Thursday, November 28, 2019

Should Marijuana Be Legalized Essays (1396 words) - Herbalism

Should Marijuana Be Legalized? The controversy of legalizing marijuana has been raging for quite a while in America. From some people pushing it for medical purposes to pott-heads just wanting to get high legally. Marijuana has been used for years as a popular drug for people who want to get a high. All this time it has been illegal and now it looks as if the drug may become legal. There has been heated debate by many sides giving there opinion in the issue. These people are not only left wing liberals either. Richard Brookhiser, a National Review Senior editor is openly supportive of medical marijuana yet extremely conservative in his writing for National Review (Brookhiser 27). He is for medical marijuana since he used it in his battle with testicular cancer. He says I turned to [marijuana] when I got cancer because marijuana gives healthy people an appetite, and prevents people who are nauseated from throwing up. (Brookhiser 27) Cancer patients are not the only benefactors from the appetite enhancer in marijuana, but so are any other nauseous people. Arizona and California have already passed a law allowing marijuana to be used as a medicinal drug. Fifty Six percent of the California voters voted for this law. We've sent a message to Washington, says Dennis Peron. They've had 25 years of this drug was, and they've only made things worse. (Simmons 111) The Arizona proposition garnished an even wider margin of separation between the fore's an against in a sixty five percent support tally. Ethan Nadelmann insists that these propositions are not about legalization or decriminalization. They're about initiating some non radical, commonsense approaches to drug policy. General Barry McCaffery disagrees saying, I don't think this was a medical issue from the start. (Simmons 111) He also calls the new laws, a tremendous tragedy. The federal government has a hard time letting the California/Arizona act stand. Marijuana is a schedule one drug, and has no medicinal purpose. Cocaine and morphine on the other hand are schedule two and do have medicinal value. Gen. McCafferey says a physician who tries to prescribe a schedule one drug with or without the referendums in California or Arizona, is subject to prosecution under federal law. (Simmons112) This quote has come under great duress since the DEA is the only group which can arrest someone who uses pot and slap someone with a petty misdemeanor. People will not care if they run the risk of a misdemeanor and likely use the drug anyway. Dennis Peron, one of the leading activists of marijuana legalization, has devoted twenty years to the legalization of marijuana. He says that when friend Jonathan West, developed AIDS, Dennis saw the potential uses for medical marijuana when he saw Jonathan feel better after smoking weed. (Rist and Harrison 75-76) Peron fought wildly to pass a bill to legalize medicinal marijuana. Any other drug that eased nausea, increased appetite, and reduced pain, would be prescribed everywhere. says Peron. (Rist and Harrison 75-76) A Harvard Medical psychiatrist calls the drug a wonder drug for pain, nausea, and appetite. However, there are many cons to the pros in prescribing marijuana for nausea and pain. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the active drug in marijuana used to help relieve nausea in cancer patients. This THC has been proven to lower testosterone in the blood stream for men. (Angier 15) This is not a major concern to full grown men because the level of testosterone quickly rises back after the smoker is done smoking. However, it may be harmful to adolescent boys. In adolescence, a boy's body is going through many changes--it grows taller, it gets hairier, the voice deepens--and these changes are controlled by testosterone. Marijuana could very well block the normal growth process. says Carol Smith, of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethsheda Maryland. Columbia university did a study on 16 men who smoked five to fifteen joints a day. After they finished smoking their sperm counts were counted. It was discovered that all of the men experienced a dip in sperm count for weeks after and had malformed sperm cells. This could cause some serious malformations in conceived children. Studies were done on female rhesus monkeys who

Sunday, November 24, 2019

A Quick Guide to Balanced Scorecards

A Quick Guide to Balanced Scorecards Here is an overview of a BSC (balanced scorecards) management tool, its advantages and disadvantages. The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a popular strategic management tool developed in 1992 by Robert Kaplan and David Norton to answer what the two researchers saw as a shortcoming in existing strategic planning methods: A way to connect the long-term objectives of a business to short-term performance measures, particularly financial indicators. The problem is easy enough to understand; a company’s overall goals, usually expressed in its Mission Vision Statement, are often somewhat abstract and difficult to express in terms of the day-to-day (or month-to-month, or year-to-year) activities and processes of the organization – it may not be clear to the people in the organization exactly how their work tasks at this moment are steps towards the company’s greater objectives, a bit of confusion that can create problems for maintaining productivity and motivation. The BSC is a way to â€Å"provide a roadmap† showing how to present activities lead to future objectives, and if used correctly, the tool can be very effective. If you have any questions our writers will gladly help you! STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT TOOLS PART 1 Background of the BSC The Fundamental Ideas Behind It Kaplan and Norton first introduced the Balanced Scorecard in an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1992 (â€Å"The Balanced Scorecard – Measures That Drive Performance†, HBR January-February 1992), in which they explained that any firm has four key perspectives from which it should consider its strategy: Financial, Customers, Internal Processes, and Learning and Growth. The firm needs to make money, and for that it needs customers; customers’ needs are served by the output of the firm’s internal processes, and in order to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, the firm must learn and improve over time. Consequently, the BSC begins with a firm asking itself four important questions: What is our value to our shareholders? (the financial perspective) What is our value to our customers? (the customer perspective) In order to provide the value to our shareholders and customers, in what must we excel? (the internal processes perspective) How do we sustain our advantages and continue to improve? (the learning and growth perspective) The answer to each of these four questions has four parts: A relevant objective or objectives; the measures of performance that appropriately assess progress towards those objectives; the specific target value of the performance measures that would signify the objectives’ having been successfully achieved; and the specific processes or activities that must be done in order to achieve them. In form, the Balanced Scorecard is a four-sided matrix, with the firm’s vision and competitive strategy at its center: The Balanced Scorecard (Source: Kaplan Norton, â€Å"Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System†, HBR, January-February 1996) DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP Advantages of the BSC The first advantage of the BSC is that it forces firms to quantify their goals. Aspirations expressed in a Mission Vision Statement such as â€Å"being an empowered organization† is a platitude without some explanation of what â€Å"an empowered organization† is, and how, exactly, the organization can become â€Å"empowered†. Or for that matter, whether or not being â€Å"empowered† actually has anything to do with effectively meeting stakeholders’ and customers’ needs, maintaining sound internal processes to achieve those, and improving the organization to maintain a competitive edge. The second advantage of the BSC is that its format makes it easy to see how all of the strategic management perspectives relate to one another. Conflicts between objectives in different areas are immediately apparent and can be corrected. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the BSC is its versatility. Although it was designed for application in business management settings, the basic template can be applied to almost any initiative or organization. By slightly modifying the four key perspectives, the BSC can even be applied to specific areas of the organization and even to individuals. In fact, there is some research that suggests that the BSC is gaining, even more, use as a performance management and assessment tool in HRM applications than as a firm-level strategic planning tool. Disadvantages of the BSC Like many other strategic management tools, the BSC has one unavoidable potential handicap in that it is only as good as the quality of the information put into it. The tool suffers from the same risk as the SWOT analysis called SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) by Oxford’s Professor Malcolm McDonald; the importance of objectives and other factors may be over- or underestimated or overlooked entirely, which leads to the BSC returning poor results because the right information is not actually included. Another problem that can make the BSC less effective than expected is that by design, it gives equal weight to all four of the key perspectives, while in actual practice, many organizations might need to give greater weight to one or another. For example, a non-profit organization would likely have very strong customer perspectives and a lesser focus on financial outcomes; without adjusting the BSC to reflect its priorities, the organization might end up actually hindering its efforts towards achieving its goals. And finally, the results of some empirical research on the effectiveness of the BSC suggests that just as with most strategic management tools, its performance in real-world applications falls a little short of the academic hype. A fairly recent broad study of strategic management tool use and effectiveness found that the BSC tends to work better for larger and more complex firms than for smaller ones, and that the alignment of strategy and performance is perceived to be better among firms that use the BSC in combination with other strategic planning and assessment tools than among firms using the BSC by itself (E.Tapinos, R.G. Dyson M. Meadows, â€Å"Does the Balanced Scorecard make a difference to the strategy development process?† Journal of the Operational Research Society, vol. 62, no. 5, 2011). One reason for this may be that, contrary to the assertions of Kaplan and Norton, the BSC is not actually designed to develop organizational strategy; the firm’s vision an d strategy must necessarily exist beforehand in order for the BSC to work as designed, meaning that the BSC is the best thought of as a performance management and operational planning tool (hence its popularity in HRM practice), rather than a strategic development tool. STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT TOOLS PART 2 Whatever project you are working on, be assured you have a  reliable team  of writers  to work with. You can place your order here!

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Google's Hotel Finder Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Google's Hotel Finder - Research Paper Example However, the tool has few drawbacks as well with respect to the determination of popularity of an area where one plans to book a hotel in. On the whole, the tool has a great impact on the hotel industry by enlisting the potential winners and losers. The launching of Google hotel finder has impacted the hotel industry tremendously. Although it has created threats for numerous distributers such as travel agencies by entering into a competition with them yet it has opened new opportunities for hotels to make the most of Google hotel finder. It is made possible by allowing the users of Google hotel finder to establish a direct link with the hotel distributers on their websites instead of communicating with Google directly. It involves the role of Google hotel finder as an advertising medium for the hotel distributers that feature on Google hotel finder. Therefore, the potential winners are the hotel distributers that can do their advertising by paying a cost to Google, the most searched optimization engine. Thus it may enable them to get benefits in the form of getting increased customers that search for hotel through Google hotel finder search tool. Hence, Google has not only created a tool to increase traffic on its site in addit ion to the previous tools of Google maps and Google places, but also allowed hotel distributers to gain a lot from this new tool of Google. To sum up the analysis of a new tool by Google that enables users to search for hotels in the exact locations in which they want to travel and stay in by providing useful information about the pricing and rates of hotels. Not only the tool equips users with helpful information about the areas by highlighting the specific parts in the form of a drawing to make users decide on which areas they would like to visit but also allows them to book a room with the hotel of their