Means of Transport Essay

Along History, people have had the necessity and the curiosity of moving and changing from some places to others, and in this sense means of transport have played an important role. Nowadays, there is a great variety of means of transport and all of them have advantages and disadvantages. When we have to choose a mean of transport we usually take into account distance, speed, comfort and cost. But I would like to focus the discussion on transport in our cities and the question is: What do you think is better: to use public or private transport? Regarding private transport, I think that the car is the king. Cars provide autonomy and they are seen as being more convenient and reliable. They also provide access to more destinations than public transport. Besides, in another way, cars are seen to confer prestige and other socially desirable attributes. But, on the contrary cars are expensive to support. see more:public transport essay Owing a car means spending a lot of money in a garage, an insurance, fuel (petrol) and tax. In addition, the main problem is that cars pollute very much and this is a problem which affects us all, car owners and non-car owners. In opposite of this, I think that nowadays we can find very modern public transports as the tube, the tram, High Speed Train which are more ecological; they use less energy and make easier the traffic through the cities, among other advantages. Besides, in modern cities, bicycles are being introduced as a public transport because they are more efficient than some public transports in some conditions, as speed, flexibility and energy saving. But I wonder, is public transport really cheaper and more efficient? Is it promoted enough by governments? We should think about this, because it seems a contradiction. If you have seen the last news in Madrid, Barcelona and other big cities, the governments are asking people to use public transport because the level of pol lution is very high. But, on the other hand, governments promote the sale of cars because they consider it is necessary to help car industry because of the economical crisis.

Biography of Michelle Obama, U.S. First Lady

Biography of Michelle Obama, U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama  (born January 17, 1964) was the first African-American first lady and the wife of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American to serve as president. She is also a lawyer, the former vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and a philanthropist. Fast Facts: Michelle Obama Known For: First Lady of the United States, wife to 44th President Barack ObamaBorn: January 17, 1964 in Chicago, IllinoisParents:  Marian Shields and Fraser C. Robinson IIIEducation: Princeton University (BA in sociology), Harvard Law School (JD)Published Works: BecomingSpouse: Barack Obama (m. October 3, 1992)Children: Malia (born in 1998) and Natasha (known as Sasha, born in 2001) Early Life Michelle Obama (nee Michelle LaVaughn Robinson) was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois, the second of two children of Chicagoans Marian Shields and Fraser C. Robinson III. She describes her parents as important early role models in her life, whom she proudly identifies as working class. Her father, a city pump operator and Democratic precinct captain, worked and lived with multiple sclerosis; his limp and crutches did not affect his abilities as the family breadwinner. Michelles mother stayed home with her children until they reached high school. The family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a brick bungalow on Chicagos south side. The living room- converted with a divider down the middle- served as Michelles bedroom. Michelle and her older brother Craig, now an Ivy League basketball coach at Brown University, grew up hearing the story of their maternal grandfather. A carpenter who was denied union membership due to race, Craig was shut out of the citys top construction jobs. Yet the children were taught they could succeed despite any prejudices they might encounter over race and color. Both children were bright and skipped second grade. Michelle entered a gifted program in sixth grade. From their parents, who had never attended college, Michelle and her brother learned that achievement and hard work were key. Education Michelle attended Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicagos West Loop, graduating in 1981. Although she was discouraged from applying to Princeton by high school advisors who felt her scores werent adequate, she was accepted and graduated from the college with honors and a bachelors degree in sociology and a minor in African-American studies. She was one of very few black students attending Princeton at the time, and the experience made her acutely aware of the issues of race. After graduation, she applied to Harvard Law School and once again faced bias as college counselors tried to talk her out of her decision. Despite their doubts, she matriculated and excelled, obtaining her J.D. in 1985. Professor David B. Wilkins remembers Michelle as forthright: She always stated her position clearly and decisively. Career in Corporate Law After graduating from Harvard Law School, Michelle joined the law firm of Sidley Austin as an associate specializing in marketing and intellectual property. In 1988, a summer intern who was two years older than she by the name of Barack Obama came to work at the firm, and Michelle was assigned as his mentor. They married in 1992 and later had two daughters, Malia (born in 1998) and Natasha, known as Sasha (born in 2001). In 1991, the death of her father from complications related to MS caused Michelle to re-evaluate her life; she subsequently decided to leave corporate law to work in the public sector. Career in Public Sector Michelle first served as assistant to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daly; later she became assistant commissioner of planning and development. In 1993 she founded Public Allies Chicago, which provided young adults with leadership training for public service careers. As executive director, she headed up a nonprofit named by President Bill Clinton as a model AmeriCorps program. In 1996, she joined the University of Chicago as Associate Dean of Student Services and established its first community service program. In 2002, she was named the University of Chicago Hospitals executive director of community and external affairs. Balancing Career, Family, and Politics Following her husbands election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004, Michelle was appointed Vice President of Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center in May 2005. Despite Baracks dual roles in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, Michelle did not consider resigning from her position and moving to the nations capital. Only after Barack announced his presidential campaign did she adjust her work schedule; in May 2007 she cut her hours by 80 percent to accommodate the needs of the family during his candidacy. Although she resists the labels feminist and liberal, Michelle Obama is widely recognized as outspoken and strong-willed. She has juggled career and family as a working mother, and her positions indicate progressive ideas on the roles of women and men in society. First Lady Michelles husband Barack was elected U.S. president in November 2007. During her first term as first lady, Michelle spearheaded the Lets Move! program, a concerted effort intended to reduce childhood obesity. Although it has been difficult to gauge the success of the program overall, her efforts led to the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010, which allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to set new nutritional standards for all food sold in schools for the first time in more than 30 years. During Barack Obamas second term, Michelle focused on the Reach Higher Initiative, which aimed to help students identify future careers and enable them to complete coursework past high school- whether its at a professional training program, a community college, or a four-year college or university.  That initiative continues, with a focus on school counselor training, raising awareness about college access tools, and social media outreach and flagship events such as College Signing Day. Post-White House Since the Obamas left the White House in January 2016, Michelle worked on and published her memoir Becoming, published in November 2018. She has also worked on the Global Girls Alliance, an education project intended to help provide tens of millions of adolescent girls worldwide who were not given a chance to finish high school; Global Girls is an outgrowth of Let Girls Learn, which she started in 2015 and left with the White House. She has actively supported the Chicago-based Obama Foundation charity, and been a spokesperson for When We All Vote, to increase voter registration. Sources: Obama, Michelle. 2018. Becoming. New York: Crown, 2018.Saulny, Susan. Michelle Obama Thrives in Campaign Trenches. New York Times, 14 February 2008.Bennetts, Leslie. First Lady in Waiting. VanityFair.com, 27 December 2007.Gewertz, Catherine. Michelle Obamas Reach Higher Initiative Merges With the Common Application. Education Week Blog High School Beyond, 27 September 2018.  Ross Johnson, Steven. Gauging the public health value of Michelle Obamas Lets Move campaign. Modern Healthcare, 23 August 2016.Rossi, Rosalind. The woman behind Obama. Chicago Sun-Times, 22 January 2008.Slevin, Peter. Michelle Obama: A Life. New York: Vintage Books, 2015.Michelle Obama’s vacation is over. Now she’s claiming her own spotlight. The Washington Post, 11 October 2018.

Fed And Monetary Policy Essays - Economy, Money, Macroeconomics

Fed And Monetary Policy Essays - Economy, Money, Macroeconomics Fed And Monetary Policy Justin McVay Period 4 Macroeconomics Term Paper FEDERAL RESERVE AND MONETARY POLICY Monetary policy affects the economic and financial decisions of virtually all of us from workers to borrowers to investors (Rukeyser 105). Louis Rukeyser wrote, If we want monetary policy to play its proper role in a true national economic reconstruction, the authentic task is to get the Fed to stop bouncing like a Chinese Ping-Pong ball, switching every few months between the inflationary effect of pumping far too much money into the economy and cramping, recessionary effect of supplying far to little (Rukeyser 104). And, because the US is the largest economy in the world, its monetary policy also has significant economic and financial effects on other countries. The object of monetary policy is to influence the performance of the economy, as reflected in such factors as inflation, economic output, and employment. It does so by affecting demand. Most people are familiar with the fiscal policy tools that affect demand, such as taxes and government spending. Less familiar is monetary policy; it is conducted by the Federal Reserve System, the nations central bank, and it influences demand mainly by raising and lowering short-term interest rates. The Federal Reserve System (the Fed) is the nations central bank. It was established by an Act of Congress in 1913 and consists of the seven members of the Board of Governors in Washington, DC and twelve Federal Reserve District Banks. Congress structured the Fed to be independent within the government. What that means is although the Fed I accountable to Congress, it is insulated from day-to-day political pressures. This reflects the conviction held both the US and in many other countries that the people who control the countrys money supply should be independent of the people who frame the governments spending decisions. Most studies of central bank independence rank the Fed among the most independent in the world (World 68). Each reserve bank President is appointed to a five-year term by that banks Board of Directors, subject to final approval by the Board of Governors. This procedure adds to independence, because the directors of each reserve bank, who are not political appointees, provide a regional cross-section of interests, including depository institutions, nonfinancial businesses, labor, and the public. The Fed is structured to be self-sufficient in the sense that it meets its operation expenses primarily from the interest earnings on its portfolio of securities. Therefore, it is independent of Congressional decisions about funding. Even though the Fed is independent of Congressional funding and administrative control, it is ultimately accountable to Congress and comes under government audit and review. The Chairman, other governors, and Reserve Bank Presidents report regularly to the Congress on monetary policy, and a variety of other issues, and meet with senior Administration officials to discuss the Federal Reserves and the federal governments economic programs (World 67). Within the Fed, the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, has the primary responsibility for conducting monetary policy. The FOMC meets in Washington eight times a year and has twelve members: the seven members of the Board of Governors, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and four of the other Reserve Bank Presidents, who serve in rotation. The remaining Reserve Bank Presidents contribute to the committees discussions and deliberations. In addition, the directors of each Reserve Bank contribute to monetary policy by making recommendations about the appropriate discount rate, which are subject to final approval by the Governors. The goals of US Monetary Policy according to the Federal Reserve Act states that they are to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. The goals of monetary policy are inconsistent. The belief that a 4% unemployment rate and stable prices are inconsistent is shaped by the widely accepted natural rate hypothesis. It argues that monetary policy has no effect on the economys long-run equilibrium unemployment rate, which is often called the natural rate of unemployment. The reason is that, in the long run, unemployment depends on so-called real factors such as technology and peoples preferences for saving, risk, and work effort; these factors are beyond the reach of monetary policy. Most current estimates place the natural rate of unemployment in the range 5.75%

Hip hop essays

Hip hop essays Hip-hop can work wonders in right hands Whether the banter is in the neighborhood beauty parlor or barbershop or the news is on the front page of your newspaper or you are hearing of the latest jeremiad of Bill Cosby, the subject is more often than not the failings of black youth, especially boys and young men. It's sometimes easy to forget that not all black youth are lost, and that there are people out there toiling to see that many more are reclaimed. Among them are the rapper Kurtis Blow and several ministers who have formed Hip Hop Church, which holds weekly services in Harlem, rotating between the Greater Hood A.M.E. Zion Church and the Abyssinian Baptist Church. The services are all about working with kids - some who were already attending traditional church but getting little out of it, others who were "unchurched," even some with hard-knock lives and street experience beyond imagination. The attraction, explained the Rev. Darren Ferguson, the church's musical director, is this: "Most people think that to be a Christian you have to give up being a young person, having fun, and we're saying you don't have to give up being young, you don't have to give up having fun." And fun - and lively and loud - it is. Because of the music, Ferguson said, "There's just enough testosterone to get the guys saying, 'Yeah, I like this.'" Lamar Haney, a 19-year-old member of a rap group called Three Shades of Faith, explained, "These are secular beats, but we use them to glorify God." Just as the Apostle Paul advised early missionaries to learn the languages of the people to whom they would take the gospel, Haney said, Hip Hop Church is using the language (sans profanity and misogyny) that many young people appreciate. Theirs is not necessarily the proper English that Cosby rightly insists be the standard. Nor is theirs necessarily the language of the smug members of the Christian right who are already pouring cold water on even the ...

Interim Progress Review Question 5 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Interim Progress Review Question 5 - Essay Example normal distribution for the given sample, because the sample is a randomly distributed set of human reactions—which ideally fall in the pattern of the normal distribution. The 95% confidence interval is given by the formula where M is the mean, SE is the standard error of the distribution, and z is the z-score for the confidence interval being used. The standard score z is derived by subtracting the sample mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the sample standard deviation. z represents the number of standard deviations between the raw score and the mean. (b) CNN and ActMedia provided a television channel that showed news feature and advertisements. It was targeted at people waiting in grocery checkout queues. The television programmes were designed with a 8 minute cycles on the assumption that the population mean time a customer stands in the queue is 8 minutes. A sample of 120 shoppers at a major grocery store produces a sample mean waiting time of 7.5 minutes with a sample standard deviation of 3.2 minutes. There is a close relationship between confidence intervals and significance tests. Specifically, if a statistic is significantly different from 0 at the 0.05 level then the 95% confidence interval will not contain 0. All values in the confidence interval are plausible values for the parameter whereas values outside the interval are rejected as plausible values for the parameter. ... There is a similar relationship between the 99% confidence interval and Significance at the 0.01 level. (Lane, Lu, Peres, Zitek) Adding and subtracting from the figure of 7.5 hours, only 5% of normally distributed queues will last longer than 7.5 + 0.57496 = 8.07496 minutes. To be more precise, 95.46% of queues will fall within (7.5 - 0.57496) = minutes and 8.07496 minutes = 8 min 4.498 seconds. We can also go the p-value and t test way, using the "level of significance" method. Since we cannot obtain the p-values directly, we thought of

Social Culture and Diversity in the Wrokplace Research Paper

Social Culture and Diversity in the Wrokplace - Research Paper Example ization because they feel appreciated and valued, thus significantly reducing the problem of turnover that is a threat to business continuity in most institutions. An organization that values diversity acknowledges differences among staffs through action by emphasizing on the rightful environment necessary to create flexibility and responsiveness where staff potential is recognized harnessed and developed. This paper will discuss the aspect of social culture and diversity in the workplace and explore the description of the subject matter in terms of social and cultural differences, managing cultural diversity, benefits accruing to a culturally diverse organization, potential impact, challenges and possible solutions for organizations that have embraced or are looking to achieve social and cultural diversity. Social and cultural diversity may be described to include a population that is culturally diverse made up of people from different parts of the globe meaning that organizations end up with a mix of multi-racial and multi-cultural employees. Demographics in any population of people are dynamic and this phenomenon trickles down to organizations where these people work. There are social and cultural differences in terms of races, national origins, ethnic backgrounds and religion. These differences in demographics among the working population bring valuable skills, knowledge and experiences which the organization can utilize to create a hybrid of human resources and capacity to develop its growth agenda and business success. As immigrants and expatriates from different national origins get employment in an organization, they come with many skills and abilities, as well as differences. Ethnic Backgrounds also comprise of diversity characteristics in an organization. Individuals are born and raised in different environments with rich cultural heritages from their parents and forefathers. These individuals bring with them different insights, ways of perceiving and

Closely watched Buffet recalculating his bets Essay

Closely watched Buffet recalculating his bets - Essay Example Even financial wizards like Mr. Buffet took a beating, amounting to around $25 billion in personal losses. However proving that he was made of sterner stuff, he took the initial beating and then decided to turn round this very crippling period of economic recession to his own advantage. Here he treaded paths where very few would have ventured and he dared to turn tides in his own favor. It was Mr. Buffet who advised the American government to bail out the plummeting financial market. It was again him who at the very middle of this turmoil advised all Americans to buy as many stocks as possible. And true to his given advice he led the way. Against all common sense and amidst general misgivings he decided to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs in September 2008. This was perhaps the boldest step ever taken by him in his entire career as a financial investor. After about eight days he declared that he was going to invest another $3billion in General Electrics which was at that time on ra ther shaky grounds. Mr. Buffet has labeled such companies as â€Å"sleeping beauties† as their stock market values are far lower than their actual book values. He believes in taking over such companies that are in turmoil and may look for takeovers or getting grounded. He invests in them by buying large amounts of stocks in the company and gets financial help in the form of concessions, in exchange. If we take a closer look at his modus operandi we will see a very sharp mind and a logical pattern of thinking behind these seemingly very absurd moves. As the Government sets off to bail out these companies to stabilize the failing economy we find that Mr. Buffet does not get any direct personal help. However, his stocks get the benefit of being bailed out by using the general taxpayers’ money. He invested in Goldman Sachs and General Electrics which all received financial bail outs from the government. So