Latinos in Television Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Latinos in Television - Essay Example Television has become one of the highest paying careers in the 21st century. As individuals become more engrossed in a demanding and intensive 21st Century lifestyle, entertainment is held in high regard. Technological advancements accord television a global audience that translates into considerable revenue annually. Sofia Vergara is currently the highest paid TV actor, earning $6 million in 2013. She earns $175,000 an episode. Cameron Diaz and Zoe Saldana are also two of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, having earned $34 million and $11 million respectively in 2013.Animated TV shows are a huge part of the film industry, especially in Hollywood. Such films have come to be loved and followed by many all over the world, creating a huge audience for the films and TV shows. In recent times, animated shows and films have had a positive portrayal of Latinos. Characters such as Disney hit Gabriella are an example of such portrayals of Latinos.The Spanish language is the symbol of Lati no heritage and culture. This language has reached a huge global audience through the emergence of numerous Spanish TV channels. Most of the global show in sports and entertainment are offered in numerous channels, Spanish and Portuguese are one of the main languages offered.In conclusion, Latinos have received a positive reception by global TV audience. This can be seen by the fact that the highest paid TV actor is of Latin origin, with numerous positive portrayals of Latinos in animated films and shows.

Homosexuality Essay Example for Free

Homosexuality Essay In today’s society homosexuality is frequently discussed and the morality of being gay or not is questioned. Based on what culture, ethics, knowledge a person has acquired in their lifetime and how their parent, teacher, preacher, or other type of mentor views the issue, people will form their own beliefs about homosexuality. Each culture has their own values regarding the appropriateness of certain types f sexuality. In Michael Levin’s â€Å"Why Homosexuality is Abnormal,† he justifies that â€Å"homosexuality is abnormal and hence undesirable- not because it is immoral or sinful, or because it weakens society or hampers evolutionary development, but for a purely mechanical reason† (290). Michael justified that homosexuality is abnormal and then goes to state that the unhappiness of homosexuals is highly due to the misuse of bodily parts; therefore, they are bound to be unhappy. Levin’s thesis claims that the abnormality of the homosexuality does not make them to live a desirable way of life which, I completely disagree with. In disagreement with Levin, the use of bodily parts in a homosexual relationship is not a misuse, but an alteration of functions and the terminology of abnormal does not lead to unhappiness. Levin claims to state that the misuse of bodily parts in a homosexual relationship will lead to an undesirable and unhappy life. I will begin my argument with why the use of bodily parts in homosexual relationship is not misuse, but an altered function, can lead to a desirable and happy life. For instance, if one day LeBron James gets into a serve accident and becomes a paraplegic. His basketball career is terminated because he is paralyzed from the waist down, which means he is not capable of using his legs ever again. His ability to walk, run, jog, jump, swim, and etc. are now vanished; therefore, causing him to never play in the National Basketball Association. As time went by, he realized the inability to use his lower body parts in a common function was not going to stop him from playing basketball. LeBron decided he was going to play wheelchair basketball and continue his drive to play basketball because that is what makes him content. Through his altered body usage, LeBron learned how to maneuver and causing him to win multiple rewards in basketball. After winning multiple rewards, it made LeBron recognize that if one has the desire to be happy and shoot for their goals, than anything is possible. In the end, LeBron was just as successful using his altered body parts and the ability to function just fine like a normal human being. In respect to LeBron’s scenario, a homosexual’s body parts should not be judged just because the bodily parts are altered and used not in the way that Levin expects. Levin argues that the misuse of body parts causes unfullfillment, which than lead to unhappiness. He uses the terminology of â€Å"evolution† as a measurement to justify the idea that heterosexuals are normal human beings and homosexuals as abnormal because they are incapable of reproducing offspring. Levin argues â€Å"human beings have penises and vaginas because our ancestors who put their penises into vaginas (or put their vaginas around penises) tended to reproduce, passing along to have penises and vaginas and to use them in this way† (302). This is what genitalia are for is what Levin said and any other uses such as homosexuals are abnormal. So, basically what Levin is trying to say is that homosexuals can never be happy because they misuse their bodily parts, which causes them to never fulfill their desires and than leads to unhappiness. In a sense, â€Å"we are â€Å"programmed† through evolution to enjoy using our organs in evolutionarily adaptive (i. e. normal) ways† (302). My theory is that homosexuals can be happy. How is Levin to judge and say that it does not fulfill their desires and makes them unhappy? Why would people do things to make themselves emotionally hurt or unhappy? If homosexuals partake in homosexual activities, it is because that is what makes them emotionally happy from the inside, not because to partake in activities just for the hell of it. If that is what fulfills their personal desires than there should be nothing abnormal or wrong about it. Just because Levin does not have those personal desires does not mean he can criticize on others about it. Levin talks a lot about evolution and how our heterosexual ancestors who had penises and vaginas passing it down for the next ancestors; well, if one think’s about it homosexuals have also evolved over time too. Just because back then in society people did not talk about it and in present-day they do, does not mean homosexuals have not been around. The fact is that it has been around just not ever mentioned. For example, talking about sex was never mentioned in the old times, but present-day people talk about it in public. Overtime, society has gained more knowledge, hence making people acknowledge more about homosexuality. Since, homosexuality has been here throughout history and continues to evolve then, Levin’s statement about evolution implies the same for homosexuals making them normal human beings. Levin’s second argument is about using the terminology â€Å"abnormal† when misusing sexual organs. He never gives a clear definition on what is abnormal, but only for the fact what I have mentioned above. For Levin, an activity is abnormal in the relevant sense whenever it involves using an organ for purposes for which it was not intended (302). Implying that being abnormal is when one does not use the penis to penetrate through the vagina to fertilize eggs and reproduce offsprings. If this is how society should be and if is this how these organs should be used, then why is it that heterosexuals partake in activities such as oral sex and anal sex? â€Å"Levin argues that penises are for inserting into vaginas, not for inserting into mouths or other orifices; vaginas are for receiving penises, not for rubbing up against other vaginas† (302). This statement is being hypocritical because these are the same actions heterosexuals partake in also, making them â€Å"abnormal† as well. He misuses the word â€Å"abnormal. † The clear definition of abnormal means is extraordinary, uncommon, rare, or different. If Levin is calling homosexuals uncommon and rare, then what makes philosophy professors common? Being a philosophy professor is uncommon in a sense that only a small minority of people do it, but it is not â€Å"abnormal† in Levin’s sense. And since majority of the heterosexual population do partake in different activities using their genitalia for other purposes, this would make them common versus uncommon. Levin last argument is about the policy issues. He is trying to say society should protect their children because if the legislation provided rights to the homosexuals, then children will have the odds to become a homosexual. In his argument Levin even states, â€Å"If homosexuality is unnatural, legislation which raises the odds that a given child will become homosexual raised the odds that he will be unhappy† (295). Legalizing homosexuality means coming to the conclusion that it is acceptable to get married to the same gender and the government would have no objections against this action. If this occurred many religious practices would raise questions and make comparison to the Bible. If Levin were saying that homosexuals would cause harm to children if allowed by the government, then what would one say when children watch pornography or movies that show kissing the same gender or opposite gender? Present-day children are already watching TV shows that harm their knowledge. What difference would it make if a child found a gay couple holding hands or kissing? Also, how much knowledge can a little child retain, they can only have minimal understanding of what is going on. In society there are other issues such as violence, murders, terrorist attacks that are more harmful to children than homosexuals being together. Levin does not stop to evaluate that continuing to degrade homosexuals and define them as abnormal based on their desires will continue to divide up the society causing tension to build up and unhappiness. After all America gives the freedom to believe in one’s own practices without any judgments. In disagreement to Levin’s argument that the abnormality of homosexuality misusing their bodily parts causing unhappiness should also take into account of policy issues in Levin’s statement. Being unique and different than the majority of the norm does not mean they are harmful to the community. In America people have the right to worship in whatever they believe in; therefore, fulfilling one’s need by misusing bodily parts does not prove they are abnormal or can lead to unhappiness. In conclusion, determining the quality of one’s life is based on the fulfilling individual’s desires and a homosexual is clearly not destined to be unhappy with the abstract use of body parts. He or she can still live a happy life in altering their functions because that is what makes morally content and fulfill their personal desires.

Where Im Calling From Essay -- Where Im Calling From Essays

Where I'm Calling From   Ã‚   Sickness is a part of life, and sometimes a gateway to death. There are many different kinds of sickness- some that strike hard and fast, and others that are slow, painful, and consuming. Alcoholism is a sickness of the latter variety. It slowly takes over a victim's life, ripping away loved ones while ravaging the victim's body from head to toe- beginning with the mind. The healing process is all that can rescue one from sickness- it is the only way to stray from its path and avoid death. In Raymond Carver's, "Where I'm Calling From," the narrator's attempted recovery from years of alcoholism is documented in detail. The story specifically focuses on the damage that alcoholism does to relationships, and how recovering from that damage can be the most difficult part of the healing process.    The narrator begins the story in Frank Martin's drying-out facility. He is a drunk, and has checked into the home for the second time. At the beginning of the story, some of the physical dysfunctions associated with the disease are revealed, and they range from shakes and tremors to seizures. This part of the story is used by Carver to display the physical problems that result from withdrawal from alcohol. It is clear that these problems are significant, but overcoming them doesn't compare to the task of repairing the bonds with family members and friends that have been destroyed. In this story, the healing process is quite unique for the characters in that it involves a large group of men, all suffering from the same illness, pulling together and supporting each other through the pain- almost like a modern day leper colony. They are separated from their family and friends, and are ... ...e call to his wife. "She'll ask me where I'm calling from, and I'll have to tell her...There's no way to make a joke out of this" (Carver 296). That is what it all comes back to. He will have to tell her that he is still trying to get well, and he must hope that she'll wait for him. His disease is what cost him his marriage, and there is no way he can bring himself to joke or lie about it. He realizes that it is all his fault. The narrator's disease is unique in that his physical addiction will never be cured, but he still has hope of finding happiness and love by refusing to drink. And, if he is to survive, it will be his need for both love and happiness that must control him, and steer him clear of the path of sickness.    Works Cited Carver, Raymond. "Where I'm Calling From." Where I'm Calling From. New York: Random House, Inc., 1989. 278-296.

Case review natalie

Do you think this Is his/her primary problem? Why or why not? Presenting problems: Natalie came In for â€Å"concerns about her boyfriend, Larry Watkins, over the past six months†. She reported that she has â€Å"been so upset that she hasn't been able to function at work and her coworkers told her she needs to get some help†. No, this is not her primary problem.Client stated that she felt so depressed and empty that she didn't think she could stand it and also notes that she hates herself. Client additionally indicated â€Å"there's Just nothing worth living for and I hate everyone and everything† Furthermore, she specified how she's been suicidal and felt worthless and hopeless and Just wants to end it all and in fact indicates she has a history of attempts. She also noted that she was having financial difficulties. And of course as we know has BAD. . What are some of his/her strengths? Natalie Is a college graduate, has a Job as an administrative assistant, ap pears to be able to convey her feelings in an (at least somewhat) articulate manner, so far has been open and honest to our knowledge, ND realizes she needs assistance and Is willing to get help. 3. What potential diagnoses would you want to rule out in this case? Mood disorder – depression or possibly manic depression (bi-polar) and other personality disorders. 4.What resources might be helpful for him/her to access? Suicide hotlist, some type of self-help meetings, employment services, medical doctor, family therapist or another therapist besides you, and/or psychiatrist. 5. What Is your preliminary diagnosis for helm/her? A. Borderline personality Disorder (BAD) 301. 83 (OFF. 3) b. NOSE unspecified personality Disorder 301. (OFF. 9) c. ROI unspecified Depressive Disorder 296. 20 (82. 9) or 296. 30 (OFF. 9) d. ROI suicidal Behavior Disorder (not yet coded) e.Frequent use of devaluation f. Frequent use of passive aggression g. Frequent use of displacement h. Frequent use of splitting B. SECT. II a. VIA NO/DXL b. As stated by client she was In a car accident and totaled her car. C. Refer to a physician for complete physical. A. ZOO. O Relationship distress with spouse or intimate partner b. ZOO. 5 Personal history of self-harm c. VIA. 2 Low income d. VIA. 20 Parent-child relational problem D. SECT. A. HOWDAHS

Pran Group Swot Analysis

PRAN  stands for  Program for  Rural  Advancement  Nationally. The largest fruit and vegetable processing industry in Bangladesh with countrywide distribution network AMCL’s  PRAN  is an established brand of Bangladesh with an extensive sales force all over the country. PRAN  have a well-developed infrastructure for production, sales and distribution. PRAN  has proven itself as –  Local product but of international standard. . Goals: †¢ Quality maintenance and improvement. †¢ Satisfied customers. †¢ Hold on to the current customers and again gain customer loyalty. †¢ Gain competitive advantage over all the competitors. To double sales and expand production capacity every 7-8 years. †¢ To become one of the biggest names in international fruit and vegetable processing industry Scope: The market of soft drinks and beverage is very competitive. We may say that as a strong market. This project paper is prepared as a marketing plan of a product of AMCL which brand name is PRAN. Methodology: To prepare this report, standard methods of report writing have been used. For writing this report different types of data were needed to complete, tabulate and analyze. The required data were collected by using secondary sources.For collecting data from secondary sources, go through various web sites. After completion of the data, these were sorted into different categories. Limitation: The study suffered a number of limitations: 1. Lack of the part of experience of the researchers. 2. Unconfirmed accuracy of certain information acquired. 3. Lack of information from the primary source. 4. The comparisons may not be effective enough. 5. Lack of time for preparing the report. Source of data: Our source of data is internet, other company profile, published magazine by other company etc. e also collect information from our experience. Current market analysis: According to the information from different sources â€Å"Pranâ₠¬  is now the market leader in the juice sector of soft drinks market. After Pran, frutika, fruto are in the position. Most market shares are now holding by AMCL (Pran), next frutika and then fruto. Product Review: Among many of their products  PRAN’s  main product is their fruit juice and fruit drinks, which is very popular among the existing market. The product line is: †¢ Fruit juice in glass bottle (returnable): It is hygienically produced by state-of-the-art machinery.Available in  mango flavor, made from fresh local ripe mangoes. †¢ Fruit juice in glass bottle (non-returnable): This category of juice is found in non-returnable glass bottle in flavors of  mango, guava and orange. †¢ Fruit juice in aseptic pack: Available flavors in this category are:  mango, lemon, orange, pineapple, guava and mango-pine. †¢ Fruit juice in can: The fruit juices in cans are hygienically produced by state-of-the-art machine from flavors of  mango, orange an d guava. Review of competitors: Currently there are so many juice companies in our country. Among them pran is the leader of juice sector in Bangladesh.Except pran, Lemu, Mojo, RC cola, Pepsi, URO Cola, Virgin, Fruti, Coca cola, 7up, Tiger. Shezan Juice, Rasna. Review of distribution: Pran primarily use existing distributors for distributing their product  Pran Juice  then; they make some new channels and assign some distributors to promote their product to all over the country. So pran deal with this chain: Manufacturer >   Wholesaler>  Ã‚   Retailer>   Customer Figure: Distribution Channel Company using mobile shop in the shopping malls, offices and crowded areas so that people can purchase the product easily when they like to consume.We will make our consumer by  Value Delivery Network. SWOT Analysis: Strengths: †¢ Government support:  Being the biggest local force in the industry AMCL always had government by its side. Government has been supporting  PRAN  in many ways like subsidies, export subsidies, tariffs on foreign competitors etc. †¢ First mover’s advantage: PRAN  entered the market when the product was still very new to the consumers and there was little or no presence of any other local companies with such investment. Therefore  PRAN  had the first mover’s advantage which they are still enjoying till now. Internal strength:  AMCL has a very powerful management team to guide a strong gigantic workforce. Despite its huge size  PRAN  has been able to maintain labor productivity and increasing sales. Its labor productivity is twice as much as any other local company in the market (Not foreign companies). †¢ Market share: PRAN  AMCL has a great competitive advantage over the other competitors. As mentioned earlier it is the largest fruit and vegetable processing industry in Bangladesh and holds the biggest share in markets in Bangladesh among the local companies.PRAN  has the largest sales in fruit drinks after Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Weaknesses: †¢ External threats:  Too much competition from international organizations, for example Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, RC-Cola, Virgin Cola, Rasna (India), Shezan (Pakistan) etc. †¢ Internal weaknesses:  Large size of the business and workforce makes it difficult to manage perfectly. As a result it often causes internal conflict. Opportunities †¢ Existing competitor of the current market is not that much strong which the pran company has. †¢ Pran can be export to other countries. †¢ Existing distribution channel is being used. High growth rate in this industry. Threats †¢ Competitor can produce the same product. †¢ Downward pressure on pricing. †¢ Political instability, economy etc. †¢ New innovation from other competitors could be a threat. Marketing Strategy Positioning Pran always try to position their product through image differentiation, because related marketing, and product differ entiation. Pran will use logo and short advertisement so that people can consistently see the advertisement so the product will occupy a clear, distinctive, and desirable place in the mind of the consumer relative to competitors’ product.Pran will use USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for their product. To do brand differences that make a better differentiation or that has the potential to create company costs as well as customer benefits. A difference is worth establishing to the extent that it satisfies the following criteria. †¢ O Important †¢ O Distinctive †¢ O Superior †¢ O Communicable †¢ O Affordable and Profitable Marketing Mix: Our marketing mixes for the product  Pran  are Product Marketing: For launching a product in the market, there is some procedure that should be followed by every marketer to move in the long run.Our product will enable our customers to have a different experience to try our juice. They will be able to differentiate our product in quality which is unique in the soft drinks market. They will not be able to feel the same way for the other soft drinks in the market. Pricing Strategies: We shall charge based on â€Å"Overhead Expenses† and â€Å"Cost Plus†. Overhead Expenses include rent, gas and electricity, business telephone calls, packing and shipping supplies, delivery and freight charges, cleaning, insurance, office supplies, postage, payroll taxes, repairs, and maintenance.The accuracy of our costing will depend on estimating logical amounts for all categories of expenses. We have to list all overhead expense items and total they divide the total overhead figure by the number of items per month (or time period we used above). The answer is our overhead per item: Overhead + Materials + Labor = Total Cost/Item From the market research, we received the following- Company Name  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Price Fruti(250ml)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   15 Mojo (250ml)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   15 Pran(250 ml)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   15 Table: Price of different brands.We want to charge 250 ml Pran soft drinks at the selling price of Tk. 14. On the other hand, the prices for Pran soft drinks are to be charged for 500 ml Tk. 32, for 1000 ml Tk. 60. Place or Distribution: We will primarily use our existing distributors for distributing our new product  Pran Juice  then; we will make some new channels and assign some distributors to promote our product to all over the country. We are using mobile shop in the shopping malls, offices and crowded areas so that people can purchase the product easily when they like to consume.We will make our consumer by  Value Delivery Network. Advertising and Promotion: The most successful advertising will be throu gh  BTV, NTV, Channel I, ATN  Bangla and RTV  which are the most popular television channels in the country. We will also use some bill-boards and leaflets and we will hold a sport event to promote the product. We will also use our experience so that we can create attention to the customers. Target market Our main target market people are the young ages people who like to drink juice very much. Mostly the school going students and the children.Beside that we also focus the young generation people. Although our main target market is young people but we also prefer the people of adult and old ages people. Forecast and Financial analysis: it just a hypothetical forecasting and financial analysis- The brands of â€Å"Pran Juice†Ã‚  will be introduced in September. We make an action program for the next four months. And we believe that, if our four month action programs will run well, then we will achieve our goals easily. June: In June we will arrange meeting with our suppl iers, dealers.And talk about our new product’s quality, product development etc. Our product is low involvement and buyers show habitual buying behavior. Then we will start production new Pran Juice. July: After meeting with the dealers we will provide sample Pran Juice to our customers for getting publicity. On the other hand we will give advertise of our new product in the Television, Radio, Bill Board, Banners, and in the Poster. Then we will launch our product in to the market. In the primary stage we will produce 250ml and 500ml can. August:After doing our successful operations of two month, at the third month we give extra benefits to the dealers and sellers to improve our sales. We will give small toys; arrange game. Observing the situations, at this stage we will produce 250ml can, and 500ml can for the consumers. In this month we will start to produce 1000ml can. And this month our product will be available in almost every shop of the country. September: In our last month of action program, if situation will favorable then we go for Divisional dealers to distribute to the whole country.Observing and analyzing we take necessary actions to develop product sales and increase our profit. In this way we will continue our production and give a particular image to the mind of every customer. Budget: This section will offer a financial overview four company as it relates to our marketing activities. We have shown break-even information. Sales Forecast: The sales forecast is broken down into the three main revenue streams; direct  Ã‚  Ã‚   sales, Web sales, consignment sales. The sale forecast for the upcoming year is based on 30% growth rate.Growth rate for year 2006 to 2010 are based on percentage increases as follows: †¢ Direct sales 20% growth rate per year †¢ Web sales 50% growth rate per year. †¢ Consignment sales 20% growth rate year. [pic] Profit/loss: January 31,2011, AMCL(PRAN) As per un-audited half yearly accounts as on 31. 12. 10 (July’10 to Dec’10), the company has reported net profit after tax of Tk. 19. 44 million with EPS of Tk. 24. 29 as against Tk. 17. 05 million and Tk. 21. 31 respectively for the same period of the previous year. Control: Our control depends on the customer satisfaction.If customer demand different things with which they feel comfortable, then we simply change our controlling techniques. Conclusion: We all know that, today’s fast moving world respect the new, innovative ideas. To keep the same pace with this situation our company had decided to launch a Juice and it has a bright future in its market. As the product is innovative, the consumers are going product will be a strong product mix for our company. And once our  Juice  will reach to the hand of our targeted customers, we will be able to capture the most market shares.

Amarcord essays

Amarcord essays History can be interpreted in many different ways. It can be viewed from different perspectives and retold in many different voices. The beauty of it all is that historic events, as beautiful or disastrous as they may be, affect people on the individual level. An artist who wishes to retell his or her past cares not how others were affected, but how the artists themselves lived and overcame these situations. A vivid example of how an artist, in this case a film director, retells his own past during the years of WWII is of Federico Fellini. The film Amarcord is a colourful retelling of Fellinis life growing up in a small costal Italian city, ruled by fascist dictators. Unbound by any particular plot, Fellini uses various characters, and locations in and around the city to visualize personal situations in a comical, and often sexual way. In the movie Amarcord, a typical Italian family is portrayed by a series of high energy, care free, and sometimes violent characters. Fellini truly captures the essence of the family in the scene when they are eating together at the dinner table. The mother of the household is constantly slapping her son, and husband on the back of their heads for saying stupid things and acting inappropriate. The father, perturbed by his sons ignorance, threatens to kick him out of the house, and chases him around the table and out the door. Through the use of slapstick comedy, Fellini is able to give the audience a peak into what his family was like, and how his mother and father reacted in their daily lives. Another scene in the movie that visualizes a time in Fellinis past is when the fascist army comes marching down the street in front of all the townspeople. The scene is a retelling of how Fellini truly felt towards the fascists, and how ignorant the townspeople were to simply allow them to march in and rule the town. In this par ...

Athletic heart syndrome Essay Example

Athletic heart syndrome Essay Example Athletic heart syndrome Paper Athletic heart syndrome Paper Athletic heart syndrome is a series of conditions steming from a physiologically enlarged heart that is noticed in athletes. Athletic heart syndrome basically as a result of an hypertrophied heart. The resting heart rate, including that measured during exercise, is low when compared with that of other normal persons (both the basal rate and the working rate) (Kenneth et al, 1973).   Muscle contraction is the primary physiological event that occurs during exercising. This is one of the processes in the body that consumes much energy. The cardiovascular system is a conduit for the transport of this energy all round the body. At the same time, the cells are detoxified of all waste products of metabolism.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Exercise puts a whole lot of stress on the cardiovascular system. Athletes are constantly involved in exercising. They frequently strain the cardiovascular system through the demand of the muscle cells (myocytes) for more perfusion. This constant strain on the heart in particular, leads to a physiological hypertrophy of the cardiac muscle cells. The left ventricle of the heart is most affected because it is a high pressure pump that supplies blood to the Aorta, the largest artery in the body. The aorta transmits the blood to other parts of the body including the brain, limbs and all other organs of the body (Kumar et al, 2004) A hypertrophy of the heart is most evident by the thickening of the left ventricle, although, other chambers of the heart are affected. This effect is a sort of physiological conditioning for the heart to be able to cope with the increased load and at the same time, does not feel stressed up. By so doing, athletes ca n persist in the vigorous activity for a longer time than other individuals without overworking the cardiovascular system. (Microsoft Encarta, 2008) Oxygen consumption of like-sized active athletes and normal individuals will be roughly the same at rest or at a given level of exercise. However, the fit individual (the athlete) will be able to achieve greater maximal oxygen consumption, even at a lower heart rate, due to the training effect that takes place with regular exercise. As the athlete engages in regular aerobic exercise, the heart, lungs, and muscles all become more efficient at utilizing oxygen. The heart pumps more blood with cardiac output, the lung capacity of each inhalation increases, and the muscle fibers (myocytes) extract more oxygen from the blood. The training effect on the heart is quite evident when heart rates are compared between long-distance runners and sedentary individuals. The athlete will have a lower heart rate at rest (perhaps as low as 50 beats per minute) and during light jogging, for example, than the non-athlete (who might have a resting rate of 80). During light jogging, the untrained person w ill experience a large increase in heart rate, while the athletes heart rate will not rise nearly as much. MECHANISM The heart has an intrinsic property of being able to generate electrical impulses that excite the myocytes. The Sinoatrial, Atrioventricular, Bundle of His and the Purkinje fibers all make up the electrical conduction system of the heart. Besides this intrinsic control, the heart is control by autonomic nerves that form part of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic part of the   ANS causes a stimulation of the heart – the rate and force of contraction are increased. The parasympathetic system on the other hand causes a decrease in the rate and force of contraction of the heart. In times of need, for instance, when an individual is exercising, the heart rate is increased so as to increase the cardiac output of the heart. In athletes, however, the heart rate is not increased in spite of the dramatic increase in the cardiac output of the heart. This is because of the physiological hypertrophy of the myocytes and also the basal firing of Vagal impulses to the heart. The Vagus nerve supplies the parasympathetic innervation to the heart.(Ganong, 2001) DIAGNOSIS Athletic heart syndrome is asymptomatic. The syndrome cannot be detected unless series or medical tests are carried out. A chest x-ray will show an enlarged heart – this is possible by checking the cardiothoracic ratio and determining if it is normal or not.   Other medical tests include stress tests. During stress tests, the athlete is asked to go on a Treadmill and exercise. Assessment of a persons physical fitness includes measurement of aerobic capacity in the form of maximum oxygen consumption during aerobic exercise. At regular intervals, the pulse rate and the blood pressure are measured; this would give an indication of the rate at which these parameters are changing with the progression of exercise. Also, on electrocardiography, increased activity is noticed in the region of the left ventricle, evidenced by a large QRS complex. The complex is tall and peaked, showing an increase in time that that the ventricular muscle fibers have to depolarize and repolarize. Systo lic murmurs, slow heart rates, arrhythmias and alterations in S-T segments and T-waves are all features of the athletic heart syndrome (Kenneth et al, 1973) MORTALITY AND MORBIDITY Athletic Heart Syndrome is asymptomatic therefore, it is a potentially morbid condition. Athletes with this condition are prone to s number of heart diseases. Cardiomyopathy, which is damage to the weakened heart, is likely to occur in some athletes – Heart failure is the ultimate. Also, in some athletes, heart failure has caused sudden death. This is because they were no prior diagnosis of any heart disease. After a period of relative inactivity by the athlete, the myriad of modifications to the cardiovascular system normalize. The cardiomegaly subsides. This is important as it distinguishes this syndrome from other cardiomyopathies. Rich (2007). REFERENCES. W. F. Ganong (2001). Review of Medical Physiology. 20th ed. McGraw Hill Companies. pp 275 290 V. Kumar, A. K. Abbas, N. Fausto (2004) Robins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease, 7th ed. Saunders – Elsevier. pp 460 -466 Microsoft Encarta (2008). The Human Heart. Microsoft Inc. Microsoft Encarta (2008). Exercise. Microsoft Inc. B. Kenneth, A. Benchimol, J. Schumacher (1973). External Pulse and Vectocardiographic Abnormalities in the Athletic Heart Syndrome. â€Å"Ches. American College Of Physicians. Pp 289-295 B. E. Rich (2007). The athletic heart syndrome. Current Sports Medicine Reports. Current Medicine Group LLC

1,462 Basic Plot Types

1,462 Basic Plot Types 1,462 Basic Plot Types 1,462 Basic Plot Types By Michael For centuries, writers and critics have tried to put stories into basic categories. Ive written about the scientific quest for universal plot types using the Hedonometer and the theories of Kurt Vonnegut. My colleague Mark Nichol has written about several lists of types of plots: three types, seven types, another seven types, twenty types, and thirty six types. Before I reread Marks article, I thought I could combine them all and write my own article called The 69 Types of Plots. Then I heard about the 1928 book Plotto, where dime store novelist William Wallace Cook comes up with 1,462 basic plots. So it never ends. Is it really true that all stories fit into rigid plot types? Maybe not. Even Plottos categories dont always seem rigid to me. But human nature does dictate certain rules. Theres a reason why the Computational Story Laboratorys Hedonometer has a story type rise then fall then rise but not one called rise rise rise rise. Our emotions need a contrasting break. If you write an experimental story without either conflict or plot or character development, the result will probably not be innovative so much as it will be boring. If you decide to be clever by not tying up any loose ends, you will succeed in frustrating your reader instead of delighting him. No, certain plots are universally attractive, even if we dont understand why. Even business proposals are easier to adopt if they have a plot. The theories of psychoanalyst Carl Jung has deeply influenced several list-makers, such as Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and Christopher Booker (The Seven Basic Plots). Jungs mythology has lost the lions share of the popularity it once held. But the fact that stories all over the world have common elements: thats more than a theory. Joseph Campbell describes 17 stages from Departure, Initiation, and Return. Christopher Bookers meta-plot has five elements: Anticipation Dream Frustration Nightmare Resolution Another theory which you might have learned in school says there are four types of plots. Here is my take on them: Dramatic the traditional chronological story, with a climax and a resolution. Episodic chronological but less linear and more loose, often made up of separate character-based episodes instead of a single story. Parallel two chronological stories are woven together. The focus may shift back and forth from the events of one character to the other. Flashback not chronological: events from the past are sometimes presented after events of the present. This can be interesting but confusing. When I looked at the lists in Marks article, I realized that some items are not mutually exclusive. Some lists have a different focus and basic types appear on more than one list. Also, your story can have more than one basic plot or conflict. The longer your story is, the longer you need to hold your readers interest, and the more plot elements or conflicts you will need to include. In Plotto, William Wallace Cook makes it to 1,462 by combining and recombining plot elements. One common list of plot types (man against x, man against y, man against z, etc.) is actually a list of conflict types, several of which can appear in a single story. In a classic amnesia tale, a man regains consciousness with no memory of who he is. He realizes he has driven his car off the road into a snowbank (or into a hole, making him a man in a hole.) He is able to start the car (person vs. technology) without freezing to death (person vs. nature). He goes to the home address on his drivers license and convinces the hostile woman who answers the door presumably his wife to let him in (person vs. person) while hiding the fact that he doesnt remember who she is. His personal calendar tells him he has an appointment in two hours, where he pretends to remember the woman hes meeting with, learning that they are leaders in a criminal conspiracy (person vs. society). That night, he dreams about his family and associates, He is tempted to deny the evil that he sees (person vs. self) and the fact, as it turns out, that he has dreamed actual events (person vs. supernatural). Aware now of what kind of life he has led, he must decide whether to change his life or continue on the same destructive path (person vs. higher power). Basic Plot Types (69 of them) Finally, heres a list of all the plot types referred to in Mark Nichols article: Overcoming the Monster Rags to Riches Voyage and Return Comedy Tragedy Rebirth Person versus higher power/fate Person versus self Person versus person Person versus society Person versus nature Person versus the supernatural Person versus technology Quest Adventure Pursuit Rescue Escape Revenge The Riddle Rivalry Underdog Temptation Metamorphosis Transformation Maturation Love Forbidden Love Sacrifice Discovery Wretched Excess Ascension Descension Supplication Deliverance Crime Pursued by Vengeance Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred Pursuit Disaster Falling Prey to Cruelty of Misfortune Revolt Daring Enterprise Abduction The Enigma Obtaining Enmity of Kinsmen Rivalry of Kinsmen Murderous Adultery Madness Fatal Imprudence Involuntary Crimes of Love Slaying of a Kinsman Unrecognized Self-Sacrificing for an Ideal Self-Sacrifice for Kindred All Sacrificed for Passion Necessity of Sacrificing Loved Ones Rivalry of Superior and Inferior Adultery Crimes of Love Discovery of the Dishonor of a Loved One Obstacles to Love An Enemy Loved Ambition Conflict with a God Mistaken Jealousy Erroneous Judgement Remorse Recovery of a Lost One Loss of Loved Ones If thats not enough, you can always try Plotto. The system is a little complicated, though. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Fiction Writing category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Types of RhymeRound vs. AroundWriting a Thank You Note

Southwest Airlines Study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Southwest Airlines Study - Essay Example In as much as such strategies are helpful in terms of expanding the business and eliminating competitors to penetrate the market, companies are always faced with various challenges in implementing them. One such challenge includes that of bringing together the human resources from the two sides and ensure they cope well and harmoniously to work towards achieving the objectives of the newly formed company. Southwest Airlines recently, in 2011, acquired AirTran Airways and the new company now is faced with the challenge of making the new acquired employees get used to the new culture at Southwest Airlines (Gary, The Mission of Southwest Airlines, 2014). Southwest will also add thousands of employees from a number of airlines from a variety of locations. The main purpose of this paper is therefore, to analyze the challenges that the Southwest Airline is faced with while trying to acquire the new employees and make them adapt well to its existing culture and ways of doing work. It will, therefore, carry out a SWOT analysis of the company to use in providing recommendations to address the issue. Looking at their strengths, Southwest Airlines has flexible employment guidelines even though the guidelines are monitored by the workers union. The airline can negotiate flexible work hours by the union (Stewart, 2008). This enables workers to avail themselves to work at times that they are most comfortable with, and their overtime allowances paid. The airline also has a warm staff relationship as it looks responsibly after its staff. This makes the staff be motivated and go extra miles for the benefit of the company as they know the company also cares for them. Looking at the weaknesses of the airline, we find that; the airline is flexible even though unionized since they can still negotiate for flexible work hours. This can be a weakness to the airline as the union

Globalization as a Political Phenomenon Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Globalization as a Political Phenomenon - Essay Example This paper stresses that technology has also been globalized through education and training, where scientists and engineers take learn about new inventions and innovations, at times via platforms such as the internet. It, therefore, gives opportunity to participants globally, aiding them in developing and advancing the global tech world. It is therefore important for countries to participate where new opportunities arise, to be at per with the rest of the world. Also, since globalization has been adopted by almost every nation around the globe, it will be of great benefit for governments to come up with regulations and rules that will govern the world at a global level. This will in turn curb crisis experiences and damages that can be caused as a result of selfishness and greediness of some countries. In terms of politics, the assigned bodies, which are responsible for regulating and overseeing the overall political issues, should start to act and perform their duties adequately. This essay makes a conclusion that economically, since globalization has influenced positively so far, organizations responsible for regulating it should stay put. They should also ensure there is equal opportunity distributed around so as to prevent future flaws and biasness. In terms of culture and socialization, countries that view themselves as of higher social status than the others should have regulation imposed on them. It will give opportunities to other countries with varying social and cultural status the opportunity to rise and probably offer the world a new insight altogether.

A critical evaluation of infection control issues for patients Essay - 1

A critical evaluation of infection control issues for patients presenting with Tuberculosis in the eye clinic department - Essay Example The present article discusses the critical evaluation of infection control issues for patients with tuberculosis in the eye clinic department. Tuberculosis or TB is a contagious, airborne disease of the lungs that is potentially spreads to other parts of the body and may be fatal. The disease can now be treated, cured, and prevented. However, inspite of the constant efforts scientists are not able to eradicate it completely. It spreads to the most sensitive population or those at higher risk especially the elderly people with reduced immunity or people with immunocompromised condition or suffering with AIDS. Elderly people are especially vulnerable for a number of reasons. First, the disease can take years to become active, so an older person may have gotten the disease earlier in life and only discovered it after it became active. Second, people who live in nursing homes and similar facilities are often in close contact with each other and the disease can spread more easily in such conditions. Third, the bodys immune system becomes weaker as a person grows older and older people may find it more difficult to hold off an attack of the tubercle bacillus. Migration of individuals from developing countries has further enhanced the chances for the spread of disease. People who abuse alcohol and illegal drugs are also at high risk for the disease. Transmission is through droplets. When a person suffering with TB coughs or sneezes, he or she releases a fine mist of water droplets containing thousands of the bacteria. A person(s) nearby the patient may inhale those water droplets and also the bacteria. These bacteria can then travel to that persons respiratory system and cause a new infection. Tuberculosis is not transmitted by contact with a persons clothing, bed linens, or dishes and cooking utensils. A fetus may become infected,

Working Capital and Financial Environment Paper Essay

Working Capital and Financial Environment Paper - Essay Example The total amount is $10493m. They are collectable within a year. Current liabilities - is another balance sheet item. It is the sum of money owed by an organization that is due for payment within a period of one year. For GlaxoSmithKline, current liabilities for year 2005 as given in the financial statements include elements such as: - Trade and other payables - trade payables, wages and salaries, social securities, other payables, deferred income, customer return and rebate accruals, other accruals, dividends payable, derivative financial instruments - $1,0091.7m Financial regulators such as IFRS body are seen as international marks quality and transparency and thus boost the image of the reporting Entity (Michael W. Maher, William N. Lanen, Madhav V. Rajan. 2004). 4. Mitigation of risks. Effective control also ensures that risks are identified early and assessed properly inorder to come up with timely mitigation plans. This is because it is not possible to completely eliminate risks in such areas as research and development where it's not certain whether investment will bear significant returns.. 7. Control programs also ensure group's compliance with audit functions, as well as regulations and ethical codes of practice. This ensures the integrity of financial statements (Horngren, C., Sundem, G. and Elliott, J. (1991). (i) GSK has... Cash and cash equivalents Short term investments Accounts receivables Short term loans Inventories Pre-paid expenses and taxes Assets held for sale Total current assets = $41,896m (Pfizer financial reports 2005) Current liabilities - This is money owed by the company and repayable within one year. For Pfizer Inc. current liabilities include: - Short term borrowings ($11,589) Accounts payables ($2,226)m Dividends Payables ($1,772)m Income tax payable ($3,617)m Accrued compensations and related items ($1,720)m Other current liabilities ($7,522)m Liabilities held for sale ($2)m Total current liabilities are given as $28,448m = 28.45 billion dollars Working capital is therefore $41,896 - $28,448 = $13,448 = $13.45 billion b. Explain the functions of intermediaries and financial regulatory bodies with the company. Functions of intermediaries and financial regulators Financial regulators such as IFRS body are seen as international marks quality and transparency and thus boost the image of the reporting Entity (Michael W. Maher, William N. Lanen, Madhav V. Rajan. 2004). They provide a platform for comparison of similar companies in same Industry and therefore boost standardization. They also enhance financial reporting ensuring that companies understand risk controls and management and understand the impact of finance in business activities. They ensure compliance of set rules and regulations within the particular industry. C. Determine the importance of control programs and effective internal control techniques to the selected organization. Discuss the impact of the 2002 Sarbanes- Oxley Act. For GlaxoSmithKline good control programs are important due to the following reasons: - 1. They enable the board to present a balanced and

Financial resource management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Financial resource management - Assignment Example From the year 2010 the company has focused in launching range of its venture brands. For the first half of 2011 the company profits were ?1.9 billion, there followed a period of low growth of sales attributed by the changing consumer behavior switching to budget rivals. The market in which this company operates is considered to be competitive. Its major competitors being Asda, Sainsbury, the Co-operative Food Plc. and Morrison’s and as by 2011 the market share standings in the context of United Kingdom were as follows (Schuh 2012). Tesco Company 30.6%, Asda Company 17.3, Sainsbury plc. 16.6% and the Co-operative Food Plc. 7.3%. Tesco plc. Financial performance The financial year for Tesco comes to an end on 27 February, thus the financial year 2010 covers 2010/2011. In this financial year there had been a registered total sales increasing by 8.3% in its first half and 8.8% in the third quarter (Infinancials 2012). For the case of international sales it increased by 15.7%. The return on equity has also increased significantly putting into consideration the impacts of the financial crisis. The company has engaged on big expansive programs notably on international markets using both retained earnings and debt financing for these projects. As at August 2010 the company balance sheet indicated a short-term debt of ?1.6 billion, ?10.5 billion long term debts with an offset of ?1.977 billion cash position which gives a net debt of ?10.1 billion (Schuh 2012). Thus the company is committed in paying down the debts. The company has greatly diversified its property assets having a gained greatly in comparison with its book value. Attributing to this is that it has provided a buffer to the current company leverage position. Better financial position of this company is attributed by the predictable and reliable earnings as well as profitability. The major products that the company is consumer staples and personal goods and the implication of recession may not signifi cantly affect its sales and profits respectively. J Sainsbury plc. J Sainsbury plc is the parent company of a chain of supermarkets in United Kingdom also referred to as Sainsbury’s. The company is the third largest chain of supermarkets thus considered to have a significant market share in the United Kingdom domestic market. This company currently operates 1012 convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets and a bank as well which sells financial services. In UK market the company is ranked third as it offers high quality grocery compared to its rivals. The company controls a market share of 16.4% coming fourth after its competitors Morrison’s, Asda’s and Tesco respectively (Infinancials 2012). Subsidiary businesses include Sainsbury’s local, Sainsbury’s online, Sainsbury’s Active Kids, Sainsbury’s Local and Sainsbury’s Bank. J Sainsbury plc. Financial performance For the past years the financial performance of this compan y has been characterized with increased turnover. From 1990 to 2010 the turnover has increased significantly from ?6.9 billion to ?21.4 billion with a fall in 2005 when the company way in the transition of restructuring itself (Schuh 2012). It is notable that for most of the years the company had a pre-tax profit of between ?500 million to ?700 million. The earnings per share have also increased significantly except in 2005 and 2006 (Infinancials 201

Conversations with History Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Conversations with History - Essay Example In large part Scheuer identifies these elements as a sort of religious awakening that occurred in Suni Islam after the Afghanistan war with Russia in the late 1970s. In believing that America was Bin Laden’s creator, Scheuer argues that the United States is doing itself a disservice, as Bin Laden transcends such easy categorization and has taken on a sort of mythic Robin Hood like status within the Arab world. Scheueur’s comments are interesting, but one wonders a number of questions related to them. For instance, what is the reason behind Bin Laden vengeance against the West? In some regards, one wonders if Scheuer is merely giving the listener the company line and shifting blame for Bin Laden’s creation to obscure political and Middle Eastern elements. 2. Remark Critique One remark Michel Scheuer makes concerns the nature of intelligence information. Scheuer had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and because of his affiliation with this organization has a unique insight into a number of policy and information elements related to their operations. The remarks Scheueur made concerns the nature of gathering intelligence.

Financial resource management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Financial resource management - Assignment Example From the year 2010 the company has focused in launching range of its venture brands. For the first half of 2011 the company profits were ?1.9 billion, there followed a period of low growth of sales attributed by the changing consumer behavior switching to budget rivals. The market in which this company operates is considered to be competitive. Its major competitors being Asda, Sainsbury, the Co-operative Food Plc. and Morrison’s and as by 2011 the market share standings in the context of United Kingdom were as follows (Schuh 2012). Tesco Company 30.6%, Asda Company 17.3, Sainsbury plc. 16.6% and the Co-operative Food Plc. 7.3%. Tesco plc. Financial performance The financial year for Tesco comes to an end on 27 February, thus the financial year 2010 covers 2010/2011. In this financial year there had been a registered total sales increasing by 8.3% in its first half and 8.8% in the third quarter (Infinancials 2012). For the case of international sales it increased by 15.7%. The return on equity has also increased significantly putting into consideration the impacts of the financial crisis. The company has engaged on big expansive programs notably on international markets using both retained earnings and debt financing for these projects. As at August 2010 the company balance sheet indicated a short-term debt of ?1.6 billion, ?10.5 billion long term debts with an offset of ?1.977 billion cash position which gives a net debt of ?10.1 billion (Schuh 2012). Thus the company is committed in paying down the debts. The company has greatly diversified its property assets having a gained greatly in comparison with its book value. Attributing to this is that it has provided a buffer to the current company leverage position. Better financial position of this company is attributed by the predictable and reliable earnings as well as profitability. The major products that the company is consumer staples and personal goods and the implication of recession may not signifi cantly affect its sales and profits respectively. J Sainsbury plc. J Sainsbury plc is the parent company of a chain of supermarkets in United Kingdom also referred to as Sainsbury’s. The company is the third largest chain of supermarkets thus considered to have a significant market share in the United Kingdom domestic market. This company currently operates 1012 convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets and a bank as well which sells financial services. In UK market the company is ranked third as it offers high quality grocery compared to its rivals. The company controls a market share of 16.4% coming fourth after its competitors Morrison’s, Asda’s and Tesco respectively (Infinancials 2012). Subsidiary businesses include Sainsbury’s local, Sainsbury’s online, Sainsbury’s Active Kids, Sainsbury’s Local and Sainsbury’s Bank. J Sainsbury plc. Financial performance For the past years the financial performance of this compan y has been characterized with increased turnover. From 1990 to 2010 the turnover has increased significantly from ?6.9 billion to ?21.4 billion with a fall in 2005 when the company way in the transition of restructuring itself (Schuh 2012). It is notable that for most of the years the company had a pre-tax profit of between ?500 million to ?700 million. The earnings per share have also increased significantly except in 2005 and 2006 (Infinancials 201

Problem-Solution Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Problem-Solution - Essay Example Many of them do carry excellent grades in their bachelors or at schools which are never a true reflection of their own selves. Partly the problem is because of the tight academic schedules the institutions are maintaining and partly because the faculty are unable to encourage and inspire their pupils to learn the concepts and understand their applicability too. Previously institutions or universities never used to maintain such demanding schedules, therefore the faculty used to have all the time in the world to prepare the students for the academic challenges. Presently Universities are more bent on sending number of batches out rather than worrying about the quality of the academics offered. For the academia this, indeed has become the greatest worry, especially in a developing country like India. The challenge is up the academia to offer a solution which can make the students saleable to the corporate. The fact that is quite disturbing is that the problem is not because of the grades the students were receiving but because of the poor quality of assessment that is taking place in offering the grades and parameters used to offer grades. The sublime truth is that presently in schools and colleges at bachelor's level we are teaching students' concepts without application (especially in India). All the time the teachers will be focusing on the teaching of concepts and the students will be focusing on learning the concepts. However the student is not aware of how to apply this particular concept in a real time situation. There by all the meaning of education is lost without a trace. The identified problem areas are: The grades are not reflecting the competency of wards in their subjects, This problem is because they are learning concepts all the time without knowledge of application of concepts in a real time situation, the examination system is designed to test their remembering skills rather than testing their conceptual skills, Poor selection of parameters such as written examination and in descriptive mode to analyze application of concepts. Study importance: The study is of prominence in colleges and schools because without learning the application of the concepts in real time situations if the student is exposed to the rigors the academics at higher levels then there is every possibility he/she can become a burnout very soon. Moreover because of the excellent grades they are receiving in colleges and schools because of an insufficient evaluation system, the student feels that he has acquired sufficient skills to enter into a university or take a job, in reality he is not. Challenge for the faculty: The big challenge for the faculty is the fact that they have to make the student understand the ground realities so that ice breaking can be done. Ice breaking is an exercise normally carried out in schools and colleges to make the students feel comfortable realize the persons they are will be easy in the later stages. Once the ice breaking is done then the faculty can turn his/her attention to the task at hand. That is to

Analysis of the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth Essay Example for Free

Analysis of the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth Essay Lady Macbeth is a complex and intriguing character she presents various elements in her character, often surprising us with sudden turns of personality. This reflects with Macbeth and her, causing various changes in their relationship drawing them both closer together, and pushing them away from one another. When we first meet Lady Macbeth in Act One, Scene 5, she is reading Macbeths letter. This is the letter that openly tells word for word what happened and what the witches told Macbeth. He obviously had no hesitation in being so open with his wife, which is notable. Straight away, Lady Macbeth takes from the letter her own interpretation, saying that she knows that Macbeth must now kill Duncan so that he can be King as the witches have said, but she also analyses his nature from the letter, fearing that he will be too good natured to carry it out. This suggests that she knows at this point that she is going to have to persuade him. As the scene progresses, an Attendant comes in and tells Lady Macbeth that the King is on his way to the castle to stay with them. Once he leaves, Lady Macbeth is speaking as if she is ultimately sure that this murder will go ahead. But she is fully aware that it is going to be emotionally very difficult to go through with, and she calls upon evil spirits to assist her murderous plans. Come, you spirits, That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here And fill me from crown to the toe top full Of direst cruelty; She does not want to have any human emotion within her, as she knows that that will cause her to possibly back down and not go through with her plans, so she begs that she lose her inner feelings of conscience; Stop thaccess and passage to remorse That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between Theffect of it. At this point Macbeth enters she greets him with notions of future greatness, almost as if she is already beginning to tempt him with her ideas of murdering Duncan. She urges him to keep a welcoming look on his face when the others arrive, so as not to give away their deadly intentions. At the end of the scene Lady Macbeth gives him words of comfort by telling him not to worry, she will take care of things. Even that small gesture goes to show how controlling she likes to be, especially of this situation. The next scene that Lady Macbeth appears in is Act 1, Scene 6, where she has a brief appearance. She comes in simply to welcome Duncan with elaborate courtesy, almost over the top in her greeting. She is obviously making every effort to lull Duncan into a false sense of security. She also makes notable reference to the loyalty, obedience, and their gratefulness for his past honours to Macbeth and herself. This is a perfect example of the sort of open lying and falsehood that seems to come easy to Lady Macbeth. She has no trouble with coming out with any sort of lies so that her plans may run smoothly. This is evident of her character throughout the play. The next scene Lady Macbeth is in, Act 1, scene 7, is when she comes in straight after a monologue from Macbeth where he is struggling with his conscience. Now he has been left to his own thoughts for a while, he has began to think back to all the times that Duncan has helped and honoured him, and is quickly coming up with more and more reasons against going ahead with the murder. Once Lady Macbeth enters, Macbeth tells her that he is now not going to go through with it and Lady Macbeth reacts very negatively. She immediately accuses him of not loving her, claiming that if he did then he would go through with it. From this time Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valour, As thou Art in desire ? This is blatant emotional blackmail, but when Macbeth doesnt back down, she quickly gets more and more harsh with her words. She borders on over dramatic, while maintaining every sense of meaning what she says, (which in itself is debatable). She says that Macbeth is no man if he is to break such a promise. This reference of not being manly is also used later, by Macbeth himself, when he accuses the two murderers of not being real men, but dogs. What beast wast then That made you break this enterprise to me ? When you durst do it, then you were a man. And to be more than what you were, you would- Be so much more the man. She then speaks the worst reference of all-she tells Macbeth that she would rather brutally kill her own child than to break such a promise. I have given suck and know, How tender tis to love a babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. All of her words are pure shock tactics, attempting to make Macbeth feel awful for even thinking of disagreeing with her. And, just as she wants, he breaks and agrees to carry on with their plot. She reassures him that it will all go smoothly, and she will drug the guards, so that they can later be blamed for the deed. Again, she is reassuring Macbeth, and he is taking in everything she tells him. This is commonplace in their relationship, with what we have seen of the couple so far. The next scene our Lady appears in is Act 2, scene 2. Lady Macbeth has drugged the bodyguards as she stated she would, and is waiting on Macbeths return from killing Duncan. She is exhilarated with excitement but fears that the murder has not been gone through with. However soon after the scene begins, Macbeth returns, bloody daggers in hand. He tells her that he has in fact killed Duncan, but is distraught. He is obsessed by his inability to say Amen after his cruel deed had been done. He is also transfixed by a voice that he had heard, crying that he has murdered sleep and would never sleep again. Still it cried, Sleep no more to all the house; Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more. Lady Macbeth in her usual non-sympathising way dismisses his hallucinations and orders him to put the daggers back by the guards. Who was it, thus cried? Why, worthy thane, You do unbend your noble strength to think So brain-sickly of things. Go and get some water And wash this filthy witness from your hand. Why did you bring these daggers from your place? They must lie there. Go carry them and smear The sleepy grooms with Blood. Macbeth, changing his usual role in the relationship, refuses! Ill go no more I am afraid to think what I have done; Look ont again, I dare not. Lady Macbeth seems a little taken aback, but bossily takes the daggers to put them back herself. She leaves Macbeth to his own thoughts. A knocking sound frightens the already very fragile-minded Macbeth, and on Lady Macbeths almost immediate return, she tells him to pull himself together, and smoothly plans an alibi. This scene is another clear cut example of Lady Macbeths dominant role in her and her husbands relationship. It seems Macbeths strength in life is found within Lady Macbeth. And Lady Macbeth herself feeds on this. So this situation is a fantastic opportunity for each of the two to show how they in their own way depend on one another. The next scene Lady Macbeth appears in, is at a climax point when Duncan is found dead. When Lady Macbeth enters, she is told of the news, and she, smooth as silk, acts suitably shocked at the news. This would have been substantial enough, but then when Macbeth re-enters to tell them all that he has killed the two guards, Lady Macbeth attempts to take the attention from him, by fainting. Of course, this as planned takes eyes away from Macbeth, and the moment is broken. Some might say however, that at this point Lady Macbeth is acting of rather high suspicion from being so overly-dramatic. But we have to assume that they are already so distraught about Duncan, and still so wrapped up in all of the goings on, that they miss this-which of course suits Lady Macbeth down to the ground! 2 scenes later, when Lady Macbeth next appears, Act 3, scene 1, she is now heralded as Queen. She only has presence there for 3 short lines, but essentially helps Macbeth to invite Banquo to that evenings banquet, and again is almost overly welcoming, which might, looked at in other eyes, look again rather suspicious. The next scene that Lady Macbeth appears in is Act 3, Scene 2. The scenes between her appearance and this one, show Macbeth hiring murderers to kill Banquo. This is a massive pivotal step for Macbeth, as he is clearly taking matters into his own hands rather than relying upon his Lady. He is however still very wound up about the murder and what has gone on. This reflects into Lady Macbeth, as in this scene she is shown to be rather troubled at this point, because Macbeth is still utterly distraught at what has gone on. She advises him not to brood at what has gone on, but this makes little difference. This may be because he is simply too upset to notice her help, but may also be because he is ceasing to listen to her so much. Macbeth then goes on to talk about how he even envies the peace that Duncan has now that he is dead! It was certainly not part of Lady Macbeths plan for Macbeth to get so upset, and I dont think shes quite sure how to handle it! Then however, Macbeth turns his attentions to telling his wife to pay special attentions to Banquo that night at the banquet. He hints darkly to her of dark deeds going ahead that night. This is almost teasing her with information-he knows that she thrives on being the one in control and is almost lavish with his words. At this, Lady Macbeth says nothing, but we can but imagine how she would be feeling to have the notion that Macbeth is doing things without her guidance or leadership. The next scene she is in is Act 3 Scene 4. Banquo has now been killed by Macbeths hired murderers. This scene is the all important banquet scene. It is a banquet held by Macbeth and his Lady, to welcome all of the lords under him, and essentially to try and impress them so that they will support him. Therefore it is undoubtedly very important for everything to go well. The very beginning of the scene shows Macbeth welcoming them all, and inviting them to sit down. The murderers then enter to inform him of Banquos death, and Fleances escape. Macbeth is distressed at the news of Fleances escape, but soon consoles himself that Fleance is too young to do any harm. Then, Banquos ghost appears, and sits in Macbeths seat. Lennox urges him to sit down with them, but Macbeth denies that there is space for him to sit down. A small discussion takes place in which they are all urging Macbeth to sit down, and Macbeth continues to deny there is space! He then becomes increasingly upset, and accuses the Lords of putting Banquos ghost there. Sensing that there will be trouble, Lady Macbeth intervenes and tries to calm the situation, and the confused Lords, by telling them that Macbeth is having a momentary lapse, and not to encourage him as it will upset him further; Sit, worthy friends. My lord is often thus, And hath been from his youth. Pray you, keep seat. The fit is momentary; upon a thought He will again be well. If much you note him You shall offend him and extend his passion. Feed, and regard him not. She then turns to Macbeth and uses a past used expression of, Are you a man?! He answers that he is, and much alike to her character, dismisses him just as she has done so often before when Macbeth shows weakness. Macbeth tells her to look at the ghost, as he is seeing already, and then tries to talk to the ghost! This shows how certain he is that Banquos ghost is there. The Ghost then leaves the room, and while still maintaining that he saw Banquos ghost, Macbeth broods for a short time on how the dead return. He then seems to settle himself, and apologises to his guests before proposing a toast of general good health to them all, and to Banquo. At this point, the situation seems to have been salvaged but then the Ghost re-enters and once again and Macbeth explodes into violent language, through obvious sheer fear. Lady Macbeth attempts to reassure the guests in between his outbursts. Think of this, good peers, But as a thing of custom. Tis no other, Only it spoils the pleasure of the time. But as Macbeth rants on, terrified, she realises she is losing control of the situation, and makes a last bid of control by ordering the Lords to leave. I pray you speak not; he grows worse and worse. Question enrages him. At once, good night. Stand not upon the order of your going, But go at once. The Lords leave, while Macbeth broods on murder, and the general unnaturalness. Lady Macbeth does little to stop him, which suggests that she is finally at a loss of what to do. It is evident that she has lost control of him at this point. Macbeth vows that he will go and see the witches and will go by anything they tell him from now onwards. This may seem simple to Macbeth, but must be difficult for Lady Macbeth, as this is yet another blatant turn away from her control and guidance. She tells him to go to bed, not even commenting on his choice to go to the witches instead of her. After this scene, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do not appear in any more scenes together. Macbeth most definitely continues to take the lead in the relationship, which is a complete and utter turn around from what we were seeing at the beginning of the play. Macbeths and his Ladys relationship was based almost entirely on the fact that he depended on her completely, trusting her with everything. She in turn depended on him, as her role in their relationship purely was to guide and dominate Macbeth. This had worked perfectly fine until the point when they killed Duncan. This was a pivotal point in the play, because after Macbeth had gone through with the murder he, through his own decision and means, went and killed the guards. This was not part of Lady Macbeths structured plan, and this was his first break away from her regulation. From that point, Macbeth rapidly began to break away from Lady Macbeths domineering side, and started doing things for himself, notably when he arranged for Fleance and Banquo to be killed. As the play progresses it was evident that Macbeth was speedily becoming a much stronger, more brutal, and perhaps most significantly, self dependant. And as a direct result, Lady Macbeth faded out in her dominance and general persona. The next scene that Lady Macbeth appears in is much later in the play, which is Act 5, scene 1. She hasnt even been mentioned during this time, let alone by Macbeth. The scene begins with a waiting-gentlewoman and a doctor. The Gentlewoman is telling the Doctor that she is concerned, as Lady Macbeth has been frequently been sleepwalking. He asks her what she has been saying all the while she has been sleepwalking, and she refuses to tell him. However at that point Lady Macbeth herself enters, sleepwalking, and he finds out for himself. She is seemingly rubbing her hands, which the Doctor enquires about. Then, Lady Macbeth speaks; Yet here a spot So the two onlookers listen to her words. Out damned spot! Out, I say! One. Two. Why then tis time to dot. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard ? What need we fear ? Who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him? And then; The Thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now ? What will these neer be clean? No more othat, my lord, no morethat. You mar all this starting. The Doctor and Gentlewoman at this point comment that they know that she has spoken of what she has not. She has basically just told them that she knows and was involved in murder. And still, she continues; Heres the smell of blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O. The doctor and gentlewoman are somewhat shocked at her words and state that her heart is heavily burdened. The Doctor says that, This disease is beyond my practise, meaning that he cannot heal her saddened heart. And then Lady Macbeth speaks again; Wash your hands, out on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquos buried; he cannot come out ons grave. And then; To bed, to bed; theres a knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand; whats done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed. And then she leaves. Her last few words are the words she told Macbeth when he was so unsure of himself and was upset at what they had done. When she repeats them at this point, it is almost as if she is reassuring herself as she speaks, rather than just going over it, which is interesting. It is obvious that now that it has finally hit Lady Macbeth the extent of what has been happening. It has finally occurred to her also, how much she has lost control. And this is literally killing her. The Doctor and Gentlewoman do not want to comment on what they have heard, for fear of what has been said. The scene ends with the Doctor being bid goodnight by the gentlewoman, as he goes to find Macbeth and tell him of his diagnosis. When Macbeth, 2 scenes later, is told that Lady Macbeth is irreparably unwell, he simply dismisses medicine and even suggestively dismisses the Doctor himself, while asking for his armour. He is only now thinking of himself. That is clear. He has no feelings of care or love for his once doted upon wife and instead can only think of himself and what is going on around him in regards to the attack. In Act5, scene 5, Macbeth is told of Lady Macbeths inevitable death. If at any point much earlier in their relationship Macbeth had been given such news, he would undoubtedly have been distraught. It would have been of great loss to him. But here, not so. Instead, he selfishly twists the news into some sort of extra problem or hassle to him. He sees it as another bad thing that has happened in his life. He shows no sadness, and instead is filled with feelings of resentment that it should just be yet another downfall in his life. This shows just how bad their relationship has got. It has got to the point where Macbeth is literally only looking out for one person, and one person only- himself. He has no further need for a wife, and so feels no grief at her death, and instead reflects on lifes futility; Out, out, brief candle, Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing. As we have followed Macbeth and Lady Macbeths relationship, various changes have occurred, which in turn have all ricocheted down the line towards Lady Macbeths death, and then eventually Macbeths own death. Macbeth took first steps towards less dependence when he went and killed the guards. This was not an apparent part of Lady Macbeths plan, and this unsettled her. But still she took charge of the situation by fainting, to draw away attention from his unintended actions. Then, he took further steps by arranging Banquo and Fleance to be murdered, and then Macduffs family. Most importantly in it all, Macbeth did not tell Lady Macbeth of his actions. Instead he teased her with the notion of his plots and plans, leaving her ponder. He most probably enjoyed this mockery of his wife, as it was a large statement in their relationship, which once had been based on his dependence. He continues after all this to keep breaking away from her. He stops telling her his thoughts and plans entirely, and in accordance to this, Lady Macbeth loses her somewhat vital status, which is essentially what she thrived on, and how was the only way to keep their relationship going in the only way she knew how. So inexorably she gets to a point when she is only left to her own thoughts which she has in the past shied away from through putting all her efforts into her husband and his welfare. Off-stage, she dies, although it is never made clear how. We are left to assume that as foreseen by the doctor she died in her bed of such a burdened heart. Alternatively she may have taken her own life, or fallen on roman daggers, as it described as earlier in the play. As described earlier Macbeth takes this to his own heart as another fault in his own life, and shortly after this point is justifiably murdered himself, by Macduff, whose family Macbeth earlier killed. Earlier in the play, Lady Macbeth sums up the futility of their actions and almost a premonition of what lay ahead was summed up when she said; Noughts had, alls spent Where our desire is got without content. Tis safer to be that which we destroy Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

The Role of Mental Variation in Cognitive Science :: Cognitive Sciences Scientific Essays

The Role of Mental Variation in Cognitive Science ABSTRACT: What is the role of mental variation in cognitive science? I will attempt to answer this question by dividing it into two separate questions: (1) what role does mental variation already (or implicitly) play in cognitive science? and (2) would cognitive science benefit by inquiring (explicitly) into the role of mental variation? I will attempt to show that mental variation already plays an important (though not always explicit) role in cognitive science. Additionally, I will suggest that explicating the role of mental variations in cognition may be seen as a vital component of maintaining the strength of certain approaches and "schools" of cognitive science. (1) Preliminary Remarks (a) Introduction What is the role of mental variation in cognitive science? I will attempt to answer this question, as it often happens in philosophy, by dividing it into two separate questions: (1) What role does mental variation already (implicitly) play in cognitive science? and (2) Would cognitive science benefit by inquiring (explicitly) into the role of mental variation? I will attempt to show that mental variation already plays an important, although not always explicit, role in cognitive science. Additionally, I will suggest that explicating the role of mental variation in cognition may be seen as a vital component of maintaining the strength of certain approaches and "schools" of cognitive science. To illustrate this, let me present the relevance of variation in disputes between the connectionist and more traditional theories of cognition. The dispute between more traditional (propositional and "language of thought" based) understanding of cognitive science and recent connectionist theories may be seen as centred, in part, on the role of variation (manipulation) in cognition. More traditional account would appeal to the fact that the correspondence between formal languages and propositional content may be seen as dependent upon the combinatorial structure of strings of symbols. Thus, one may claim that sentences have parts with both fixed and adjustable meanings and that we form new meaningful sentences by rearranging these parts in new combinations. In this case, the ability to vary parts of structured sentences may be seen as quite significant: this ability would help us account for our understanding of propositions we never encountered before. Instead of appealing to the paradigms of cognition which involve either strings of symbols or some sort of propositional structure, connectionists would rather appeal to some type of neural architecture. They argue that the properties of some sort of functional networks in cognition represent the properties of neural activity much closer than the properties of any sequential symbol-processing system.

What Is Inside That Beige Box :: essays research papers

What Is Inside That Beige Box? Power Supply The +3.3V and +5V circuits supply power to all the electronic circuitry in the system (motherboard, adapter cards and disk drive logic boards), and through the port sockets on the motherboard that poke out through the rear of the case, to the peripherals that don't have their own power supply (e.g. keyboard, mouse). Power supplies are often overlooked, but are essential to the proper operation of your system which requires a good, steady supply of DC power at the appropriate voltages. These voltages must be constant, right up to the maximum current your system will draw under load. CPU The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the brain of the system. It executes all the program code from the operating system and the applications you run, and does most of the calculating and processing of data. It sends commands to direct the actions of all the other components in the PC and it manages the distribution of data to/from those various components. Inside the CPU are registers, arithmetic and logic units (ALU), a floating-point unit (FPU), control circuitry and cache memory. Registers are circuits designed to hold data so that it can be processed in some way by an ALU or the FPU. Cache memory is extremely fast, but small relative to the main memory. Cache memory is used to store the current set of working data and code. So when the processor needs to read the next bit of data or code, usually it can retrieve it much faster from the cache. On occasions when it must recall data from the (slower) main memory, the CPU is forced to wait instead of getting on with other operations. The CPU is the fastest component in your system. It works hard only sometimes, maybe when you play a game involving 3D graphics, or perhaps compile a very large program or run a very large spread-sheet; but most of the time it is just waiting for you to press the next key, or for the next bit of data to arrive from the Internet, through your modem. Main Memory or RAM (Random Access Memory) Memory is temporary storage where the processor can access program code and data. It is temporary because any information stored there is lost when the system loses power or is rebooted. A low or high (on or off) voltage state in those small circuits represents a "0" or "1", which are the only two possible states of a binary digit (a "bit").

How to Become a Straight a Student

Contents Cover Page Title Page Introduction Part 1. Study Basics Step 1 Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day Step 2 Declare War on Procrastination Step 3 Choose When, Where, and How Long Part One Cheat Sheet Part 2. Quizzes and Exams Step 1 Take Smart Notes Step 2 Demote Your Assignments Step 3 Marshal Your Resources Step 4 Conquer the Material Step 5 Invest in â€Å"Academic Disaster Insurance† Step 6 Provide â€Å"A+† Answers The Plan in Action Part Two Cheat Sheet Part 3. Essays and Papers Step 1 Target a Titillating Topic Step 2 Conduct a Thesis-Hunting ExpeditionStep 3 Seek a Second Opinion Step 4 Research like a Machine Step 5 Craft a Powerful Story Step 6 Consult Your Expert Panel Step 7 Write Without the Agony Step 8 Fix, Don’t Fixate The Plan in Action Part Three Cheat Sheet Conclusion Acknowledgments Getting in is just the beginning Copyright Page Introduction â€Å"My friends always wondered why I was never in the library, but instead in the student center socializing, or at a party, or at an event. They said I made it ‘all look so easy. ’† Anna, a straight-A college studentThis is not your average college study guide. Unlike the titles next to it on the shelf, none of the advice presented here was devised by professors or self-proclaimed academic skills experts. I promise that you won’t find any mention of the Cornell note-taking method, mental map diagrams, or any other â€Å"optimal learning technique† crafted in an office or laboratory—environments far removed from the realities of typical college life. Instead, this book reveals—for the first time—the study habits used by real straight-A college tudents. All of the advice that follows was distilled from a series of interviews I conducted with a large group of top-scoring undergraduates. These participants were drawn predominantly from the Phi Beta Kappa rolls of some of the country’s most rigorous colleges and u niversities—including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Amherst, and Skidmore—and they were carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of academic concentrations. In each interview, I asked the student to detail his or her study habits.The questions ranged from the general (â€Å"How do you defeat the urge to procrastinate? †) to the specific (â€Å"What techniques or systems do you use to locate and organize sources for a research paper? †). If the questionnaire revealed the student to be a grind—someone who earns high grades simply by studying an excessive amount—I discarded the responses. I was interested only in students who improved their grades through smarter, more efficient study skills—not through longer hours and more painful study sessions. How did I know such students existed?I am one of them. When I arrived as a freshman at Dartmouth College, I had no idea how to prepare for exams or write coll ege-level papers. Like most students, I left high school believing that to study meant to reread your class notes and assignments as many times as possible and that paper writing required you to sit down in front of your computer and start typing until you finished. The problem, however, is that college is not high school. The material to be mastered is much more complicated and the professors have higher expectations.In the college environment, simple brute force study methods can end up requiring a lot of time and causing a lot of pain. Nevertheless, most students still rely on them. And this is why they find themselves regularly pulling all-nighters and developing an antagonistic attitude toward their courses. The taxing effects and spotty success of these methods also underlie the common belief that only geniuses and grinds can score top grades. When I first entered college, I shared in these beliefs. But soon I became dubious. It didn’t take long for me to decide that th ere had to be a better way to learn the material.The results of my studying using simple techniques varied widely—I’d spend all night hacking away at an essay and end up scoring a B-, or give what I thought was a frantic last-minute review for a quiz and score an A. I constantly felt like I was behind in my reading, and there always seemed to be new deadlines on the horizon that I had to scramble to meet. It was truly a chaotic existence. But when I looked around, all of my friends seemed to be having the same experience—and none of them seemed willing to question it. This didn’t sit right with me.I wasn’t content to work in long, painful stretches and then earn only slightly above-average grades for my efforts. I wanted to be exceptional. And I wanted to achieve this without having to sacrifice sleep or my social life. To many students, such a goal may sound hopelessly hubristic. But I’m an optimist by nature, and, observing the sorry state of my current study skills, I was convinced that I could do better. It took me most of my freshman year to construct, through repeated experimentation, a toolbox of sufficiently improved study habits.But once I had perfected them, the results were profound. Of the thirty-six courses I took between my sophomore and senior years of college, I scored exactly one A- and 35 perfect As. The most stunning piece of this transformation, however, was how much less time I had to spend on studying. As my strategies became more refined, the hours required were reduced. By my senior year it got to the point where, during finals periods, I would sometimes pretend to be heading off to the library just so I wouldn’t demoralize my roommates, who were preparing for yet another grim all-nighter.What was my secret? Efficiency. The simple truth is that the brute force techniques used by most students are incredibly inefficient. When it comes to exam preparation, passive review is not an effective way to learn complicated concepts. It’s also mentally draining, which further diminishes the rate at which you can absorb and internalize information. For paper writing, this same problem holds. When you approach the task without proper preparation, it becomes incredibly tiring and you can end up spinning your wheels.After a while, even the formation of coherent sentences becomes difficult and time intensive. In contrast, the techniques I came up with were so streamlined that I could learn more material than my classmates and actually spend less time studying. By eliminating stupid habits and wasted effort, I transformed exam prep and paper writing from a dreaded chore to a targeted activity. For a while, I was convinced that I was unique for having discovered such a smart approach to learning. But, alas, this illusion was soon shattered.It occurred during the winter of my senior year, when I was attending a ceremony celebrating my induction, along with thirty other classmat es, into Phi Beta Kappa. This group represented, more or less, the thirty students with the highest G. P. A. s out of my class of over a thousand. Accordingly, I had arrived at the venue prepared to spend the evening with some serious nerds. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise. Upon walking through the door that night, I was immediately struck by how many of the other students I knew socially.These were people who, given their level of visibility on campus, I never would have imagined were scoring straight As. They were magazine editors, frat boys, and crunchy environmentalists. I knew them from parties and campus clubs and through mutual friends. They were, for the most part, normal, well-rounded, and interesting—not at all the type of super-grind one might assume would occupy such an elite level of academic achievement. The lesson of that night was obvious: Perhaps I was not, in fact, as unique as I had first imagined.Maybe there were others out there who had discovered similar secrets to academic success. The writer instincts in me soon took over. Fascinated to know exactly how these seemingly normal students had done so well, I sent all of my fellow Phi Beta Kappas a survey about their study habits. Most were happy to share their methods and I quickly confirmed that my suspicions were true. Not only were many of them using innovative, homegrown study strategies, but many of these strategies were surprisingly similar to those that I had developed during the previous few years.At the time I had just finished editing the manuscript for my first book, How to Win at College, so I wasn’t exactly eager to get started right away with another massive writing project. But after seeing these initial survey responses, I knew I had stumbled onto something big. While most college students toil arduously through the study and paper-writing processes, there exists an elite group of undergrads who have discovered unconventional strategies for ea rning much higher grades in much less time. I wanted to share these secrets with other students, and thus the idea for this book was born.Soon I was sending out more questionnaires to more straight-A students at colleges around the country, until I gathered enough responses, from students with enough different backgrounds and majors, to distill the advice presented in this guide. In the pages that follow, you will discover the details of these often surprising study strategies. I’ve included examples and case studies throughout the book to demonstrate how to apply the advice in many different reallife academic situations. You will learn how to: †¢ Manage your time and deal with the urge to procrastinate. Take targeted notes in class. †¢ Handle reading assignments and problem sets with ease. †¢ Prepare efficiently for exams. †¢ Master the art of exam-taking. †¢ Write incisive critical analysis essays. †¢ Conduct thorough research. †¢ Write st andout term papers. Remember, this advice comes from real students and was honed, through trial and error, in real college classrooms. This distinction is important. It’s what separates this book from the many existing study guides that sit next to it on the bookstore shelf.As mentioned, most study guides are written either by professors or academic skills experts, many years separated from their own college experience. The result is that the authors of these guides are disconnected from the realities of undergraduate life. For example, How to Study, by college professors Allan Mundsack, James Deese, and Ellin K. Deese, suggests that students wake up at 7 A. M. each morning, go to sleep by 11 P. M. each night, and on many days schedule only a single hour of â€Å"recreation,† with the rest of the time dedicated to attending class, eating, or working.One gets the feeling that these professors haven’t spent much time socializing with students lately. Even their pl an for Friday—the biggest party night of the week—has the student working until 10 P. M. , taking a one-hour break, then turning in by eleven. Student Success Secrets, written by Eric Jensen, a learning expert and professional public speaker, offers equally out-of-touch suggestions. His tips to help you remember concepts learned from a reading assignment include â€Å"put it in a picture or poster—use intense colors,† â€Å"act out the material or do a fun role play in your own room,† or â€Å"create or redo a song; make a rap. Just try to imagine a sophisticated liberal arts major attempting to make a rap about her recent reading assignment concerning post-structuralist interpretations of pre-Victorian English literature! (Key question: What word rhymes with â€Å"Foucault†? ) The granddaddy of all unrealistic study guides, however, just might be What Smart Students Know, by Princeton Review cofounder Adam Robinson. In this best-selling gu ide, Robinson suggests—and I swear I am not making this up—that students approach a reading assignment as a twelve-step process! That’s right, twelve separate steps.Before you even crack the actual assignment, Robinson suggests that you jot down questions about the importance of the reading and then take notes on what you know about the topic, what it reminds you of, and what you want to learn. He then asks you, among other things, to read the assignment a total of three separate times, write and then rewrite your notes, represent the information in picture form, construct â€Å"question charts,† and devise mnemonics to help you memorize the concepts. Needless to say, this approach to a simple reading assignment is humorously unrealistic.I even did a little math. For a typical college-level liberal arts course, a student might be assigned an average of two hundred pages of reading a week. In his book, Robinson provides a one-page sample reading and descri bes twenty-three different questions that students might ask about it. At this rate of twenty-three questions per page, spending thirty seconds on each query, we would end up spending around forty hours a week (i. e. , a full-time job’s worth of time) simply completing one of the twelve steps on the reading assignments for just one class.Sounds like a great plan! These examples highlight the simple truth that the advice in most existing study guides—written by â€Å"experts,† not students—is often impractical and time consuming. How to Become a Straight-A Student, on the other hand, is the first guide based on the experiences of real college students, and it was written to provide an alternative to the other titles on the market. In the pages that follow, you will find homegrown strategies that are compatible with the demands of your day-to-day student life.They may not be as elaborate as the intricate systems devised by the â€Å"experts,† but the y’re easy to implement—and they get the job done. Best of all, when you start putting these strategies into practice, you will experience immediate results. Keep in mind: If you find a piece of advice that doesn’t quite fit your needs or circumstances, that’s okay. In fact, you should expect this. Each of the students I interviewed for this book had his or her own unique take on the best way to study. Follow their lead and, when stuck, experiment.Replace techniques you don’t like with ones that seem better. If these new techniques work, keep them; if they fail, replace them with something else. The key to improving your grades without becoming a grind cannot be found in any single study habit. It is, instead, rooted in the big picture decision to reject rote review once and for all and begin the flexible search for strategies that work better for you. Above all, remember that college is a multifaceted experience, of which grades are just one of man y important pieces.It’s my hope that this book will help you painlessly conquer this one piece so you can have more time and energy to explore all of the others—the friends, the unburdened idealism, the heroic beer consumption—that make these four years so rich. A common complaint I hear from students is that they never seem to have enough time to finish all of their work. They vent about how many hours they spend—late nights reviewing in the library, weekends sacrificed to paper writing—but no matter how hard they try, there always seems to be something else due.As Matthew, a straight-A student from Brown, explains, it’s easy for college students to become â€Å"stuck in a state of permanent catch-up. † Understandably, these students feel like they have reached their academic limit; they believe that unless they forgo sleep or any semblance of a social life, there are simply not enough hours in the day to stay on top of all their sch oolwork. Let’s start by getting one thing clear: This belief is false. The problem here is not the amount of available hours, but rather how each hour is spent. I know this from firsthand experience.While researching this book, I spent time with some of the country’s most accomplished students, and I can assure you that no matter how diligent you think you are, there is a Rhodes scholar out there who fits in three times the amount of work and activities you do and probably still manages to party harder than you would ever dare. I don’t mean to imply that everyone should aim to become a drunken Rhodes scholar (though it would certainly be fun to try); rather, my point is that a surprising amount of work, relaxation, and socializing can be extracted from a single twelve-hour day.A lack of time, therefore, isn’t enough to explain why so many students feel overwhelmed. So what does explain this phenomenon? The answer, as it turns out, has much more to do with how we work than what we’re trying to accomplish. As humans, our minds have evolved to prefer short-term tasks such as â€Å"run away from that lion† or â€Å"eat food. † Therefore, when you walk into the library on a Sunday morning with the goal of finishing all of your homework and writing a paper, your brain isn’t happy. The idea of spending eight consecutive hours trapped in a study carrel is dispiriting.Plus, it’s hard to focus for that long, so pretty soon fatigue will set in, your concentration will wander, and every distraction will suddenly seem impossibly appealing. Before you know it, the day will be over and you’ll realize that you haven’t accomplished much productive work at all. The next day, new assignments will pile onto those you didn’t finish on Sunday, and the tedious process starts all over again. Jason, a straight-A student from the University of Pennsylvania, uses the term â€Å"pseudo-working† to describe this common approach to studying.The pseudo-worker looks and feels like someone who is working hard—he or she spends a long time in the library and is not afraid to push on late into the night—but, because of a lack of focus and concentration, doesn’t actually accomplish much. This bad habit is endemic on most college campuses. For example, at Dartmouth there was a section of the main library that was open twenty-four hours a day, and the students I used to see in there late at night huddled in groups, gulping coffee and griping about their hardships, were definitely pseudo-working.The roommate who flips through her chemistry notes on the couch while watching TV is pseudo-working. The guy who brings three meals, a blanket, and six-pack of Red Bull to the study lounge in preparation for an all-day paper-writing marathon is also pseudo-working. By placing themselves in distracting environments and insisting on working in long tedious stretches, these stud ents are crippling their brain’s ability to think clearly and efficiently accomplish the task at hand. The result is fatigue headaches and lackluster outcomes. The bigger problem here is that most students don’t even realize that they’re pseudo-working.To them pseudo-work is work—it’s how they’ve always done it, and it’s how all of their friends do it. It never crosses their mind that there might be a better way. Straight-A students, on the other hand, know all about pseudo-work. They fear it, and for good reason. It not only wastes time, but it’s also mentally draining. There is just no way to be wellbalanced, happy, and academically successful if you’re regularly burning through your free hours in long, painful stretches of inefficient studying. The students I interviewed for this book emphasized again and again the importance of avoiding this trap.In fact, when asked what one skill was most important in becoming a non -grind straight-A student, most of them cited the ability to get work done quickly and with a minimum of wasted effort. So how do these students achieve this goal? A big part of the solution is timing—they gain efficiency by compressing work into focused bursts. To understand the power of this approach, consider the following simple formula: work accomplished = time spent x intensity of focus Pseudo-work features a very low intensity of focus. Therefore, to accomplish something by pseudo-working, you need to spend a lot of time.The straight-A approach, on the other hand, maximizes intensity in order to minimize time. For example, let’s rank intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most intense). Assume it takes ten hours to finish studying for a test by pseudo-working with a low intensity score of 3. According to our formula, this same amount of work can be accomplished in only three one-hour bursts, each with an intensity of 10. The work that took you all da y Sunday to complete could instead be finished by studying an hour after breakfast, an hour after lunch, and an hour after dinner—the rest of the day being free for you to relax!With this formula in mind, you can begin to understand why many straight-A students actually study less than their classmates: They replace long, low-intensity stretches of work with a small number of short, high-intensity sessions. Of course, this is not the whole story behind their success; what straight-A students actually do in these short bursts is also crucial—technique is just as important as timing. Part Two (Quizzes and Exams) and Part Three (Essays and Papers) of this book are dedicated to these technical details.But learning how to follow an efficient schedule, and banishing pseudo-work from your college experience for good, is a crucial first step toward your academic overhaul. To accomplish this transformation, however, you will need to gain control over your lifestyle—and t hat’s often no small task. For example, you will need to spread out the intense work sessions so that you have time in between to recharge. This requires basic time-management skills. You’re also going to have to overcome your urge to procrastinate, because scheduling your work is meaningless if you don’t actually work in the time you set aside. This requires self-motivation.Finally, to obtain the highest possible levels of intensity, you need to choose the right locations, times of day, and durations to study. If you aren’t careful about how you select these three factors, you can unintentionally sabotage your ability to focus. This requires a smart planning strategy. Part One will teach you how to satisfy these requirements. It begins with the presentation of a simple timemanagement system, customized for the busy college lifestyle. Don’t be frightened, the system is incredibly lightweight—it’s designed to require only five minutes a day of planning and can survive periods of neglect.Part One then continues with a collection of battle-tested strategies to help you fight procrastination. This advice comes straight from the experiences of real students and has been proven to work amid the chaos and distractions of the typical undergraduate lifestyle—it is simple, easy to apply, and surprisingly effective. This part concludes with a discussion of when during the day, where on campus, and for how long to study to maximize your productivity. The students interviewed for this book experimented extensively to find the right answers to these key questions, and, in this final step, I pass these answers on to you.Together, these basic skills are the foundation upon which all the advice in this book is built. Without them, you’ll be unable to implement the specific study techniques described in the parts that follow. Master them, however, and you will experience improvements in all aspects of your life†”not just grades. You’ll have more free time, you’ll get the sleep you crave, you’ll party harder, and you’ll be able to devote more energy to your extracurricular interests. So relax. You are about to take your first step toward a much more enjoyable and productive college experience. Step 1Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day Real straight-A students, like most reasonable students, hate time management. After all, college is supposed to be about intellectual curiosity, making new friends, and becoming obsessed with needlessly complicated drinking games. An overwhelming interest in time management is best left to harried business executives (or, perhaps, premeds). At the same time, however, you can’t abandon all attempts to keep tabs on your schedule. As mentioned in the introduction to Part One, all of the techniques described in this book require some ability to control your schedule.Ignore this skill, and you doom yourself to four long year s of playing catch-up with your work. As Doris, a straight-A student from Harvard, states: â€Å"Time management is critical—it’s a skill that you absolutely must develop over the course of your time at college. † Most students, however, misunderstand the purpose of time management—they believe it’s used only to cram as much work as possible into the day. But this is not the main motivation behind controlling your schedule. As it turns out, a little planning goes a long way toward reducing your daily stress levels. Having deadlines and bligations floating around in your mind is exhausting—it makes it impossible to completely relax, and, over time, can lead you down the path toward a breakdown. However, once you figure out what work needs to be done and when, it’s like a weight being lifted from your shoulders. The uncertainty vanishes: When you work, you can fully concentrate on the assignment in front of you, and when you relax, you can do so without any anxiety. â€Å"I don’t believe in giving up anything,† says Jenna, a straight-A student from Princeton. â€Å"Not my social life, not my extracurricular activities, not my academic success. Basic control over your schedule breeds balance. This is why time management, as Doris stated earlier, is the key to getting the most out of all aspects of your college experience. The goal of Step #1 is to present a time-management system that helps you achieve this stress-free balance without requiring you to sacrifice the spontaneity and excitement of college. Specifically, we present a system tailored to the typical undergraduate lifestyle that meets the following criteria: 1. Requires no more than five to ten minutes of effort in a single twenty-four-hour period. 2. Doesn’t force an unchangeable minute-by-minute schedule on your day. . Helps you remember, plan, and complete important tasks before the very last moment. 4. Can be quickly restarted af ter periods of neglect. We will cover the details of this system in a few simple steps and then conclude with a detailed case study so you can see how it works in a realistic setting. What You Need This system requires two pieces of equipment. 1. A calendar: It doesn’t matter what type of calendar, and it’s not something that you have to carry around with you. It can be Microsoft Outlook or iCal on your computer, a cheap day planner, or one of those advertisement-laden freebies they hand out at orientation.It just has to be something that you can reference every morning that has enough space to record at least a dozen items for each day. 2. A list: Some piece of writing material that you can update throughout the day. This you do have to carry around with you, so make it something simple, like a sheet of paper ripped out of a notebook each morning. The Basic Idea Record all of your to-dos and deadlines on your calendar. This becomes your master schedule, the one place that stores everything you need to do. The key to our system, however, is that you need to deal with your calendar only once every twenty-four hours.Each morning, you look at it to figure out what you should try to finish that day. Then, throughout the day, whenever you encounter a new to-do or deadline, simply jot it down on your list. The next morning, you can transfer this new stuff from your list onto your calendar, where it’s safe. And we’re back where we started. That’s it. Pretty simple, right? The whole system can be summarized in three easy steps: (1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.Now, we’ll examine these steps in a little more detail. In particular, we need some strategies for how to plan your day each morning using your calendar and what to do when unexpected events interfere and turn that plan upside down (trust me, this will happen more often than not). Update Your Calendar Each Morning This is where the magic happens. Every morning, spend a few minutes to update your calendar and figure out what you should try to accomplish. This is the only serious time-management thinking you have to do for the whole day, so the demand is pretty reasonable.This updating process should proceed as follows: Find your list from the day before. It will probably look something like the example described in Figure 1. Don’t worry too much about how this list is formatted; we will discuss that shortly. For now, focus on the â€Å"things to remember† column, which contains the new to-dos and deadlines that were jotted down throughout the day. Figure 1. Sample List Tuesday—1/24/06 Today’s Schedule †¢ 10:00 to 12:00 Econ class †¢ 12:00 to 1:00 Lunch with Rob †¢ 1:00 to 1:45 Government reading †¢ 2:00 to 4:00 Government class †¢ 4 :00 to 5:30 Finish government reading 5:30 to 6:30 Start French essay Things to Remember †¢ Econ study group, Thur. at 9 P. M. †¢ French quiz moved to Friday. †¢ Laundry †¢ Start researching summer internship opportunities. Transfer these new items onto your calendar. Write the deadlines on the appropriate dates, and write the todos on the days when you plan to complete them. Following the example of our sample list, you would first jot down the econ study group time under Thursday’s date and the French quiz under Friday’s date. You would then choose a day to do laundry and jot down a reminder under that date, and choose a day to start internship research and ot down a reminder under this date. You can move these items around on your calendar as many times as you want, so don’t worry too much about which date you initially choose for a new to-do. However, try to use some common sense. For example, if Wednesday afternoon and evening are packed with meetings and work, this might not be the best day to schedule doing your laundry. Similarly, if you have a big test Monday morning, don’t schedule a lot of annoying errands for Sunday; you’ll need your concentration for studying.If something is not especially time sensitive, such as the internship research example from above, don’t be afraid to put it on a day far in the future, at a point when you know you will be less busy—such as right after midterms or at the beginning of a new semester. Next, move the to-dos that you planned for yesterday, but didn’t complete, to new days on your calendar. In our sample list from Figure 1, the Today’s Schedule column describes to-dos planned from the day before. As you can see, in this example, all the to-dos were completed except the â€Å"Start French essay† task, so you would need to move this task to a new date.At this point, your calendar once again holds everything that you need to ge t done. Now it’s time to figure out your plan for the current day. Go ahead and trash yesterday’s list—it’s served its purpose—and grab a fresh sheet of paper to use as today’s list. Divide it into two columns, as shown in Figure 1, and label them Today’s Schedule and Things to Remember, respectively. Next, look at the calendar entry for the current day. It will probably contain a handful of appointments and todos. Your goal is to figure out how much of this work you can realistically accomplish.You might be tempted to simply copy all of these tasks into your Today’s Schedule column and then treat it as a simple to-do list for the day. Don’t do this! If you want to avoid getting overwhelmed by your work, you need to be smarter about your time. Here is what you should do instead: Try to label each of your to-dos for the day with a specific time period during which you are going to complete it. Be honest. Don’t reco rd that you are going to study for three hours starting at three if you know that you have a meeting at five. And be reasonable about how long things really take—don’t plan to read two hundred pages in one hour.For simplicity, group many little tasks (errands that take less than ten minutes) into one big block (for example: â€Å"10:00 to 10:45—mail letter, return library book, buy new deodorant, fill out transcript request form at registrar†). Leave plenty of time for breaks. Give yourself an hour for meals, not twenty minutes. And, if possible, end your day at an appropriate hour; don’t try to fit in work right up until sleep time because you need to be able to unwind and relax. In general—though it may seem counterintuitive—be pessimistic. The truth is: Things will come up.Don’t assume that every hour that looks free in the morning will stay free throughout the day. Remember, the goal here is not to squeeze everything into o ne day at all costs, but rather to find out how many of the tasks listed for the day you actually have time to accomplish. If you can’t fit all the to-dos into your schedule for the day, no problem! Simply move the remaining items onto the calendar entries for future dates. You can deal with them later. Your final step is to record the tasks you will have time for into the Today’s Schedule column of your list. As shown in Figure 1, label each task with its time.That’s it. You can now reference your list throughout the day to remind yourself of what you should be doing and when. But here’s the important point: The specific times on your schedule aren’t set in stone—they’re more of a suggestion. As we will discuss shortly, you will be free to move tasks around throughout the day, depending on your energy level and unexpected events that may arise. The main reason you break down your to-dos into time slots is to help you avoid the common student mistake of overestimating your free time. Many well-intentioned students use a simple to-do list to keep track of their daily obligations.But without time labeling, they have no idea how much they can actually accomplish, leading to an unrealistic plan. A twelve-hour day seems like a large amount of time, but when you account for meals and classes and meetings and breaks and socializing, your schedule suddenly becomes a lot tighter. The equation is simple: If you overestimate your free time, then you are likely to put off work until it’s too late. And this leads to all-nighters, panic attacks, and shoddy performance. A realistic sense of time is arguably one of the most important factors in succeeding as a student.After a week or two of time labeling your to-dos, you will be well along your way toward developing this crucial trait. Use the List During the Day As you move through your day, use the rough schedule recorded under the Today’s Schedule column to rem ind yourself what you should be doing. Keep in mind that the student lifestyle is, generally, quite unpredictable. Things will always come up at the last minute. Work will take longer than expected, your roommate will point you toward some absurd Web site that immediately demands an afternoon of your scrutiny—you know how it goes.So adjust your time labels as many times as needed. But don’t procrastinate excessively! The list you constructed in the morning should contain a reasonable amount of work, so if your schedule doesn’t become too unexpectedly crazy, you should be able to accomplish most, if not all, of these tasks. In general, if you’re completing most of what’s on your list at least five days out of seven, then you’re as productive as any student realistically needs to be. If not, don’t worry—the next section of Part One will teach you how to combat your urge to procrastinate.Remember, your list also serves another imp ortant purpose. During the day you will probably encounter various new to-dos and deadlines that need to be scheduled. For example, a professor might announce the date of an upcoming exam, or a friend might give you the date and time for an upcoming study group. The key is to get these obligations out of your head as soon as possible so your mind is not unnecessarily cluttered. Jot down a quick reminder on your list, in the Things to Remember column, as soon as they occur. This takes only a few seconds, and then you can forget about them.The actual scheduling of these tasks will take place the next morning; all you have to do for now is scribble a few words on a piece of scrap paper. Remember, to-dos and deadlines that exist only in your mind drain your energy, distract your attention, create stress, and are more likely to be forgotten. When you’re working, you should be able to concentrate on working, and when you’re relaxing, you should be able to enjoy relaxing. But you can’t devote 100 percent of your energy to any activity when you have important reminders bouncing around in your head.Few students have the energy to schedule every new piece of information that comes along during the day. Think about this for a moment: If it’s the middle of the afternoon, and you are hungry, and everyone is just getting up to leave at the end of a long class, when suddenly the professor yells out a notice that a paper topic is due the following week†¦you’re probably not going to have the energy to stop packing up, take out a calendar, think about what steps are involved in coming up with a paper topic, and then schedule each step on the appropriate days.It would be nice if you did, because then you could purge the deadline from your mind and be confident that it’s safely recorded in your calendar—but this is unrealistic. And it violates our original criterion that any timemanagement system should require only a few minu tes each day. That’s the power of the â€Å"things to remember† column of your list. You can’t expect yourself to be able to think seriously about time management at all points during your busy day. But the act of pulling out a piece of scrap paper from your pocket and quickly jotting down â€Å"anthro paper topic† requires minimal energy, no thinking, and barely any time.You don’t have to consider when to begin working on the paper topic, what steps are involved, or how many days it will require. You simply scribble down three words. The key is that the list is a trusted piece of storage. You are confident that tomorrow morning, when you’re doing your only time-management thinking for the day, you will see that reminder and record the appropriate steps in your calendar. Because of your list, the deadline will not be lost. It will be scheduled. Restarting After a Period of NeglectTo date, I have yet to have successfully followed any time-man agement system without interruption for longer than two months. I try, but inevitably I hit a rough patch. Typically, this happens during the few days following a really busy period—I’m so exhausted from the intensity of the preceding work that I find myself unable to even mention the word â€Å"to-do† without breaking into a cold sweat. This happens to everyone, and you can expect that periodically it will happen to you too. Don’t fear these occasions, and don’t let them make you feel like a failure.They’re normal. The key point is that these lapses are temporary. After a couple days of swearing off my calendar, I always find myself growing uncomfortable with the increasing number of obligations that are free floating in my mind. Before I know it, I’m back into the swing of using the system again, and no worse for wear. The same will be true for you. Once you have learned the power of feeling organized, you will have a hard time goin g long periods without it. Fortunately, the system described here is adaptable to these periods of neglect.If you skip a few days, all you need to do upon restarting is to dump all the to-dos and deadlines free floating in your mind onto a sheet of paper and then push these back onto your calendar for future dates. Case Study: A Monday with Stephen Even the simplest systems can come across as confusing when first described. So let’s go through a quick example that will show you how to put this system into practice. Stephen’s story is based upon the real-life college experiences of myself and the many students I interviewed. If you’re already at college, what follows will seem familiar.If you haven’t yet started your undergraduate career, don’t panic! Yes, Stephen has a lot on his plate. Notice, however, how he uses our system to keep control of his many obligations. Though he can’t finish everything in one day, he remains confident that ever ything that needs to get done will get done in time. As you read this example, imagine how Stephen’s stress might increase, and his efficiency decrease, if he didn’t have his list and calendar to guide his actions and capture the new to-dos and deadlines that constantly pop up. Monday Morning Stephen gets up early because he has class at 9:30 A.M. —a horrible thing. He grabs his calendar from his desk and roots around in his hamper to find the sheet of notebook paper that he used as yesterday’s list. He has only a couple of minutes before class, but that’s okay. Our system requires very little time. Figure 2 shows what Stephen finds recorded on his calendar for today. Figure 2. Stephen’s calendar entry for Monday Monday—3/11/07 †¢ Finish reading for Tuesday Gov class. †¢ Gift for Dad’s birthday †¢ First step of research for Gov paper—find books, Xerox relevant chapters. †¢ Pay cell phone bill. †¢ Return Mark’s CD. First half of Econ problem set (due Wed) †¢ Pick topic for Anthro paper (due tomorrow). †¢ Read five chapters from Anthro book (need to catch up for Friday’s quiz). †¢ Dinner with guys—7 P. M. —Molly’s †¢ Ill-conceived toga party—10 P. M. —Alpha Chi Figure 3. Stephen’s list from Sunday Sunday—3/10/07 Today’s Schedule †¢ 1:00 to 3:00—read article for Anthro. †¢ 3:00 to 6:00—write Government essay. †¢ 7:00 to 8:00—dinner with Sarah †¢ 9:00 to 10:00—edit Government essay. †¢ 10:00 to 11:00—start reading for Tuesday’s Government Things to Remember †¢ Call home. †¢ Start researching summer nternships. †¢ Create schedule for practicing guitar? class Figure 3 shows what he finds scrawled on yesterday’s list. There are several things to notice here. First, Stephen has a lot of work recorded on hi s calendar entry for today. More than he can probably accomplish in twelve hours, so some of these to-dos will need to be moved to other dates. Also notice Stephen’s schedule from the day before (Sunday). This is typical. A fun night on Saturday inevitably leads to a late start and a large workload on Sunday. Stephen was too ambitious with his planning, and by 10:00 P. M. e was burnt out from working on his essay and never got around to starting the Government reading he had scheduled. So this task will need to be carried over to today. Finally, notice how Stephen’s Things to Remember column from yesterday includes some long-term projects, such as â€Å"Create schedule for practicing guitar. † This is a great use of the list! If you jot down ideas for extracurricular and personal projects as they occur to you, they will get moved onto your calendar and therefore won’t be forgotten until you finally get around to doing something about them. Now let’ s see how Stephen gets a handle on all of this before class.What Does Stephen Do First? Stephen’s first step is to time label the tasks currently on his plate so he can determine how much he can actually get done. Between his calendar entry for today and the leftovers from yesterday’s list, Stephen has a lot of to-dos to schedule. His strategy is simple: He starts time labeling in order of importance until his schedule is full, and then moves the rest of the items to other days on the calendar. To effectively time label, however, he must first figure out how much free time he has available. Stephen quickly runs through the following in his head:I have class from 9:30 to 10:30, and another class from 11:00 to 12:00. It’s unlikely that I will get any work done between my 7:00 P. M. dinner and the Alpha Chi party that starts soon after. I should also try to squeeze in an hour or two for a predinner workout (have to look good in that toga), so I should aim to be don e with all of my work by 5:00. With his free time now identified, Stephen can begin to time label his to-dos. Here is his thought process: In between class, from 10:30 to 11:00, I can squeeze in my three small tasks—pay cell phone bill, buy a birthday gift for Dad, and return Mark’s CD.After my second class, I will need to get lunch, but then I should get right to work on my Government reading because it’s due tomorrow! Let’s see, I have three Government articles to read, which will realistically take two hours, so I will label this task with 1:00 to 3:00. Hmmmm, I am running out of time here. I need to start that Econ problem set because those suck, and it’s due Wednesday morning, so I’ll label that task with 3:00 to 4:30. Okay, I am down to my final half hour. What else has to get done? My Anthro paper topic is due tomorrow, so I will have to squeeze that in at 4:30 to 5:00. And that’s all I have time for.At this point, Stephen is a lmost done. All that’s left is taking care of the still-unscheduled to-dos by moving them to future dates. Remember, these include both the unscheduled tasks recorded for the current day and the â€Å"things to remember† items from yesterday’s list. On yesterday’s list I have a reminder to Call home†¦this week is so busy†¦okay, I’ll jot that down on the calendar entry for Friday, I’ll be more relaxed by then. I really don’t have time right now for these other two reminders—start internship research and create guitar schedule—so I’ll jot those down on the calendar entry for the first weekend after midterms are over.I should have more free time then. Okay, what’s left? The unlabeled items from today’s calendar entry. No problem. I can move the Anthro reading to tomorrow’s calendar entry, and then move the Government paper research to Wednesday—I can work on it after I hand in my Econ problem set. Done! That’s it. Stephen has finished all of his serious time-management thinking for the day. Before leaving for class, he rips out a fresh sheet of notebook paper to use for today’s list. He divides it into two columns and jots down the tasks he scheduled for the day. Figure 4 shows what Stephen’s list looks like as he bolts out the door.The entire process described above would realistically take only around three to five minutes to complete. The more you use this system, the more natural it becomes. Before you know it, updating your calendar and dashing off a daily schedule will become as routine as taking a morning shower. Remember, this is the only serious timemanagement thinking that Stephen has to do all day. Now he’s ready to face his Monday with his mind free from worry about tasks he’s forgetting or due dates that are looming. He knows he has scheduled all the tasks on his plate and that they will get done eventually.He has a flexible plan. And he can trust it. Figure 4. Stephen’s list on Monday morning Monday—3/11/07 Today’s Schedule †¢ 9:30 to 10:30 Class †¢ 10:30 to 11:00—Gift for Dad’s birthday, pay cell phone bill, return Mark’s CD. †¢ 11:00 to 12:00—Class †¢ 12:00 to 1:00 Lunch/Break †¢ 1:00 to 3:00 Do Government reading assignment. †¢ 3:00 to 4:30 Start work on Econ problem set. †¢ 4:30 to 5:00 Come up with topic for Anthro paper. †¢ 5:00 to 7:00 Get huge. †¢ 7:00 Dinner followed by inevitable embarrassment at toga party (Note to self: Flex a lot at party. ) Things to RememberNow let’s see how Stephen holds up†¦ During the Day on Monday The day starts off fine. Stephen successfully finishes the small tasks that he scheduled for 10:30. During his second class, he remembers that he has some overdue library books that need to be returned. No problem. Stephen whips the list out of his pocke t and jots down â€Å"Return books† under the â€Å"Things to Remember† column. A little later, the professor announces the date and time of the midterm—something else that needs to be scheduled. Again, no problem for Stephen. He adds â€Å"Sched. Gov midterm (4/5, 3 P. M. † to his list, and then leaves the classroom confident that these tasks will be scheduled appropriately tomorrow morning. After a leisurely lunch, Stephen hunkers down in the library to tackle his government reading. The articles are a little shorter than usual, so he finishes by 2:30, which is nice. As he leaves the library, however, Stephen runs into a friend who convinces him to tag along on a Wal-Mart run. To be honest, it didn’t take much convincing. College students, for some inexplicable reason, love Wal-Mart runs. After this (unavoidable) detour, Stephen gets back to campus by 3:30. Now he’s behind schedule.Quickly checking his e-mail, Stephen sees a message from a classmate asking if he wants to join a study group at 4:00 to work on the Econ problem set. Swiftly adapting, Stephen once again whips out his list and makes a couple of rapid changes to the Today’s Schedule column. He bumps up the Anthro paper topic work to start now, and then replaces his Econ problem set work with the study group that he just found out about. One of the big advantages of this system is its flexibility. Schedules will always change, but this the system makes it easy for you to regain your focus after getting sidetracked.Figure 5 shows the new state of Stephen’s list. Figure 5. Stephen’s list Monday afternoon Monday—3/11/07 Today’s Schedule †¢ 9:30 to 10:30—Class †¢ 10:30 to 11:00—Gift for Dad’s Return Mark’s CD. Things to Remember †¢ return books. †¢ Sched. Gov midterm birthday, Pay cell phone bill, (4/5, 3 P. M. ) †¢ 11:00 to 12:00—Class †¢ 12:00 to 1:00—Lu nch/Break †¢ 1:00 to 3:00—Do Government reading assignment. †¢ 3:30 to 4:00—Choose Anthro paper topic †¢ 4:00 to 5:00—Work with group on Econ problem set †¢ 5:00 to 7:00—Get huge. †¢ 7:00—Dinner followed by inevitable embarrassment at toga party. (Note to self: Flex a lot at party. )The Anthro work goes fine. Stephen finds a topic that he is happy with and then runs off to meet with his Econ group. During the meeting, the group agrees to meet again Tuesday morning to finish the problem set. Stephen quickly jots down â€Å"Econ group—10 A. M. † under Things to Remember and then heads off to the gym. He’s done with work for the day. The Aftermath Because he finished a lot of work during the morning and afternoon before the party, Stephen was able to really relax and have a good time that night. In addition, he successfully recorded all of the new to-dos and deadlines that cropped up during the day.Instead of bouncing around in his head and causing stress, they were safely placed in Stephen’s system and will be scheduled in due time. Most important, none of this required him to explicitly think about time management beyond the five minutes he spent planning that morning and the quick rescheduling he did in the afternoon. As suggested at the beginning of this case study, imagine for a moment what Stephen’s day might have been like without the simple time-management system. What if, instead, he’d employed the strategy used by most students and simply tried to remember what he needed to get done?It’s highly unlikely that the small tasks— returning a CD, buying a birthday gift, paying a bill—would have been completed. Without a schedule, people don’t like to do menial chores unless they’re 100 percent necessary. There’s also a good chance that he would have forgotten about the Anthro paper topic altogether after the last-minu te study group came up. What about the big-picture reminders from Sunday—calling home, scheduling internships, creating a guitarpracticing schedule? Those would have been pushed out of his head completely by the demands of near-future deadlines.Without a system to capture them, we can’t expect Stephen to remember long-term ideas for any extended period of time. Most important, without the system, Stephen would have completed much less schoolwork on Monday. The day would have focused, more or less, only on the Government reading, because that was the only big task actually due the next day. Without time labels, Stephen would have had a much hazier understanding of his free time, so he probably wouldn’t have started this reading until later in the afternoon (for the most part, students don’t like to start any work without a large block of free time ahead of them).Remember, however, that this assignment took a couple of hours to complete, so that means if St ephen had waited until the afternoon to start, he would have finished only this single task by 5:00, with the Econ problem set and Anthro paper topic likely falling by the wayside. Instead, Stephen ended up finishing six tasks by 5:00, leaving plenty of time for exercise and debauchery during the evening. As you can see from the case study, this simple time-management system, which requires only a few minutes of planning each day, made Stephen significantly more productive and significantly less stressed.It will do the same for you. In other words, five minutes every morning and a sheet of scrap paper in your pocket are enough to transform you from a stressed-out student struggling to get things done, into an organized, relaxed, finely tuned academic machine. If you remember one lesson from this book, it should be the lesson of this case study: A little organization goes a hell of a long way. Step 2 Declare War on Procrastination In the previous section we introduced a simple time-m anagement system to help you plan your day intelligently. That was the easy part.Anyone can spend five minutes to figure out what they should be doing. The real challenge is marshaling the motivation to actually do the work once it’s scheduled. Without some control over your schedule, you cannot be a happy and successful student—no matter how good your intentions. As you might expect, in conducting interviews for this book, I put a significant focus on the issue of procrastination. Anyone who makes straight As has clearly found a way to consistently get work done when it needs to be done, and I wanted to find out how. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise.Every student I interviewed was asked the following question: â€Å"How do you defeat procrastination? † As soon as the first responses were returned, it became clear that something was not quite right. I received answers such as: â€Å"I don’t. † â€Å"Rarely. † â€Å"I didnâ €™t. † â€Å"I don’t think that you can. † These were not the responses that I expected—it didn’t make sense! Everything else they told me about how they studied and wrote papers clearly indicated that these scholastic studs were kicking some very serious procrastinatory ass, so why were they all claiming they didn’t defeat procrastination?What was going on here? Fortunately, many students went on to qualify this first reaction, and it was in these qualifications that I began to figure out what they really meant. â€Å"I don’t think that you can,† was how Lee, a straight-A student from Columbia, began his answer, but he soon added: â€Å"You just have to try to limit it. † Ryan, a straight-A Dartmouth student, started by claiming, â€Å"Really, I don’t defeat procrastination. † But then he continued: â€Å"Or, at least, I don’t think I do†¦although, I suppose, compared to the majority of stu dents, I’m not as bad as I think. † I don’t know that I’ve yet defeated procrastination,† was how Christine, a straight-A Harvard student, began before concluding: â€Å"but I’ve found ways to make this inevitable tendency less destructive. † Over time, these extended responses began to paint a clear picture. When the straight-A students answered â€Å"I don’t defeat procrastination,† they really meant to say â€Å"I don’t defeat the urge to procrastinate. † And this makes perfect sense. To put it simply, some work just plain sucks, and you, like the straight-A students interviewed for this book, will want to procrastinate on this sucky work.It’s unavoidable. Therefore, the goal in this step is not to teach you how to love all work and never feel like procrastinating ever again. Instead, I’m going to describe some targeted strategies to help you sidestep this unavoidable urge when it arises†”not destroy it altogether. This is how straight-A students prevent procrastination from destabilizing their schedule. They don’t rely only on willpower and good intentions, but instead deploy an arsenal of specific, tested rules that help them short-circuit their natural desire to procrastinate.These students, of course, aren’t perfect, and they still occasionally put off work for no good reason. But overall their strategies made them significantly more effective at following a study plan then their peers—and this made all the difference. What follows are five anti-procrastination battle plans drawn directly from my straight-A interviews. These techniques are not theoretical; they are exhaustively used by real students to beat down procrastination again and again. Trust them. Put them into practice immediately. Make them into a habit. The effect will be immediate.You may never fully rid yourself of the urge to procrastinate, and that’s okay. But with t he right strategies in place, you can rid yourself of the fear that you’ll always give in to that urge. Procrastination Battle Plan #1: Keep a work progress journal Think about the last time that you procrastinated on something important. You can probably recall some of the wishy-washy excuses your mind concocted for delaying the work. Something along the lines of â€Å"I don’t have all the materials here with me now, but if I waited until tomorrow, I could get tarted right away with everything I need,† or â€Å"It’s getting late, and my concentration is waning, it would be a waste to start now, so I will wait to tackle this when I’m fresh in the morning. † Why are these excuses necessary? Why don’t we simply think: â€Å"This is boring, and I’m lazy, so I’m not going to do it,† which is much closer to the truth? The answer is that your ego is a powerful force. We procrastinate, but we don’t want to admit t o ourselves that we procrastinate. So we make excuses to ourselves to avoid the truth. A work progress journal is a simple tool that takes advantage of this reality to help you defeat procrastination.It works as follows: Buy a cheap spiral notebook, and keep it near your calendar. Each morning, when you work out your schedule for the day, quickly jot down in the notebook the date and the most important tasks that you are scheduled to get done. At the end of the day, if you’ve completed all of these tasks, simply jot down all completed. If you failed to complete some tasks, record this, along with a quick explanation. The system adds only an extra minute to your morning routine and requires only an extra minute each night before you go to sleep. It’s simple enough to turn into a habit.What’s amazing, however, is the journal’s immediate effect. Having to record, in ink, on paper, that you procrastinated over a task for no good reason is a powerful blow to y our ego. It might be easy to tell yourself a few weak excuses for putting off a tedious assignment, but when you have to record these same excuses on paper their foolishness is exposed. You can no longer get away with lame rationalizations. This is especially true if you continue to delay the same task day after day. After seeing all of those excuses pile up in your journal, there will be no escape from reality: You are being lazy!Your ego won’t like this truth, so it will kick-start your motivation in an effort to avoid it. The journal, in this way, acts like a personal drill sergeant, sitting on your shoulder and yelling into your ear: â€Å"Soldier, I want you to go get me a pillow, because I know I must be dreaming. I thought I just saw you consider not starting your paper this afternoon, and I knnnoooowwww you wouldn’t try to pull that crap with me standing right next to you! Now go grab your notes and get workin’ before I make you record your laziness in ink where everyone can see it! Many students, myself included, don’t keep a journal all the time, but use it to help them get through unusually busy periods. For example, my work progress journal was a key force in getting me through my senior fall semester, which involved classes, grad school applications, and the writing of my first book. Others have had great success with the journal to keep focused on their LSAT preparation while juggling the demands of regular class work. Some students go so far as to use the system with a friend, agreeing to review each other’s journal once a week.As Christine from Harvard suggests: â€Å"If you have a friend in the same class, check up on each other’s progress. † And even if you can’t find a willing journal partner, there are other ways to use friends to jumpstart your drive: â€Å"It helps to simply tell your roommates of your goals, and have them guilt-trip you into working. † Procrastination Battle Plan #2: Feed the Machine Low energy breeds procrastination. Most students know the feeling—your mind starts to feel sluggish, you begin to read whole pages of text without remembering a single word, and writing coherent notes becomes a Herculean task.It’s almost impossible to motivate yourself to stick to a schedule under these mental conditions. Accordingly, during long work periods, you need to feed your body the fuel it needs to perform at it