nancy Jaax, Colonel Jerry Jaax, Dan Dalgard, Gene Johnson, and Colonel C J Peters etc must encounter the virus face- to-face in the monkey house. Some hair- raising events are there during the destruction of animals, like an escape of one monkey and failures in the protective suits worn by personnel. The fourth section, entitled â€Å"Kitum Cave†, signals the denouement of the story. Here Preston reflects on the origin and spread of AIDS. The Hot Zone highlights the impact of lethal viruses on human and animal population. The stars of the hot zone are these two viruses, Marburg and Ebola. These are considered to be ancient and their potential to eradicate huge masses is really high, as more and more humans encroach on the rain forest. There are well- establish cases in which Ebola and Marburg have been transmitted from captive monkeys to humans. Preston points out in The Hot Zone that these viruses have ‘jumped species’ from monkeys to humans at the time human activity is upsetting the habitat and survival of her primates. His first case history of Charles Monet exemplifies this. Charles Monet, a French expatriate working in a sugar plantation in Kenya, becomes mysteriously ill after visiting Kitum Cave. He experiences head aches and back aches for several days before spiking a fever and vomits huge amounts of blood with black specks. Finally the virus, Marburg completely devours him. In 1989, Ebola traveled to Reston, Virginia in a shipment of a hundred crab eating monkeys from the Philippines, imported by Hazleton Research products for medical and pharmaceutical research. The final irony is that one version of Ebola turned out not to be toxic in humans. The author also creates an effectual atmosphere of fear by showing that doctors, who are almost always viewed as being heroic, can so easily contract this virus. The Hot Zone is a Jurassic park with germs, not of dinosaurs. Here Preston constantly reminds of how tiny and how hazardous a virus is. The impact of Ebola or Marburg could destroy the entire planet if it got a grip. Within 24 hours, a virus could make its way out of Africa on a plane and into such places like London, Paris, or New York and then spread out to the rest of the world. The tiny HIV virus has already spread destruction throughout the human population of the globe, and this is a point the author drives home again and again. A very minute amount of contaminated blood is enough to infect a human with the Ebola virus, so those working in the Hot Zone must constantly be careful for the smallest little tear that might allow it into their space suits. Preston makes an effort to draw attention to the AIDS epidemic in this bio –thriller. The HIV virus was in reality just making its way into the human population about the time that Charles Monet contracted Marburg. It appears that the origins of Marburg and HIV are almost similar. Both seem to have originated in African monkeys, and they undergo genetic change and ‘jump’ into human beings. C.J. Peters spends some time comparing AIDS and Ebola, as well. In the last section of the novel, the author explains the idea that as humans capture and destroy more and more of the rain forests, they may discharge many more unidentified viruses. It is as if the viruses act as the forests immune system, which is truly ironic since HIV and AIDS destroy the human immune system. In the book, Preston emphasizes the potential of such a little beasts, that are only microns in size, to wipe out the human population of the planet. In fact, the strength and appeal of this book come from the fear evoked in the reader. The gruesome, horrific deaths of Charles Monet, Nurse Mayinga, and Peter Cardinal set the reader in tension and dread of what will happen if the virus at Reston jumps into the human population. The majority of The Hot Zone is written from the third-person omniscient point of view. The author is not simply composing characters thoughts and emotions. This book recounts a true story, and Richard Preston interviewed many people to learn directly from those involved. Therefore, the reason the author is able to be omniscient is because he has taken great pains to be accurate in his telling of the tale. If he describes someones internal reaction to an event, he is relating what that person told him. He is also careful to give credibility to everyones viewpoints in the cases where people have conflicting recollections of a sequence of events. There are a few places in which the point of view switches to first person. This is a result of the authors reporting on his interviews with the various people engaged in the crisis at Reston, as well as those involved in earlier Ebola outbreaks. This serves to remind the reader that the story is not a piece of fiction, and it also allows the author to tell portions of the story in the participants own words. There are multiple settings in the book because it spans a long period of time (1980 to 1993) and follows viruses all over the world. Much of the African portion of the story takes place in Kenya and Sudan, and the real centerpiece is Kitum Cave in Western Kenya. The story starts and ends there though under very different circumstances. On the international level, there are also references to the Marburg virus stint in Germany, and a monkey farm in the Philippines. Aside from these brief mentions, the true settings of the story are Africa and the United States. The fact that the potential Ebola outbreak is happening so near the capital of one of the most powerful nations on earth definitely adds to the tension of the story. The language used in The Hot Zone is very explanatory. The novel could easily have been a litany of medical terms and acronyms. It is a factual story involving science, medicine, government, and military. The author is concerned with drawing the reader into the story. He wants to generate such a vivid picture that it is sporadically quite upsetting. Richard Prestons capacity to write literature is also obvious. His use of imagery is very successful. By the time there is an outbreak in the monkey house, the reader has been thoroughly apprised of the terribly agonizing, fierce death that awaits anyone infected by the virus. Throughout the entire story, Preston amalgamates scientific perception with fictional writing. Works Cited Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone. New York: Anchor, 1995. Litsum.com Hot Zone Stuff. 2007. http://acaclassof2010studyguides.blogspot.com  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  \2007\09\litsumcom-hot-zone-stuff.html

Ancient Egypt’s Comparison with Mesopotamia

Ancient Egypt’s Comparison with Mesopotamia Ancient Egypt’s farming system compared with Mesopotamia Ancient Egyptians had an easier life compared to the other ancient civilizations because of their reliable agriculture system. Geography played a big role, especially in farming. Due to geography, Mesopotamia and Egypt had different farming methods, weathers, environment, and flooding seasons. In fact, Egypt’s great farming system led them to have better conditions to farm than Mesopotamia because of flooding, the rivers and irrigation and the farming tools that they used. Economy, crops, flooding, and the weather varied between Mesopotamia and Egypt. Geography, flooding seasons, different farming tools, and methods led Egypt to have a better agriculture system than Egypt. The difference between geographies, which includes the environment, was the main factor that the farming was different in Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Flooding influenced farming in Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, flooding helped Egypt but it influenced badly in Mesopotamia. Egypt is settled on the world’s longest river, the Nile, which flows from south to north because of the geography of land. Unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt had a predictable flooding seasons. Farmers, knowing when to expect floods, were able to schedule growing seasons around when crops needed water. Not only did flooding help with good timing with farming, but it also provided rich soil from the flooding. The Nile River floods between June and October (Louis, and Jennifer). After floods, there would be a fertile land along the river which Egyptians used to plant and grow things such as fruits and vegetables (Gill, 29). Flood played a big role in farming and growing crops in Egypt. On the contrary, growing crops were more difficult for Mesopotamians because of the difference in geography. Mesopotamia had limited natural resources because of the unpredictable floods (David, 117). Farmers had no prediction when it was going to flood, which gave the farmers hard times finding the right season to farm. Unlike Egyptians, Mesopotamians lived in the city-states which were based on farming and trade. The city-states were a group of small cities which needed unity with one the other. Also, they were isolated from one another geographically and so the independence of each city-state became important. Farming played a big role in city-states. However, Egypt did not have a good environment, especially the flood was the main problem. Floods destroyed villages and took many lives (David, 121). The floods sometimes caused rivers to change courses and due to this farmers had a lot of trouble with crops. Sudden floods forced Mesopotamians to create an organized agricultural sys tem to help them with farming and growing crops. Mesopotamia was very dry, hot and had little rainfall. Farmers had hard time finding water for their crops. Farming was hard for Mesopotamians due to the hot weather and bad environment conditions (David, 122). Flood was not the only cause of having different farming system, but also due to using different tools and farming methods. Using different tools in farming and farming in different environment such as soil and weathers led Mesopotamia and Egypt to harvest different crops. Egyptian grew a lot of crops due to good weather and soil. Egyptian farmers grew crops such as wheat, barley, vegetables, figs, melons, pomegranates and vines (Barrow). Also, they grew flax which was made into linen (Barrow). Out of all the crops that the Egyptian farmers harvested, the most important crop was grain because ancient Egyptians used grain to make bread, porridge and beer (Barrow). Moreover, grain was the first crop that they grew after inundation. Once the grain was harvested, they grew vegetables, such as onions, leeks, cabbages beans and lettuce (Barrow). Crops differed between Mesopotamia and Egypt because of the environment, but also due to the different tools that they used to farm. Ancient Egypt ian had simple farming tools such as winnowing scoops, hoes, rakes, flint-bladed sickles and ploughs (Barrow). Farming methods, and tools also took a big role in Egypt to have a reliable farming system. Moreover, Egypt was geography isolated by deserts, mountains and seas which allowed their crops to grow well. Mesopotamia had only few crops to grow due to the geography and flooding which influenced the Economy. Due to unpredictable floods, Mesopotamians did not know when to farm. For some farmers, when it was time to harvest, flooded unexpectedly and swept away all the crops. However, the farmers raised few crops which were grains, fruit, vegetables, and barn yard animals. One of the methods that the farmers used was by filling the containers with seeds. Cows would pull plow seed and the seeds would go into the ground (Louis, and Jennifer). Mesopotamian people invented the seeder plow, which enabled farmers to carry out the tasks of seeding and plowing at the same time. The plow created a long, narrow trench made in the ground as seed was dropped into a funnel (Gabriel). The Mesopotamians further enhanced the technology of the plow by learning how to use ox to power it (Gabriel). There were few farming methods, however, Mesopotamia did not have enough methods than Egypt (Louis, and Jennife r). Due to the lack of farming methods, the Mesopotamian farmers hand harvested most crops. Because of the unpredictable flood, and lack of farming tools and methods, Egypt had a better profit in crops and had developed farming system. Along with the farming methods and tools, Mesopotamian and Egyptians were both influenced by geography (McIntosh, 56). Egypt, irrigation led to an increased food supply and helped water dry lands with streams, canals, or pipes. Due to irrigation, farmers could plan for the seasonal flooding. Nile River played a big role in farming because the river provided silt whenever there was a flood, so Egypt was ready for flood and they did not have to worry about the right time for farming. Also, after floods, there would be a fertile strip along the Nile River that was about 12 miles wide (Louis, and Jennifer). Moreover, this benefited the soil, due to this they had rich fertile soil which was good for farming. Not only good fertile soil land, but also the economy boosted. Farmers had a lot of profit due to growing crops. Crops were able to boost the economy because of irrigation. This increased food supply, fertile lands, canals, pipes, and farmers suffered less. Due to Egypt’s geogr aphy, economy boosted because of crops. On the other land, Mesopotamia had hard time with their economy because of their geography. Mesopotamia depended on Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, however, they sometimes brought unpredictable floods (Wallenfels, 28-29). Unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia was overwhelmed with a large amount of silt. This silt was a constant cause of problems in the manmade irrigation systems (Grigg, 22). Not only the silt was the problem, but also the salt was the problem. Right below the surface of where Mesopotamia was, there was a large cluster of salt deposits. This high saline content of the soil made farming in Mesopotamia much more complex and difficult than it was in Egypt. Also, any time the irrigation waterways were not able to be maintained, a lack of the large food would result. Due to the salt deposit and overload of silt caused a decline in economy and crops in Mesopotamia (Grigg, 21). Above all, Egypt had better and suitable environment to grow crops which developed their farming skills as well as their economy. Also, there were many farming methods and tools which led them to grow more crops, and no longer had to do hand harvested crops. Egypt’s distinguished geography, farming methods, and farming tools helped to set them up to be more advanced and outstanding society than Mesopotamian civilization. Works Cited Bertman, Stephen. Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.  Print. Cline, Eric H., and Jill Rubalcaba. The Ancient Egyptian World. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.  Print. David, A. Rosalie. Geography of Ancient Egypt. Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt. New  York: Facts On File, 2003. 117-22. Print. Louis, and Jennifer. Farming and Agriculture of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Farming and  Agriculture of Egypt and Mesopotamia. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2014. Roaf, Michael. Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. Arlington, VA: Stonehenge, 1992.  Print. Wallenfels, Ronald. World Eras, Volume 8: Ancient Mesopotamia, 3300-331 BCE. Detroit: Gale,  2004. Print. Gill, Vernon Dale, Tom (1974). Topsoil and Civilization, University of Oklahoma Press. Grigg, D.B, (1974). Agricultural Systems of the World. Cambridge University Press. Jacobsent, Thorkild (1982). Salinity and Irrigation Agriculture in Antiquity, UndenaPublications. Leonard, Jonathan Norton, (1973). The First Farmers, Time Life Books. Louis, and Jennifer. Farming and Agriculture of Egypt and Mesopotamia.Farming and Agriculture of Egypt and Mesopotamia. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2014.

Zinc hyperaccumulation :: science

Zinc hyperaccumulation Zinc hyperaccumulation in Thlaspi caerulescens as a chemical defence against herbivory ABSTRACT Thlaspi caerulescens is one of several plant species known to accumulate heavy metals in excess of 2% of their above ground plant biomass. The reasons for hyperaccumulation are unknown, but several studies conclude that it may be a plant chemical defence. This has been of interest to biologists because these metals are usually toxic. The accumulation of these metals may serve as a model for coevolution. We examined the effects of zinc hyperaccumulation in Thlaspi on Xanthomonas campestris and found that the plants containing zinc thrived when inoculated with this bacteria, while plants not containing zinc showed signs of deterioration. INTRODUCTION There are several wild plant species that have the ability to accumulate high quantities of heavy metals in their above ground biomass, up to three percent or more. Many of these plants are found in the Brassicaceae family throughout Europe and the British Isles. These plants thrive on mineral outcrops with calamine and serpentine soils rich with high levels of zinc, cadmium, and nickel (Baker et al, 1994). Several theories have been advanced on the reasons for this hyperaccumulation. Boyd and Martens propose that it could be a form of drought resistance, inadvertent uptake, interference, tolerance or disposal of metal from the plant, or a chemical defence against herbivory or pathogens. Several studies have supported the chemical defence hypothesis. Martens and Boyd (1994 and Boyd and Martens, 1994) showed that nickel hyperaccumulation is an effective defence against insect herbivores in two different feeding experiments. Boyd et at (1994) also demonstrated that nickel hyperaccumulating plants resisted pathogens including Xanthomonas campestris. Thlaspi caerulescens J. and C. Presl (Brassicaceae) is a hyperaccumulating plant found in the British Isles. It has been shown to accumulate 10,000 ppm (>1%) of its biomass in zinc (Bakeret at, 1994), and Pollard and Baker (1997) suggest that this is an effective defence against herbivory for this species. This paper explores the effects of zinc hyperaccumulation in Thlaspi as a defence against Xanthomonas campestris. MATERIALS AND METHODS Thlaspi caerulescens seeds were collected in Cloughwood, U. K. These seeds germinated on polyester beads supported in expanded polystyrene rafts floating on one-tenth strength Rorison's solution (Hewitt, 1966). These containers were placed in a Conviron E-15 environmental growth chamber at the following settings: 20 C, 90% RH, 16 hr day, and 8 hr night. After three weeks, twenty seedlings were transferred to 4 rafts composed of expanded styrene on polyethylene, each supporting five plants individually.

Analysis of Aristotles The Politics Essay -- Aristotle Poetics Politi

An Analysis of Aristotle's The Politics In "The Politics", Aristotle would have us believe that man by nature is a political animal. In other words, Aristotle seems to feel that the most natural thing for men to do is to come together in some form of political association. He then contends that this political association is essential to the pursuit of the good life. Finally he attempts to distinguish what forms of political association are most suitable to the pursuit of this good life. In formulating a critique of "The Politics", we shall first examine his claims as to what is natural to man and whether the criterion of the natural is sufficient to demonstrate virtue. We shall then examine what it is about political association that is essential to the pursuit of the good life. In conclusion, we shall see whether Aristotle's recommended mix of oligarchy and democracy is really suited to the practice of the good life. It seems to me that there is indeed something more natural to man than politics. While it is true that wherever you find men you tend to find political associations, it is also true that not all human associations are political. Aristotle rightly points out the family is a basic form of association that is mostly apolitical. Religion brings people together, as does the economic desire to trade and pursue economic activity. None of these spheres of human activity can be said to necessitate politics. These spheres of human action however, are seemingly found wherever human beings can be found, hence they are more natural in the sense that they automatically arise. Aristotle's account of the formation of the state is pure historical rationalization. He says that the state is natural because it arises out of mor... ...r to preserve virtue in the face of rampant vice than in times where individual virtue abounds in order to maintain stability and justice. The nature of politics is power over material things however, not virtue. Justice and virtue may be the professed functions and goals of politics, but this does not define what politics in fact are. A perplexing question however, is that of how the ideal constitution will be brought about when the virtuous have no interest in bringing it about precisely because virtue is defined by disinterestedness. Works Cited Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 Lord, Carnes. Aristotle: The Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 Nehamas, Alexander. Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Open Domain Event Extraction from Twitter

Open Domain Event Extraction from Twitter Alan Ritter University of Washington Computer Sci. & Eng. Seattle, WA [email  protected] washington. edu Mausam University of Washington Computer Sci. & Eng. Seattle, WA [email  protected] washington. edu Oren Etzioni University of Washington Computer Sci. & Eng. Seattle, WA [email  protected] washington. edu Sam Clark? Decide, Inc. Seattle, WA sclark. [email  protected] com ABSTRACT Tweets are the most up-to-date and inclusive stream of information and commentary on current events, but they are also fragmented and noisy, motivating the need for systems that can extract, aggregate and categorize important events.Previous work on extracting structured representations of events has focused largely on newswire text; Twitter’s unique characteristics present new challenges and opportunities for open-domain event extraction. This paper describes TwiCal— the ? rst open-domain event-extraction and categorization system for Twitt er. We demonstrate that accurately extracting an open-domain calendar of signi? cant events from Twitter is indeed feasible. In addition, we present a novel approach for discovering important event categories and classifying extracted events based on latent variable models.By leveraging large volumes of unlabeled data, our approach achieves a 14% increase in maximum F1 over a supervised baseline. A continuously updating demonstration of our system can be viewed at http://statuscalendar. com; Our NLP tools are available at http://github. com/aritter/ twitter_nlp. Entity Steve Jobs iPhone GOP Amanda Knox Event Phrase died announcement debate verdict Date 10/6/11 10/4/11 9/7/11 10/3/11 Type Death ProductLaunch PoliticalEvent Trial Table 1: Examples of events extracted by TwiCal. vents. Yet the number of tweets posted daily has recently exceeded two-hundred million, many of which are either redundant [57], or of limited interest, leading to information overload. 1 Clearly, we can bene? t from more structured representations of events that are synthesized from individual tweets. Previous work in event extraction [21, 1, 54, 18, 43, 11, 7] has focused largely on news articles, as historically this genre of text has been the best source of information on current events. Read also Twitter Case StudyIn the meantime, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become an important complementary source of such information. While status messages contain a wealth of useful information, they are very disorganized motivating the need for automatic extraction, aggregation and categorization. Although there has been much interest in tracking trends or memes in social media [26, 29], little work has addressed the challenges arising from extracting structured representations of events from short or informal texts.Extracting useful structured representations of events from this disorganized corpus of noisy text is a challenging problem. On the other hand, individual tweets are short and self-contained and are therefore not composed of complex discourse structure as is the case for texts containing narratives. In this paper we demonstrate that open-domain event extraction from Twitter is indeed feasible, for example our highest-con? dence extracted f uture events are 90% accurate as demonstrated in  §8.Twitter has several characteristics which present unique challenges and opportunities for the task of open-domain event extraction. Challenges: Twitter users frequently mention mundane events in their daily lives (such as what they ate for lunch) which are only of interest to their immediate social network. In contrast, if an event is mentioned in newswire text, it 1 http://blog. twitter. com/2011/06/ 200-million-tweets-per-day. html Categories and Subject Descriptors I. 2. 7 [Natural Language Processing]: Language parsing and understanding; H. 2. [Database Management]: Database applications—data mining General Terms Algorithms, Experimentation 1. INTRODUCTION Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter present the most up-to-date information and buzz about current ? This work was conducted at the University of Washington Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classr oom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for pro? t or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the ? rst page.To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior speci? c permission and/or a fee. KDD’12, August 12–16, 2012, Beijing, China. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1462-6 /12/08 †¦ $10. 00. is safe to assume it is of general importance. Individual tweets are also very terse, often lacking su? cient context to categorize them into topics of interest (e. g. Sports, Politics, ProductRelease etc†¦ ). Further because Twitter users can talk about whatever they choose, it is unclear in advance which set of event types are appropriate.Finally, tweets are written in an informal style causing NLP tools designed for edited texts to perform extremely poorly. Opportunities: The short and self-contained nature of tweets means they have very simple d iscourse and pragmatic structure, issues which still challenge state-of-the-art NLP systems. For example in newswire, complex reasoning about relations between events (e. g. before and after ) is often required to accurately relate events to temporal expressions [32, 8]. The volume of Tweets is also much larger than the volume of news articles, so redundancy of information can be exploited more easily.To address Twitter’s noisy style, we follow recent work on NLP in noisy text [46, 31, 19], annotating a corpus of Tweets with events, which is then used as training data for sequence-labeling models to identify event mentions in millions of messages. Because of the terse, sometimes mundane, but highly redundant nature of tweets, we were motivated to focus on extracting an aggregate representation of events which provides additional context for tasks such as event categorization, and also ? lters out mundane events by exploiting redundancy of information.We propose identifying im portant events as those whose mentions are strongly associated with references to a unique date as opposed to dates which are evenly distributed across the calendar. Twitter users discuss a wide variety of topics, making it unclear in advance what set of event types are appropriate for categorization. To address the diversity of events discussed on Twitter, we introduce a novel approach to discovering important event types and categorizing aggregate events within a new domain. Supervised or semi-supervised approaches to event categorization would require ? st designing annotation guidelines (including selecting an appropriate set of types to annotate), then annotating a large corpus of events found in Twitter. This approach has several drawbacks, as it is apriori unclear what set of types should be annotated; a large amount of e? ort would be required to manually annotate a corpus of events while simultaneously re? ning annotation standards. We propose an approach to open-domain eve nt categorization based on latent variable models that uncovers an appropriate set of types which match the data.The automatically discovered types are subsequently inspected to ? lter out any which are incoherent and the rest are annotated with informative labels;2 examples of types discovered using our approach are listed in ? gure 3. The resulting set of types are then applied to categorize hundreds of millions of extracted events without the use of any manually annotated examples. By leveraging large quantities of unlabeled data, our approach results in a 14% improvement in F1 score over a supervised baseline which uses the same set of types. Stanford NER T-seg P 0. 62 0. 73 R 0. 5 0. 61 F1 0. 44 0. 67 F1 inc. 52% Table 2: By training on in-domain data, we obtain a 52% improvement in F1 score over the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer at segmenting entities in Tweets [46]. 2. SYSTEM OVERVIEW TwiCal extracts a 4-tuple representation of events which includes a named entity, event p hrase, calendar date, and event type (see Table 1). This representation was chosen to closely match the way important events are typically mentioned in Twitter. An overview of the various components of our system for extracting events from Twitter is presented in Figure 1.Given a raw stream of tweets, our system extracts named entities in association with event phrases and unambiguous dates which are involved in signi? cant events. First the tweets are POS tagged, then named entities and event phrases are extracted, temporal expressions resolved, and the extracted events are categorized into types. Finally we measure the strength of association between each named entity and date based on the number of tweets they co-occur in, in order to determine whether an event is signi? cant.NLP tools, such as named entity segmenters and part of speech taggers which were designed to process edited texts (e. g. news articles) perform very poorly when applied to Twitter text due to its noisy and u nique style. To address these issues, we utilize a named entity tagger and part of speech tagger trained on in-domain Twitter data presented in previous work [46]. We also develop an event tagger trained on in-domain annotated data as described in  §4. 3. NAMED ENTITY SEGMENTATION NLP tools, such as named entity segmenters and part of speech taggers which were designed to process edited texts (e. g. ews articles) perform very poorly when applied to Twitter text due to its noisy and unique style. For instance, capitalization is a key feature for named entity extraction within news, but this feature is highly unreliable in tweets; words are often capitalized simply for emphasis, and named entities are often left all lowercase. In addition, tweets contain a higher proportion of out-ofvocabulary words, due to Twitter’s 140 character limit and the creative spelling of its users. To address these issues, we utilize a named entity tagger trained on in-domain Twitter data presented in previous work [46]. Training on tweets vastly improves performance at segmenting Named Entities. For example, performance compared against the state-of-the-art news-trained Stanford Named Entity Recognizer [17] is presented in Table 2. Our system obtains a 52% increase in F1 score over the Stanford Tagger at segmenting named entities. 4. EXTRACTING EVENT MENTIONS This annotation and ? ltering takes minimal e? ort. One of the authors spent roughly 30 minutes inspecting and annotating the automatically discovered event types. 2 In order to extract event mentions from Twitter’s noisy text, we ? st annotate a corpus of tweets, which is then 3 Available at http://github. com/aritter/twitter_nlp. Temporal Resolution S M T W T F S Tweets POS Tag NER Signi? cance Ranking Calendar Entries Event Tagger Event Classi? cation Figure 1: Processing pipeline for extracting events from Twitter. New components developed as part of this work are shaded in grey. used to train sequence models to extract events. While we apply an established approach to sequence-labeling tasks in noisy text [46, 31, 19], this is the ? rst work to extract eventreferring phrases in Twitter.Event phrases can consist of many di? erent parts of speech as illustrated in the following examples: †¢ Verbs: Apple to Announce iPhone 5 on October 4th?! YES! †¢ Nouns: iPhone 5 announcement coming Oct 4th †¢ Adjectives: WOOOHOO NEW IPHONE TODAY! CAN’T WAIT! These phrases provide important context, for example extracting the entity, Steve Jobs and the event phrase died in connection with October 5th, is much more informative than simply extracting Steve Jobs. In addition, event mentions are helpful in upstream tasks such as categorizing events into types, as described in  §6.In order to build a tagger for recognizing events, we annotated 1,000 tweets (19,484 tokens) with event phrases, following annotation guidelines similar to those developed for the Event tags in Timebank [43] . We treat the problem of recognizing event triggers as a sequence labeling task, using Conditional Random Fields for learning and inference [24]. Linear Chain CRFs model dependencies between the predicted labels of adjacent words, which is bene? cial for extracting multi-word event phrases.We use contextual, dictionary, and orthographic features, and also include features based on our Twitter-tuned POS tagger [46], and dictionaries of event terms gathered from WordNet by Sauri et al. [50]. The precision and recall at segmenting event phrases are reported in Table 3. Our classi? er, TwiCal-Event, obtains an F-score of 0. 64. To demonstrate the need for in-domain training data, we compare against a baseline of training our system on the Timebank corpus. precision 0. 56 0. 48 0. 24 recall 0. 74 0. 70 0. 11 F1 0. 64 0. 57 0. 15 TwiCal-Event No POS TimebankTable 3: Precision and recall at event phrase extraction. All results are reported using 4-fold cross validation over the 1,000 manu ally annotated tweets (about 19K tokens). We compare against a system which doesn’t make use of features generated based on our Twitter trained POS Tagger, in addition to a system trained on the Timebank corpus which uses the same set of features. as input a reference date, some text, and parts of speech (from our Twitter-trained POS tagger) and marks temporal expressions with unambiguous calendar references. Although this mostly rule-based system was designed for use on newswire text, we ? d its precision on Tweets (94% estimated over as sample of 268 extractions) is su? ciently high to be useful for our purposes. TempEx’s high precision on Tweets can be explained by the fact that some temporal expressions are relatively unambiguous. Although there appears to be room for improving the recall of temporal extraction on Twitter by handling noisy temporal expressions (for example see Ritter et. al. [46] for a list of over 50 spelling variations on the word â€Å"tomorrow †), we leave adapting temporal extraction to Twitter as potential future work. . CLASSIFICATION OF EVENT TYPES To categorize the extracted events into types we propose an approach based on latent variable models which infers an appropriate set of event types to match our data, and also classi? es events into types by leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data. Supervised or semi-supervised classi? cation of event categories is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it is a priori unclear which categories are appropriate for Twitter. Secondly, a large amount of manual e? ort is required to annotate tweets with event types.Third, the set of important categories (and entities) is likely to shift over time, or within a focused user demographic. Finally many important categories are relatively infrequent, so even a large annotated dataset may contain just a few examples of these categories, making classi? cation di? cult. For these reasons we were motivated to investigate un- 5. EXTRACTING AND RESOLVING TEMPORAL EXPRESSIONS In addition to extracting events and related named entities, we also need to extract when they occur. In general there are many di? rent ways users can refer to the same calendar date, for example â€Å"next Friday†, â€Å"August 12th†, â€Å"tomorrow† or â€Å"yesterday† could all refer to the same day, depending on when the tweet was written. To resolve temporal expressions we make use of TempEx [33], which takes Sports Party TV Politics Celebrity Music Movie Food Concert Performance Fitness Interview ProductRelease Meeting Fashion Finance School AlbumRelease Religion 7. 45% 3. 66% 3. 04% 2. 92% 2. 38% 1. 96% 1. 92% 1. 87% 1. 53% 1. 42% 1. 11% 1. 01% 0. 95% 0. 88% 0. 87% 0. 85% 0. 85% 0. 78% 0. 71% Con? ct Prize Legal Death Sale VideoGameRelease Graduation Racing Fundraiser/Drive Exhibit Celebration Books Film Opening/Closing Wedding Holiday Medical Wrestling OTHER 0. 69% 0. 68% 0. 67% 0. 66% 0. 66% 0. 65 % 0. 63% 0. 61% 0. 60% 0. 60% 0. 60% 0. 58% 0. 50% 0. 49% 0. 46% 0. 45% 0. 42% 0. 41% 53. 45% Label Sports Concert Perform TV Movie Sports Politics Figure 2: Complete list of automatically discovered event types with percentage of data covered. Interpretable types representing signi? cant events cover roughly half of the data. supervised approaches that will automatically induce event types which match the data.We adopt an approach based on latent variable models inspired by recent work on modeling selectional preferences [47, 39, 22, 52, 48], and unsupervised information extraction [4, 55, 7]. Each event indicator phrase in our data, e, is modeled as a mixture of types. For example the event phrase â€Å"cheered† might appear as part of either a PoliticalEvent, or a SportsEvent. Each type corresponds to a distribution over named entities n involved in speci? c instances of the type, in addition to a distribution over dates d on which events of the type occur. Including calen dar dates in our model has the e? ct of encouraging (though not requiring) events which occur on the same date to be assigned the same type. This is helpful in guiding inference, because distinct references to the same event should also have the same type. The generative story for our data is based on LinkLDA [15], and is presented as Algorithm 1. This approach has the advantage that information about an event phrase’s type distribution is shared across it’s mentions, while ambiguity is also naturally preserved. In addition, because the approach is based on generative a probabilistic model, it is straightforward to perform many di? rent probabilistic queries about the data. This is useful for example when categorizing aggregate events. For inference we use collapsed Gibbs Sampling [20] where each hidden variable, zi , is sampled in turn, and parameters are integrated out. Example types are displayed in Figure 3. To estimate the distribution over types for a given event , a sample of the corresponding hidden variables is taken from the Gibbs markov chain after su? cient burn in. Prediction for new data is performed using a streaming approach to inference [56]. TV Product MeetingTop 5 Event Phrases tailgate – scrimmage tailgating – homecoming – regular season concert – presale – performs – concerts – tickets matinee – musical priscilla – seeing wicked new season – season ? nale – ? nished season episodes – new episode watch love – dialogue theme – inception – hall pass – movie inning – innings pitched – homered homer presidential debate osama – presidential candidate – republican debate – debate performance network news broadcast – airing – primetime drama – channel stream unveils – unveiled – announces – launches wraps o? shows trading – hall mtg – zoning – brie? g stocks – tumbled – trading report – opened higher – tumbles maths – english test exam – revise – physics in stores – album out debut album – drops on – hits stores voted o? – idol – scotty – idol season – dividendpaying sermon – preaching preached – worship preach declared war – war shelling – opened ? re wounded senate – legislation – repeal – budget – election winners – lotto results enter – winner – contest bail plea – murder trial – sentenced – plea – convicted ? lm festival – screening starring – ? lm – gosling live forever – passed away – sad news – condolences – burried add into – 50% o? up shipping – save up donate – tornado relief disaster relief – donated – raise mone y Top 5 Entities espn – ncaa – tigers – eagles – varsity taylor swift – toronto britney spears – rihanna – rock shrek – les mis – lee evans – wicked – broadway jersey shore – true blood – glee – dvr – hbo net? ix – black swan – insidious – tron – scott pilgrim mlb – red sox – yankees – twins – dl obama president obama – gop – cnn america nbc – espn – abc – fox mtv apple – google – microsoft – uk – sony town hall – city hall club – commerce – white house reuters – new york – u. . – china – euro english – maths – german – bio – twitter itunes – ep – uk – amazon – cd lady gaga – american idol – america – beyonce – glee church – jesus – pastor faith – god libya – afghanistan #syria – syria – nato senate – house – congress – obama – gop ipad – award – facebook – good luck – winners casey anthony – court – india – new delhi supreme court hollywood – nyc – la – los angeles – new york michael jackson afghanistan john lennon – young – peace groupon – early bird facebook – @etsy – etsy japan – red cross – joplin – june – africaFinance School Album TV Religion Con? ict Politics Prize Legal Movie Death Sale Drive 6. 1 Evaluation To evaluate the ability of our model to classify signi? cant events, we gathered 65 million extracted events of the form Figure 3: Example event types discovered by our model. For each type t, we list the top 5 entities which have highest probability given t, and the 5 event phrases which as sign highest probability to t. Algorithm 1 Generative story for our data involving event types as hidden variables.Bayesian Inference techniques are applied to invert the generative process and infer an appropriate set of types to describe the observed events. for each event type t = 1 . . . T do n Generate ? t according to symmetric Dirichlet distribution Dir(? n ). d Generate ? t according to symmetric Dirichlet distribution Dir(? d ). end for for each unique event phrase e = 1 . . . |E| do Generate ? e according to Dirichlet distribution Dir(? ). for each entity which co-occurs with e, i = 1 . . . Ne do n Generate ze,i from Multinomial(? e ). Generate the entity ne,i from Multinomial(? n ). e,i TwiCal-Classify Supervised Baseline Precision 0. 85 0. 61 Recall 0. 55 0. 57 F1 0. 67 0. 59 Table 4: Precision and recall of event type categorization at the point of maximum F1 score. d,i end for end for 0. 6 end for for each date which co-occurs with e, i = 1 . . . Nd do d Generate ze,i from Multinomial(? e ). Generate the date de,i from Multinomial(? zn ). Precision 0. 8 1. 0 listed in Figure 1 (not including the type). We then ran Gibbs Sampling with 100 types for 1,000 iterations of burnin, keeping the hidden variable assignments found in the last sample. One of the authors manually inspected the resulting types and assigned them labels such as Sports, Politics, MusicRelease and so on, based on their distribution over entities, and the event words which assign highest probability to that type. Out of the 100 types, we found 52 to correspond to coherent event types which referred to signi? cant events;5 the other types were either incoherent, or covered types of events which are not of general interest, for example there was a cluster of phrases such as applied, call, contact, job interview, etc†¦ hich correspond to users discussing events related to searching for a job. Such event types which do not correspond to signi? cant events of general interest were simply marked as OTHER. A complete list of labels used to annotate the automatically discovered event types along with the coverage of each type is listed in ? gure 2. Note that this assignment of labels to types only needs to be done once and produces a labeling for an arbitrarily large number of event instances. Additionally the same set of types can easily be used to lassify new event instances using streaming inference techniques [56]. One interesting direction for future work is automatic labeling and coherence evaluation of automatically discovered event types analogous to recent work on topic models [38, 25]. In order to evaluate the ability of our model to classify aggregate events, we grouped together all (entity,date) pairs which occur 20 or more times the data, then annotated the 500 with highest association (see  §7) using the event types discovered by our model. To help demonstrate the bene? s of leveraging large quantities of unlabeled data for event classi? cation, we compare against a supervised Maximum Entropy baseline which makes use of the 500 annotated events using 10-fold cross validation. For features, we treat the set of event phrases To scale up to larger datasets, we performed inference in parallel on 40 cores using an approximation to the Gibbs Sampling procedure analogous to that presented by Newmann et. al. [37]. 5 After labeling some types were combined resulting in 37 distinct labels. 4 0. 4 Supervised Baseline TwiCal? Classify 0. 0 0. 2 0. 4 Recall 0. 0. 8 Figure 4: types. Precision and recall predicting event that co-occur with each (entity, date) pair as a bag-of-words, and also include the associated entity. Because many event categories are infrequent, there are often few or no training examples for a category, leading to low performance. Figure 4 compares the performance of our unsupervised approach to the supervised baseline, via a precision-recall curve obtained by varying the threshold on the probability of the most lik ely type. In addition table 4 compares precision and recall at the point of maximum F-score.Our unsupervised approach to event categorization achieves a 14% increase in maximum F1 score over the supervised baseline. Figure 5 plots the maximum F1 score as the amount of training data used by the baseline is varied. It seems likely that with more data, performance will reach that of our approach which does not make use of any annotated events, however our approach both automatically discovers an appropriate set of event types and provides an initial classi? er with minimal e? ort, making it useful as a ? rst step in situations where annotated data is not immediately available. . RANKING EVENTS Simply using frequency to determine which events are signi? cant is insu? cient, because many tweets refer to common events in user’s daily lives. As an example, users often mention what they are eating for lunch, therefore entities such as McDonalds occur relatively frequently in associat ion with references to most calendar days. Important events can be distinguished as those which have strong association with a unique date as opposed to being spread evenly across days on the calendar. To extract signi? ant events of general interest from Twitter, we thus need some way to measure the strength of association between an entity and a date. In order to measure the association strength between an 0. 8 0. 2 Supervised Baseline TwiCal? Classify 100 200 300 400 tweets. We then added the extracted triples to the dataset used for inferring event types described in  §6, and performed 50 iterations of Gibbs sampling for predicting event types on the new data, holding the hidden variables in the original data constant. This streaming approach to inference is similar to that presented by Yao et al. 56]. We then ranked the extracted events as described in  §7, and randomly sampled 50 events from the top ranked 100, 500, and 1,000. We annotated the events with 4 separate criter ia: 1. Is there a signi? cant event involving the extracted entity which will take place on the extracted date? 2. Is the most frequently extracted event phrase informative? 3. Is the event’s type correctly classi? ed? 4. Are each of (1-3) correct? That is, does the event contain a correct entity, date, event phrase, and type? Note that if (1) is marked as incorrect for a speci? event, subsequent criteria are always marked incorrect. Max F1 0. 4 0. 6 # Training Examples Figure 5: Maximum F1 score of the supervised baseline as the amount of training data is varied. entity and a speci? c date, we utilize the G log likelihood ratio statistic. G2 has been argued to be more appropriate for text analysis tasks than ? 2 [12]. Although Fisher’s Exact test would produce more accurate p-values [34], given the amount of data with which we are working (sample size greater than 1011 ), it proves di? cult to compute Fisher’s Exact Test Statistic, which results in ? ating poin t over? ow even when using 64-bit operations. The G2 test works su? ciently well in our setting, however, as computing association between entities and dates produces less sparse contingency tables than when working with pairs of entities (or words). The G2 test is based on the likelihood ratio between a model in which the entity is conditioned on the date, and a model of independence between entities and date references. For a given entity e and date d this statistic can be computed as follows: G2 = x? {e, ¬e},y? {d, ¬d} 2 8. 2 BaselineTo demonstrate the importance of natural language processing and information extraction techniques in extracting informative events, we compare against a simple baseline which does not make use of the Ritter et. al. named entity recognizer or our event recognizer; instead, it considers all 1-4 grams in each tweet as candidate calendar entries, relying on the G2 test to ? lter out phrases which have low association with each date. 8. 3 Results The results of the evaluation are displayed in table 5. The table shows the precision of the systems at di? rent yield levels (number of aggregate events). These are obtained by varying the thresholds in the G2 statistic. Note that the baseline is only comparable to the third column, i. e. , the precision of (entity, date) pairs, since the baseline is not performing event identi? cation and classi? cation. Although in some cases ngrams do correspond to informative calendar entries, the precision of the ngram baseline is extremely low compared with our system. In many cases the ngrams don’t correspond to salient entities related to events; they often consist of single words which are di? ult to interpret, for example â€Å"Breaking† which is part of the movie â€Å"Twilight: Breaking Dawn† released on November 18. Although the word â€Å"Breaking† has a strong association with November 18, by itself it is not very informative to present to a user. 7 Our high- con? dence calendar entries are surprisingly high quality. If we limit the data to the 100 highest ranked calendar entries over a two-week date range in the future, the precision of extracted (entity, date) pairs is quite good (90%) – an 80% increase over the ngram baseline.As expected precision drops as more calendar entries are displayed, but 7 In addition, we notice that the ngram baseline tends to produce many near-duplicate calendar entries, for example: â€Å"Twilight Breaking†, â€Å"Breaking Dawn†, and â€Å"Twilight Breaking Dawn†. While each of these entries was annotated as correct, it would be problematic to show this many entries describing the same event to a user. Ox,y ? ln Ox,y Ex,y Where Oe,d is the observed fraction of tweets containing both e and d, Oe, ¬d is the observed fraction of tweets containing e, but not d, and so on.Similarly Ee,d is the expected fraction of tweets containing both e and d assuming a model of independence. 8. EXPERIMENTS To estimate the quality of the calendar entries generated using our approach we manually evaluated a sample of the top 100, 500 and 1,000 calendar entries occurring within a 2-week future window of November 3rd. 8. 1 Data For evaluation purposes, we gathered roughly the 100 million most recent tweets on November 3rd 2011 (collected using the Twitter Streaming API6 , and tracking a broad set of temporal keywords, including â€Å"today†, â€Å"tomorrow†, names of weekdays, months, etc. ).We extracted named entities in addition to event phrases, and temporal expressions from the text of each of the 100M 6 https://dev. twitter. com/docs/streaming-api Mon Nov 7 Justin meet Other Motorola Pro+ kick Product Release Nook Color 2 launch Product Release Eid-ul-Azha celebrated Performance MW3 midnight release Other Tue Nov 8 Paris love Other iPhone holding Product Release Election Day vote Political Event Blue Slide Park listening Music Release Hedley album Music Rele ase Wed Nov 9 EAS test Other The Feds cut o? Other Toca Rivera promoted Performance Alert System test Other Max Day give OtherNovember 2011 Thu Nov 10 Fri Nov 11 Robert Pattinson iPhone show debut Performance Product Release James Murdoch Remembrance Day give evidence open Other Performance RTL-TVI France post play TV Event Other Gotti Live Veterans Day work closed Other Other Bambi Awards Skyrim perform arrives Performance Product Release Sat Nov 12 Sydney perform Other Pullman Ballroom promoted Other Fox ? ght Other Plaza party Party Red Carpet invited Party Sun Nov 13 Playstation answers Product Release Samsung Galaxy Tab launch Product Release Sony answers Product Release Chibi Chibi Burger other Jiexpo Kemayoran promoted TV EventFigure 6: Example future calendar entries extracted by our system for the week of November 7th. Data was collected up to November 5th. For each day, we list the top 5 events including the entity, event phrase, and event type. While there are several err ors, the majority of calendar entries are informative, for example: the Muslim holiday eid-ul-azha, the release of several videogames: Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) and Skyrim, in addition to the release of the new playstation 3D display on Nov 13th, and the new iPhone 4S in Hong Kong on Nov 11th. # calendar entries 100 500 1,000 ngram baseline 0. 50 0. 6 0. 44 entity + date 0. 90 0. 66 0. 52 precision event phrase event 0. 86 0. 56 0. 42 type 0. 72 0. 54 0. 40 entity + date + event + type 0. 70 0. 42 0. 32 Table 5: Evaluation of precision at di? erent recall levels (generated by varying the threshold of the G2 statistic). We evaluate the top 100, 500 and 1,000 (entity, date) pairs. In addition we evaluate the precision of the most frequently extracted event phrase, and the predicted event type in association with these calendar entries. Also listed is the fraction of cases where all predictions (â€Å"entity + date + event + type†) are correct.We also compare against the precision of a simple ngram baseline which does not make use of our NLP tools. Note that the ngram baseline is only comparable to the entity+date precision (column 3) since it does not include event phrases or types. remains high enough to display to users (in a ranked list). In addition to being less likely to come from extraction errors, highly ranked entity/date pairs are more likely to relate to popular or important events, and are therefore of greater interest to users. In addition we present a sample of extracted future events on a calendar in ? ure 6 in order to give an example of how they might be presented to a user. We present the top 5 entities associated with each date, in addition to the most frequently extracted event phrase, and highest probability event type. 9. RELATED WORK While we are the ? rst to study open domain event extraction within Twitter, there are two key related strands of research: extracting speci? c types of events from Twitter, and extracting open-domain even ts from news [43]. Recently there has been much interest in information extraction and event identi? cation within Twitter. Benson et al. 5] use distant supervision to train a relation extractor which identi? es artists and venues mentioned within tweets of users who list their location as New York City. Sakaki et al. [49] train a classi? er to recognize tweets reporting earthquakes in Japan; they demonstrate their system is capable of recognizing almost all earthquakes reported by the Japan Meteorological Agency. Additionally there is recent work on detecting events or tracking topics [29] in Twitter which does not extract structured representations, but has the advantage that it is not limited to a narrow domain. Petrovi? t al. investigate a streaming approach to identic fying Tweets which are the ? rst to report a breaking news story using Locally Sensitive Hash Functions [40]. Becker et al. [3], Popescu et al. [42, 41] and Lin et al. [28] investigate discovering clusters of rela ted words or tweets which correspond to events in progress. In contrast to previous work on Twitter event identi? cation, our approach is independent of event type or domain and is thus more widely applicable. Additionally, our work focuses on extracting a calendar of events (including those occurring in the future), extract- . 4 Error Analysis We found 2 main causes for why entity/date pairs were uninformative for display on a calendar, which occur in roughly equal proportion: Segmentation Errors Some extracted â€Å"entities† or ngrams don’t correspond to named entities or are generally uninformative because they are mis-segmented. Examples include â€Å"RSVP†, â€Å"Breaking† and â€Å"Yikes†. Weak Association between Entity and Date In some cases, entities are properly segmented, but are uninformative because they are not strongly associated with a speci? c event on the associated date, or are involved in many di? rent events which happen to oc cur on that day. Examples include locations such as â€Å"New York†, and frequently mentioned entities, such as â€Å"Twitter†. ing event-referring expressions and categorizing events into types. Also relevant is work on identifying events [23, 10, 6], and extracting timelines [30] from news articles. 8 Twitter status messages present both unique challenges and opportunities when compared with news articles. Twitter’s noisy text presents serious challenges for NLP tools. On the other hand, it contains a higher proportion of references to present and future dates.Tweets do not require complex reasoning about relations between events in order to place them on a timeline as is typically necessary in long texts containing narratives [51]. Additionally, unlike News, Tweets often discus mundane events which are not of general interest, so it is crucial to exploit redundancy of information to assess whether an event is signi? cant. Previous work on open-domain informat ion extraction [2, 53, 16] has mostly focused on extracting relations (as opposed to events) from web corpora and has also extracted relations based on verbs.In contrast, this work extracts events, using tools adapted to Twitter’s noisy text, and extracts event phrases which are often adjectives or nouns, for example: Super Bowl Party on Feb 5th. Finally we note that there has recently been increasing interest in applying NLP techniques to short informal messages such as those found on Twitter. For example, recent work has explored Part of Speech tagging [19], geographical variation in language found on Twitter [13, 14], modeling informal conversations [44, 45, 9], and also applying NLP techniques to help crisis workers with the ? ood of information following natural disasters [35, 27, 36]. 1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank Luke Zettlemoyer and the anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on a previous draft. This research was supported in part by NSF grant IIS-0803481 and ONR grant N00014-08-1-0431 and carried out at the University of Washington’s Turing Center. 12. REFERENCES [1] J. Allan, R. Papka, and V. Lavrenko. On-line new event detection and tracking. In SIGIR, 1998. [2] M. Banko, M. J. Cafarella, S. Soderl, M. Broadhead, and O. Etzioni. Open information extraction from the web. In In IJCAI, 2007. [3] H. Becker, M. Naaman, and L. Gravano. Beyond trending topics: Real-world event identi? ation on twitter. In ICWSM, 2011. [4] C. Bejan, M. Titsworth, A. Hickl, and S. Harabagiu. Nonparametric bayesian models for unsupervised event coreference resolution. In NIPS. 2009. [5] E. Benson, A. Haghighi, and R. Barzilay. Event discovery in social media feeds. In ACL, 2011. [6] S. Bethard and J. H. Martin. Identi? cation of event mentions and their semantic class. In EMNLP, 2006. [7] N. Chambers and D. Jurafsky. Template-based information extraction without the templates. In Proceedings of ACL, 2011. [8] N. Chambers, S. Wang, and D. Jurafsky. Classifying temporal relations between events. In ACL, 2007. 9] C. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, M. Gamon, and S. Dumais. Mark my words! Linguistic style accommodation in social media. In Proceedings of WWW, pages 745–754, 2011. [10] A. Das Sarma, A. Jain, and C. Yu. Dynamic relationship and event discovery. In WSDM, 2011. [11] G. Doddington, A. Mitchell, M. Przybocki, L. Ramshaw, S. Strassel, and R. Weischedel. The Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) Program–Tasks, Data, and Evaluation. LREC, 2004. [12] T. Dunning. Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Comput. Linguist. , 1993. [13] J. Eisenstein, B. O’Connor, N. A. Smith, and E. P. Xing.A latent variable model for geographic lexical variation. In EMNLP, 2010. [14] J. Eisenstein, N. A. Smith, and E. P. Xing. Discovering sociolinguistic associations with structured sparsity. In ACL-HLT, 2011. [15] E. Erosheva, S. Fienberg, and J. La? erty. Mixed-membership models of scienti? c publ ications. PNAS, 2004. [16] A. Fader, S. Soderland, and O. Etzioni. Identifying relations for open information extraction. In EMNLP, 2011. [17] J. R. Finkel, T. Grenager, and C. Manning. Incorporating non-local information into information extraction systems by gibbs sampling. In ACL, 2005. [18] E. Gabrilovich, S. Dumais, and E.Horvitz. Newsjunkie: providing personalized newsfeeds via analysis of information novelty. In WWW, 2004. [19] K. Gimpel, N. Schneider, B. O’Connor, D. Das, D. Mills, J. Eisenstein, M. Heilman, D. Yogatama, J. Flanigan, and N. A. Smith. Part-of-speech tagging 10. CONCLUSIONS We have presented a scalable and open-domain approach to extracting and categorizing events from status messages. We evaluated the quality of these events in a manual evaluation showing a clear improvement in performance over an ngram baseline We proposed a novel approach to categorizing events in an open-domain text genre with unknown types.Our approach based on latent variable mode ls ? rst discovers event types which match the data, which are then used to classify aggregate events without any annotated examples. Because this approach is able to leverage large quantities of unlabeled data, it outperforms a supervised baseline by 14%. A possible avenue for future work is extraction of even richer event representations, while maintaining domain independence. For example: grouping together related entities, classifying entities in relation to their roles in the event, thereby, extracting a frame-based representation of events.A continuously updating demonstration of our system can be viewed at http://statuscalendar. com; Our NLP tools are available at http://github. com/aritter/twitter_nlp. 8 http://newstimeline. googlelabs. com/ [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] for twitter: Annotation, features, and experiments. In ACL, 2011. T. L. Gri? ths and M. Steyvers. Finding scienti? c topics. Proc Na tl Acad Sci U S A, 101 Suppl 1, 2004. R. Grishman and B. Sundheim. Message understanding conference – 6: A brief history.In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 1996. Z. Kozareva and E. Hovy. Learning arguments and supertypes of semantic relations using recursive patterns. In ACL, 2010. G. Kumaran and J. Allan. Text classi? cation and named entities for new event detection. In SIGIR, 2004. J. D. La? erty, A. McCallum, and F. C. N. Pereira. Conditional random ? elds: Probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. In ICML, 2001. J. H. Lau, K. Grieser, D. Newman, and T. Baldwin. Automatic labelling of topic models. In ACL, 2011. J.Leskovec, L. Backstrom, and J. Kleinberg. Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. In KDD, 2009. W. Lewis, R. Munro, and S. Vogel. Crisis mt: Developing a cookbook for mt in crisis situations. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2011. C. X. Lin, B. Zhao, Q. Mei, and J. Han. PET: a statistical model for popular events tracking in social communities. In KDD, 2010. J. Lin, R. Snow, and W. Morgan. Smoothing techniques for adaptive online language models: Topic tracking in tweet streams. In KDD, 2011. X. Ling and D. S. Weld.Temporal information extraction. In AAAI, 2010. X. Liu, S. Zhang, F. Wei, and M. Zhou. Recognizing named entities in tweets. In ACL, 2011. I. Mani, M. Verhagen, B. Wellner, C. M. Lee, and J. Pustejovsky. Machine learning of temporal relations. In ACL, 2006. I. Mani and G. Wilson. Robust temporal processing of news. In ACL, 2000. R. C. Moore. On log-likelihood-ratios and the signi? cance of rare events. In EMNLP, 2004. R. Munro. Subword and spatiotemporal models for identifying actionable information in Haitian Kreyol. In CoNLL, 2011. G. Neubig, Y. Matsubayashi, M. Hagiwara, and K.Murakami. Safety information mining – what can NLP do in a disaster -. In IJCNLP, 2011. D. Newman, A. U. Asuncion, P. Smyth, and M. Welling. Distributed inference for latent dirichlet allocation. In NIPS, 2007. D. Newman, J. H. Lau, K. Grieser, and T. Baldwin. Automatic evaluation of topic coherence. In HLT-NAACL, 2010. ? e D. O S? aghdha. Latent variable models of selectional preference. In ACL, ACL ’10, 2010. S. Petrovi? , M. Osborne, and V. Lavrenko. Streaming c ? rst story detection with application to twitter. In HLT-NAACL, 2010. [41] A. -M. Popescu and M. Pennacchiotti.Dancing with the stars, nba games, politics: An exploration of twitter users’ response to events. In ICWSM, 2011. [42] A. -M. Popescu, M. Pennacchiotti, and D. A. Paranjpe. Extracting events and event descriptions from twitter. In WWW, 2011. [43] J. Pustejovsky, P. Hanks, R. Sauri, A. See, R. Gaizauskas, A. Setzer, D. Radev, B. Sundheim, D. Day, L. Ferro, and M. Lazo. The TIMEBANK corpus. In Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2003, 2003. [44] A. Ritter, C. Cherry, and B. Dolan. Unsupervised modeling of twitter conversations. In HLT-NAACL, 2010. [45] A. Ritter, C. Cherry, and W. B. Dolan.Data-driven response generation in social media. In EMNLP, 2011. [46] A. Ritter, S. Clark, Mausam, and O. Etzioni. Named entity recognition in tweets: An experimental study. EMNLP, 2011. [47] A. Ritter, Mausam, and O. Etzioni. A latent dirichlet allocation method for selectional preferences. In ACL, 2010. [48] K. Roberts and S. M. Harabagiu. Unsupervised learning of selectional restrictions and detection of argument coercions. In EMNLP, 2011. [49] T. Sakaki, M. Okazaki, and Y. Matsuo. Earthquake shakes twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors. In WWW, 2010. [50] R. Saur? R.Knippen, M. Verhagen, and ? , J. Pustejovsky. Evita: a robust event recognizer for qa systems. In HLT-EMNLP, 2005. [51] F. Song and R. Cohen. Tense interpretation in the context of narrative. In Proceedings of the ninth National conference on Arti? cial intelligence – Volume 1, AAAI’91, 1991. [52] B. Van Durme and D. Gildea . Topic models for corpus-centric knowledge generalization. In Technical Report TR-946, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, 2009. [53] D. S. Weld, R. Ho? mann, and F. Wu. Using wikipedia to bootstrap open information extraction. SIGMOD Rec. , 2009. 54] Y. Yang, T. Pierce, and J. Carbonell. A study of retrospective and on-line event detection. In Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, SIGIR ’98, 1998. [55] L. Yao, A. Haghighi, S. Riedel, and A. McCallum. Structured relation discovery using generative models. In EMNLP, 2011. [56] L. Yao, D. Mimno, and A. McCallum. E? cient methods for topic model inference on streaming document collections. In KDD, 2009. [57] F. M. Zanzotto, M. Pennaccchiotti, and K. Tsioutsiouliklis. Linguistic redundancy in twitter. In EMNLP, 2011.