Eu to Impose Anti-Dumping Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels. Essay Example for Free

Eu to Impose Anti-Dumping Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels. Essay Commentary: EU to impose anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Free trade versus protectionism is a topic of great debate in internal economics. The former takes place when there are no barriers to trade established by the government or international organizations. On the other hand, protectionism is the use of barriers to imports in a determined country and it is usually applied to protect domestic employment and firms. According to the article, China is being accused by the EU of dumping, defined as the selling by a country of large quantities of a commodity, at a price lower than its production cost, in another country. In the case the accusation was proved, the government is allowed, under international trade rules, to impose anti-dumping measures to reduce the damage to its domestic industry. The EU is already imposing a protectionist measure, tariffs. These are defined as a tax that is charged on imported goods and are considered as the most common type of anti-dumping measure. Before applying tariffs, the country consumed 0-Q2 Solar Panels at the price of the world (Pw), but domestic firms were producing only 0-Q1 and the rest (Q1-Q2) were imports. When the tariff is imposed, S (World) shifts upward by the quantity of the tariff to S (World)+Tariff. This produces prices to go up to Pw+T and the total quantity demanded of Solar Panels falls to 0-Q4. Because of the shift in the world’s supply curve, domestic producers now produce from 0-Q3 and their revenue increases from g to g+a+b+c+h. Foreign producers now supply Q3-Q4, but even when their products now have a higher price, they have to pay the amount of the tariff to the government and thus, their revenue falls from h+i+j+k to only i+j. As a result, the government receives tariff revenue of d+e. However, there are some issues that come with the application of this measure. First, is the dead-weight loss of welfare produced by the loss of consumer surplus, because even when consumers keep the amount â€Å"k† that they would have spent on Solar Panels, the new consumer surplus (equivalent to â€Å"f†) is not purchased. Secondly, now the EU would produce Q1-Q3 units of Solar Panels in a more inefficient way compared to China, and thus â€Å"c† represents the inefficiency of the domestic producers and a loss of world efficiency. Another issue with this measure is the creation of trade diversion with regards to Germany. As a member of a custom union the imposition of the tariffs to China are also compulsory for Germany, which is by far China’s greatest partner in the EU and, therefore, the production of Solar Panels for Germany would move from a low-cost producer outside the union to a high-cost producer inside the union. Before the EU imposed the tariff, Germany would produce 0-Q1 units of Solar Panels domestically and would import Q1-Q4 units of Solar Panels from China. Now with the new tariff, Chinese Solar Panels become more expensive than those produced in the EU. This would make Germany to produce 0-Q2 units of Solar Panels itself and import Q2-Q3 units from the EU. Now there is an overall fall in the quantity demanded of Solar Panels of Q3-Q4 units and so a loss of consumer surplus. Moreover, a misallocation of the world’s resources is produced since Q1-Q2 units of solar panels are now being produced by less efficient German producers and the production of Q2-Q3 units has transferred from efficient Chinese producers to relatively inefficient EU producers. It is true that, if the EU can prove that dumping has damaged its industries, they are allowed, under international trade rules, to impose anti-dumping measures. However, it is very difficult to prove whether or not a foreign industry has actually been guilty of dumping. Furthermore, the EU has the most subsidized economy in the world and it is arguable that when they subsidize a product, it is actually a case of dumping because the price doesn’t reflect the actual costs of the EU producers. This makes the issues about protectionism even greater, since (taking the previously mentioned assumption into account) the EU would not have the grounds to accuse China. There is now a high risk of retaliation from China leading to a possible  major tariff imposed by them to the EU and â€Å"Chinese and EU interests would be hurt if not properly handled† as mentioned by Chinese Premier, Li Keqiang. Clearly a better solution would have been a talk between governments, rather than any form of protectionism.

Irish Housing Policy Essay Example for Free

Irish Housing Policy Essay The legacy of anxious tenant and the battle for security of tenure continues to educate much political debates and imagery around housing. The longing to be free of landlordism usually is the primary factor for owner occupation at any cost. Many people view Irish as a conservative race by nature. In the field of housing, unique features have developed over the years which make Irish different from other European states. One of these features is the longing to own one’s own home. Successive regime have acknowledged this natural tendency towards this type of tenure and the need of providing it by introducing measures structured to encourage home ownership over the years. Irish housing policy has been greatly controlled by developers and house building companies since the 60s. This is still same today because possession of riches, properties, land and housing is not extensively divulged (O’Connell, 2007). Evolution of Irish Housing Policy Current Irish housing policy has been struggling to tackle the economic development of the past ten years. The upsurge of the economy since the mid 90s resulted to a fast growth in demand for housing mainly in the major cities, with a belated growth in housing development/production. Between 1993 and 2001, the real economic growth was approximately 8% per annum (Norris and O’Connell 2002). Irish emigrants returning home hunted housing in the thriving economy and the pace of new household establishment rose due to absence of emigration in the history of Ireland state. This led to a flourishing housing market and housing price inflated by 20% per year. All this unanticipated development occurred without a rational housing policy suitable for a modern industrializing nation. House builders and developers were left to address the new phenomenon (Norris et al 2007). Politicians complained of the rising prices which were excluding part of the population from accessing housing. This led to development of measures and plans for allowing access to those excluded from the market. One of the key responses of the government was the 2003 partnership agreement which had pledged to provide some ten thousand affordable housing units for low economic group who could not afford housing in the market. This was done by coordinating housing developer and market to develop cheaper units for sale. The state offered assistance through local government and provided subsidies of some state land (Norris and O’Connell 2002). The establishment of social housing policy in Ireland has mostly been seen as a responsibility of the domineering class to integrate the poorest of the low economy into the national community. Attempts to address social segregation of many Ireland population which finds it roots from historical residualisation of social housing have birthed another development and building chances instead of any real resource distribution (O’Connell, 2007). However, the 21st century Ireland housing policy is mostly dealing with housing equity, affordability, mortgage securitization and seasonally horrors of homelessness. The year 2000 was marked with increased social housing construction but this failed to recapture the relative output seen before the 80s. To this end, a number of policies have been formulated and introduced with mixed accomplishment. The first and immediate reaction to drops in social housing was a changing towards housing allowances for private renters (rent supplement) as a way of accommodating low economic households. Though this was structured as a short term housing support, the number of claimants and duration of claiming increased and the scheme became a parallel housing arrangement (Norris et al 2008). Doubts on the efficacy of this scheme and the poor quality of houses rented to claimant made the government to respond by announcing a new Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS) in 2002. The local government was made responsible for administration of rent supplement claims and take long term lease from private renters for letting to these households. This was aimed at reducing rental costs and improvement of the quality of accommodation. Social housing reduced its role as a means towards home ownership in the 90s. This led to difficulties in home purchasing and the government came up with schemes to enable the poor householders to purchase their own house. These schemes included the affordable housing scheme, the shared ownership scheme and the mortgage allowances. Between 1991 and 2002, 29% home owners availed themselves for the schemes but there was a question of the sustainability of the scheme due to high mortgage arrears (Norris et al 2007). In 2003, 38% of home owners in the shared ownership scheme had over 3 month arrears (Norris O’Connell 2002). Conclusion Severe economic recession and related political predicament which has hit Ireland in the recent years has made future social housing prediction difficult. However, the mood of latest housing policy changes is an indication of likelihood of expansion of state intervention in the housing system. There has been a radical increase of private rented sector regulation as well as mainstream social housing production (Cowan 2006).

Performance Enhancement for Robot Localization

Performance Enhancement for Robot Localization Performance Enhancement for Robot Localization and Fault Minimization Using Alternative Least Square Machine Learning Technique ABSTRACT Machine learning tools are used for specific applications. The purpose is to investigate proper machine learning tools for the SFU Mountain data-set. Impact: Revealing the appropriate machine learning tools will guide us to build a better data model. We are conducting semi-structured woodlands for fault diagnosis of how environmental variables affect the availability of important robotic services. Using a modeling framework, we are creating future scenarios of robotic service availability based upon local knowledge and climate projections. In addition, we are developing models derived from inputs to compare and potentially combine with local knowledge inputs. This allows us to assess, from several perspectives, how a critical component of community flexibility cans revolution in the future. Perfect productivities will be used to simplify deliberations in the groups on variation options that could minimize the negative consequences while seizing upon positive opportunities. Keywords: Sfu-mountain, ALS, fault diagnosis etc. I.INTRODUCTION This paper considers the problem of recognizing locations based on their appearance. This problem has recently received attention in the context of large-scale global localization [Schindler et al., 2007] and loop-closure detection in mobile robotics [Ho and Newman, 2007]. We progresses the state of the art by developing a principled probabilistic framework for robotics algorithms for long-term deployment. Unlike many existing systems, our approach is not limited to localization we are able to decide if new observations originate from places already in the map, or rather from new, previously unseen places. This is possible even in environments where many places have similar sensory presence (a problem known as perceptual aliasing). Our system effectively learns a model of the common objects, which allows us to improve inference by reasoning about which sets of features are likely to appear or disappear. We present results which demonstrate that the system is capable of recognizing pl aces while rejecting false matches due to perceptual aliasing even when such observations share many features. The approach also has reasonable computational cost fast enough for online loop closure detection in realistic mobile robotics difficulties where the plot covers numerous thousand places. We establish our scheme through identifying loop conclusions over a 4km path length in an initially-unknown outdoor environment, where the system detects a large fraction of the loop closures without false positives. A calibrated sensor If you have a sensor or instrument that is known to be accurate. It can be used to mark position interpretations for evaluation. Best laboratories will have devices that have been standardized beside and documentation including the specific reference alongside that they were regulated, as well as several improvement issues that need to be functional to the output. B. Trail environment Relatively few researchers have focused on the needs, trail location predilections, and involvements of the mountain biker. This research gives recreation supply managers with data that can prompt modification in the method they observe how trail environments should be managed. In one of the few comprehensive studies of mountain biker preferences for recreational settings and experiences, Cessford (1995) in a study for the Department of Conservation, New Zealand, measured altered users and their near of involvement about desired setting issues, trail types, trail conditions, downhill and uphill preferences, and social encounters. Major results presented that there was a relationship between biker preference and level of experience. For example, novice bikers preferred smooth, open, or clear trails and had low preference for obstacles and carrying bikes on sections not feasible for biking. II. Literature survey Jake Bruce, Jens Wawerla and Richard Vaughan [1] they have taken a dataset which are based on measured, coordinated and ground truth- aligned of woodland trail navigation in semi organized shifting outdoor surroundings. The dataset is projected to support the growth of ground in robotics procedures for long-term arrangement in challenging outside situations. It takes total time more than 8 hours for trail navigation, with more accessible in the upcoming as the location variations. The data contain of interpretations from adjusted and coordinated sensors functioning at 5 Hz to 50 Hz in the form of color stereo and gray scale monocular camera images, perpendicular and push-broom laser scans, GPS sites, wheel odometry, inertial sizes, and atmospheric density standards. Dudek Jugessur [2] proposed an appearance-based navigation which is long history inside robotics; there has been substantial expansion in this field in last 5 years. Appearance-based navigation and loop closing recognition schemes working on routes on the instruction of a few kilometers in length are now common. Certainly, place detection schemes comparable in character to the one labeled here is now used equal in single-camera SLAM organizations intended for small scale uses in (Eade Drummond, 2008) [3]. In real time application of these schemes on the scale of tens of kilometers or new has too initiated to be possible. For example, in (Milford Wyeth, 2008) a scheme employing a set of naturally stimulated approaches accomplished effective loop closing recognition and plotting in an assembly of more than 12,000 images from a 66 km route, with processing time of less than 100 ms per image. The appearance-recognition element of the scheme was built on direct pattern matching, so sca led linearly with the size of the location. Working at a comparable scale, Bosse and Zlot define a place identic classification built on distinctive key points removed from 2-D lidar data (Bosse Zlot, 2008) [5] and prove good precision-recall performance over an 18 km suburban data set. Cummins Newman, 2009 [6], they established loop closure recognition on a 1,000 km path, using a type of FAB-MAP which used to an inverted index structural design. One latest research is the improvement of combined schemes which syndicate appearance and metric data. Olson [7] defined a method to increasing the robustness of overall loop closure detection schemes by using both appearance and comparative metric information to choose a single dependable set of loop closures from a bigger no. of applicants (Olson, 2008). The technique was assessed over numerous kilometers of urban data and shown to improve high precision loop closures even with the use of artificially poor image features. More loosely joined systems have also newly labeled in (Konolige et al., 2009; Newman et al., 2009). Significant applicable work also occurs on the more limited problem of overall localization. II.PROBLEM STATEMENT The data are highly challenging by virtue of the self-similarity of the natural terrain; the strong variations in lighting conditions, vegetation, weather, and traffic; and the three highly different trails. In contrast, we traverse challenging semi structured woodland trails, resulting in data useful for evaluating place recognition and mapping algorithms across changing conditions in natural terrain. III. PROPOSED IMPLEMENTATION Interestingly, optimizing the posterior probability therefore amounts to optimizing the likelihood function *plus* another term that depends only on the parameters. The posterior probability objective function turns out to be one of a class of so-called penalized likelihood functions where the likelihood is combined with mathematical functions of the parameters to create a new objective function. Dataset The SFU Mountain Dataset involves of numerous 100 GB of sensor data verified from Burnaby Mountain, British Columbia, Canada. Each traversal covers 4km of woodland trails with a 300m altitude change. Recordings contain complete video since 6 cameras, collection data from two LIDAR sensors, GPS, IMU and wheel encoders, plus calibration parameters for each sensor, and we provide the data in the form of ROS bag files, JPEG image files, and CSV text files. Jake Bruce, Jens Wawerla, and Richard Vaughan. The SFU Mountain Dataset: Semi-Structured Woodland Trails Under Changing Environmental Conditions, in IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Robotics, Factory on Visual Place Acknowledgment in Varying Surroundings. Seattle, USA, 2015. Proposed Approach Flow Alternating Least Square (ALS) Machine Learning Alternating Least Squares starts by rotating between fixing one two coordinate for matrix dimension ui or vj that can be computed by solving the least-squares problem. This approach is handful as it improves the previous non-convex problem into a quadratic that can be solved easily [9]. A general description of the algorithm for ALS algorithm for collaborative filtering taken from Zhou et. al [11] is as follows: Step 1: Initializing matrix V by allocating the average rating for that motion as the first row, and then for the small random numbers of the remaining entries. The least squares simply adding up the squared differences between the model and the data.   Minimizing the sum of squared differences leads to the maximum likelihood estimates in many cases, but not always.   One good thing about least squares estimation is that it can be applied even when your model doesnt actually conform to a probability distribution (or its very hard to write out or compute the probability distribution).One of the most important objective functions is the so-called posterior probability and the corresponding Maximum-Apostiori-Probability or MAP estimates/estimators. In contrast to ML estimation, MAP estimation says: choose the parameters so the model is most probable given the data we observed. Now the objective function is P(theta|X) and the equation to solve is As you probably already guessed, the MAP and ML estimation problems are related via Bayes theorem, so that this can be written as Once again, it is convenient to think about the optimization problem in log space, where the objective function breaks into three parts, only two of which actually depend on the parameters. Step 2: Fix V, solve U by minimizing the RMSE function. Step 3: Fix U, solve V by minimizing the MSE function similarly. Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until convergence. Development tool The raw data development kit provided on the Autonomy Lab / SFU Mountain Dataset contains MATLAB demonstration code with file which gives further details. Here, we will briefly discuss the most important features. Before running the scripts, steps are: Step 1: Read curves points from the Excel file Step 2: Extract Row Co-ordinate and column too Step 3: Define fault rate Step 4: fault Detected Parameter Machine// Compute current from voltage vector Step 5: Do coerce to limit extrap values to positive values Step 6: fault Detection rate minimization as per coverage distance Step 7: Define sigmoid function regularization for numerical stability Step 8: Define bernoulli probability weight matrix response update Step 9:check convergence Step 10: compute MSE V.RESULT In this section we present results showing sample trajectory matches, fault detection rate and MSE on results plots. The current implementation has ALS optimization built in, so compute scales linearly with the length of the dataset. For all experiments, computation was performed at real-time speed or faster on a standard Intel Core i7 PC. We have evaluated our system with the public datasets from the [1] Project. The data were collected by a robotic platform in static and dynamic indoor, outdoor and mixed environments. Figure 5.1: initial robot position in equilibrium state. Above figure 5.1, the static position for robot 21.15 mm with 1.99-time slot fixing the pointer location having dynamic stages assign to each tracking region. Figure 5.2: Robot define fix counter to each direction and tracking target position with dynamic localization in green lines. Figure 5.3: robot coverage distance divide region in track and make define position of laser range at 360o  Ãƒâ€šÃ‚  Ãƒâ€šÃ‚   Above figure 5.3 specification the counter stage as per rotated angle and capture each laser to minimization and tolerate skipping factor from 6.5 -9 micro meter in 0.96 millisecond timing. Figure 5.4: Fault detection rate minimization as per coverage distance over Energy level Above figure 5.4, the model of 200 mm distance with weather circumstances at 25oC having least fault detection rate i.e. 1.19, if we raise coverage or laser range of robot with same angle as previous weather circumstances meanwhile fault detection rate get highly maximized with same energy level or battery power of our robot configuration. Figure 5.5: MSE vs iteration for least square machine learning for faults Abovefigure 5.5, specification our proposed approach if raised no of dimension with same angular rotation of expert system means square error improving, hence minimum mean square error rate with 4- dimension of same iteration for our approach. iteration Fault minimization Rate 1 1.483500 2 1.034048 3 0.791479 4 0.340193 5 0.044917 6 0.000661 7 0.000000 The ALS method for computing correspondences, since they proved effective under several kinds of environments in the training datasets. In Fig. 5.5 we show the MSE curves obtained for our proposed simulation part which implemented in MATLAB tool with these parameters, we achieved a low MSE rate in the datasets with no false positives at dimension 4. In order to check the reliability of our algorithm with datasets, we used MATLAB as evaluation datasets. For these, we used our algorithm as a ALS, with the default configuration given above and the same vocabulary. This test shows that our method can work fine out of the box in many environments and situations, and that it is able to cope with sequences of images taken at low or high frequency, as long as they overlap. VI.CONCLUSION In this work, our proposed simulation of robot self-localization and utilizing all dimension and transferring position towards fix position by using a Alternate least square method. Our strategy is to create a visual experience for the library of raw visual images collected in different domains, to discover the appropiate visual patterns that clearly depicts the input scene, and use them for scene retrieval. In particular, we also showed that the appearance of the pose of the mined visual patterns, user laser range with tracking all coordinate with 360 degree which are matched with those of the database scenes by employing image-to-class distance and spatial pyramid matching. In future , the quadrate can be make for floor plan for learning object finder in internet of things and applying the deep learning into it. REFERENCES [1] Jake Bruce, Jens Wawerla and Richard Vaughan The SFU Mountain Dataset: Semi-Structured Woodland Trails Under Changing Environmental Conditions Autonomy Lab, Simon Fraser University. [2] Dudek, G. and Jugessur, D. Robust place recognition using local appearance based methods. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, volume 2, 2000 [3] Eade, E. and Drummond, T. Unified loop closing and recovery for real time monocular slam. In Proc. 19th British Machine Vision Conference, 2008 [4] Milford, M.J. and Wyeth, G.F. Mapping a Suburb With a Single Camera Using a Biologically Inspired SLAM System. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 24 (5):1038-1053, 2008. [5] Bosse, M. and Zlot, R. Keypoint design and evaluation for place recognition in 2D lidar maps. In Robotics: Science and Systems Conference: Inside Data Association Workshop, 2008. [6] Cummins, M. and Newman, P. Highly scalable Appearance-only SLAM FAB-MAP 2.0. In Pro- ceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, Seattle, USA, June 2009. [7] Olson, E. Robust and Efficient Robotic Mapping. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2008 [7] Konolige, K., Bowman, J., Chen, J.D., Mihelich, P., Calonder, M., Lepetit, V., and Fua, P. View-based maps. In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2009. [8] Schindler, G., Brown, M., and Szeliski, R. City-Scale Location Recognition. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1-7, 2007 [9]Nist ´er, D. and Stewenius, H. Scalable recognition with a vocabulary tree. In Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, volume 2, pp. 2161-2168, 2006 [10] J ´egou, H., Douze, M., and Schmid, C. Hamming embedding and weak geometric consistency for large scale image search. In David Forsyth, Philip Torr, Andrew Zisserman (ed.), European Conference on Computer Vision, volume I of LNCS, pp. 304-317. Springer, oct 2008. [11] Y. Zhou, D. Wilkinson, R. Schreiber, and R. Pan. Large-scale parallel collaborative filtering for the netflix prize. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management, AAIM 08, pages 337-348, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. Springer-Verlag.

Grendel the Existentialist Monster :: Grendel Essays

Grendel the Existentialist Monster The monster Grendel is the ironic eye through which the action is viewed and from this perspective he provides the reader with never-ending examples of buffoonery and self-parody. Often his claims reveal the Sartrean component in his makeup: "I create the whole universe, blink by blink"(Gardner 22). Gardner,of course,wants to make a point here about solipsism. There is more to the objective world than Grendel's ego. Naturally the universe still exists when Grendel closes his eyes. Likewise, when Grendel says "I observe myself observing what I observe", (Gardner 29) ,he reminds us of Sartre's view of the self-reflective nature of consciousness. As he said in his interview, Gardner planned to parody Sartre's ideas in Being and Nothingess in these sections of the novel. When Grendel says "then I am not that which observes! I am lack. Alack. "(Gardner 29) he plays on the French verb manquer(to lack) that Sartre uses in his description of the lacking quality of consciousness. This ability to observe his observing is a clue to the philosophical underpinnings of the early chapters. Gardner's irony should be crystal clear--Grendel is amusing himself with Sartre's phenomenology. Now what is the reader to make of all this? A brief summary of Sartre's description of consciousness may help. According toSartre man exists on the level of being-in-itself(as a body in a world of objects) and on the level of being-for-itself(consciousness ). The key to understanding Grendel's view of the world is this distinction between the in-itself and the for-itself.Since, for Sartre, being-in-itself is uncreated(he can find no evidence of a creating God) and superfluous("de trop"), it reveals itself as a sort of absurd, meaningless outer reality. But being-for-itself, on the other hand, is the awareness that consciousness is not the being of the in-itself. Its being is revealed in a more paradoxical way-- as an emptiness in the center of being. How can it be aware of itself as an object?Impossible says Sartre. Simply put, the for-itself is the absence or the lack(thus Grendel's "lack") of the objectness of the in-itself . It reveals itself as the nothingness that remains when y ou realize that your consciousness is not an awareness of an object(such as your body), but rather an awareness of the lack of an object; or,to put it another way, it is an awareness of a nihilated presence.Grendel is proof that only an

Educational Goals and Philosophy :: Education Teaching Teachers Essays

Educational Goals and Philosophy It was not until middle school that I began distinguishing those of my teachers who motivated and inspired me from those who simply went through the motions of teaching. It was also about that same time that I began envisioning myself as an educator -- one who not only impressed his students with the mastery of content but also impressed upon his students the need to perform at the highest academic level possible. When you really think about it, an education is simply an instrument with as many uses that an individual can come across; however, it is also something that is taken for granted by so many. Educating our youth and society is essential to the survival of the human race, and making sure that all children not only receive a full, well-rounded education but also take nothing for granted is a serious challenge for today's educator. I possess that inner desire to make a difference; I hold myself in that light hoping to inspire and motivate generations of students to come. T o accomplish this dream, though, I will need much more than sheer desire and determination. In fact, any hopeful educator must subscribe to philosophies and strategies ranging from teaching styles to discipline, from motivational techniques to leadership. In the following text, I will attempt to touch on all of these issues and also spend some time discussing such topics as educational reform and mainstreaming in the classroom. First, I should focus on what philosophies I will adhere to as an educator. At best, I can describe my philosophy as a combination of the well-established, almost timeless philosophies of idealism and realism. The idealist in me views discipline the same as do other idealists. Handling student misbehavior and misconduct is a personal issue that I will handle with the student privately. Only after several of these attempts fail or the misconduct is so severe will I involve a third party such as parents or administrators. Another similarity I have with the idealist point of view is their passion for teaching. It's an almost indescribable feeling, but I just cannot wait to have my own classroom. Looking at things from a different point of view, I identify very much with the realist philosophy in terms of the sharing and gaining of knowledge.

The Success of the Civil Rights Movement Essay -- 1960s Civil Rights M

Although there was significant improvement in the lives of black people through the Success of the civil rights movement by the late 1960s, there were also some failures and aspects that the civil rights movement had not achieved. These failures were social, economical, political and cultural. These failures included the fact that some laws were not upheld. Black people saw this as an injustice and inconvenience and as a failure economically. There was unemployment to a certain degree amongst the black community, as over 10% of black people were unemployed. This could be linked to poverty and poor quality of schooling and education Poverty and the condition of living and housing was a major issue in 1967, when one third of black families were living below the government's poverty level in comparison to under 10% of white people who were living below the government's poverty level. Economically, this was another failure. A cultural and social failure was the mortality rate of black babies, that being twice as high ...

ANZ Sustainable Business Practices Essay

â€Å"Sustainable† business practices are being touted, or even required, more and more by western society. What is ANZ’s sustainability policy and how is this congruent (or not) with cutting edge sustainability thinking and theory. Does this thinking and practice change across borders? And if so, how does the ANZ’s Australian head office engage with it? Does what they espouse align with the reality of their practice? Over the past few decades, sustainable business practices have become more prevalent and required in corporations. Australian organisations are required to be responsible for being sustainable socially, economically and environmentally, here we focus on the environmental factors. Australia’s government is constantly coming up with new way for its people and businesses to follow more sustainable programs. Western society as a general believes that sustainable business practices are an essential part of any business policy. Pushes through meeting between world leaders, countries are now more than ever expected to upkeep sustainable conventions. Although almost all large corporations claim that they have strong sustainable business practices and policies, not all corporations espouse what they preach. It is difficult for any corporation to achieve sustainability at a level which pleases everybody, however most organisations are noticing that having sustainable business practices is rewarding both financially and at a customer satisfaction level. Meeting the needs of a business and its stakeholders, while at the same time managing it’s effects on society and the environment are core to business sustainability (Pojasek 2007). The culture we live in thrives off of new and improved ways of living. Finding the most sustainable option, in every case, allows organisations and their customers to grow. This generation will not stand for ignorance and insensible approaches to sustainability in the corporate world. Large businesses must be aware that the decisions they make will often impact beyond the walls around them, and that they must answer for the damage they cause. Organisations that shy away from sustainable options, be it due to finances or ignorance will see themselves placed under immense pressure from government organisations all the way down to the consumers. This push for a better tomorrow, is being incorporated around the world on a business and personal level. Burke (1991), lists ten characteristics for a sustainable  society, such as using renewable resources and linking development with conservation, these when applied to an organisation build a trust and a loyalty with stakeholders who align their morals with the companies they choose. If everyone were to stand by these rules, the prospect of the population doubling in the next fifty years may not seem so daunting. However not everyone abides, as it is not always economical or immediately beneficial to be sustainable and some corporations cannot see the footprints they are leaving behind for the next generations to deal with. Corporations need to see the potential for improving business value through sustainability, starting internally with management, before reaching out. The general consensus is that sustainable business practices are vital in the longevity of any organisation and needs to be taken seriously. Australia is ranked quite highly when it comes to cutting edge sustainabil ity thinking and theory. In fact the most sustainable company in the world in 2014 is Westpac Banking, which is an Australian corporation (Smith 2014). With four companies placed in the top hundred, on the most sustainable companies list, one can see that Australia’s expectations for business’ to adopt sustainable approaches throughout all their business operations is taking effect. The government uses many tactics to make sure that businesses are using sustainable business practices. One method is the annual Australian business award for sustainability, this is useful, as it is important to commend sustainable companies and it encourages a healthy competition to have the best continual business model and be more aware and proactive in regards to the environment. The Australian government is active in its move to promote and push for sustainable business practices, one of their more recent resolutions is the Clean Energy Legislation, which is made of individual bills covering levys on green house gases and fuel tax, this enforces corporations to oblige and making a move towards being green (Griffiths, 2012). However this means that certain organisations will do the bare minimum of what is required of them by law and nothing more. There are other initiatives in place to encourage sustainable business practices which are not legally binding, such as Sustainable Bu siness Australia, who provide policy recommendations and resources for sustainability challenges (SBA, n.d). Companies who become members with SBA are held in high regards by their stakeholders as they abide by the recommendations regarding carbon  action and resource solutions. There is also an emphasis on the people, and their crucial role in creating business value. Previously people were satisfied with just their basic needs being fulfilled, but no longer, we now see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs triangle unravelling as people require more to feel satisfied with themselves and what they do in their work space (Kiel, 1999). With encouragement from government and local communities, Australia is making an effort with great determination towards having the best sustainable business practices. ANZ (2013) asserts that it endeavours to recognise the environmental impact within its work places and branches, following social and environmental pressures to reduce them. ANZ makes it clear that they are aware of their environmental impact directly through their buildings, structures and empl oyees, as well as indirectly through their lending. They are certified carbon neutral with the National Carbon Offset standards and create progress reports biannually regarding their impact on a variety of areas such as gas emissions, water and paper usage and resource efficiency among others, they have been doing so for ten years (ANZ 2004). Although ANZ has variety of KPIs and targets to meet, they cannot always fulfil their requirements. One of the targets for 2013 was to reduce paper usage by converting everything into electronic statements, New Zealand successfully did so, however Australia did not reach that target, and has set it as a goal for the year to come (Nash 2013 p.68). ANZs sustainability policy is very broad and covers a range of issues, beginning with educating sustainability, it is seen as vital to begin by reaching out and teaching staff so they are aware of the impacts they have on the environment, directly and indirectly. The policy goes over safety, fairness and responsibility as well as maintaining an environmental management system and integrating government and community needs in regards to sustainability (ANZ 2004 pg.2). ANZ’s sustainability policy goes above and beyond what is required of them by law, this is the case through to stakeholder. ANZ works closely with its stakeholders through collaboration and engagement, progress is reported to stakeholders regularly and based on responses, ANZ makes public commitments which they aim to accomplish (ANZ n.d.). Questionable practices and unethical behaviour would have stakeholders removing themselves from being associated, for this reason ANZ aims high to please its stakeholders which intern promotes sustainability and business  continuity. Crossing borders to the rest of the world we find variations in sustainable business practices from commendable nuclear recycling in France to disgraceful toxic waste dumping off the Ivory coast. Every co untry has a different set of laws and legislations set up that can affect the way one runs a sustainable business. An Australian based corporation with locations around the world, still has to abide by the countries laws that they are set up in. Luckily more and more people are realising the benefit of sustainable business practices around the world such as Ray Anderson (Ted Talks, 2009) who claims, â€Å"The biggest culprit in this massive mistreatment of the earth by the human kind†¦that culprit is business and industry†, and that the only solution is for businesses to take responsibility of their actions and move towards more sustainable resolutions. In 1997 many of the worlds countries met in Kyoto, Japan to discuss greenhouse gas emissions, through this the Kyoto protocol was created with the aim to help avoid global warming (Gang 2007). Through these worldly events and meetings between leaders, countries are becoming more obligated to be vigorous in their attempts to create a sustainable future. As the governments accept new world protocols and create their own, businesses must oblige and follow suit. Overall western societies are all on the same page when it come sustainability, as they can afford to take steps to preparing for a greener future. It is a struggle with third world countries who do not have the funds to improve on their sustainability, such as the upfront costs of solar power. What must be realised that no matter poor or not, one cannot afford to be wasteful or carless with resources on this planet. Since 1835 ANZ has branched itself all over the world, originating in the United Kingdom, then Australia and now in the Asia Pacific region amongst other areas. Considering that business is being conducted in these areas, and major lending does occur, the effects of this must be contemplated. ANZ proactively adopts a program called the sensitive sector policy, which regulates who ANZ lends to. Employees who are working in the lending field at ANZ are thoroughly trained in social and environmental risk and how the people and companies they lend to will affect the standard of living and the environment in the country that they are in. This training goes on, and is consistent in all of ANZ’s branches across the planet from Australia to Hong  Kong and Singapore (ANZ n.d.). ANZ does put an effort in to having a globally sustainable business policy, not just within their company but also through the communities it works in. In 2013 one of ANZ’s global key aims was to have their staff do at least 100,000 hours of volunteering in the districts that they operate in. They hit ninety precent of their target, which is an achievement (Nash 2013). What ANZ is seeing is that businesses need to seek sustainable solutions internally as well as externally, as they have an affect on whichever communities they are in. They use a geocentric view, which is more world orientated and find people from around the globe who are best suited to knowing what is needed in the communities that they are in. ANZ uses an accommodative approach to corporate social responsibility. Luke (2013) says that CSR is a type of political agenda, a way to deceive people that one is doing good for good, even so the social impact programs and the environmental outreach, whether a form of coercion to be seen as a good and successful company, still has a positive effect even if the intentions weren’t so. ANZ also partners with WWF, which is aimed at creating awareness, providing information and education in regards to the environment and sustainability within the corporation and to the customers it serves (ANZ, n.d.). ANZ aspires to have and uphold sustainable business practices globally and believes that it is. Although companies aim to achieve the best sustainable business policies, often they cannot hold true to their word. Unfortunately for ANZ due to their investments in projects which will have an adverse affect on the climate and natural habitats of the Great Barrier Reef, their customers are protesting, threatening and are indeed changing banks (Vincent, 2013). In fact ANZ is Australia top lender when it comes to coal and gas projects, they have already lent a whopping $1.1 Billion to the undertaking of finding fossil fuels in the Great Barrier Reef (Charlie, 2013). Interestingly though, ANZ’s attitudes on the subject of coal and fossil fuel investments are not negative. ANZ actually approaches the subject of their investments in coal and fossil fuels as a positive, even though this area is receiving a large amount of negative publicity on the news and from a variety of NGO’s. They do not try to hide their investments either. Their argument is that coal is one of Australia’s main sources of energy and is also our second largest export, therefore helping finance the country (Nash, 2013). Although they do  fund many of these fossil fuel and coal schemes, they do control where they invest, ANZ has recently not agreed to lend to three coal and gas-fired power prospects, because of various reasons including the level of gr eenhouse gas involved and incompetent business practices (Nash 2013). Whilst the intentions of most large corporations are for the good, often the product of their doings is not seen that way. To continue to be a successful business, one must always seek to improve and to look towards a sustainable future. ANZ has done an outstanding job at doing so, winning awards in innovation and excellence, and coming in as a finalist in the award for the best sustainable development in the new buildings category. All architects and builders now look towards creating a harmony between building designs and being environmentally conscious. Studies have shown that using sustainable building methods can be more cost efficient in the long term (Sims, Rogner & Gregory, 2003). ANZ has gone above and beyond in 2009 when they completed the work on their accredited six green star ANZ headquarters, situated in the docklands of Melbourne. This building includes a myriad of environmental features such as solar power, wind turbines, tri-generation black water recycling, and use of the river cooling (Puchalski 2011). One of ANZ’s objectives for the coming years is to increase their lending to lower carbon emission power and financing new energy opportunities. While it was uncovered that one of ANZ’s customer was attaining oil from illegal palm oil plantations, ANZ identified the situation, and through delicate discussion, cleared the air and made sure that all practices were completely certified (Nash 2013). ANZ has many goals and KPIs both financial and non financial that they set and aim to achieve every year, a surprising amount of these are part of their sustainable business policy. As a corporation they are doing more good than harm. Whilst countless organisations aim for profit growth, the need of sustainable business practices means that choices may be made that might not necessarily maximise capital, but will be beneficial for society and the environment. Sustainable business practices are essential to all organisations, even more so in the western world. Sustainable technology is constantly growing as the need for it expands. However it is not always simple to comply and meet everyone’s expectations when it comes to sustainability, even so through world incentive corporations are being pushed to take the matter seriously. Although there are set policies for  what is appropriate and approved, businesses have the ability to surpass what is expected of them and in doing so help nurture a sustainable future. Reference List ANZ 2013, Our approach and performance, ANZ, Australia, viewed 25 April 2014, www.anz.com.au/about-us/corporate-responsibility/framework/urban-sustainability. ANZ n.d., Engagement and best practices, ANZ, Australia, viewed 6 May 2014 http://www.anz.com.au/about-us/corporate-responsibility/environment/engagement-best-practice/ ANZ n.d., Sensitive sector policies, ANZ, Australia, viewed 26 April 2014, http://www.anz.com.au/about-us/corporate-responsibility/customers/responsible-business-lending/policies-guidelines/sector-policies/. ANZ n.d., Stakeholder Engagement, ANZ, Australia, viewed 25 April 2014, http://www.anz.com.au/about-us/corporate-responsibility/more-mike/stakeholder-engagement/. Burke, J, 1991, Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living, IUCN/Gland, Switzerland, viewed 25 April 2014, https://portals.iucn.org/library/efiles/edocs/CFE-003.pdf. Charlie, 2013, Coal and climate dominate ANZ AGM, 350 Australia, viewed 23 April 2014, http://350.org.au/coal-and-climat e-dominates-anz-agm/. Griffiths, M 2012, ‘Climate change policy in Australia: contexts and consultation on the Clean Energy Legislative Package’, Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on e-Government, held in Barcelona, Spain 14-15 June, 2012, Academic Conferences and Publishing International, M. Gascà ³, pp. 1-9. Kiel, J 1999, ‘Reshaping Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to reflect today’s educational and managerial philosophies’, Journal of Instructional Psychology, September, Vol. 26 Issue 3, p167, viewed 6 May 2014, Teacher reference centre Luke, T 2013, ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: An Uneasy Merger of Sustainability and Development’, Sustainable Development, March, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p83, viewed 5 May 2014, EBSCO Host. Nash, J 2013, Corporate sustainability report 2013, ANZ, viewed 25 April 2014, http://www.anz.com/resources/e/2/e29f5bf3-8b7e-456f-a3a3-f381b46a99f8/ANZ_Sustainability_Review_FY13.pdf. Pojasek, R 2007, â₠¬ËœA framework of business sustainability’ Environmental quality management, December, vol. 17, issue 2, p.81, viewed 23 April 2014, Wiley Online Library.