Linguistic Research Essay Example for Free

Linguistic Research Essay When does language begin? In the middle 1960s, under the influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child language researchers assumed that language begins when words (or morphemes) are combined. (The reading by Halliday has some illustrative citations concerning this narrow focus on â€Å"structure. †) So our story begins with what is colloquially known as the â€Å"two-word stage. † The transition to 2-word utterances has been called â€Å"perhaps, the single most disputed issue in the study of language development† (Bloom, 1998). A few descriptive points: Typically children start to combine words when they are between 18 and 24 months of age. Around 30 months their utterances become more complex, as they add additional words and also affixes and other grammatical morphemes. These first word-combinations show a number of characteristics. First, they are systematically simpler than adult speech. For instance, function words are generally not used. Notice that the omission of inflections, such as -s, -ing, -ed, shows that the child is being systematic rather than copying. If they were simply imitating what they heard, there is no particular reason why these grammatical elements would be omitted. Conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and prepositions (with) are omitted too. But is this because they require extra processing, which the child is not yet capable of? Or do they as yet convey nothing to the child—can she find no use for them? Second, as utterances become more complex and inflections are added, we find the famous â€Å"over-regularization†Ã¢â‚¬â€which again shows, of course, that children are systematic, not simply copying what they here. Chomsky’s Influence Research on child language was behavioristic in the years that preceded Chomsky’s critique of Skinner, and his publication of Syntactic Structures: â€Å"though there had been precedents for setting problems in the study of child language acquisition at a more abstract, cognitive level by continental scholarsmost notably, Roman Jacobson (e. g. , 1941/1968)much of the research on child language acquisition at midcentury was influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the highly concrete, behaviorist orientation of B. F. Skinner and others. Two events were of major important in the change from behaviorist to cognitive thinking in research on child language. The first was Chomsky’s classic review (1959) of Verbal Behavior, Skinner’s major book-length work on the learning and use of language; the second Handout for Psy 598-02, summer 2001 Packer Two-Word Utterances 2 was the detailed longitudinal study of the acquisition of English by three young children conducted over a 17-month period by Roger Brown and others in the early 1960s (Brown, 1973). † Ritchie, W. C. , Bhatia, T. K. (1999). Child language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W. C. Ritchie T. K. Bhatia (Eds. ), Handbook of child language acquisition, (pp. 3-30). San Diego: Academic Press, p. 3-4 note 2. â€Å"A child who has learned a language has developed an internal representation of a system of rules† (Chomsky, 1965, p. 25). The psychologist’s task, it follows, is to determine what the child’s rules are. â€Å"The linguist constructing a grammar for a language is in effect proposing a hypothesis concerning the internalized system† (Chomsky, 1968, p.23). Up to the 1950s, people simply counted characteristics such as sentence complexity, proportion of grammatical utterances, etc. After Chomsky, the search was on for child grammars, assumed to be universal. Roger Brown’s Research In 1956 Roger Brown heard Chomsky for the first time, speaking at Yale. In 1962 he began a five-year research project on children’s language at Harvard University. The historical significance of Brown’s laboratory at Harvard can hardly be exaggerated. The names of students and colleagues who worked with Brown pop up all the time, to this day, in psycholinguistic research: the list includes Jean Berko Gleason, Ursula Bellugi, David McNeill, Dan Slobin, Courtney Cazden, Richard Cromer, Jill de Villiers, Michael Maratsos, Melissa Bowerman, Eleanor Rosche, Sue Ervin (now Ervin-Tripp), Steven Pinker. Brown set out to write grammars for each of the stages of language development, by looking at the distribution of forms and construction patterns in spontaneous speech. In most cases the data allow for more than one  grammatical description. â€Å"The description to be preferred, of course, is the one that corresponds to the way the speaker’s linguistic knowledge is structured, the one that determines the kinds of novel utterance he can produce or understand, how he constructs their meanings, and what his intuitions are about grammatical well-formedness† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28) â€Å"Every child processes the speech to which he is exposed so as to induce from it a latent structure. This latent rule structure is so general that a child can spin out its implications all his life long. The discovery of latent structure is the greatest of the processes involved in language acquisition, and the most difficult to understand† (Brown Bellugi, 1964, p. 314) Brown collected samples of spontaneous speech from three children, given the pseudonyms Adam, Eve, and Sarah. The corpus of collected data can be found in the Packer Two-Word Utterances 3 CHILDES archive. Eve was visited from age 18m to 26m, Adam from 27m to 42m, Sarah from 27m to 48m. Dan Slobin described the project: â€Å"We paid close attention to the auxiliary system and to word-order patterns, because these had played a central role in Syntactic Structures. We kept track of sentence types—affirmative, negative, and questions—in which use of auxiliaries and word order would vary. Linguistic growth was assessed in terms of things to be added to childish sentences to make them adult-like: the additions of omitted functors (inflections, prepositions, articles, and the like) and transformational operations. We did not categorize utterances in terms of communicative intent—that is, in terms of semantics or speech acts or extended discourse skills—and so we did not look for growth in terms of additions or enrichment of such abilities. Our central concern was with syntax and morphology, with some later interest in prosody. We worried about such questions as whether child grammar was finite state or transformational, and whether syntactic ‘kernels’ were the first sentence forms to appear in child speech† (Slobin, 1988, p. 11). Mean Length of Utterance This simple measure of syntactic complexity was introduced by Roger Brown. Table 7. Rules for calculating mean length of utterance and upper bound (Brown, 1973, p. 54) 1. Start with the second page of the transcription unless that page involves a recitation of some kind. In this latter case start with the first recitation-free stretch. Count the first100 utterances satisfying the following rules. 2. Only fully transcribed utterances are used; none with blanks. Portions of utterances, entered in parentheses to indicate doubtful transcription, are used. 3. Include all exact utterance repetitions (marked with a plus sign in records). Stuttering is marked as repeated efforts at a single word; count the word once in the most complete form produced. In the few cases where a word is produced for emphasis or the like (no, no, no) count each occurrence. 4. Do not count such fillers as mm or oh, but do count no, yeah, and hi. 5. All compound words (two or more free morphemes), proper names, and ritualized reduplications count as single words. Examples: birthday, rackety-boom, choo-choo, quack-quack, night-night, pocketbook, see saw. Justification is that no evidence that the constituent morphemes function as such for these children. 6. Count as one morpheme all irregular pasts of the verb (got, did, went, saw). Justification is that there is no evidence that the child relates these to present forms. 7.  Count as one morpheme all diminutives (doggie, mommie) because these children at least do not seem to use the suffix productively. Diminutives are the standard forms used by the child. 8. Count as separate morphemes all auxiliaries (is, have, will, can, must, would). Also all catenatives: gonna, wanna, hafta. These latter counted as single morphemes rather than as going to or want to because evidence is that they function so for the children. Count as separate morphemes all inflections, for example, possessive {s}, plural {s}, third person singular {s}, regular past {d}, progressive {ing}. 9. The range count follows the above rules but is always calculated for the total Packer Two-Word Utterances 4 transcription rather than for 100 utterances. The title of Brown’s 1973 book, summarizing of a decade of research (his own and other people’s), was A First Language: The Early Stages. A follow-up was planned, describing the â€Å"later† stages, but never written. What is this book about? â€Å"It is about knowledge; knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. The book primarily presents evidence that knowledge of the kind described develops in an approximately invariant form in all children, through at different rates. There is also evidence that the primary determinants of the order are the relative semantical and grammatical complexity† (58) Here is an early attempt to write a â€Å"syntactic† grammar of two-word speech, first describing only 89 observed utterances (Table 4), then going â€Å"beyond the obtained sentences to the syntactic classes they suggest (Table 5) (Brown Fraser, 1964, pp. 59, 61): Packer Two-Word Utterances 5 Brown’s Two Main Findings Two main findings are described in A First Language. 1. The â€Å"Semantic Look† of Stage I Speech First, that the organization of early word-combinations cannot be described in purely syntactic terms. Brown and his coworkers quickly had to change direction. Syntactic descriptions didn’t suffice. That’s to say, Stage I constructions couldn’t be satisfactorily explained either as â€Å"telegraphic† speech, or in terms of â€Å"pivot-open† grammar. Telegraphic Speech One of the first ways of characterizing 2-word utterances was to say that they omitted â€Å"function words,† such as articles, auxiliary verbs, inflexions, prepositions, and the copula (is). The words that are spoken tend to be nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and their order tends to resemble the order in what one presumes the adult sentence would be. These characteristics make early utterances sound like telegrams. But inflections are omitted too, and these are free in telegrams. And a few functors such as more, no, you and off are found. More important problems are that this description uses adult categories. And it doesn’t explain the productive character of children’s two-word utterances. Pivot-Open grammars Martin Braine suggested that children have simple rules they use to generate two-word utterances. Each pair of words selects one from a small set of words—called â€Å"pivots†Ã¢â‚¬â€that occur in many utterances, and always in a fixed position (either the first word, or the second). For example, â€Å"Allgone† is a first-position pivot: allgone egg, allgone shoe, but not shoe allgone. A second-position pivot â€Å"off†: shirt off, water off, etc. The choice of the second word is more â€Å"open. † Packer Two-Word Utterances 6 But â€Å"the rules simply do not fit the evidence; pivot words do occur in isolation, pivots occur in combination with one another, sentences longer than two-words are fairly common in I, and there is distributional evidence which indicates that more than two word-classes exist† (Brown, 1973, p. 110). Brown and his colleagues noted that adults â€Å"expand† children’s utterances. These expansions don’t seem effective in teaching the child anything new (Cazden, 1965). But they do provide important clues to the researcher. If one assumes that adult expansions are generally accurate interpretations of the child’s utterance, then pivot-open grammars are inadequate because they underestimate the child’s knowledge. (Both would simply be described as O + O. ) For example, Lois Bloom showed that when one attended to context the utterance mommy sock was used by her child in two different ways. The first could be glossed as â€Å"It’s mommy’s sock,† while the second could be glossed â€Å"Mommy is putting on your sock. † A pivot-open grammar would not be able to distinguish these two. From Non-Semantic (Lean) Grammars to Semantic (Rich) Grammars So Brown and his co-workers started instead to describe two-word utterances in semantic terms. They employed a process that Lois Bloom called â€Å"rich interpretation†: using all the contextual information available to infer what the child meant by an utterance. As Lois Bloom said, â€Å"evaluation of the children’s language began with the basic assumption that it was possible to reach the semantics of children’s sentences by considering nonlinguistic information from context and behavior in relation to linguistic performance. This is not to say that the inherent ‘meaning’ or the child’s actual semantic intent was obtainable for any given utterance. The semantic interpretation inherent in an utterance is part of the intuition of the child and cannot be ‘known’ with authority. The only claim that could be made was the evaluation of an utterance in relation to the context in which it occurred provided more information for analyzing intrinsic structure than would a simple distributional analysis of the recorded corpus† (Bloom, 1970, p. 10). The result was the identification of a small set of basic semantic relations that the children’s utterances seems to be expressing. The eight most common of these are summarized in the following table (cf. Brown, p.193-197): â€Å"Major Meanings at Stage I† Two-Word Utterance mommy come; daddy sit drive car; eat grape mommy sock; baby book go park; sit chair cup table; toy floor my teddy; mommy dress Semantic relation expressed agent + action action + object agent + object action + location entity + location possessor + possession Packer Two-Word Utterances 7 box shiny; crayon big dat money; dis telephone entity + attribute demonstrative + entity It seems that children when they first combine words talk about objects: pointing them out, naming them, indicating their location, what they are  like, who owns them, and who is doing things to them. They also talk about actions performed by people, and the objects and locations of these actions. Brown suggested that these are the concepts the child has just finished differentiating in the sensorimotor stage. This kind of semantic characterization of children’s speech continues in current research. For example, the following table is redrawn from Golinkoff Hirsh-Pasek, (1999, p. 151. ) The terminology differs a little, and Recurrence and Disappearance have been added (or at least were not in Brown’s â€Å"top eight†), but other than this the picture is the same. Two-Word Utterance Mommy sock Probable meaning expressed Possessor-possessed or Agent (acting on) an object Recurrence Disappearance or Nonexistence Action on object Agent doing an action Object at location Object and property Naming Possible gloss â€Å"That’s Mommy’s sock† or â€Å"Mommy, put on my sock† â€Å"I want more juice† â€Å"The outside is allgone† (said after front door is closed) â€Å"(Dad) is throwing the toy chicken† â€Å"The car is going† â€Å"The sweater is on the chair† â€Å"The dog is little† â€Å"That is Susan† or â€Å"Her name is Susan†. More juice! Allgone outside Throw chicken Car go Sweater chair Little dog That Susan What Grammar to Write? How to represent the knowledge that underlies children’s utterances viewed in these semantic terms? What kind of grammar can one write? Brown (1973) reviewed several possibilities are concluded that â€Å"No fully explicit grammar proves to be possible† (p. 244). Bloom wrote essentially syntactic grammars, which however included information necessary to give an appropriate semantic interpretation. Schlesinger (assigned reading) wrote a semantic grammar. Antinucci Paresi (optional reading) wrote a grammar that included some pragmatic information too. The following is a grammar for one of the three children Bloom studied: it â€Å"consists of (1) the phrase structure, (2) lexico feature rules, and (3) transformations (Bloom, 1970, pp. 67-68): Packer Two-Word Utterances 8 Packer Two-Word Utterances 9 Criticism of Interpretive Analysis An interesting criticism of these semantic analyses was made by Howe in 1976. Howe noticed a lack of consistency across semantic categorization of two-word utterances by Bloom, Slobin, Schlesinger and Brown, and suggested that the identification of semantic relations actually tells us more about adult interpretation of children’s speech that is does about what the child has in mind. â€Å"Overall, the existence of contradictions between the categories presented in Table 1, the fact that some of the categories are not always mutually exclusive and the fact that it is hard to demonstrate that some of the so-called ‘semantic’ distinctions are more than syntactic alternatives for expressing the same meaning, make it unlikely that Bloom, Brown, Schlesinger and Slobin have produced an adequate categorization of the meanings common to the speech of children at the beginnings of word combination or indeed of adults. [A]ll four writers tacitly assumed that the two-word utterances of young children always express a meaning adults might express using these words and hence their aim was to specify which of the meanings adults might express occur in the first word combinations† (Howe, 1976, p. 34). Howe asserted that (as she later put it) â€Å"there was no evidence that children at the beginning of word combination recognize a world containing agents, locations, and so on† (Howe, 1981, p. 443). It is interesting to read the next rounds of this debate: Bloom, Capatides, Tackeff (1981), Golinkoff (1981), and Howe’s reply (1981). Bloom is witheringly derisive (and seems to miss the point of Howe’s article), Golinkoff is more constructive. Howe accepts Golinkoff’s suggestion that non-linguistic data will show us how a child understands their situation, and she concludes that so far the research shows â€Å"that children do not discover that language encodes roles [played in actions and states of affairs, as distinct from entities involved in actions and states of affairs], until some time after their first word combinations† (451). But I  think there’s a larger point here that I’ll explore in class. Brown’s conclusions about Stage I Brown drew the following conclusions about Stage I: â€Å"The Stage I child operates as if all major sentence constituents were optional, and this does not seem to be because of some absolute ceiling on sentence complexity. In Stage II and after we shall see that he operates, often for long periods, as if grammatical morphemes were optional. Furthermore, the child’s omissions are by no means limited to the relatively lawful omissions which also occur in adult speech. He often leaves out what is linguistically obligatory. This suggests to me that the child expects always to be understood if he produces any appropriate words at all. And in fact we find that he would usually be right in this expectation as long as he speaks at home, in familiar surroundings, and to family members who know his history and inclinations. Stage I speech may then be said to be well adapted to its communicative purpose, well adapted but narrowly adapted. In new surroundings and with less familiar addresses it would  Packer Two-Word Utterances 10 often fail. This suggests that a major dimension of linguistic development is learning to express always and automatically certain things (agent, action, number, tense, and so on) even though these meanings may be in many particular contexts quite redundant. The child who is going to move out into the world, as children do, must learn to make his speech broadly and flexible adaptive† (Brown, 1973, p. 244-245). 2. The Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes in Stage II  The second major finding that Brown reported in A First Language was that â€Å"a set of little words and inflections begins to appear: a few prepositions, especially in and on, an occasional article, an occasional copula am, is, or are, the plural and possessive inflections on the noun, the progressive, past, and third person present indicative inflections on the verb. All these, like an intricate sort of ivy, begin to grow up between and upon the major construction blocks, the nouns and the verbs, to which Stage I is largely limited† (Brown, 1973, p.  249). Brown found that the 14 of these grammatical morphemes of English that he selected for detailed study were acquired in a fixed and universal order. These are the grammatical morphemes we discussed in an earlier class: affixes like –s, -ed, {PAST}, and small function words like on, in, the. We’ve already noted that these morphemes are omitted from the first word-combinations. Brown studied the way they are gradually added to a child’s speech. This takes place in what he called Stage II. The child begins to explicitly mark notions such as number, specificity, tense, aspect, mood, using the inflections or unbound morphemes. Of course, Brown was studying only three children, but the finding of invariant order has stood up when larger numbers of children have been studied. For example, de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) replicated his finding with a sample of twenty-one children. Brown offered evidence that the order of their acquisition was determined by their linguistic complexity. (That’s to say, the number of features each of them encoded.) (Though he noted too that children differ greatly in their rate of acquisition of these morphemes. ) Order 1. 2/3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Morpheme present progressive prepositions plural irregular past tense possessive copula uncontractible articles regular past tense third-person present tense regular Example singing; playing in the cup; on the floor books; dolls broke; went Mommy’s chair; Susie’s teddy This is my book The teddy; A table walked; played he climbs; Mommy cooks Packer Two-Word Utterances 11 11. 12. 13. 14.  third-person present tense irregular auxiliary uncontractible copula contractible auxiliary contractible John has three cookies She was going to school; Do you like me? I’m happy; you are special Mommy’s going shopping Brown examined each utterance is see whether it required any of these morphemes to make it fully grammatical by adult standards, attending to both linguistic and nonlinguistic context. E. g. , when the child points to a book and says that book, Brown inferred that there should have been a copula (‘s or is) and an article (a). Then he checked how many of these obligatory positions for each morpheme were actually filled with the appropriate morphemes at each age. Acquisition—defined as the age at which a morpheme is supplied in 90 percent of its obligatory positions—was remarkably constant across Brown’s three subjects. Why did Brown study these morphemes? Presumably because they are at first omitted. But more importantly, he was trying to test the hypothesis that children are taught grammar by adults. And Brown found that frequency of exposure (in adult speech) was not a predictor. For example, adults used articles more frequently than prepositions, but children acquired these in the opposite order. Brown suggested that linguistic complexity does predict acquisition. The morphemes differ in both semantic complexity (the number of semantic features encoded) and syntactic complexity (the number of rules each requires). For example, the copula verb encodes both number and temporality. These two types of complexity are highly correlated, so they cannot be teased apart, but in either case they predict order of acquisition. The other important change that occurs in Stage II is that, as utterances grow in complexity, the child begins to combine two or more of the basic semantic relations from Stage I: Adam hit ball = agent + action + object = agent + action, plus action + object The Other Stages of Language Acquisition Each of the five stages that Brown distinguished is named for the linguistic process that is the major new development occurring in that stage (â€Å"or for an exceptionally elaborate development of a process at that stage† p. 59). Thus we have: Packer Two-Word Utterances 12. Stage I. Semantic Roles Syntactic Relations. MLU: 1. 0 – 2. 0 agent, patient, instrument, locative etc. expressed (in simple sentences) by linear order, syntactic relations, prepositions or postpositions. Stage II. Grammatical Morphemes the Modulation of Meaning. MLU: 2. 0 – 2. 5 Stage III. Modalities of the Simple Sentence. MLU: 2. 5 Next the child forms transformations of simple declarative sentences: yes-no interrogatives, question request, negation, imperative. During the earlier stages children use intonation to mark different sentence modalities. Now they begin to use morphosemantic devices to mark negatives, questions, and imperatives. Stage IV. Embedding of Sentences One simple sentence will now become used as a grammatical constituent or in a semantic role within another sentence. Stage V. Coordination of Simple Sentences Propositional Relations Sentences are linked together with connector words. Individual Differences Brown also noted some individual differences among Adam, Eve, and Sarah. Two of the children combined V with N, and also used N for possession: eat meat, throw ball, mommy sock. But the child third combined V (or objects of possession) with pronouns: eat it, do this one, my teddy. These two strategies were found by other researchers too. Catherine Nelson called them pronominal nominal strategies (they have also been called â€Å"holistic analytic†; â€Å"expressive referential†), and noted that they could be seen in one-word utterances also: some children tend to produce single-word utterances that are nouns, other children tend to use social or personal words such as hi, bye, and please. Subsequent research has explored the connections between these strategies and later development, cognitive style, and input differences (cf. Shore, 1995. Individual differences in language development, Sage). However, these strategies converge over time. By MLU=2. 5, sentence subjects (agents) are typically pronominal, and predicate objects (patients) are typically nominal. Packer Two-Word Utterances 13 Directions After Brown By the mid-1970s grammar-writing was dying out. Incorrect predictions had discouraged researchers, as had the problem of indeterminacy: the fact that more than one grammar could be written. Interest was growing in other considerations: in the role of semantics; in cognitive precursors to syntax, and to language in general; in mother-child interaction; and in the pragmatic uses to which early speech is put. In the view of some people, linguistic structures and operations became neglected. 1. How Does the Child go from Semantics to Syntax? We’ve seen that Brown’s research found that the grammar of children’s early word combinations was better described in semantic than in syntactic terms. If this is so, how does a child make the transition from a semantic grammar to the adult grammar? Researchers continue to argue about this. Steven Pinker (1984, 1987) suggests that children use semantics to enter the syntactic system of their language. In simple â€Å"basic sentences† the correspondence between things and names maps onto the syntactic category of nouns. Words for physical attributes and changes of state map onto verbs. Semantic agents are almost always the grammatical subjects of sentences. This semantic-syntactic correspondence in early utterances provides a key to abstract syntactic categories of grammar. Paul Bloom has argued that children actually are using syntactic categories from the start, and he cites as evidence for this the fact that children will they place adjectives before nouns but not pronouns: big dog but not: * small she Some linguists have offered a syntactic description of Stage I utterances. They argue that at this stage children merely have a lexicon and a limited set of phrase structure rules in deep-structure. They lack functional categories such as INFL (inflectionals) and COMP (complementizers). No transformations exist at this stage: instead, elements of the deep structure are assigned thematic (i. e. semantic) roles to yield the surfacestructure. And they have proposed that the lack of grammatical subjects in Stage I utterances reflects the default setting of a â€Å"null-subject parameter. † (Since in languages like Italian and Spanish a subject is optional. ) Lois Bloom (1990b) has suggested that children simply have a more limited processing capacity at this age. Sentence subjects are often provided by context, and so can be safely omitted. Dan Slobin has proposed that â€Å"children create grammars in which clearly identifiable surface forms map onto basic semantic categories† (1988, p. 15). Packer Two-Word Utterances 14 For example, locative prepositions—in, on, under—are omitted in early child speech. They are used earlier in languages when they are encoded more saliently—as noun suffixes or as postpositions following nouns. At the same time, there is a common order of emergence across languages: simple topological notions of proximity, containment and support (in, on, under, next to), with locative relations embodying notions of perspective (back, front) always later. Slobin infers that â€Å"conceptual development provides the content for linguistic expression, while linguistic discovery procedures are necessary for working out the mapping of content according to conventions of particular languages† (p. 15). Slobin has looked carefully at the English grammatical morphemes—and their equivalents in other languages—to see how they are used before they are completely acquired (by Brown’s 90% criterion). He finds that children generally use the morphemes systematically, though their use is still â€Å"incomplete† by adult standards. For example, a Russian child applied the accusative inflection only to nouns that â€Å"were objects of direct, physical manipulation, such as ‘give,’ ‘carry,’ ‘put,’ and ‘throw,’ omitting the accusative for less manipulative verbs such as ‘read’ and ‘see. ’† Children will â€Å"organize systems of pronouns and case inflections; but, to begin with, children will organize these various forms to express particular, child-oriented speech functions† (p. 18). They are using the resources of the adult language to mark distinctions that are salient to them. Slobin has also proposed some â€Å"universal language-learning principles. † These are an attempt to explain observed cross-language regularities in order of acquisition. â€Å"According to Slobin, the child has certain concepts, based on cognitive growth, that are expressed through the language system. Using certain principles of acquisition, the child scans the language code to discover the means of comprehension and production† (Owens, 2001, p. 214-215). 1. Pay attention to the ends of words 2. Phonological forms of words can be systematically modified 3. Pay attention to the order of words and morphemes 4. Avoid interruption and rearrangement of linguistic units 5. Underlying semantic relations should be marked overtly and clearly 6. Avoid exceptions 7. The use of grammatical markers should make semantic sense Knowledge of Verb syntax Lois Bloom asserts that learning the argument structure of verbs, and the syntactic differences for different thematic relations is the foundation for acquiring a grammar. Verbs play a central role in further multiword utterances. Opinions differ, however, on how knowledge of verb syntax is acquired. Bloom suggests that the first verbs are those that name actions (do, make, push, eat). Nouns and pronouns take thematic roles (agent, object) in relation to these actions. Bloom says that this implies that children’s â€Å"theories† of objects, space, and causation are important here. Packer Two-Word Utterances 15 A few all-purpose verbs—â€Å"pro-verbs†Ã¢â‚¬â€are used for most early sentences. E. g. , do, go. With these, verb argument structures, verb inflections, and Wh-questions are learned. Subsequently, the child adds the syntax for negation, noun- and verb-inflection, and questions. And then moves on to embedded verb phrases (â€Å"drink [Mommy juice]†) 2. From Semantics to Semantics Language involves a great deal of categorization. â€Å"The forms of language are themselves categories, and these forms are linked to a vast network of categorical distinctions in meaning and discourse function† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28-29).

Calculating Year-On-Year Growth of GDP

Calculating Year-On-Year Growth of GDP Introduction The model which is to be developed is real GDP in the UK. From such a series of real values, it is straightforward to calculate year-on-year growth of GDP. Selection of variables To model GDP, key factors identified by Easton (2004) include labour costs, savings ratio, taxation issues, inflation and terms of trade. However, many of these variables are not available for the required 40 year time span. The variables eventually chosen and the justification were as follows: GDP: the dependent variable, measured at 1950 prices. As GDP deflator figures were not available back to 1960, the eventual starting point of the analysis, the RPI inflation measure was used to convert the series into real prices. Exim: this variable is the sum of imports and exports, at constant 1950 prices. As a measure of trade volumes, EXIM would be expected to increase as GDP also increases. The RPI deflator was also used for this series. Total trade was plasced into one variable was to abide by the constraint of no more than four independent variables. Energy: energy consumption was calculated as production plus imports minus exports in tonnes of oil equivalent. As energy use increases, we would expect to see an increase in the proportion of GDP attributable to manufacturing.[1] Labour: this variable is the total number of days lost through disputes. We would expect this variable to have a negative coefficient, since an increase in the number of days lost will lead to a reduction of GDP. Scatter diagrammes showing the relationship between the dependent variable GDP and each of the independent variables is sown in Appendix 1. These diagrammes support each of the hypotheses outlined above. Main results The regression equation produced by EViews, once the energy variable is excluded, is as follows: GDP = -73223.22384 + 1.062678514*EXIM 0.1391051564*LABOUR + 1.565374397*POPN The adjusted R2 is equal to 0.978; or, 97.8% of the variation in GDP is accounted for by the variation in EXIM, LABOUR and POPN. Each of the coefficients of the three independent variables, EXIM, LABOUR and POPN, have t-statistics sufficiently high to reject the null hypothesis that any of the coefficients is equal to zero; in other words, each variable makes a significant contribution to the overall equation. To test the overall fit of the equation, the F value of 703 allows us similarly to reject the hypothesis that the coefficients are simultaneously all equal to zero. Dependent Variable: GDP Method: Least Squares Date: 04/15/08 Time: 09:10 Sample: 1960 2006 Included observations: 47 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-Statistic Prob. C -73223.22 23204.60 -3.155548 0.0029 EXIM 1.062679 0.117445 9.048297 0.0000 LABOUR -0.139105 0.036951 -3.764585 0.0005 POPN 1.565374 0.443541 3.529270 0.0010 R-squared 0.980046 Mean dependent var 32813.25 Adjusted R-squared 0.978654 S.D. dependent var 10905.60 S.E. of regression 1593.331 Akaike info criterion 17.66631 Sum squared resid 1.09E+08 Schwarz criterion 17.82377 Log likelihood -411.1582 F-statistic 703.9962 Durbin-Watson stat 0.746519 Prob(F-statistic) 0.000000 The Akaike and Schwartz criteria are used principally to compare two or more models (a model with a lower value of either of these statistics is preferred). As we are analysing only one model here, we will not discuss these two further. Using tables provided by Gujarati (2004), the upper and lower limits for the DW test are: DL = 1.383 DU = 1.666 The DW statistic calculated by EViews is 0.746, which is below DL. This results leads us to infer that there is no positive autocorrelation in the model. This is an unlikely result, given that we are dealing with increasing variables over time, but we shall examine the issue of autocorrelation in detail later on. Multicollinearity Ideally, there should be little or no significant correlation between the dependent variables; if two dependent variables are perfectly correlated, then one variable is redundant and the OLS equations could not be solved. The correlation of variables table below shows that EXIM and POPN have a particularly high level of correlation (the removal of the ENERGY variable early on solved two other cases of multicollinearity). It is important, however, to point out that multicollinearity does not violate any assumptions of the OLS process and Gujarati points out the multicollinearity is a consequence of the data being observed (indeed, section 10.4 of his book is entitled â€Å"Multicollinearity; much ado about nothing?†). Correlations of Variables GDP EXIM POPN ENERGY GDP 1.000000 EXIM 0.984644 POPN 0.960960 0.957558 ENERGY 0.835053 0.836279 0.914026 LABOUR -0.380830 -0.320518 -0.259193 -0.166407 Analysis of Residuals Overview The following graph shows the relationship between actual, fitted and residual values. At first glance, the residuals appear to be reasonably well behaved; the values are not increasing over time and there several points at which the residual switches from positive to negative. A more detailed tabular version of this graph may be found at Appendix 2. Heteroscedascicity To examine the issue of heteroscedascicity more closely, we will employ White’s test. As we are using a model with only three independent variables, we may use the version of the test which uses the cross-terms between the independent variables. White Heteroskedasticity Test: F-statistic 1.174056 Probability 0.339611 Obs*R-squared 10.44066 Probability 0.316002 Test Equation: Dependent Variable: RESID^2 Method: Least Squares Date: 04/16/08 Time: 08:24 Sample: 1960 2006 Included observations: 47 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-Statistic Prob. C -2.99E+09 4.06E+09 -0.735744 0.4665 EXIM -49439.98 45383.77 -1.089376 0.2830 EXIM^2 -0.175428 0.128496 -1.365249 0.1804 EXIM*LABOUR -0.049223 0.047215 -1.042532 0.3039 EXIM*POPN 0.982165 0.879151 1.117174 0.2711 LABOUR -18039.83 18496.29 -0.975322 0.3357 LABOUR^2 -0.018423 0.009986 -1.844849 0.0731 LABOUR*POPN 0.344698 0.336446 1.024526 0.3122 POPN 120773.0 157305.5 0.767761 0.4475 POPN^2 -1.217523 1.523271 -0.799282 0.4292 R-squared 0.222142 Mean dependent var 2322644. Adjusted R-squared 0.032933 S.D. dependent var 3306810. S.E. of regression 3251902. Akaike info criterion 33.01368 Sum squared resid 3.91E+14 Schwarz criterion 33.40733 Log likelihood -765.8215 F-statistic 1.174056 Durbin-Watson stat 1.306019 Prob(F-statistic) 0.339611 The 5% critical value for chi-squared with nine degrees of freedom is 16.919, whilst the computed value of White’s statistic is 10.44. We may therefore conclude that, on the basis of the White test, there is no evidence of heteroscedascicity. Autocorrelation The existence of autocorrelation exists in the model if there exists correlation between residuals. In the context of a time series, we are particularly interested to see if successive residual values are related to prior values. To determine autocorrelation, Gujarati’s rule of thumb of using between a third and a quarter of the length of the time series was used. In this particular case, a lag of 15 was selected. Date: 04/16/08 Time: 08:05 Sample: 1960 2006 Included observations: 47 Autocorrelation Partial Correlation AC PAC Q-Stat Prob . |**** | . |**** | 1 0.494 0.494 12.234 0.000 . |*** | . |** | 2 0.423 0.237 21.409 0.000 . |*. | .*| . | 3 0.155 -0.171 22.669 0.000 . | . | .*| . | 4 0.007 -0.145 22.672 0.000 .*| . | .*| . | 5 -0.109 -0.069 23.319 0.000 **| . | .*| . | 6 -0.244 -0.160 26.674 0.000 **| . | . | . | 7 -0.194 0.037 28.845 0.000 **| . | . | . | 8 -0.202 -0.004 31.247 0.000 **| . | .*| . | 9 -0.226 -0.162 34.344 0.000 **| . | .*| . | 10 -0.269 -0.186 38.859 0.000 .*| . | . |*. | 11 -0.134 0.122 40.013 0.000 .*| . | . | . | 12 -0.079 0.047 40.428 0.000 .*| . | .*| . | 13 -0.078 -0.151 40.837 0.000 . | . | . | . | 14 0.013 0.029 40.849 0.000 . | . | . | . | 15 0.041 0.018 40.970 0.000 The results of the Q statistic indicate that the data is nonstationary; in other words, the mean and standard deviation of the data do indeed vary over time. This is not a surprising result, given growth in the UK’s economy and population since 1960. A further test available to test for autocorrelation is the Breusch-Godfrey test. The results of this test on the model are detailed below. Breusch-Godfrey Serial Correlation LM Test: F-statistic 15.53618 Probability 0.000010 Obs*R-squared 20.26299 Probability 0.000040 Test Equation: Dependent Variable: RESID Method: Least Squares Date: 04/16/08 Time: 09:23 Presample missing value lagged residuals set to zero. Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-Statistic Prob. C 9294.879 18204.51 0.510581 0.6124 EXIM 0.047292 0.092176 0.513065 0.6107 LABOUR 0.039181 0.031072 1.260967 0.2144 POPN -0.182287 0.348222 -0.523479 0.6035 RESID(-1) 0.788084 0.154144 5.112655 0.0000 RESID(-2) -0.180226 0.160485 -1.123009 0.2680 R-squared 0.431127 Mean dependent var 0.000100 Adjusted R-squared 0.361753 S.D. dependent var 1540.499 S.E. of regression 1230.710 Akaike info criterion 17.18731 Sum squared resid 62100572 Schwarz criterion 17.42350 Log likelihood -397.9019 F-statistic 6.214475 Durbin-Watson stat 1.734584 Prob(F-statistic) 0.000225 We can observe from the results above that RESID(-1) has a high t value. In other words, we would reject the hypothesis of no first order autocorrelation. By contrast, second order autocorrelation does not appear to be present in the model. Overcoming serial correlation A method to overcome the problem of nonstationarity is to undertake a difference of the dependent variable (ie GDPyear1 – GDPyear0) An initial attempt to improve the equation by using this differencing method produced a very poor result, as can be seen below. Dependent Variable: GDPDIFF Method: Least Squares Date: 04/16/08 Time: 08:17 Sample: 1961 2006 Included observations: 46 Variable Coefficient Std. Error t-Statistic Prob. C 14037.58 12694.29 1.105818 0.2753 EXIM 0.084287 0.052601 1.602398 0.1167 ENERGY 0.011470 0.011710 0.979487 0.3331 LABOUR -0.004251 0.014304 -0.297230 0.7678 POPN -0.300942 0.265082 -1.135279 0.2629 R-squared 0.207408 Mean dependent var 816.6959 Adjusted R-squared 0.130082 S.D. dependent var 657.1886 S.E. of regression 612.9557 Akaike info criterion 15.77678 Sum squared resid 15404304 Schwarz criterion 15.97555 Log likelihood -357.8660 F-statistic 2.682255 Durbin-Watson stat 1.401626 Prob(F-statistic) 0.044754 Forecasting The forecasts for the dependent variables are based on Kirby (2008) and are presented below. The calculation of EXIM for future years was based upon growth rates for exports (47% of the 2006 total) and imports (53%) separately. The two streams were added together to produce the 1950 level GDP figure, from which year-on-year increases in GDP could be calculated. The results of the forecast are shown below. The 2008 figure was felt to be particularly unrealistic, so a sensitivity test was applied to EXIM (population growth is relatively certain in the short term and calculating a forecast of labour days lost is a particularly difficult challenge). Instead of EXIM growing by an average of 1.7% per annum during the forecast period, its growth was constrained to 0.7%. As we can see from the â€Å"GDP2† column, GDP forecast growth is significantly lower in 2008 and 2009 as a result. Critical evaluation of the econometric approach to model building and forecasting GDP is dependent on many factors, many of which were excluded from this analysis due to the unavailability of data covering forty years. Although the main regression results appear highly significant, there are many activities which should be trialled to try to improve the approach: a shorter time series with more available variables: using a short time series would enable a more intuitive set of variables to be trialled. For example, labour days lost is effectively a surrogate for productivity and cost per labour hour, but this is unavailable over 40 years; transformation of variables: a logarithmic or other transformation should be trialled to ascertain if some of the problems observed, such as autocorrelation, could be mitigated to any extent. The other, more relevant transformation is to undertake differencing of the data to remove autocorrelation; the one attempt made in this paper was particularly unsuccessful! Approximate word count, excluding all tables, charts and appendices: 1,400 Appendix 1 – Scatter diagrammes of GDP against dependent variables Appendix 2 obs Actual Fitted Residual Residual Plot 1960 17460.5 15933.8 1526.78 | . | * | 1961 17816.1 16494.5 1321.57 | . | *. | 1962 17883.8 16714.1 1169.67 | . | * . | 1963 18556.7 18153.6 403.108 | . |* . | 1964 19618.0 19117.8 500.191 | . | * . | 1965 20209.7 19558.9 650.773 | . | * . | 1966 20699.1 20272.1 426.905 | . |* . | 1967 21303.1 20973.3 329.754 | . |* . | 1968 22037.1 22395.3 -358.204 | . *| . | 1969 22518.6 22824.6 -305.982 | . *| . | 1970 23272.7 23147.8 124.912 | . * . | 1971 23729.9 23395.8 334.070 | . |* . | 1972 24806.3 22418.6 2387.67 | . | . * | 1973 26134.9 27249.5 -1114.60 | . * | . | 1974 25506.2 28880.9 -3374.64 | * . | . | 1975 25944.6 28401.8 -2457.14 | * . | . | 1976 26343.7 30306.2 -3962.47 |* . | . | 1977 26468.8 29829.1 -3360.31 | * . | . | 1978 28174.4 29922.0 -1747.61 | * | . | 1979 29232.7 27846.9 1385.71 | . | *. | 1980 28957.2 29271.0 -313.855 | . *| . | 1981 28384.0 29590.8 -1206.86 | .* | . | 1982 28626.2 29526.2 -899.933 | . * | . | 1983 29915.3 30883.9 -968.627 | . * | . | 1984 30531.7 29677.7 853.960 | . | * . | 1985 31494.3 33289.4 -1795.09 | * | . | 1986 32748.5 33293.0 -544.520 | . * | . | 1987 34609.2 34223.2 385.976 | . |* . | 1988 36842.2 34669.4 2172.76 | . | . * | 1989 37539.8 35938.6 1601.20 | . | * | 1990 37187.7 35988.5 1199.22 | . | *. | 1991 36922.2 35080.4 1841.84 | . | .* | 1992 37116.4 35793.7 1322.74 | . | *. | 1993 38357.7 38051.2 306.418 | . |* . | 1994 39696.7 39790.8

Public School Mentality in Howards End and Passage to India Essay

Public School Mentality in Howard's End and Passage to India The public-school system remains unique because it was created by the Anglo-Saxon middle classes - how perfectly it expresses their character - with its boarding houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence on good form and on esprit de corps - (E.M. Forster, 'Notes on the English Character', 1936.) Forster perceived the public-school system to be at the centre of the English middle-classes, defining their set of core values and moulding their behaviour. He was particularly intrigued by the notion of emotional repression being indoctrinated into public-school pupils, and the effects of this 'stiff upper lip' mentality is keenly considered in both Howards End and A Passage to India. While several of his male protagonists unquestionably display solidity and efficiency, their lack of imagination and inclination towards hypocrisy inevitably undermine any potentially positive characteristics. Their personal relationships with others are consequently affected, and in A Passage to India the failure of Anglo-Saxon relations is significantly contributed to by the small-minded selfishness of the English. Forster's skilful use of contrast means that those removed from the public-school mentality, such as the colourful characters of Leonard Bast and Aziz, can serve to expose its flaws. The extreme importance of maintaining an unruffled sense of composure, or 'good form' in all situations, even if done in an illusory manner, is an element of public-school mentality much explored by Forster. Margaret Schlegel is subjected to this when travelling in a train with the Fussells, and somewhat bemusedly notes how they raised windows for som... ...ring will inherit Howard's End is perhaps a way for Forster to applaud his emotional maturity: in contrast, Henry reaches a dead end with no prospects. The fact that Forster is clearly opposed to the public-school system and its values is responsible for much of the effectiveness of his writing, especially in Howards End and A Passage to India. His rigorous scepticism of rigid, middle-class behaviour leads to particularly vivid characterisation, and enhances the exciting tension prevalent in both novels. While he is hesitant in explicitly condemning public-school mentality - which is, incidentally, never clearly defined by Forster - his sly observations and cunning implications regarding the subject are significant. Even if one is reluctant to draw firm conclusions about his viewpoint, there can be no denying that it is a powerful vehicle for Forster's wry wit.

The Sugarbusters Diet :: Science Scientific Medical Essays

The Sugarbusters Diet History of the Sugarbusters Diet One of the Authors, H.Leighton Steward, began eating "bad" foods such as steak, lamb, and cheese after fifteen years of obstaining and found that his cholesterol dropped by fifteen percent and triglycerides by fifty percent. Baffled by this, steward talked to his doctor about the possibility that insulin must have been provoking the liver to produce cholesterol. His doctor, Bethea, another author of the book enthusiastically agreed. He sighted proof by explaining that insulin injections in diabetics tend to elevate cholesterol levels (Steward,Andrews, Bethea & Balart, 1995). Pledge of the Sugarbusters Diet. The diet will allow for most foods to be eaten in normal quantities or possibly larger ones. One will be able to eat many foods which have been considered "non-diet", such as meat, cheeses, and eggs. The foods to be avoided will be any foods which stimulate large amounts of insulin to regulate blood sugar. Sugar is targeted, not fat, as the culprit for extra pounds (Dawson, 1997). "By simply doing this, one can get slimmer and healthier simultaneously" (Steward, 1995). One author, Dr. Balart, even states that the diet is easy. He believes that after two to four days on the diet the desire for sweets will disappear and after ten to fourteen days they will be intolerable(http://www.sugarbusters.com:80/balofe.html). Following the Diet The basis of the sugarbusters diet is to trim fat by eliminating extra sugar. Sugarbusters states that lowering extra sugar is achieved by avoiding white rice, white bread and refined pastas. Other foods to be avoided are carrots, beets, and bananas. Dieters should instead eat foods which are high in protein such as nuts, steaks, eggs and also some fruits, vegetables and whole grain cereals and breads (Steward, 1995). The discerning factor between which foods can be eaten and which can not depends on the particular glycemic index of the food. Glycemic Index The glycemic index is the classification of food based on their blood glucose response relative to a starchy food, usually white bread. "A glycemic index is calculated as the weighted mean of the glycemic index value of the individual carbohydrate food, with the weighting based on the the proportion of the total carbohydrate contributed by each food"(Wolever, Nguyen, Chiassen,& Hunt, 1994). In total there are nearly six hundred separate entries including values for most common Western foods, yet these are not available on the Sugarbusters web site.

Eliyahu M. Goldratts The Goal Essay -- Goldratt

The Goal Here are the principles behind the dramatic turnaround story in The Goal. The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money. Jonah poses this as a question: "What is the goal?" and Rogo actually struggles with it for a day or two, but any manager or executive that can't answer that question without hesitation should be fired without hesitation. But then again, the goal isn't clear to everyone. One of the characters in the book, an accountant, responds to an offhand comment about the goal with a confused "The goal? You mean our objectives for the month?" That's sure to strike a chord with a lot of readers. At an operational level, measure your success toward the goal with these three metrics: Throughput - The rate at which the system generates money through sales. Inventory - The money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. Operational expense - The money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. You could rephrase it this way - and someone does, a bit later in the book: Throughput - Goods out; the money coming in. Inventory - Materials in; the money currently inside the system. Operational expense - Effort in; the money going out. Obviously, your job is to minimize expense and inventory and maximize throughput. Adjust the flow of product to match demand. In particular, don't trim capacity to match demand. It's a standard cost-cutting procedure, sure. But you'll need that capacity later, if you're serious about increasing throughput. Find bottlenecks. If manufacturing is what's limiting your throughput, then the problem isn't that people aren't working hard enough. You have bottlenecks in your manufacturing processes that are holding up everything else. Find the bottlenecks and do everything you can to fix them. Increase their efficiency, even at the expense of efficiency in non-bottleneck places, because the efficiency of a bottleneck directly determines the efficiency of the entire process, all the way through final payment. In the book, a variety of steps are taken to "elevate" and circumvent the bottlenecks. This is where the results start showing up on the bottom line. Soon the plant can actually use information from the bottleneck to do an effective job of scheduling work and (for the first time) reliably predicting when orders w... ...deas in novel form. There were already a dozen essays or articles on manufacturing management paradigms; you couldn't sell those. Novels sell better than essays. They're more readable. Once you realize that managers will buy thousands of copies of a "business novel" and make it required reading for their subordinates, a novel is the only way to go. (Also, The Goal was originally intended as marketing for Goldratt's plant management software company.) My main objection to The Goal is that it's fiction. Rogo makes a few changes, and his problems miraculously go away. It just works. Granted, the policies seem like good sense. But the unrealistic points are glossed over. Maybe plant managers in real life have the authority to adopt dramatic changes in the way they operate, the way Rogo did. Maybe it's easy to convince your top accountant that all his models are wrong, even though you have no accounting experience yourself. Maybe the average plant has an IT department that can create new scheduling software out of thin air in a few days. Maybe not. Goldratt claims a lot of real-life plant managers say they've turned The Goal into a documentary. That's a book I haven't read yet. Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal Essay -- Goldratt The Goal Here are the principles behind the dramatic turnaround story in The Goal. The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money. Jonah poses this as a question: "What is the goal?" and Rogo actually struggles with it for a day or two, but any manager or executive that can't answer that question without hesitation should be fired without hesitation. But then again, the goal isn't clear to everyone. One of the characters in the book, an accountant, responds to an offhand comment about the goal with a confused "The goal? You mean our objectives for the month?" That's sure to strike a chord with a lot of readers. At an operational level, measure your success toward the goal with these three metrics: Throughput - The rate at which the system generates money through sales. Inventory - The money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell. Operational expense - The money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. You could rephrase it this way - and someone does, a bit later in the book: Throughput - Goods out; the money coming in. Inventory - Materials in; the money currently inside the system. Operational expense - Effort in; the money going out. Obviously, your job is to minimize expense and inventory and maximize throughput. Adjust the flow of product to match demand. In particular, don't trim capacity to match demand. It's a standard cost-cutting procedure, sure. But you'll need that capacity later, if you're serious about increasing throughput. Find bottlenecks. If manufacturing is what's limiting your throughput, then the problem isn't that people aren't working hard enough. You have bottlenecks in your manufacturing processes that are holding up everything else. Find the bottlenecks and do everything you can to fix them. Increase their efficiency, even at the expense of efficiency in non-bottleneck places, because the efficiency of a bottleneck directly determines the efficiency of the entire process, all the way through final payment. In the book, a variety of steps are taken to "elevate" and circumvent the bottlenecks. This is where the results start showing up on the bottom line. Soon the plant can actually use information from the bottleneck to do an effective job of scheduling work and (for the first time) reliably predicting when orders w... ...deas in novel form. There were already a dozen essays or articles on manufacturing management paradigms; you couldn't sell those. Novels sell better than essays. They're more readable. Once you realize that managers will buy thousands of copies of a "business novel" and make it required reading for their subordinates, a novel is the only way to go. (Also, The Goal was originally intended as marketing for Goldratt's plant management software company.) My main objection to The Goal is that it's fiction. Rogo makes a few changes, and his problems miraculously go away. It just works. Granted, the policies seem like good sense. But the unrealistic points are glossed over. Maybe plant managers in real life have the authority to adopt dramatic changes in the way they operate, the way Rogo did. Maybe it's easy to convince your top accountant that all his models are wrong, even though you have no accounting experience yourself. Maybe the average plant has an IT department that can create new scheduling software out of thin air in a few days. Maybe not. Goldratt claims a lot of real-life plant managers say they've turned The Goal into a documentary. That's a book I haven't read yet.

Ethics and Morality Essay

There is an inherent question on the basis of morality and whether or not it is a man-made, almost religious invention or if it is intrinsic to our beings as humans. I think that the rope that is the argument between is too complicated and tightly knotted to have a short conversation about, but by fraying the ends of the rope we can inevitably decide that morality is innate and that religion may have a part in building upon it, but not in creating it. The curiosity behind the topic of morality is normally fashioned by religious arguments for the assumption that a deity endowed us as humans with some sort of moral compass. However, by searching the brain for its different functions and activities during moral dilemmas and religious interactions, along with historical clues and a little knowledge of sociology, determining that morality is not created, only built upon, is inevitable. Morality is defined as normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons (Stanford). With this as a definition, the first question to rises is the following: What is one moral action that a believer can do that a non-believer cannot do? There are few answers to the inverse, if any, but non-believers do not pose that they have any stronger of a moral compass than believers, while believers do. It is incredibly important to think about an answer to this question because if there truly is no answer to this challenge, then a road has been paved toward an objective that we can already see, which is that being ethical and moral is not necessarily a religious view, so such claims can immediately be cast off and the topic can stay on a strictly scientific road. Now the consideration lies upon what is deemed as an ethical person. Is the president ethical in his decisions? Is a doctor ethical in his decisions? Of course, there is an ethical code in these circles, but does that immediately mean that any decisions outside of the codes are immoral? A moral person is normally described as somebody who takes into account the possible consequences of his or her actions and rationally decides on a choice based on how it may affect those around him. We call these people morally good because their contributions to whomever they are around are normally well thought-out, harmless contributions to the topic. However, this is simply a definition, and the person is simply his or her self. Take into account the thoughts of those around the subject. A religiously-convicted man would say that his religion is the reason for his good nature, while one not necessarily supporting religion would say that he is simply a good person. As an aside, there are multiple people who would take the chance to point out many historically immoral figures, such as Mao Zedong, Stalin, Pol Pot, who were atheistic. While it is true that these figures were indeed non-believers, it is important to distinguish the reasons for their immorality. It was not based on religion, but rather by social constructs and a greed for power that caused them to act out. Some may cite Hitler as an atheist as well, but they’d be digging their own grave. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, even gives credit to the Christian god, and had religious inscriptions on every Nazi-uniform belt. To get back to the previous point, it is important to take into account what those around the subject would perceive, and although the religiously-convicted man might have millions of people around the world following his train of thought, research done Dr. Pyssiainen and Dr. Hauser from the departments of Psychology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University offers an interesting perspective on the topic: â€Å"†¦Despite differences in, or even an absence of, religious backgrounds, individuals show no difference in moral judgments for unfamiliar moral dilemmas. The research suggests that intuitive judgments of right and wrong seem to operate independently of explicit religious commitments. † Pyssiainen’s and Hauser’s study grants us that although religious backgrounds may indeed build upon moral constructs, as good religion is only positively influential to a good person, a complete lack of religious background is perfectly plausible if an individual wishes to be moral because moral judgments are not linked to religious commitments. This finding is absolutely crucial to determining whether or not morality is man-made or inherent to humans because it breaks the perceived bond between belief and morality. So their contribution to the topic has been seen through and accepted as a welcome source of reference. However, it is essential to look at the other side of the argument. Which studies show that seem to show that religion is a key factor in morality? Unfortunately, they are found few and far between. As a matter of fact, there are literally no scientific studies that show religion is crucial in the formation of morality. It’s widely granted that religion, in some aspects, can further construct upon morality and cause others to be exceedingly altruistic and generous, and that is conceded by Paul Bloom of Yale University, but it is not a formative agent. In his paper, â€Å"Religion, Morality, Evolution,† he accepts that religion can be a guiding influence on a positive path. However, he points out that it is by no means the reason for morality, and that religion itself may just be an accident by which humans needed an answer to questions that they couldn’t fathom without the help of a deity. Necessity dictates that there should be some rather fueled individuals on a topic as flammable as the topic of morality and religion. Speaking as an outsider looking in, I cannot very well use the words of Christopher Hitchens, though I would love to dearly, because he was so against religion. While he was indeed logical in most of his claims, he was a self-described anti-theist, meaning that he was against a spectating deity who watched over each individual. Thus, his words would seem rather biased. However, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, and Sam Harris, a well-known neuroscientist, are individuals who speak strictly through logical and provable means. Richard Dawkins posed the same point as Paul Bloom that religion is most likely an accident through evolution that was used as a possible answer to the world’s greatest questions, and Harris poses multiple reasonable points. The most relevant, though, is that if the bible were the only book in the world, it would be rational to use it as a basis for morality. However, because the bible is not the only book in the world and society is far more civilized now than it was when the bible was conceived, it is reasonable to assume that the bible is not the best book for building a moral compass. To end on a rather short note, there are few, if any, scientific studies arguing that religion is the factory that builds moral compasses. However, there are studies being conducted which follow Pyssiainen’s and Hauser’s and should end up corroborating their finds that morality works independently of religious constructs and confines. Thus, it is both rational and reasonable to assume that, after looking through history at the reasons for extreme wrongdoings and the social situations that facilitated them, and the evidence against opposing claims, morality is indeed intrinsic to our human nature and that it is simply augmented by outside forces, such as good religion. References Bloom, Paul, Religion, Morality, Evolution (January 2012). Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 63, pp. 179-199, 2012. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn. com/abstract=1982949 or http://dx. doi. org/10. 1146/annurev-psych-120710-100334 Cell Press (2010, February 9). Morality research sheds light on the origins of religion. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 12, 2013, from http://www. sciencedaily. com /releases/2010/02/100208123625. htm Harris, Sam. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Random House, Print. Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton, Print. Pyysiainen, Hauser et al. The origins of religion Q1 : evolved adaptation or by-product? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, February 8, 2010 â€Å"The Nature of Morality and Moral Theories. † Morality and Moral Theories. University of San Diego. Web. 12 May 2013. .

Addiction to social networking Essay

Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience that actions need to be taken to stop the addiction to social networking. Thesis Statement: Being too addicted to social networking can cause some serious problems, so it is necessary to stop it. Main Points: ?.Addiction to social networking has caused serious problems. A. Addiction to social networking leads to distraction while working. B. Addiction to social networking makes us feel isolated in real life. C. Addiction to social networking weakens our ability to think. ?.Some factors contributes out addiction to social networking. A. Technology development gives us the chance. B. Psychological need to express ourselves adds to the obsession. ?.Actions need to be taken to stop the addiction to social networking. A. We can download some app to force ourselves to be focused. B. We should arrange our time for efficiently. C. We should engage ourselves in real-life socializing. See more: Satirical elements in the adventure of Huckleberry Finn essay INTRODUCTION (Attention getter) How many of you know what ‘s the picture I showed on the screen?Actually, it’s an APP for Apple and Android users.It was developed to force ourselves to focus on our study, cutting our obsession with our phone.It works very simple but also very rude.At first, you should set a time, such as 20 min, or 1 h, during which, you expect yourself to focus on your study without any connection to you phone. Once you break the law you set yourself, immediately, the app will automatically send a message to renren, to inform everyone that you fail to concentrate and seek contempt and supervision. .(Relevancy statement) But why we must use the app to force ourselves to get focused? Even at the cost of being abused?Could it be  said that there is something making it a really tough job to be attentive to our daily life?Then what is it ? ?.(Credibility) But why we must use the app to force ourselves to get focused? Even at the cost of being abused?Could it be said that there is something making it a really tough job to be attentive to our daily life?Then what is it ? (Thesis statement) So we must stop our addiction to social networking. ?.(Preview of main points) Today we will analyze the harm, cause of social networking and some tips to help us end it. (Transition) Let’s start with the harm. BODY (Main Point 1)problems But was it worth the time we spent?Of course not.Now I will show the three bad consequences resulted from overuse of social network.They are: Distraction while working, Isolated in real life, Weakening in thinking. (Internal Preview) Now I will show the three bad consequences resulted from overuse of social network.They are: Distraction while working, Isolated in real life, Weakening in thinking. A.(Subpoint 1) There is a research sponsored by harmon.ie and executed by uSamp, showed that almost 60% time for distration are wasted exchanging different windows of social network, email, sms, 45% staff can work continually without any interruption for 15 min and 53%staff at least waste 1 hour on social networking. It’s obvious that distraction has killed most of our efficiency. B.(Subpoint 2) Social networking also makes us feeling lonely in real life. Let’s think about why social networking is developed? What’s its initial aim?In light of the fact that we’re too busy to meet with each other and to involve ourselves in socializing, it gives us chance to communicate through Internet and generally, is aimed at building relationship. But what’s happening now?While get-together, we focus on mobile phones. Then the waiter serves the dishes, we take a photo of the dishes then go on with the phone thing. Some foreigners even ask whether phones in China can test the food is poisonous or not. It may sounds hilarious.Thing really go contrary to our wished. Check the following signals: 1How often do you stay up late for SNS? 2How long do you focus on your phone while real-life socialing? 3Will you be upset without phone? 4Do you often feel I have nothing to say – -? 5Are you  anxious when face-to-face talking? If most of your answers is yes, you had better pay attention to whether your connection with social networking is too much. Don’t be the slave of social networking. C.(Subpoint 3)Do you know the man in the picture?He’s mark bauerlein. He wrote a book called the dumbest generation. In his book, he indicates that digital era is making the young the dumbest generation Nowadays, young people are too engaged in tools for entertainment, such as social networking, mobile phone, and so on. Technology does a vitally supportive job. What do we usually do in SNS? Girls tend to upload their photos, which are carefully elected, to gain respect or admiration or something. short messages are common too. It can show how some one feels instantly. Another function is share. Whatever catches your eyes or whatever you are for, click share, then anyone is informed. (Transition)But what indeed contribute to its burgeoning? (Main Point 2) causes A. (Subpoint 1) Technology development Firstly, nowadays almost every one brings with himself a cell phone, and there is wifi everywhere like in cafe, classroom, bus stop and airports. It gives us the chance. B.(Subpoint 2) Psychological need What do we mostly post on social networking? Photos, short messages. The phenomena implies the need to express ourselves. Also we tend to choose to be defined by others, which results from the lack of self-confidence. (Transition) Given the situation above, people are now working on the solution. (Main Point 3) There are some tips. A.(Subpoint 1) we can appeal to outside forces. B.(Subpoint 2) we should be a good timer. C.(Subpoint 3) we should engage ourselves in real-life socializing. CONCLUSION (Review of main points) On the whole , it is high time that we recognized the significance of ending our attraction to social networking. So As a  result, we should take some effective methods to solve the problem. ?.(Closing remarks) So keep away from your phones or laptops and reach the real-life friends. Thank you! REFERENCE 1.We Are Social 2.harmon.ie 3.Internet