Organizational Quality Improvement

Various methodologies exist for the integration of quality improvement strategies into performance improvement measures. With concepts of total quality management (TQM) and quality improvement (QI) being introduced to health care organizations; administrators have had to decide which methodology is right for the organization. There are numerous methodologies: Six Sigma, Lean, and Customer Inspired Quality. Each has its own pros and cons. A key component of quality improvement is the technology that gathers and compares the data that the quality improvement measure produces.All of the information that is gathered from the technology can be benchmarked against other health care organizations. Numerous methods exist for the integration of quality improvement into the health care setting. The Six Sigma model was pioneered by Motorola. This method focuses on reducing variance through a problem solving approach that will improve the quality of the output. The fundamental objective of the S ix Sigma methodology is the implementation of a measurement based strategy that focuses on process improvement and the reduction of variance.The Six Sigma method does through the DMAIC process (define, measure, analyze, improve, and control). The DMAIC process is an improvement system for existing quality processes that fall below specifications and need to be improved in increments. Lean Thinking was used by Toyota as a key in its success. The Lean method strives to reduce waste and to improve performance through workflow. The Lean method is concerned with driving out waste so that all work adds value to the product and serves the customers’ needs.Lean thinking identifies all steps in a process and identifies them as value-added or non-value-added steps. All non-value-added steps are then removed to prevent waste in the process. Customer Inspired Quality was patented by Shaw Resources in 1992 and this methodology focuses on work processes that have direct impact on the care and services that are provided in a hospital. This method identifies, defines, analyzes, and improves the quality and effectiveness of processes in the health care arena. This method uses techniques from the other methodologies.Pros and cons of QI methods. Pros and cons exist in all of the methods for quality improvement. Some of the pros of the Six Sigma method are: Six Sigma places a heavy importance on leadership and its support for the success of the project, Six Sigma integrates the human elements (culture change, customer focus). The Six Sigma method uses the concept of statistical thinking and encourages the application of proven statistical tools and techniques for reducing variability. The cons of Six Sigma methods are having quality data available. In a new process where there is no data available to begin with can be discouraging.The solutions that Six Sigma proposes are often expensive and only small parts of the solution can be implemented. In Six Sigma methodology the selection of the right project is critical to success. Lean thinking has pros and cons also. Organizations that have adopted Lean double their productivity, cut their production and reduce their inventory that is normally kept on hand. Employees that work in a Lean environment have a clear objective of what is expected of them and are interrupted less. The Customer Inspired quality model deals with the service industries, primarily the Health care industry.The pros of this model are that the process improvement efforts are prioritized from the customers’ perspective. The methodology is service friendly and all of the hospital staff is encouraged to provide their input. This methods con is that the method is structured primarily for health care organizations. Florida Hospital uses the Six Sigma method for quality improvement because it provides the best opportunity to implement best practices that have been identified. Information Technologies for Quality Improvement Informati on technology is a large part of the quality improvement methods that a health care organization uses.Florida Hospital uses Business Objects which is a software company that specializes in business intelligence. Business Objects has components that provide performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. The Business Objects Enterprise can track report instances that will trigger alerts. These reports are created by Crystal Reports and have parameters that can be modified to perform analysis on the data. The customer can set alerts that trigger when certain conditions are met or not met by the data.The data can be customized to show in charts. Further customization allows the customer the chance to drill down into the data. Other information can be obtained from technology. Information technology allows data to be displayed in a dashboard or a scorecard. Dashboards are tool that monitor the ongoing performance of a process. A da shboard tracks data in real time. Scorecards report on past performances and generally focus on outcomes rather than processes. All of these applications can be used by administrators to track the quality improvement processes of the organization.Administrators can design the scorecards or dashboards to display the information that is important. Benchmarks and Milestones Benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or to best practices from other industries. Benchmarking involves management identifying the best in their industry and comparing the results and processes of those studied to their own results and processes. Benchmarking compares the organization to its competitors and defines how the competition performs better.By better understanding how the competition is meeting their standards, the healthcare organization can then set goals for themselves. Benchmarking can be used to improve patient satisfaction. Using the website hospitalcompare. hhs. gov an organization can see how satisfied their competitors’ patients are. Benchmarking can also be used to improve the core measures that the Joint Commission measures. The outcomes of acute MI, pneumonia, heart failure and surgery can be compared to their own. If the competition is performing better on one of the core measures, the organization can then set their own goal based on the competition.Potential benchmarks that Florida Hospital will strive for are improved core measures at 90% for pneumonia, Acute MI, heart failure and surgical care. Another benchmark that Florida Hospital will strive for is to improve patient safety. The hospital will continue to implement the processes that support the Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goals. The hospital will implement CPOE (computerized provider order entry) and the hospital will begin to extend the goals to the ambulatory services. The third benchmark is to enhance the patient experience.The hospital will use the DMAIC model to understand and support the emotional, spiritual, and clinical needs of the patients. Florida Hospital will use different methods for their performance improvement plans. The hospital will use combinations of Six Sigma and Lean thinking. The hospital will use data from Crystal reports to display balanced scorecards and dashboards. The dashboards will be divided into the Extending Excellence Elements (Team, Clinical, Service, Market, and Finance). The hospital will use this information in conjunction with information from benchmarking data to monitor their quality improvement plan. References Dlugacz, Y. D. (2006). Measuring Health Care Using Data for Operational, Financial, and   Clinical Improvement. San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass. Florida Hospital. (2010). Florida Hospital Orlando's Most Preferred Hospital. Retrieved from   http://www.floridahospital.com/default.aspx Insititute for Healthcare Improvement. (2010). A resource from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Retrieved from http://www.ihi.org/ihi Ransom, E. R., Joshi, M. S.,Nash, D. B., ; Ransom, S. (2008). The Healthcare Quality Book Vision Strategy and Tools (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press. U.S. Department of Health ; Human Services. (2010). Hospital Compare. Retrieved from http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/ United States Department of Veterans Affairs. (2010). Quality Enhancement Research Initiative. Retrieved from http://www.queri.research.va.gov/default.cfm

Bush Meat: African Apes Essay

The African people, particularly those who live in and near forest areas, have been eating meat of wild animals or bushmeat for centuries. They hunted for subsistence, as bushmeat was a main source of protein in the forest. But as Africa’s forests increasingly become more accessible through urbanization, the hunting for bushmeat in West and Central Africa is now developing into an enormous and extremely profitable commercial trade. In fact, bushmeat is now being exported to and sold in underground markets in the United States and Europe, where bushmeat is treated as a luxury food item like caviar or shark meat. With the increasing demand for bushmeat in and out of Africa and the growing trade that supplies it, bushmeat hunting is now the greatest threat to Africa’s great ape population. Meats from chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos may only be a small proportion in the bushmeat trade, but because these great apes reproduce more slowly than other mammals the hunting puts them in danger of extinction. The absence of parent apes to nurture their young also poses a risk to the great ape population. Young orphaned apes, because they still don’t have much meat in them to eat, are being sold as pets. Conservationists argue that unless the bushmeat trade is stopped there would be no more viable great ape population within 50 years. There are three African great apes: bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas. All three are now endangered species. The subsequent ape population estimates provided here, unless otherwise stated, are from 1996 figures. Bonobos can only be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo and were estimated to be 10,000-25,000 in numbers. Western chimpanzees, estimated to be 12,000, could still be found in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Ghana and Senegal. This sub-species of chimpanzees are now extinct in Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin. The central chimpanzee population was estimated to be 80,000. They can still be found in Gabon, Congo (Brazzaville), Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Angola (Cabinda enclave only). The last sub-species of the chimpanzee is the eastern chimpanzee and could be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and Sudan. Their population was estimated to be 13,000. There are also three sub-species of the gorilla: the western lowland gorilla, the eastern lowland gorilla and the mountain gorilla. The western lowland gorilla, with an estimated population of 110,000, live in the states of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo (Brazzaville), Cameroon, Central African Republic, Nigeria and Angola. The eastern lowland gorilla, meanwhile, could only be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its population is estimated to range from 8,700-25,500 in 1998. Lastly, the mountain gorilla is the fewest of all the great apes. There are only about 600 of them and they could be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Rose (1998) had cited various studies on bushmeat trade across West and Central Africa. The bushmeat commerce around the Congolese city of Ouesso done by Hennessey found that 64% of the bushmeat in the area came from just one village and that a single hunter could have supplied more than 80 gorillas annually. He also estimated that 19 chimpanzees are killed every year in the city. In the Sangha region, many hunters prefer to trade their bushmeat at Ouesso rather than sell them at logging concessions because in Ouesso they can sell it for a higher price. As cited by Rose, Stromayer & Ekobo had reported that Ouesso and Brazzaville are the â€Å"ultimate sources of demand† for bushmeat. There is also an intense hunting of gorillas and chimpanzees in southeastern Cameroon. Most of the meats hunted here are shipped to the provincial capital of Bertoua and to Yaounde and Douala where hunters could make more profits. Bushmeat trade is also present in villages near Lope, Ndoki and Dja Reserves, and in city markets at Bangui, Kinshasa, Pt Noire and Libreville. Based on the studies on bushmeat commerce, Rose extrapolates that â€Å"the bushmeat trade across equatorial Africa could be more than a two billion-dollar annual business. If logging and hunting continue to expand unchecked, the numbers of monkeys and apes killed for the cooking pot will increase. † A good payoff is a great motivation for hunters of bushmeat. Bowen-Jones (1998) said chimpanzee carcasses in Cameroon could pay as much as $US20 to $25 each. The increase in bushmeat hunting has been fueled by general improvements in infrastructure, which makes road access to forests and transportation to urban markets easier. The growing timber industry, dominated by European-owned companies and increasingly joined by Asian industries, also increased demand and helped facilitate the supply end. The forestry employees hunt so they could provide for their own needs. Commercial hunters abound to provide for the needs of forestry workers and other consumers outside the forested region. Buyers of bushmeat are not just the logging camp families, but also restaurateurs and private feasts in wealthy national capitals. Bushmeat is sold at prices ranging from two to six times that of beef or pork, both of which are readily available to consumers in larger towns and cities. The increasing availability of guns also adds to the pervasiveness of the bushmeat trade. The expansion of commerce in Africa also threatens the cultural heritage of African communities. As cited by Rose (1998), Mordi’s study of attitudes toward wildlife in Botswana found that â€Å"contemporary Africans have lost their traditional ‘theistic’ reverence for wildlife and many have taken on the harshest utilitarian view. † Rose further explained that â€Å"tribal values of conserving and protecting non-human life are rendered spiritually inoperable, while new ecological and ethical foundations for sustaining nature have not emerged. † He also cited Ammann’s talk in Washington DC to report that African tribes that had before forbidden the consumption of primates are now beginning to eat their meat. Rose further says that, in Africa, â€Å"A ‘live for today’ attitude prevails. This holds for people struggling to survive, as well as for wealthy Africans. † Citing Hart’s 1978 study, Bowen-Jones (1998) reported that the change from subsistence to commercial hunting began half a century ago. Hart’s study of the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo found that the pygmies had began making contact with meat traders in the 1950s. These meat traders went with them to their forest camps to promote â€Å"intensification of traditional hunting methods such as communal net drives. † Meat, then, was a means for barter. They exchanged it for iron tools, tobacco or agriculturally produced food. In many other places in Central Africa, indigenous forest dwellers have also been trading meat for other commodities for a long time. Bowen-Jones suggested that â€Å"This trading ethos, accompanied in some cases by varying degrees of coercion, has led to an often hierarchical structure in the newly prospering commercial trade in meat from the forest, where Bantu patrons [who are agriculturalists] make use of Pygmy hunters. In other cases, the hunting is carried out by immigrants attracted by work or the prospect of making money by poaching and hunting. However, the common denominator is that, increasingly, animals are hunted not for local consumption but for the urban population centres, where demand keeps prices high and inspires others in the forest to hunt. † Another problem posed by bushmeat hunting is the risk of transmitting dangerous diseases to humans. This is because apes, being the closest living kin to humans, harbor pathogens that also affect humans. The Ebola virus, which is epidemic in chimps and gorillas, has been found to come from dead carcasses of primates and could spread during butchering. Scientists have reported in an Independent Online article by Fox (2004) that the virus breaks out when people slaughter chimpanzees, gorillas and small antelopes. The Ebola virus had killed 29 people in the Congo Republic in January 2004. And always increased animal mortality always comes before the first human cases. HIV, which causes AIDS, is also said to have been transmitted to humans from apes. Hunting and butchering produces blood splatters which can easily create infective aerosols. Rose (1998) reported that medical scientists have discovered evidence that points to western African chimpanzees as the original source of the viruses that causes AIDS. Bushmeat hunting â€Å"could transmit new forms of SIV that could further expand the AIDS epidemic. The illegal bushmeat commerce had before been viewed as a wildlife crisis. But now, with evidence supporting the transfer of epidemic diseases from apes to humans, the bushmeat crisis extends from a problem of ape extinction to a threat to human civilization. To sum up, the illegal bushmeat trade is fueled by: the increasing demand in and out of Africa; the diminishing cultural reverence for wildlife; the rapidly growing timber industry: the improvement of forestry infrastructure like roads, vehicles and camps; and the increasing availability of guns. Some of the consequences of an unregulated bushmeat commerce are as follows: vulnerable and endangered species, including all three African great apes, face extinction; unprotected and unstudied species are put in danger; the ancient culture of African indigenous communities are imperiled; and there is an increased risk of transmitting dangerous diseases to humans. Bibliography: Rose, A. (1998). Growing Commerce In Bushmeat Destroys Great Apes And Threatens Humanity. Retrieved February 22, 2007 from http://bushmeat. net/afprimates98. htm Bowen-Jones, E. (1998). A Review of the Commercial Bushmeat Trade with Emphasis on Central/West Africa and the Great Apes. In The African Bushmeat Trade – A Recipe For Extinction. Ape Alliance. Retrieved February 22, 2007 from http://www. 4apes. com/bushmeat/report/bushmeat. pdf Fox, M. (2004, January 15). Ebola may come from ‘bush meat’ – study. Independent Online. Retrieved February 22, 2007 from http://www. iol. co. za/index. php? click_id=117&art_id=qw1074190685813B243&set_id=1

Background on Stress

INTRODUCTION BACKGROUND OF STUDY Work Related stress is a major cause of employee’s low productivity in an organisation. Encarta dictionary defines stress as strain felt by somebody mentally, physically, emotionally which may cause symptoms as raised blood pressure and depression. It is important to recognise and address properly job-related stress because it badly affects the employee’s mental and physiological health. As there is so many resources for employees to perform excellent in their jobs but there are also some factors that hinder their performance. These factors lead to their performance negatively.Newman and Behr (1979) defined job stress as ‘a situation wherein job-related factors interact with the worker to change his or her psychological and or psychological condition such that the person is forced to deviate from normal functioning. Some reasons for stress at the workplace could be; inability to meet the demand of the job, building and maintaining an amiable relationship with colleagues, management of subordinate staff, imparting knowledge to others and taking works from them, excessive work pressure to meet deadlines, inability to be creative, change of job, sexual harassment.These kind of work related stress results in poor performance by members of the organization. Attison (2002) says stress is a major factor in up to 80% of all work-related injuries and 40% of workplace turnovers. Despite tremendous advancement in science and technology and availability of various sources of luxury, majority of the workers in Ghana seem to be experiencing moderate to high degree of psychological stress in various spheres of their lives.Job related-stress is also a serious cause of mental health and health-related injuries. David and Cooper (1981) discovered that workplace stress has been increasingly quoted as the main cause of accidents, job dissatisfaction and other psychological illnesses like heart attack, alcoholism and hypertension . WORK RELATED STRESS Well-designed, organised and managed work is good for us but when insufficient attention to job design, work organisation and management has taken place, it can result in Work related stress.Work related stress develops because a person is unable to cope with the demands being placed on them. Stress, including work related stress, can be a significant cause of illness and is known to be linked with high levels of sickness absence, staff turnover and other issues such as more errors. Stress can hit anyone at any level of the business and recent research shows that work related stress is widespread and is not confined to particular sectors, jobs or industries.

The Issues of Left-Wing or Right-Wing Politics Essay

The Issues of Left-Wing or Right-Wing Politics - Essay Example Further, history has observed a considerable number of conceptual overlaps and cross-laps resulting in an abstract blurriness regarding the exact political and implications these terms bear (Foldvary, 1998). According to Giddens (2001), ‘left’ refers to radical or progressive political groups while the term ‘right’ is used to imply more conservative groups. The left favours intentional political, economic and social change, while the right stands against it (Tansey, 2000). The purpose of this paper is to explore into whether fathomable differences exist within the left and right wings in terms of differential significance placed upon the individual and the group which requires developing a comparative understanding of the central themes these two concepts bear. The practice of using the left-right demarcation to imply particular distinct political inclinations originated in 18th century France during the revolutionary era when ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were used to refer to the way seating was arranged in legislative bodies of France. Representatives of the third estate, a term collectively used to denote the working class, sat to the left of the president's chair in the Estates General of 1789 while the representatives of the nobility, known as the Second Estate, sat to the right. Again in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791, the Feuillants who were moderate royalists, took seats at the right side of the chamber, while the more radical Montagnards sat on the left (Goodsell, 1988). In subsequent periods the "right" wing assumed meaning based on tradition and was taken to represent and upheld traditional moral values and traditional institutions and power relationships. Through the course of history in Europe and Ameri ca, power had come to be based on not only the institutions of church and state, but also on the race, gender, and ownership of property, particularly land. Left-wing ideology, which arose to counter the right-wing dominance, was based on reason, and the liberal philosophers pointed out at the lack of natural reason for the existence of relations centred around any form of dominance and concluded that all human beings have the same moral worth and thus should have equal rights and all religious practices should be equally treated by law.  Ã‚  

Personal Responsibility Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Personal Responsibility - Essay Example Student B is saying, â€Å"The exam was very difficult for me, and I will not be surprised if I get an F, but, I should have known better and spent more time revising instead of playing video games†. Both cases are of course hypothetical; nevertheless they personify common phenomena in schools wherein some students take responsibility of their actions (B) and others like A want to abscond this. Ultimately, by accepting responsibility B has identified the problem hence has an idea of how to rectify the situation in posterity. â€Å"A†, on the other hand, might fail more exams in the future since he is not willing to take responsibility for his inactions and blames a third part whose errors he cannot rectify. This essay discusses the role of personal responsibility in students, as well as some of the strategies they may use to improve their chances of achieving success in their various field of study. It is the onus of every student to ensure they come up with the best pl ans and strategies, so they can guarantee their academic success. For a student to come up with these strategies, it is imperative they put into consideration first several factors, have the strategies they want to use been used before in similar circumstances? If so, were they successful? They could also consider the resources in terms of time and academic resources, so they make strategies, which they will be able to execute from within their budgeted time, and other resources. The past is also an important consideration when it comes to strategizing; before one makes any plans to improve themselves, it is crucial they consider what lead to their lackluster or mediocre performance in the past. A student wishing to see real improvement must first do a thorough post Mortem of the past performance, in order to identify the weak points in past plans and avoid repeating them in the new strategy. Student may apply the following are strategies to improve their performance; They should ta ke to account the learning styles which provide them with the best results this is the individuals preferred orientation toward learning (Bulut andYukselturk, 2007). Some students learn through class discussion others through listening in class and other by active research where they seek out the answers for themselves; the student should hence apply whichever technique, or combination of techniques, that works for them and hence adapt their plan to the most suitable learning theory for the best results. The student directly takes personal responsibility for their performance through setting personal goals, since they dictate, autonomously, the kind performance they wish to achieve. Operating in any situation without predetermined goals is analogous to running a race without a finish line. As such goals are a vital aspect of any accomplishment in academic pursuits, they can be measured in a number of ways depending on individual students such s Grades, or personal fitness and other forms of self-improvement like, read two books a week. Goals should be specific, measurable, and students should write them down and ensure they are in a place where they are seen daily, so they are a constant reminder. One should also have both long-term and short-term goals, the latter, which help them evaluate their

Discrimination and affirmative action in business Research Paper

Discrimination and affirmative action in business - Research Paper Example Affirmative action refers to the policies and procedures set up by taking certain factors into account, such as race, color, creed, sex or religion. In recent history, discrimination on the basis of religion is the most common. There have been reports made by the members of the Muslim community, of harassment and discrimination due to 9/11 (Edward, 2006). This essay tries to understand the reasons for affirmative action and the importance of its presence in business and management. It further outlines the origin or the need for such an action. Another popular belief, that affirmative action leads to a discriminatory action towards the majority of that society is also discussed. A conclusion on the debate is presented towards the end of this essay. The movement of such an action that protected the minority from any discrimination was initially started in the United States only. Civil right programs were enacted in the United States, in order to save the African Americans and provide them a status of full citizenship in the country. The thirteenth amendment of the Constitution made slavery as an illegal action; the fourteenth amendment allows equal protection to all while the fifteenth amendment allows full access to voting and forbids any act of racism during voting (Marquita, 1995). These amendments were one of the first steps towards affirmative action. John F. Kennedy was the first person to use Affirmative action as a phrase, in 1961. This required that federal contractors are supposed to take affirmative action to ensure people from all classes, creed, race, religion and nations are employed and treated as equals to other members of their workplace. Since then, affirmative action is required in regards to employment based on gender as well. The major aim for affirmative action is to increase the representation of women, people of color or minorities in areas of education, employment and business, where they have not

Breast Cancer Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Breast Cancer - Research Paper Example Other areas of the breast can also be affected, however, this is rare. Treatment will also vary considering the type of breast cancer and the stage it is in. One can find out if they are a victim to this disease by getting an examination by a physician, a biopsy, a mammography or an ultrasound test. Rates of breast cancer have risen over the years, however there are many women who also fight this disease and survive in America. Men can also suffer from this disease. (society, 2000) Causes of breast cancer The exact factor that causes breast cancer is yet to be pinpointed. Certain factors increase the probability of the cancer’s occurrence. Some can be controlled and modified in order to avoid the onset of the disease; whereas other factors cannot be controlled. There are some main reasons as to why it occurs; Family tree: having family members, especially closely related women in the family such as an aunt, a sister etc. who have breast cancer greatly increases the chances of developing breast cancer. Age: as a person grows older, the chances of breast cancer also increase. Life history: having cancer in one breast increases the likelihood of having cancer in the other breast in the future, or other different types of cancers in the same breast. Menstrual cycle: women with a cycle that started before twelve or ended before fifty five are more susceptible to this disease. Race: black women tend to have stronger potential to avoid the tumor than white women Breast tissue: women with a denser breast tissue as compared to others have a higher probability of developing breast cancer. Giving Birth: having no children or having children at a very late age can also increase the probability of breast cancer occurrence. Studies show that a breastfeeding mother for one or two years has a lesser probability of developing breast cancer. Weight: obese people have a greater probability of suffering from breast cancer than women who have an average body weight. Use of c ontraceptives: The use of oral contraceptives for about ten years or so increases the probability of breast cancer occurrence. Exercise: Exercise has been shown to lower the probability of breast cancer. Alcohol consumption: The rate of consumption of alcohol and the probability of developing breast cancer are directly proportional These are the risk factors that are associated in the development of cancer of the breast in women. Aspects such as age cannot be controlled, as one cannot stop aging, however other factors such as exercise, weight and alcohol consumption etc. can be controlled. (Majure, 2000) Signs, symptoms and diagnosis One of the most common symptoms of breast cancer is a mass or lump in the breast. Other symptoms include dimpling or swelling of the breast, nipple or breast pain, or discharge from the breast or redness. A healthcare provider can confirm whether these signs or symptoms point towards breast cancer. Mammograms are usually used to detect breast cancers. A nd women should at least at the age of forty get regular screen shots in order to prevent the disease or catch it at its earlier stages. A clinical breast exam, CBE, should also be conducted in women in their twenties or thirties in order to be aware of the changes that the breasts are undergoing as well as the early onset of the disease or possibility of the disease. A self-exam of the breast can also be done called a breast self-exam (BSE) by women especially those in their early

The Racial negative and positive dynamics coming from supervisors Essay

The Racial negative and positive dynamics coming from supervisors - Essay Example First, there is a likelihood of the supervisor falling in favor with some workers in the work place. Being a racist supervisor, there is a likelihood that one will be in good books with others while one may not be in goods with others. In case one is favored by a majority of the workers, there is a likelihood that they are likely to influence a positive relationship within the dyad and the higher the chances of having work done on time. (Priest, 1994) Being a racist supervisor, there is a likelihood of having a loyal following of employees who are favored. This means that as a supervisor, one is likely to have an "underground intelligence force" in the work place which might one gather a lot of information about what is happening. The supervisor will therefore be able to monitor and come up with formidable solution to situation before they happen. For example, if workers might be planning a boycott of duties, the supervisor will have first hand information on it even before it materializes. In this regard, the likelihood of a boycott happening in the work place is reduced in a number of ways. Hence as a worker if you are favored by your supervisor, you are likely to get things done the way you want. This means that as a worker you will be favored by supervisor in allocation of duties and other aspects of work. First the supervisor employs what can be termed as a political policy of "divide and rule" tactics. This ensures that the supervisor have a part of loyal supporters who are favored in return while the rest of the workers may be against. The concept at work here is that there is no unity among the workers since they cannot speak on one term. This makes it difficult to plan any kind of work boycott. As a worker, this division among the workers can give you an undue advantage over the rests since the supervisor will be referring to you on most matters. Second, with the underground intelligence gathered by the loyal workers, other workers who are not "loyal" to the supervisor may find it difficult to integrate with the 'loyal" workers and hence such a plan cannot work. Hence as a worker you may be in a position to act as a spy for the supervisor which gives you an upper hand in the work place since those who are not favored by the supervisor cannot be given such a task. (Reynolds et al., 2002) Hence being favored by a racial supervisor will give the worker an advantage over the rest. But this will depend on the number of workers in the work place who are favored by the supervisor against the number that is not favored by the supervisor. In this regard if majority are favored by the supervisor, they may be likely to have an advantage over the rest but if they are the minority, they will have no advantage over the rest. At the same time there are a number of negative aspects that are associated with being a worker under a racist supervisor at the work place. First, it may affect the relationship within the dyad such that it becomes difficult for the supervisor to implement their duties effectively and the workers to perform their tasks effectively. This is because practicing racism among the worker brings about division among them such that it becomes difficult for the worker to work as a team. It kills the spirit of team work. Once workers are divided, they

Importance and Impact of Global Institutions Assignment

Importance and Impact of Global Institutions - Assignment Example Global institutions also play a vital role in protecting the environment such as by facilitating the signing of treaties to protect the environment. The UNEP, a branch of the UN, concerns itself with matters environmental protection, warns the human race of deteriorating environmental state (as evidenced by phenomenon such as global warming), and teaches on ways of conserving the environment for future generations. On the social front, organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been instrumental in funding social projects (such as availing water to poor communities and providing relief in form of food and medicine to the less fortunate like refugees) aimed at enhancing human lives. Global institutions equally play great roles in stabilizing world economies and the economies of the regions in which they operate. The WB and the IMF are particularly known to inject (bailout/ loan) massive amounts of cash into struggling economies that can barely afford to look after their citizens with what they have. These institutions, together with world governments, endeavor towards the eradication of hunger and poverty, initiating global partnerships that spur growth, promoting gender equality and empowering women for development, attaining universal primary education, enhancing maternal health, reducing child mortality, fighting disease (that lowers economic potential of economies) and facilitating stable environments for business. These goals aid in the economic growth of an area and the world at large and are especially important for the developing world.

Political Science Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 19

Political Science - Essay Example ACH manages to avoid both human bias and analytical errors by integrating both cognitive psychology and scientific methods into its system of exploration. That notwithstanding, I hold the opinion that bringing on board other analysts when using ACH is more productive than when an analyst uses it alone. This is because having many analysts on board ensures that each situation is approached form a broad angle, thereby taking into consideration all the possible alternatives. The input of the other analysts will similarly be important in doing away with assumptions while collecting evidence against each alternative (Intelligence Reports 2013). The ideal result would be that the alternative with the least evidence against it would be accepted. Bringing on board several analysts would be challenging as handling numerous views may be mentally hectic, nonetheless, the process would be comprehensive and without pitfalls, notably because the alternatives will be competing against each other. Response to Tyler I harbor the same belief as you that the content that we have covered in this course will come in handy in ensuring that we become worldwide professionals in the field of intelligence. Taking a walk down memory lane, we all attest to the fact that intelligence has made significant strides. This is because the physical maps and marker pens that were the order of the day have been overtaken by the use of satellites and information technology (Hypothesis, 2008).

Gender Differences in Mathematics Essay Example for Free

Gender Differences in Mathematics Essay Throughout the first half of the 20th century and into the second, women studying or working in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best, outcasts at worst, defying traditional gender norms. Female engineers created systems of social, psychological, and financial mutual support, through such strategies, conditions for female engineers changed noticeably over just a few decades, although many challenges remain. Engineering education in the United States has had a gendered history, one that until relatively recently prevented women from finding a place in the predominantly male technical world. For decades, Americans treated the professional study of technology as mens territory. At places where engineerings macho culture had become most ingrained, talk of women engineers seemed ridiculous (Sax, 2005). For years its been assumed that young women avoid careers in mathematics-based fields, like engineering and physics, because they lack confidence in their math skills. But a new study finds that it’s not a lack of confidence in their math skills that drives girls from those fields; its a desire to work in people-oriented professions. It has been found that young women who are strong in math tend to seek careers in the biological sciences. They value working with and for people, they dont perceive engineering as a profession that meets that need. The environment at many tech schools is hostile toward helping students achieve a degree and is more geared toward weeding out those who are struggling. Its difficult to come up with alternative engineering solutions if everybody in the room looks alike. Thats the initial reason why automakers and suppliers are busy trying to identify and hire minority and women engineers. The business case is that if more than half of an automakers customers are either female and/or people of color, which they are, then those groups need to be represented in every sector of the company. One of the most important areas for automakers to get a range of views is in product development. With that diversity mission in mind, DaimlerChrysler Corp. , Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. , all have mounted aggressive programs to identify and hire minority and women engineers. At GM the story is the same. To attract minority and women engineers, the automaker proclaims that innovation comes from the people who see the world in a different way than everyone else. One women and minorities enter into the automotive engineering ranks, they need to be challenged and encouraged to develop their careers or theyll be gone (Sax, 2005). Its not just the Big Three that are working to create a more diverse engineering workforce. Suppliers and engineering support organizations such as the Society of Automotive Engineers are trying to draw more women and minorities into the profession. Faced with chronically small percentages of minorities and women in virtually every segment of engineering, companies are going to great lengths to attract them to the world of automotive engineering. Harvard President Lawrence Summers ignited a firestorm recently when he suggested more men than women are scientists because of differences between males and females in â€Å"intrinsic aptitude. † Many scientists-both men and women-expressed outrage at Summer’s remarks and blamed any lag in math among girls mainly on discrimination and socialization (Dean, 2006). They point out that girls have closed the gap in average scores on most standardized math tests in elementary and high school. Today women constitute almost half of college math majors and more than half of biology majors. But Summer’s supporters say he courageously raised a legitimate question for scientific inquiry. Indeed, in recent years some researchers have been pursuing a scientific explanation for the discrepancies in math and science aptitude and achievement among boys and girls and have found differences, including biological ones. Summer’s suggestion that women are biologically inferior in math infuriated many female scientists. Some asserted that the other two factors he mentioned were far more important in keeping women out of science: sex discrimination and the way girls are taught to view math as male territory. Some differences are well established. Girls do better on tests of content learned in class and score much higher on reading and writing tests than boys. Boys score higher on standardized tests with math and science problems not directly tied to their school curriculum. On tests of spatial awareness, boys do better on tests that involve navigation through space. Girls are better at remembering objects and landmarks. Studies show differences in brain structure and hormonal levels that appear to influence spatial reasoning. But the implications of these differences for real world math and science achievement remain unclear. â€Å"There is evidence that male and female brains differ anatomically is subtle ways, but no one knows how these anatomical differences relate to cognitive performance,† (Dean, 2006). At the heart of the current controversy is a societal implication-that the failure of an institution like Harvard to tenure even one woman mathematician can be blamed on the lack of top-flight women mathematicians, which in turn can be blamed on too-few top female minds in math. As evidence of intrinsic aptitude differences, Summers pointed out that more boys than girls receive top scores on standardized math tests. Today girls receive better grades than boys in math and science through high school, have closed the gap on average scores on most standardized math tests and take more advantage high school classes than boys in almost every category except physics and high-level calculus. In college they constitute nearly half the math majors and more than half the biology majors. Indeed, today a growing number of researchers contend boys are the ones who are shortchanged-judging by the larger proportion of boys in special-education classes and the declining proportion attending college. Women now make up 56 percent of students enrolled in college; by 2012, the Department of Education projects they will account for about 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees (2002). The fact that more boys than girls make top scores on standardized math tests is often invoked as evidence that boys possess an innate superiority in high-level math. Experts on both sides of the divide agree gender differences are real, even if they disagree bout how much is socially learned and how much biologically based. Girls do better on writing and on algebra problems, probably because algebraic equations are similar to sentences, and girls excel in language processing. Boys are better at mathematical word problems; girls are better at mathematical calculation. Boys and girls also differ on spatial skills, and experts are divided over how innate or important these differences are. A recent study of the Graduate Record Exam, for instance, found men did better on math problems where a spatially based solution was an advantage (Gallagher, Kaufman, 2005). Sex hormones have been shown in several studies to affect the ability to envision an object rotating in space. Females who take male hormones to prepare for a sex-change operation improve on tests of 3-D rotation and get worse on tests of verbal fluency, at which women typically excel. During their menstrual cycle, women do better on 3-D rotation when levels of the female hormone estrogen are low; they do better on verbal fluency when estrogen levels are high. If science be taught directly with a hands-on, inquiry-based approach, it sustains girl’s interest in science. Girls like to work in cooperative teams, a lot of science was taught in a competitive mode. Women scientists also earn less than men. But it’s only fair that women who work fewer hours face the economic consequences of lower salaries and less status. References: Dean, Cornelia. (2006). â€Å"Dismissing ‘Sexist Opinions’ About Women’s Place in Science†. A Conversation with Ben A. Barres. The New York Times. July 18, 2006, pp. 1-5. Gallagher, Ann M. , Kaufman, James M. (2005). â€Å"Gender Differences in Mathematics: An Integrative Psychological Approach. Cambridge University Press. National Center for Education Statistics, â€Å"Projections of Education Statistics To 2012†. (2002). Available on-line: http://nces. ed. gov/pubs2002/proj. 2012/ch_2. asp.. Sax, Leonard. (2005). Too Few Women- â€Å"Figure It Out†. Los Angeles Times. Jan. 23, 2005.

Graffiti Art Essay Example for Free

Graffiti Art Essay Graffiti is the art of regular people; these people are not considered artists but the criminalised voice of the populace. For most artists, gaining recognition and selling their works for high-prices is a life-long aspiration and for the most recognition doesn’t happen before death. Graffiti artists don’t have these ambitions and from city to coast we can admit to admiring the aesthetic value and eccentric expressions that are portrayed by Graffiti artists. They portray quirky, humorous artworks and provide a political voice for the lower class people of the world. Largely emerging in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s, Graffiti was the people’s way of expressing their feelings about anti-consumerism, anti-war, feminist and political issues. It is the art that has attitude and makes every surface of a city an installation that brings people together and provokes thought about the world as it is. A largely popular quasi-anonymous graffiti artist that is supposedly from Bristol, England is Banksy. As his artworks were considered criminal he ensured that his real name was not discovered by the media and to this day remains anonymous. Inspired by local artists and the Bristol underground scene, Banksy initially employed freehand and stencilling techniques to create his pieces but later converted to stencilling entirely after â€Å"realising how much less time it took to complete a piece† (Wikipedia, 2008). He used graffiti to â€Å"promote alternative aspects of politics from those promoted by mainstream media† (Sewell, 2010) and provided a voice for people affected by political issues that could not express their emotions. It is highly debated as to whether graffiti is in fact art or vandalism with many people regarding the work of Banksy and similar artists such as Blek le Rat and Jef Aerosol as straight up criminal destruction. In regards to Banksy’s work being vandalism he states that â€Å"Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place† (Vidar, 2011). Though, to this day graffiti that is not approved legally is considered a criminal act that is punishable, instead of being seen as art brightening the bland streets of this world. Above: Artwork by Banksy of a police officer snorting cocaine. Not only does Banksy regard his pieces to be artworks, Terrance Lindall an artist and executive director of the Williamsburg Art and Historic Centre also made a tatement about graffiti, he says, Graffiti is revolutionary, in my opinion and any revolution might be considered a crime. People who are oppressed or suppressed need an outlet, so they write on walls—its free (Ciuraru, 2006) Despite the social and economic status of the people holding these high opinions of graffiti art, be the lower class or even highly educated, Banksy remains an artistic fugitive in hiding and graffiti still remains illegal. Banksy is essentially a modern day, anonymous Andy Warhol that has the clear capacity to insult, irritate and mock, in the most educated way possible. He is the representation of everyone, he remains anonymous as there is no need to meet such an artist; we would simply have to look in the mirror and we would find Banksy. He has the ability to delve deep into the thoughts of common society and voice the feelings that people are afraid to exploit publicly, which makes him an incredibly powerful figure. His artworks promote the underdogs, the suppressed mentality of an entire societal collective, the mentality of the corrupt and the moral deterioration that continues to spread like an uncontrollable wild fire. Even though Banksy is rebelling against not only the law, but politics and those in society who disagree with his creations he was also rebelling against the movements of other artists at the time.

ICT Developments In The Construction Industry

ICT Developments In The Construction Industry The use of ICT has over the years in different ways influenced and to a certain degree also changed roles and processes within the building project. A better understanding and overview of how ICT affect on the complex mechanisms in construction industry within the early stages of the planning process can be seen as central to achieve project success in this chapter. This chapter will touch on the general ICT development and application in construction industry whether in Malaysia or foreign countries such as United Kingdom, Australia, etc. but more focus on QS, architectural and engineering firms. Current software developments in construction industry which separate into three main types: design software, QS software and management software will be briefly described and discussed in this chapter too. Besides, this chapter will present a framework for exploring the positive or negative impacts of ICT developments in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (hereinafter referred to as AEC) sector of construction industry. Few survey analyses will be provided to briefly explain the impacts of ICT developments in practice. The strategies related to ICT implementation such as self-motivation, training, etc. will be discussed in the following section. After that, the final section presents a summary to this chapter of this research. 2.2 ICT Developments in Construction Industry The developments of ICT such as internet, email, e-tendering, software etc. in the AEC sector have evolved over several years. Emerging ICT introduces opportunities for improving communication to enhance effectiveness of many construction processes at each project phase as well as creating new business opportunities (Peansupap and Walker, 2005). The average annual growth rate of ICT investment in the construction industry is increasing every year and constitutes now a significant part of the total project cost. According to Woksepp and Olofsson (2007), some studies indicate that the ICT utilization ratio is still relatively low in the construction industry. In Malaysia, Public Works Department director which is Datuk Seri Prof Judin Abdul Karim hastened the construction companies to adopt ICT to enhance their capability during the two-day Infrastructure Construction Asias Building Information Modelling Sustainable Architecture 2009 conference in August 2009. He said that the awareness of using ICT was there but the cost of investment prohibited companies from adopting the technology and upgrading the system especially for the small companies. He also emphasized on the importance to have an integrated software system as a lot of professionals such as architects and engineers within the same companies were using different kinds of software. Standardisation is important in obtaining effective workflow for the project development and implementation (The Star, 20 August 2009). In parallel with the developments in academia and the software industry, organisations in the AEC industry have adopted new technologies in support of their business and the implementation of ICT is becoming significantly important now. Most industrially developed countries such as United Kingdom believe the need for implementing and using new technologies for gaining competitive advantage but are reluctant to invest in these technologies. The financial return appears to form the basis for IT investment related decisions. Besides, the results of previous research on measuring the ICT use and trends in Turkey (Sarshar and Isikdag, 2004) suggested that the Turkish AEC industry has been facing difficulties related to inefficient communication and loss of information due to fragmentation in the industry. However, developments of ICT in construction industry are still lacking. 2.2.1 QS Firms According to Smith (2004), the QS profession in Australia has experienced significant change over the past decade in terms of the scope of services provided both within and outside of the construction industry. These changes have occurred primarily in response to changing industry or client demands, ICT developments and increased levels of competition for services. As information flows increasingly become electronic QS computing facilities, software and databases will need to develop in a compatible manner. Compatibility with and the utilization of ICT developments is just the beginning and it is inevitable that documentation and date will be increasingly automated to the point where measurement and other technical processes will require minimal human intervention. It advancement provides the QS profession with enormous opportunity to strengthen its position in the industry. Thus, quantity surveyors are well placed to become the major information handlers on construction projects as the majority of information flow revolves around quantities and cost. Actually, no profession can legitimately lay claim to being best suited to take control of information management. It is likely that current opportunities will be taken up by others if the profession adopts a wait and see approach. In Malaysia, QS practice plays an important role in any construction development projects. The environments for QS practice have changed along with the countrys rapid economic development. Future development prospects and changes will have implications on the development of the profession. On the other hand, there have been concerns in the past few years on the role and future of the QS profession. The QS Think Tank Report of RICS has noted that many clients are critical of traditional QS services and are demanding a different and more comprehensive range of services (Page, Pearson and Pryke, 2004). Although there is a general lack of published data on the development and current scenario of the QS practice in Malaysia, anecdotal evidence suggests that the scenario in Malaysia parallels the findings by RICS. Hence, a reliable understanding of the present situation as well as the future perceptions of the QS practice is required in order to aspire to future challenges and needs (Abdul lah and Haron, 2006). 2.2.2 Architectural and Engineering Firms In accordance with the survey of Rivard (2000), ICT are an integral part of the day to day business within the most of the AEC industry nowadays. Almost every single employee in architectural and engineering firms do works on a desktop computer. Many business processes such as bookkeeping, invoicing and specification writing are now almost completely computerised and the tendency is toward a greater computerisation of the remaining processes. The firms have adopted the internet and are using emails and the World-Wide Web on a daily basis. However, even though ICT has been adopted by most firms because it provides quick and efficient means of exchanging information digitally, the majority of AEC professionals still exchange design information by means of paper drawings and specifications ad they used to do prior to the advent of computers. The AEC industry was a little slower in adopting ICT than other service industries that are more information intensive such as the communications industry and business services., but this is understandable since the AEC industry tends to be risk avert and prefers to adopt a technology that has been proven. 2.3 Current Software Developments in Construction Industry Software development is a highly dynamic field that heavily relies on the experience of experts when it comes to learning, applying, evaluating, disseminating and improving its methods, tools and techniques (Acuna and Sanshez-Segura, eds, 2006). The use of IT to transform and upgrade the construction industry is an objective requirement for the development of construction industry. At present, software quality and practical application level lags far behind developed countries. Thus, there is some great practical significance like summing up the status quo, looking for gaps, to explore a path of development, to promote in-depth practical application for improving the project standards, and achieve industry information, industrial advancement. There are three main types of software developments which are design software, QS software and management software in construction industry to enhance effectiveness of many construction processes at each project phase as well as creating new bus iness opportunities. 2.3.1 Design Software The use of CAD-technique in building design has increased rapidly during the last ten years and it is the standard technique for producing building documentation nowadays. International Organization for Standardization (hereinafter referred to as ISO) has defined a draft international standard, ISO/DIS 13567 recently, in order to increase interoperability between different CAD applications for building design (Bo-Christer, Kurt and Arto, 1997). CAD has several related technologies, two of which are geographic information systems and rendering packages. A geographic information system is an integrated software application devised to capture, store, edit, analyse and display geographic information and is typically used in land use planning, infrastructure management, environmental engineering, natural resources planning and management. A rendering package is a software application used to create, edit and render a realistic 3-D image of an architectural or engineered effort and typical ly includes lighting effects, camera setup and the application of materials on surfaces (Rivard, 2000). With the advent of ISO 9000, the quality management and quality assurance standard, more and more firms are adopting quality assurance in their processes to ensure that their firms can time and time again deliver the product or services that satisfy given requirements for quality. 2.3.2 QS Software Throughout history there have been numerous medians used to quantify construction materials. From the ruler, scale, and measuring tape to the planimeter and the digitizer, QS tools have changed with the technology of the time. There is no exception presently with the invention of fast-paced computer generated design applications and fast-track more efficient construction practices. In the market today, there are a plethora of computer-based QS software programs such as On-screen Take-off by on Center Software Inc, Computer-Aided Design (hereinafter referred to as CAD) Based Measurement Software (hereinafter referred to as CBMS), etc. On-screen Take-off On-screen Take-off software has been around since 1995. It is a valuable tool in the cost estimating process. McElreath (2010) implementing this software whenever digital copies of drawings are available in the market. He also mentioned that the speed and accuracy of this software has increased nearly 50 percent because of the functions and features of this product. One of the basic advantages of On-screen Take-off is the ability to zoom in and out of the drawings. This takes the place of a magnifying glass needed for full size drawings and save the estimators eyes. It also has an integrated magnification tool that can zoom in certain sections of the drawings without zooming in on the whole document. This is especially helpful when reading key notes, but it still allows the user to see the whole floor plan. However, one of the biggest advantages to using this product is that the software allows the user to verify and defend quantity takeoffs quickly and easily when performing an esti mate. CBMS The usage of CBMS would basically perform directs measurement of quantities from the object models produced by the designers for building elements to support tendering and contract administrative activities. Quantity surveyor can use CBMS to obtain certain quantities or calculations. For example, components such as windows, doors and sanitary fittings are easily designed or taken from the library of the software and it also can be counted easily using scheduling (Ong, Lim and Aziz, 2005). Thus, quantity surveyors are able to produce work description details and quantities for such items easily. Based on the preliminary experiment which conducted by Ong, Lim and Aziz (2005), the CAD software is able to generate the quantities easily for certain elements in a building while problems are encountered in taking-off quantities for other elements. Hence, there is a need for cooperation between the designers and quantity surveyors to ensure that there is a seamless flow of information from t he designers to the quantity surveyors especially with respect to the information contains in CAD drawings. 2.3.3 Project Management Software According to Walker (ed, 2007), construction project management is defined as the planning, coordination and control of a project from conception to completion including commissioning on behalf of a client requiring the identification of the clients objectives in terms of utility, function, quality, time and cost, and the establishment of relationships between resources, integrating, monitoring and controlling the contributors to the project and their output, and evaluating and selecting alternatives in pursuit of the clients satisfaction with the project outcome. The industry needs to be concerned with identifying and studying the process of managing construction projects and with structuring its organisations and implementing techniques and procedures that make the project management process more effective. Project management software consists of five main functional modules which are progress program management capabilities, resource management, cost management capabilities, report generation and output functions, and auxiliary functions which mainly refer to the interface with other software, secondary development, data confidentiality and the like. This concept stems from the analysis of similar products abroad such as Primavera Software, Microsoft Project, etc. Primavera Software Primavera offers best-in-class solutions focused on the mission critical Project Portfolio Management requirements of key vertical industries including engineering and construction, IT and services and the like. Primavera P6 Professional Project Management which is one of the products gives todays project managers and schedulers the one thing they value most: control. It is the recognised standard for high-performance project management software and designed to handle large-scale, highly sophisticated and multifaceted projects. It can be used to organise projects up to 100,000 activities and provides unlimited resources and an unlimited number of target plans. On the other hand, Primavera P6 Professional Project Management can balance resource capacity, plan, schedule, and control complex projects, allocate best resources and track progress, monitor and visualise project performance versus, conduct what-if-analysis and analyse alternative project plans (Oracle, 2010). Microsoft Project 2010 Project 2010 offers easier and more intuitive experiences to help the client simply be more productive and realise amazing results from meeting crucial deadlines to selecting the right resources and empowering your teams (Microsoft Project 2010). Microsoft Project 2010 builds on the Microsoft Office project 2007 foundation with flexible work management solutions and the right collaboration tools for occasional and professional project managers and includes a pathway to more advanced project and portfolio management capabilities as business needs evolve. Through a dramatically enhanced user experience, it also drives team productivity with integration across familiar Microsoft technologies including Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Exchange Server. This integration allows a powerful business collaboration platform, proven project and portfolio management to result in a familiar, connected environment for customers to manage the simplest or the most complex projects (Phoenix, 2009). 2.4 Impacts of ICT Developments on Construction Industry The advent of ICT development has been both beneficial and detrimental. According to the respondents of the survey (Rivard, 2000), ICT developments have raised productivity in most business processes and particularly in general administration, design and project management. The main benefits achieved by the use of ICT is an increase in the speed of work, a better financial control, better communications, simpler and faster access to common data as well as a decrease in the number of mistakes in documentation. However, the benefits of ICT developments come at a cost since the complexity of work, the administrative needs, the proportion of new operations and the costs of doing business have all increased. Figure 1 attempt to show the changes caused by the introduction of ICT in construction industry. Figure 1: Changes caused by the introduction of ICT (Rivard, 2000) Furthermore, to explore the impacts of ICT developments on the architectural design process, Moum (2006) developed a framework to support the exploration and analysis of the multiple and complex amounts of information collected from both theory and practice. Based on the four selected design process aspects: generation of design solution, communication, evaluation of design solution, and decision making within the design process, and the three hierarchical levels: macro, meso and micro, an ICT impact matrix is conducted as a tool to summarizing and giving overview the key points explored by Moum (2006). Table 1 summarize some of the explored and discussed ICT related benefits and challenges within generation of the four selected design process aspects. The ICT systems used within the design process, support drafting and modelling rather than special design attributes and analytical capabilities, and have not changed the task of drafting or modelling. ICT also would develop from being a tool to becoming a design partner with having a design agent to make a designer aware of inconsistency regarding building legislation such as the minimum height of a staircase handrail (Kalay, 2004). Other than that, network technologies such as email and the internet have contributed to the most radical changes within the average working day for the building process participants as they support information exchange independent of geographical and organisational borders in communication stage within design process. ICT also offer a most powerful support of evaluation. Unrecognised problems can be identified, uncertainty reduced and errors avoided already at an early stage of the building project. It is easier to make a decision if every uncertainty i s eliminated within the architectural design process (Moum, 2006). Obviously, ICT developments have these far definitely brought benefits. Table 1: The ICT impact matrix summarizing the key points of the literature review (Moum, 2006) In the same time, CIRIA (1996) reviewed the procedures used by seven major construction organisations for their internal assessment of potential investments in IT in a study of United Kingdom construction organisations. These organizations included building and civil engineering contractors, civil engineering consultants and one large joint venture construction project. CIRIA concluded that, in the construction industry, formal cost-benefit analysis is not widely used to assess possible investments in IT. Even the simplest form of analysis of costs and benefits of smaller items can cost more staff time than the item itself and advancement of IT within organisations appears to be almost cyclical, alternatively evolutionary and revolutionary with periods of consolidation and evolution following radical assessments of IT strategy. This is a classic IT problem. For instance when Project Management software is introduced the software and hardware is a small part of the total cost-benefit equation. Staff training often costs more than the system, but the benefits of the training generally outweigh the costs (cited by Andresen, Baldwin, Betts, Carter, Hamilton, Stokes, and Thorpe, 2000). As a result of this industry-based debate of this issue, a framework of construction of construction IT benefits was colligated by academic perspectives reflecting perspectives reflecting the literature review conducted (Andresen et al. 2000). Table 2 shows a summary of the typical, process-based benefits that arise from IT investments that was colligated. Three categories: typical efficiency benefits, typical effectiveness benefits and typical performance benefits. Table 2: Typical IT benefits (Andresen et al. 2000) 2.5 Strategies Related to ICT Implementation There are three aspects which are self-motivation, training and environment for workplace support to understand how to encourage and manage the process of actual implementation of ICT diffusion within construction organisations. 2.5.1 Self-motivation ICT use remains dependent upon the individuals decisions whether to accept or reject the application. This is in turn affected by the degree of motivation. One motivation behind an individuals ICT application use is their characteristics such as self-confidence, enjoyment of learning and their previous foundation ICT skills. Peansupap and Walker (2005) indicated that users with high self-confidence levels are more likely to use and adopt ICT applications than users with low self-confidence. Igbaria, Iivari and Maragahh (1995) found that previous experience has a direct influence on the use and adoption of ICT. Individuals are able to use their existing ICT skills to perform the task. They found that computer experience is likely to improve a persons perceptions and belief of the usefulness of the ICT by enhancing their beliefs in their ability to master the challenges and to reduce any fears (cited by Peansupap and Walker, 2005). 2.5.2 Training Training is a primary organisational ICT diffusion factor because it helps users understand how to use and adopt ICT applications effectively. Likewise, Peansupap and Walker (2005) noted that many construction case studies found that lack of training is a key barrier to adopting and using ICT applications. So it is important to assess users training requirements to reduce the knowledge gap between what they already know and what they need to know to best perform their job through undertaking a personalised user needs analysis. Due to the threat of free-market and globalise competition has been view with serious concern by the various professional bodies, they believe their members will be able to better perceive the professions activity in a wider context and addressing this threat through Continuing Professional Development (hereinafter referred as CPD) programme. CPD is important for people and organisations need to continually learn and re-learn to sustain in this rapid changing business environment. Houle (1980) defines CPD as the ways in which professionals try, through their own knowledge and ability and build a sense of collective responsibility to society. Madden and Mitchell (1993) identifies CPS as the maintenance and enhancement of the knowledge, expertise and competence of professionals throughout their careers according to a plan formulated with regard to the needs of professional, the employer, the profession and society. (Adnan, Hashim, Janipha Hassan, and Ismail, 2009, p. 21) CPD is a requirement for members of most professional associations and the construction industry is no exception. Rather than relying solely on their employees, practitioners need to also take responsibility for their own professional development. ICT is a classic area for CPD due to regularity and speed of change and such personal development can significantly enhance an individuals value to a firm (Smith, 2004). 2.5.3 A Supportive Environment Workplace It can be argued that workplace environment characteristics such as commitment, open discussion, personal anxiety, and frustration also affect ICT implementation. The ICT diffusion process can be seen as a process of change within an organisation, so we need commitment from both users and their organisation. Individual commitment focuses on end-users who devote themselves to using ICT whereas organisational commitment focuses on top manager who support end-user to use ICT. Basic requirements of ICT adoption is the need to directly or indirectly persuade users to commit to support and allocate adequate resources for ICT technology investment (Peansupap and Walker, 2005). Open discussion helps to improve work productivity via the reporting of system difficulties. In addition, Senge et al. (1999) open discussion helps managers better understand problems or difficulties experienced by those operating ICT applications so that strategies can be devised to address deficiencies. Frustration or anxiety might develop from a negative users response when using computers. Igbaria and Parasuraman (1989) found that computer anxiety has a negative impact on users attitude toward microcomputers, especially when it is difficult to use ICT systems o r they can only be partially used (cited by Peansupap and Walker, 2005). Therefore, adequate ICT systems might be chosen for the companies to prevent users feel frustrated when faced the problems of insufficient or restricted their use of ICT systems. 2.6 Summary This chapter provides the general ICT developments information which focuses on QS firms and architectural engineering firms. Datuk Seri Prof Judin emphasized that the importance of ICT investment in construction industry and noted that standardisation is essential in obtaining workflow of the project development and implementation effectively. The development of design software, QS software and project management software can facilitate the exchange and management of information and has lot potentials for the information process component of the construction industry. This research found that CAD software is widely utilized in the current construction industry through all these surveys. These recent ICT developments undoubtedly have a profound impact whether is positive or negative on how organisations operate on a daily basis. Normally, benefits will be discovered much more than problems or barriers of ICT developments in AEC sector. The ICT developments in construction industry will improve the productivity and quality of output with the lesser time such as the increased speed in architectural design process. But, this research shows that the organisation and functions of each construction company will influence the impacts from ICT software developments. Lack of understanding of how to implement ICT into a construction organisation will be a significant problem too. Therefore, many construction organisations have found that the ICT investment has failed to meet their expectations. Continuing industry change and ICT developments will present the profession with many challenges, threats and opportunities. Hence, strategies of self-motivation, training provides and workplace environment may lead to efficient ICT implementation in a construction organisation.

Privacy vs. Security Essay -- USA Terrorism Iraq Bush Patriot Act Essa

Privacy vs. Security Introduction Pictures seen in homes across America and throughout the world of American symbols in flames and crashing a quarter mile to the ground changed the world forever. The world's last and only superpower had been attacked in a way only conceivable in a Hollywood script. However, the physical destruction that resulted was not necessarily the biggest loss that the United States faced. The emotional destruction of Americans could be considered much greater and can be captured in one word: "fear." Because of this fear, most Americans were more willing to sacrifice many of the freedoms that make this country great in exchange for added security. United States citizens were much more concerned about their security than their freedoms. As the President declared war against terrorism, an implicit war was declared against some of our freedoms. In particular, most Americans were more willing to let the government into their lives and forfeit some privacy in the name of increased security. The events of September 11, 2001 affected not only the United States, but the entire world as well. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world was left with one remaining superpower. The United States proved in Afghanistan and Iraq that it has the power to defeat an entire country in a minimal amount of time and without losing many of the lives of its own soldiers. However, is it legal to do these acts? Is it the right thing to do? Not only is the United States government interfering with the freedoms of its own citizens, but it is also imposing its own standards and freedoms on people around the globe. Though the United States has shown that it has the power to do so, is the security of the American people para... ...chive.aclu.org/issues/privacy/hmprivacy.html> 3 "Privacy and Human Rights: An International Survey of Privacy Laws and Practice", Global Internet Liberty Campaign, 21 Jan. 2004 <http://www.gilc.org/privacy/survey/intro.html> 4 "Surveillance Under the "USA/Patriot" Act", American Civil Liberties Union, 2002, 22 Jan 2004 <http://archive.aclu.org/issues/privacy/USAPA_surveillance.html> 5 Timothy Lynch, "More Surveillance Equals Less Liberty: Patriot Act reduces privacy, undercuts judicial review", 2003, 20 Jan. 2004 <http://www.cato.org/research/articles/lynch-030910.html> 6 "United States of America", Global Internet Liberty Campaign, 21 Jan. 2004 <http://www.gilc.org/privacy/survey/surveylz.html#USA> 7 "USA Patriot Act" United States Senate, 2001, 20 Jan. 2004 <http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html> Privacy vs. Security Essay -- USA Terrorism Iraq Bush Patriot Act Essa Privacy vs. Security Introduction Pictures seen in homes across America and throughout the world of American symbols in flames and crashing a quarter mile to the ground changed the world forever. The world's last and only superpower had been attacked in a way only conceivable in a Hollywood script. However, the physical destruction that resulted was not necessarily the biggest loss that the United States faced. The emotional destruction of Americans could be considered much greater and can be captured in one word: "fear." Because of this fear, most Americans were more willing to sacrifice many of the freedoms that make this country great in exchange for added security. United States citizens were much more concerned about their security than their freedoms. As the President declared war against terrorism, an implicit war was declared against some of our freedoms. In particular, most Americans were more willing to let the government into their lives and forfeit some privacy in the name of increased security. The events of September 11, 2001 affected not only the United States, but the entire world as well. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the world was left with one remaining superpower. The United States proved in Afghanistan and Iraq that it has the power to defeat an entire country in a minimal amount of time and without losing many of the lives of its own soldiers. However, is it legal to do these acts? Is it the right thing to do? Not only is the United States government interfering with the freedoms of its own citizens, but it is also imposing its own standards and freedoms on people around the globe. Though the United States has shown that it has the power to do so, is the security of the American people para... ...chive.aclu.org/issues/privacy/hmprivacy.html> 3 "Privacy and Human Rights: An International Survey of Privacy Laws and Practice", Global Internet Liberty Campaign, 21 Jan. 2004 <http://www.gilc.org/privacy/survey/intro.html> 4 "Surveillance Under the "USA/Patriot" Act", American Civil Liberties Union, 2002, 22 Jan 2004 <http://archive.aclu.org/issues/privacy/USAPA_surveillance.html> 5 Timothy Lynch, "More Surveillance Equals Less Liberty: Patriot Act reduces privacy, undercuts judicial review", 2003, 20 Jan. 2004 <http://www.cato.org/research/articles/lynch-030910.html> 6 "United States of America", Global Internet Liberty Campaign, 21 Jan. 2004 <http://www.gilc.org/privacy/survey/surveylz.html#USA> 7 "USA Patriot Act" United States Senate, 2001, 20 Jan. 2004 <http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html>

Whistle or Scream While You Work :: Essays Papers

Whistle or Scream While You Work Life is full of encounters with annoying, horrendous, wretched, irritating, pathetic wastes of human life, and I am in constant contact with them wherever I go. Although I have a choice whether or not I want to deal with these people, I do not have a choice at my place of employment. While working at 9 Ball Joe, a coffee/billiards hall, I am forced to interact with mainly four groups of people; from rowdy, revolting children and useless, pitiable teens, to scheming schoolgirls and bothersome regulars, a line of work seeming so simple is anything but. First and foremost, I am a 19 year-old college student who places value in any chance I get for peace and quiet, thus, babysitting is not my profession of choice. However, on most weekend nights 9 Ball Joe is infested with children between the ages 12-16. They are loud, obnoxious, and in some situations, disrespectful. Unfortunately for me, they have strength in numbers. Because most of them are too young to drive, they often come piled in a van driven by one of their parents. Before entering the building, they feel it is necessary to â€Å"hang out,† or loiter in the parking lot for at least ten minutes, leaving a trail of litter behind. Once in the building, they huddle in a large mass near the entrance door causing messy customer traffic-jams. Because young children are commonly indecisive, fifteen minutes can pass before any decision is made on whether to shoot pool, or to purchase drinks. If they do decide to get drinks, they spend as little as possible (a one drink minimum is policy). Jones Sodas seem to be the beverage of choice since they are cheap, colorful, and sweet. Having to deal with their loud voices and sugar-high theatrics all night is only the beginning of my torture. I am continually left with scads of dishes to clean up after they leave even though our signs clearly read: PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOUR OWN DISHES. The next breed of 9 Ball-goers consists of 20 year-old high school dropouts who still live with their parents and have excessive drinking problems. Unfortunately, age is not an indicator of maturity. These individuals are worse than youngsters half their age. I often wonder how they make enough money to feed their alcohol and cigarette addiction as well as pay for their pool and drinks.

Retaining Tomorrows Scientists :: Education Learning Gender Essays

Retaining Tomorrow's Scientists I chose to summarize the article "Retaining Tomorrow's Scientists". This article described a study done on differences between men and women enrolled in scientific curriculums in college. It looked at how individual characteristics, experiences, and goals affected a person's success rate in graduating. It also explained why women are not as successful as men in completing their science education. For starters, the study showed that women don't seem to be as interested in math and science courses in school. Studies show that boys and girls show equal capabilities in these courses while in elementary school. Girls, however, don't show much interest in them. Therefore, they take less of these courses in junior and senior high school. This in turn leads to lower rates of women taking these classes at a college level. Because they don't have the basic knowledge of these subjects, they are reluctant to major in scientific areas. Confidence also plays a major part in women choosing a major. By not taking these classes in high school, women feel that they aren't smart enough to select a scientific major. It was shown in this study that "Émath self-confidence is the most influential predictor of women's SAT scores, as well as of their decision to pursue math and science fields in college"(Sax, 46). Another reason that women are reluctant is the so-called "glass ceiling." It has long been known that women earn less than men, and aren't promoted as quickly. This is true in the laboratory as well as the office. Lastly, women are often forced to choose between the workplace and the home. Most scientific jobs demand long days and a lot of travel. Women realize this, and it interferes with their desire to have children and a home. Though men are also affected, it seems to be easier for men to make that choice. As with any scientific study, there are uncontrollable variables. The variables involved in this study were separated into blocks. Individual characteristics were classified as "É race, citizenship, parents' education, family income, religion, SAT scores, high school academic information, high school activities, reasons for coming to college, degree aspirations, life goals, views, personality types, and expectations about college"( Sax, 49). The second set of characteristics dealt with students' intended majors. Since everyone's college experience is so different, scientists had to figure in environmental variables, also. These variables were also classified into blocks. The first dealt with financial aid and living arrangements.

Essay Bishop

The below essay is a final draft, and not a final copy; therefore, it does not have page numbers and cannot be quoted in future publications. The published version of the essay is in the following book available in print and online versions in the Seneca library: Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century: Reading the New Editions. Eds. Cleghorn, Hicok, Travisano. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, June 2012. Part II (of the 4 part book with 17 essays by different people) Crossing Continents: Self, Politics, Place Bishop's â€Å"wiring fused†: Bone Key and â€Å"Pleasure Seas†Angus Cleghorn Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box and the Library of America edition of Bishop's poetry and prose provide readers with additional context enabling a richer understanding of her poetic project. Alice Quinn's compelling tour of previously unpublished archival material and her strong interpretive directions in the heavily-annotated notes let us color in, highlight and extend lines drawn in The Complete Poems. Some of those poetic lines include wires and cables, which are visible in Bishop's paintings, as published in William Benton's Exchanging Hats.If we consider the extensive presence of wires in the artwork alongside the copious, recently published poetic images of wires, we can observe vibrant innovation, especially in the material Bishop had planned for a Florida volume entitled Bone Key. The wires conduct electricity, as does The Juke-Box, both heating up her place. Florida warms Bishop after Europe: in this geographical shift, we can see Bishop relinquish stiff European statuary forms and begin to radiate in hotbeds of electric light.Also existing in this erotic awakening is a new approach to nature in the modern world. Instead of wires representing something anti-natural (modernity is often this sort of presence in her Nova Scotian poems, for example, when â€Å"The Moose† stares down the bus), the wires conduct ener gy into a future charged with potential where â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together† after an â€Å"Electrical Storm. † This current brings Bishop into alien territory where lesbian eroticism is illuminated by green light, vines, wires and music. Pleasure Seas,† an uncollected poem that stood alone in The Complete Poems, is amplified by the previously unpublished Florida draft-poems, many of which include the words Bone Key in the margins or under poem titles; this planned volume is visible in the recent editions and is prominent in Bishop's developing sexual-geographic poetics. In The Complete Poems, â€Å"Pleasure Seas† is first of the â€Å"Uncollected Poems† section. As written in the â€Å"Publisher's Note,† Harper's Bazaar accepted the poem but did not print it as promised in 1939.This editorial decision cut â€Å"Pleasure Seas† out of Bishop's public oeuvre until 1983 when Robert Giroux resuscitated it in the uncollected se ction. Thus it is read as a marginal poem, which has received relatively little critical attention. Far less than â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together,† a previously unpublished poem found by Lorrie Goldensohn in Brazil that has been considered integral to understanding Bishop's hidden potential as an erotic poet since Goldensohn discussed it in her 1992 book, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry.Perhaps because â€Å"Pleasure Seas† has been widely available since 1983 in The Complete Poems, this poem does not appear to critics as a found gem like â€Å"It is marvellous . . . .† Now, however, we can read these previously disparate poems together in the Library of America Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters volume, in which â€Å"Pleasure Seas† was placed accurately by editors Lloyd Schwartz and Robert Giroux in the â€Å"Unpublished Poems† section. As such, it accompanies numerous unpublished poems, many of them first published by Quinn i n Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box. Pleasure Seas† is a tour de force, and its rejection in 1939 likely indicated to Bishop that the public world was not ready for such a poem. I speculate that had that poem been published as promised, Bishop would have had more confidence in developing the publication of Bone Key, a volume which would have followed, or replaced A Cold Spring and preceded Questions of Travel; she might have re-formed A Cold Spring into a warmer, more ample volume as Bone Key.A Cold Spring ends with the lesbian mystique of â€Å"The Shampoo,† the bubbles and â€Å"concentric shocks† of which make a lot more sense when accompanied, not by the preceding poem, â€Å"Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,† but by erotic poems such as â€Å"Pleasure Seas,† â€Å"Full Moon, Key West,† â€Å"The walls went on for years & years†¦,† â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together,† and â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. â⠂¬  Bishop's writing in Florida involves tremendous struggle to express sexual desire and experience.Automatic bodily impulses contend with traditional strictures. Since in Florida â€Å"pleasures are mechanical† (EAP 49) and for Bishop counter the norms of heterosexual culture, her tentative imagination treads â€Å"the narrow sidewalks / of cement / that carry sounds / like tampered wires †¦ † in â€Å"Full Moon, Key West† (EAP 60). She fears the touch of her feet may detonate bombs. Bishop's recently published material offers explosive amplitudes measured against the constraints of traditional poetic architecture. Full Moon, Key West† and â€Å"The walls went on for years & years†¦,† in EAP are dated circa 1943. In both poems, Bishop envisions nature merging with technology to provide an extension of space in her environment: The morning light on the patches of raw plaster was beautiful. It was crumbled & fine like insects' eggs or wal ls of coral, something natural. Up the bricks outside climbed little grill-work balconies all green, the wires were like vines. And the beds, too, one could study them, white, but with crudely copied lant formations, with pleasure. (EAP 61) Teresa De Lauretis writes in Technologies of Gender about how innovative language and technology (in film) represent gender and sexuality in new formal expressions of life previously considered impossible. The new poetic material from Bishop similarly re-formulates human living spaces. In the above poem, the man-made room's construction breaks down into natural similes. A dialectic between nature and architecture has nature grow into walls, balconies and rooms.This poetic process is found in later poems such as â€Å"Song for the Rainy Season,† in which the mist enters the house to make â€Å"the mildew's / ignorant map† on the wall. Typical human divisions between construction and organicism are made fluid. In â€Å"The walls†¦,† divisions between inner and outer worlds crumble; for instance, white beds are studied, but are they beds to lie in, or plant beds on the balconies? Bishop writes that they are â€Å"with crudely copied / plant formations,† suggesting both flowers and perhaps a patterned bedspread (rather like the wallpaper-skin of â€Å"The Fish†).The phrase, â€Å"walls of coral,† itself merges architecture with nature, also echoing Stevens' 1935 image of â€Å"sunken coral water-walled† in â€Å"The Idea of Order at Key West,† which Bishop had been reading and discussing in letters with Marianne Moore. Stevens and Bishop draw attention to artifices of nature, and nature overpowering artifice. The natural versus manufactured-world dichotomy is deconstructed through innovative cross-over imagery, continuing in these lines: Up the bricks outside climbed little grill-work balconies all green, the wires were like vines. (EAP 61)Vines simply grow up buildin gs, so we have a precedent for nature's encroachment on man-made constructions. Here, Bishop replicates natural vines with â€Å"little grill-work balconies / all green,† a man-made architecture that looks as if it grows on its own. Then the poet surprises us again with another simile, â€Å"the wires were like vines. † The imagery of the wires blackly echoes that of the balconies; again this accretion lends the physical man-made constructions a fluid, surreal life of their own, which is empowered naturally by the simile that has them acting like vines.Vine-wires extend nature through technology into potential domains far from this balconied room. However, despite the revolutionary â€Å"Building, Dwelling, Thinking,† to use the title of the well-known Heidegger essay, this is a poem of walls, which offers temporary extensions of nature, only to be shut down when One day a sad view came to the window to look in, little fields & fences & trees, tilted, tan & gray . Then it went away. Bigger than anything else the large bright clouds moved by rapidly every evening, rapt, on their way to some festivity. How dark it grew, no, but life was not deprived of all that sense f motion in which so much of it consists. (EAP 62) With a last line again sounding like Stevens, and yet the rest of the poem very much Bishop, â€Å"The walls†¦Ã¢â‚¬  concludes with walls between the poet's human nature and nature's indifferent â€Å"festivity. † The muted colors of traditional human habitation infiltrate her window, so Bishop will have to wait, as her wishful thinking indicates earlier in the poem, for a â€Å"future holding up those words / as something actually important / for everyone to see, like billboards† (61). My essay hoists up these formerly scrapped images of alien technology, held back in Bishop's time, â€Å"like billboards. Those diminutive â€Å"little fields & fences & trees, tilted, tan & gray† are found in an earli er poem, â€Å"A Warning for Salesmen,† written between 1935 and 1937. Earlier poems, especially from Bishop's years in Europe, lack wires as conduits of energy and transformation. â€Å"A Warning to Salesmen† offers a static portrait of marital doldrums; it speaks of a lost friend, dry landscape, and farmer at home †¦putting vegetables away in sand In his cellar, or talking to the back Of his wife as she leaned over the stove. The farmer's land Lay like a ship that has rounded the worldAnd rests in a sluggish river, the cables slack. (EAP 16) Alice Quinn found this poem in Bishop's notebook, written when she took a â€Å"trip to France with Hallie Tompkins in July 1935†³ (251). Even if it is a poem of loss, it also anticipates gain. The slack cables await tightening. The lack of desire in the poem begs for it; Quinn notes this through Bishop's scrawling revisions: Lines scribbled at the top of the page to the right of the title: â€Å"Let us in confused, b ut common, voice / Congratulate th'occasion, and rejoice, rejoice, rejoice / The thing love shies at / And the time when love shows confidence. To the right at the bottom of the draft, Bishop writes, â€Å"OK,† but the whole poem is crossed out. And below, on the left: â€Å"My Love / Wonderful is this machine / One gesture started it. † (251) This machine anticipates the mechanical sexual pleasures found in the Florida bars written into â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe ; the Juke-Box. † â€Å"A Warning to Salesman† shows she had long been waiting for Florida. Before she slots nickels into the Floridian Juke-Box, Bishop's trip to France includes time spent residing by â€Å"Luxembourg Gardens† in fall 1935.This poem of garden civilization indicates Bishop's relationship with European traditional architecture; the poem begins: Doves on architecture, architecture Color of doves, and doves in air— The towers are so much the color of air, They could be any where. (EAP 27) While the deadpan-glorious tone might resemble Stevens, we might also think of Bishop's â€Å"The Monument,† which was written earlier and first published in 1940; it also ambiguously provokes present explorations of art, thought and place, rather than fixing memories of the past.Barbara Page's essay, â€Å"Off-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop,† clearly demonstrates that Bishop's â€Å"The Monument† is a response to Stevens' statues in Owl's Clover, one of which was located in Luxembourg Gardens, as Michael North demonstrated in The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poetry. Similar to Stevens' rhetorical parody of monuments, in Bishop's â€Å"Luxembourg Gardens,† â€Å"histories, cities, politics, and people / Are made presentable / For the children playing below the Pantheon† (27) and on goes a list of history's prim pomp.Then a puff of wind sprays the fountain's water, mocking à ¢â‚¬Å"the Pantheon,† the jet of water first drooping, then scattering itself like William Carlos Williams' phallic fountain in â€Å"Spouts. † Finally, the poem ends with a balloon flitting away, as children watching it exclaim, â€Å"It will get to the moon. † By employing the fluid play of kids, wind, water and dispersal, Bishop builds a conglomerate antithesis to traditional Parisian monumentality.With even more Stevensian flux than â€Å"The Monument,† this poem situates Bishop's critique of monuments in Europe, unlike the well-known â€Å"Monument† poem, which could be anywhere, and thus speaks of a more liberating and expansive American perspective, drifting from European classical culture possibly all the way to Asia Minor or Mongolia. Also from her 1935 notebook is â€Å"Three Poems,† which works well to explain Bishop's transition from studying the architecture of Europe to recognizing its sterile limitations and then finding her own perspective.Section III develops an emotional movement away from stultifying monumentality: The mind goes on to say: â€Å"Fortunate affection Still young enough to raise a monument To the first look lost beyond the eyelashes. † But the heart sees fields cluttered with statues And does not want to look. (EAP 19) In the final stanza a future is foretold by the promise of a fortunate traveler: Younger than the mind and less intelligent, He refuses all food, all communications; Only at night, in dreams seeking his fortune, Sees travel, and turns up strange face-cards. EAP 19) Starving (a word Susan Howe uses to describe American women poets before Dickinson), this speaker is impoverished by statues and has, as the lone alternative, future fortune in surreal night visions of travel. Bishop's travels will fill her gypsy-heart's desire as it expands its vocabulary in the roaming poetic technologies found in Florida and Brazil, but Paris itself does not illuminate love. In the Pari s of â€Å"Three Poems,† â€Å"The heart sits in his echoing house / And would not speak at all† (19).This inarticulate â€Å"prison-house† enables us to see why Bishop needed to travel in search of home as an idea, but not a physical settlement, as her use of Pascal illustrates in â€Å"Questions of Travel. † Her jaunt to Brazil inadvertently became an eighteen-year residence with Lota de Macedo Soares, but their home was not fully expressed in the volume, Questions of Travel. Florida was the source of sexual-poetic experimentation; Bishop's work from there proliferates with freedom not yet found in Europe, and not written into the published poems from Brazil.The reticent Bishop did not want to be known as a lesbian poet; it would limit her reputation and her private life in the public sphere, and she likely feared that sexual expression would not be accepted in print. A poem from Questions of Travel, â€Å"Electrical Storm† (1960), strikingly ind icates excitement with Lota in Brazil. Just as striking, though, is the repressive prison-house in this poetry. It reveals as much repression as it does desire: Dawn an unsympathetic yellow. Cra-ack! – dry and light. The house was really struck. Crack! A tinny sound, like a dropped tumbler. . . . hen hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls. Dead-white, wax-white, cold – diplomats' wives favors from an old moon party – they lay in melting windrows on the red ground until well after sunrise. We got up to find the wiring fused, no lights, a smell of saltpetre, and the telephone dead. The cat stayed in the warm sheets. The Lent trees had shed all their petals: wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls. (PPL 81) While the electrical storm is substantial, the poem narrates it after the fact, and the storm cuts off communication with a dead telephone and â€Å"wiring fused. So the electricity certainly was there, but the lightning is pejoratively â€Å"like a dropped tumbler. † And the only animal in bed is Tobias the cat, â€Å"Personal and spiteful as a neighbor's child. † Personal electricity is not expressed, certainly not through Lent; it is spited in the society of neighbors and â€Å"diplomats' wives,† whose nature is described as â€Å"dead-white,† their hail like â€Å"artificial pearls. † Unlike the earlier poem of desire, â€Å"The walls went on for years . . . ,† in which balconies are transformed by vines into wired energy, â€Å"Electrical Storm† displays the reverse action.Nature is hardened into artifice. Social civilization, like Bishop's monuments, is a restrictive agent, part of the past in conflict with the newfound energy of Bishop's tropical present. In Brazil, the poet constantly observes the natural world as vulnerable to civilization. Sometimes Bishop presents an alternative harmony, as in â€Å"Song for the Rainy Season,† which moistly answers to the repres sive short-circuiting of â€Å"The Electrical Storm† by opening the door of an â€Å"open house† to the mist infiltrating the house and causing â€Å"mildew's / ignorant map† on a wall.This poem's erotica is played out as the house receives nature's water. The house, with its opening to the outer environment, suggests Lota de Macedo Soares' property, Samambaia (a giant Brazilian fern), in the mountains above Petr? polis where Soares built Bishop a studio (PPL 911). The progressive architecture of their house lends itself to the way in which Bishop's poem has the outer environment flow indoors. More often, however, Questions of Travel traces aggressive conquests, as Bishop works through history's impact on the country. Natural power has been contained – harnessed, mined and packaged throughout history.Take â€Å"Brazil, January 1, 1502,† for example, and note how Bishop's natural images dialectically break down, then reach forward technologically. T he branches of palm are broken pale-green wheels; symbolic birds keep quiet; the lizards are dragon-like and sinful; the lichens are moonbursts; moss is hell-green; the vines are described as attacking, as â€Å"scaling-ladder vines,† and as â€Å"‘one leaf yes and one leaf no' (in Portuguese)†; and while the â€Å"lizards scarcely breathe,† the â€Å"smaller, female† lizard's tail is â€Å"red as a red-hot wire. † That beacon beckons from the poem's forms of colonial imprisonment. Breathlessness will find breath in EAP. * * William Benton's words from Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings accurately convey the benefit of studying two of Bishop's art forms to gain greater compositional insight into her â€Å"One Art. † In his introduction, he writes that, â€Å"If Elizabeth Bishop wrote like a painter, she painted like a writer† (xviii). Wires, cables and electrical technology are strewn abundantly through the paintings. O bserved in sequence, Bishop's black lines powerfully extend this emergent narrative of Bishop as an electric writer. The paintings Olivia, Harris School, County Courthouse, Tombstones for Sale, Graveyard with Fenced Graves, Interior withExtension Cord, Cabin with Porthole, and E. Bishop's Patented Slot-Machine are marked with black lines that technically disturb nature. The bold presence of Bishop's lines factor in virtually every painting to infringe upon nature (with the exception of the explicitly pretty watercolor odes to nature, such as the arrangement on the cover of One Art). When we align the Florida paintings with Bone Key and other published poems from Florida, we can chart the artist's development in accord with the technological presence of wires.As with the early poems in EAP, her oft-undated Florida paintings, circa 1937-39 when Bishop had returned from Europe, depict square architecture set off by wires askew. In Olivia, a painting of a weathered wood house on Olivia Street in Key West, the modest brown house is fronted by two contrasting white porch-pillars, and to the left â€Å"like a cosmic aspect, the telephone lines form a tilted steeple† (Benton 18) connected to the proximate telephone pole. The painting comes across as a satiric â€Å"Monument. † Likewise, the next painting, Harris School (21), is topped with battlements contrasted by wispy kites flying freely in the orange sunlight.Bishop's painterly contrasts invoke satire, rather like the parody of old Parisian architecture in â€Å"Luxembourg Gardens. † County Courthouse (23) is extremely dramatic – a transitional painting in the evolution of Bishop's transgressive art. Benton describes it well: â€Å"A view composed of what obstructs it. The central triangle [courthouse structure] that leads the eye into the painting is at once overwhelmed by foliage. Downed power lines contribute to the sense of disorder. The scene is the exact opposite of what a Sunday watercolorist might select. It is, in fact, a picture whose wit transforms it from a â€Å"scene† into an image of impasse†(22).The palms in the foreground overpower the courthouse of similar size in the center. Nature's supremacy over the architecture of man-made legal institution is accentuated by downed power lines, symbolizing, as often for Bishop, that our efforts to transmit information over and above nature depend on the co-operation of nature, the winds of which can knock down our voices. Tombstones for Sale, which is the cover of The Collected Prose, and Graveyard with Fenced Graves (31, 33) are filled with iron bars in harsh but beautiful contrast with flowering trees. Recall the iron-work balconies ‘growing'† up buildings in â€Å"The walls went on for years and years †¦. † These wonky walls are evident in Interior with Extension Cord, a painting of undetermined year with â€Å"the dramatic focus on the extension cord crossing the pl anes of the white room† (42). In here, the barren walls out-space the open door with view of the garden. The painting yearns for nature to be let in the door. Cabin with Porthole, the next painting (45), provides compositional relief. Bare but cheerful yellow walls surround the open porthole with blue ocean view; the painter's travel bags are casually set in order beside a neat flowerpot on the table.Travel looks homey here, made additionally comfortable by the fan plugged into the wall with electrical cord in the top-right corner. The next undated painting, Gray Church (47), is set by Benton in contrast to the lightness of Cabin with Porthole. The editor's placement of Gray Church, the painting's mood nearly as dark as van Gogh's The Prison Courtyard, suggests that Benton, like Quinn in EAP, ordered a dramatic narrative sequence so observers could follow an interpretive trail of artistic development. Although E.Bishop's Patented Slot-Machine (77)appears later in the book's se quence, perhaps because it is more of a sketch than a painting, it would have likely been created near the time she wrote â€Å"The Soldier and the Slot-Machine† in Florida, as Quinn documents it with a rejection letter from The New Yorker, October 28, 1942 (EAP 279). These amateur works of art evince the crucial importance of publishing flawed poems, scrawl, sketches and paintings that are incredibly useful tools to instruct us about their masters; in this case we see projection of the artist's techno-dreams. Of E.Bishop's Patented Slot-Machine, Benton writes, â€Å"The rainbow arc at the top of the picture – resembling the handle of a suitcase – bears the legend â€Å"The ‘DREAM'† (76). This dream, rainbow-shaped, carries technology in the form of the slot-machine. Whether or not observers want to view the rainbow dream as lesbian codification, as some students of â€Å"The Fish† do with that poem's victorious rainbow of otherness, the und eniable fact is that Bishop has painted â€Å"The ‘DREAM'† onto the handle of her slot-machine. This slot-machine is dependent upon currency for the dream of a fortunate future.Although an amateur painting, it is far more developed in terms of the progress of artistic, hopeful vision than earlier works, such as 1935's â€Å"Three Poems,† in which Bishop is desperately scanning seas from France, and the fortune teller turns up strange face cards as the only potential currency, so the poet dreams of travel. The 1942 sketch and poem, â€Å"The Soldier and the Slot-Machine† (EAP 56-57), not to be confused with the painting just discussed, appears like an adult-version Dr. Seuss parody of E. Bishop's Patented Slot-Machine complete with fearful alien beast atop machine in the sketch.In the poem, Bishop uses the soldier persona to depersonalize her dream, destroyed by a third-person other. Still, the persona employs first person: â€Å"I will not play the slot-m achine† bookends the poem as a mantra of abstinence from the drunken slot-machine. Nevertheless, it consumes coins until they melt surreally into â€Å"a pool beneath the floor . . . / It should be flung into the sea. / / Its pleasures I cannot afford† (EAP 58). This denial and apparent dismissal through the otherness of the soldier stays with Bishop, who cannot trash her desires in the sea; they pulled on her for years even if their expression remained unpublished.After The New Yorker's Charles Pearce rejected â€Å"The Soldier and the Slot-Machine,† Bishop recalled this event twenty-two years later in a letter to Robert Lowell: â€Å"Once I wrote an ironic poem about a drunken sailor and a slot-machine – not a success – and the sailor said he was going to throw the machine into the sea, etc. , and M[oore] congratulated me on being so morally courageous and outspoken† (EAP 279). Moore in 1964 was at that time congratulating Bishop on a moral lesson to be learned about Brazilian crime and punishment in â€Å"The Burglar of Babylon. However, the point that Bishop makes with quiet sarcasm in her letter to Lowell is that Moore missed the irony so crucial to understanding â€Å"The Soldier and the Slot-Machine. † Moore reads moral courage in Bishop's condemnations; actually, Bishop's morally courageous core, the one of social conformity that Moore applauds, melts in the machine. The soldier's denial to play it is weaker than the power of the machine itself, which melts and breaks into subterranean pieces – unacceptable mercurial junk that will be â€Å"taken away,† a disposal of natural, illicit desire.Travel in Florida and Brazil offers many cabins with portholes for Bishop to view the sea far away from stultifying northwestern culture. Sometimes Bishop allows the establishment to triumph, as in the balanced yellow painting of The Armory, Key West. Even here, though, wires dangle from the flagpole to create slight asymmetry. Merida from the Roof (27), the well-known cover of The Complete Poems, while a bit chaotic with copious windmills outnumbering church steeples, nevertheless illustrates an intoxicating tropical harmony. The dominant palm, telephone wires, city streets and buildings hang together nicely from the painter's balcony view.This Mexican painting from 1942 anticipates work Bishop would do in Brazil over the next two decades, such as â€Å"The Burglar of Babylon,† which ends with the poet looking down on Rio's crime-ridden poverty with binoculars. * * * When we contrast The Complete Poems with Edgar Allan Poe ; The Juke-Box, we can see just how much further Bishop's unpublished poems went in configuring her relation with the world through nature and technology's extensions of it; natural growth is given additional electrical currency to express sexual awakening, and I argue, a potentially full realization of her poetic power.Lorrie Goldensohn in The Biography of a Poetry discusses her discovery of â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together† in a box from Linda Nemer in Brazil. This discovery and â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box† best exemplify Bishop's rewired sexuality. Quinn cannot be certain which of these poems was written first. In terms of the arc of the poetics I'm tracing here, it makes sense for â€Å"Poe's Box† to come first because it works to loosen up the sexual expression of â€Å"It is marvellous †¦. However, Quinn notes work on â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe ; The Juke-Box† as late as 1953, and narrates its intended place as the closing poem of A Cold Spring, which Bishop considered calling Bone Key. It may have been written as early as 1938 when Bishop wrote to â€Å"classmate Frani Blough from Key West about her immersion in Poe† (EAP 271). Lloyd Schwartz and Robert Giroux date it in the late thirties to early forties period. As A Cold Spring stands, it concludes with the rapture of à ¢â‚¬Å"The Shampoo† – a thinly veiled poem of lesbian eroticism in nature's guise. And yet when I teach this poem to students, I often have to explain the â€Å"concentric shocks. â€Å"The Shampoo† is a wonderful climax, but it abruptly follows â€Å"Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore. † This sequence repeats the juxtaposition evident in Bishop's letters between her lush tropical experience and her polite correspondence with Moore. Now we can envision an enlarged not so cold spring in the key of human bone warming up with â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. † This poem is filled by emanations of light and sound from the Juke-Box. Starlight and La Conga are the Floridian dance-halls described as â€Å"cavities in our waning moon, / strung with bottles and blue lights / and silvered coconuts and conches† (49).This erotic-tropical electric fulfillment sounds more like Walcott than Bishop. The poem has â€Å"nickels fall into the slots,† drinks drop down throats, hands grope under tablecloths while â€Å"The burning box can keep the measure †¦. † Perhaps to ruin the party, Edgar Allan enters the last stanza in which Bishop writes, â€Å"Poe said that poetry was exact. † This poem, though, is a corrective to Poe's poetics, for Bishop knows for herself and Poe in the drinking establishment of poetry that â€Å"pleasures are mechanical / and know beforehand what they want / and know exactly what they want. Bishop focuses on â€Å"The Motive for Metaphor,† like Stevens, or like Baudelaire whom she was also reading at the time, knowing and tracing her desire for expression as expression. Conversely, Poe in the 19th-century tried to unite his metrical poetic exactitude with ideals of beauty while explaining his technique in â€Å"The Philosophy of Composition. † While the mechanics of meter involve precise measures, Bishop suggests that seeking pleasures is comprised of a more powerful m echanics. â€Å"Lately I've been doing nothing much but reread Poe, and evolve from Poe . . a new Theory-of-the-Story-All-My-Own. It's the ‘proliferal' style, I believe, and you will see some of the results †¦ [a reference to her prize-winning Partisan Review story ‘In Prison']† (OA, 71; EAP 271). Bishop's use of Poe illustrates her gripe with tradition as a source of monumental fixture, thus limited understanding, which has taught her well but prevents the poet from dancing at La Conga and telling that Floridian tale in A Cold Spring. Bishop wanted this poem near the end of A Cold Spring but didn't quite get it done.The final lines of the poem deal a further blow to Poe, and by extension to Bishop herself, when she asks, â€Å"how long does your music burn? / like poetry or all your horror / half as exact as horror here? † (50). Poe's horror stories (see Bishop's notes on â€Å"The Tell-Tale Heart† on the upper-right corner of the draft of this poem), and I would suggest her writing in The Complete Poems (as wonderful as it is), articulate a fictional horror that only comes half-way to expressing the full pleasure of horrific catharsis available in the experience and writing of Florida honky-tonks.Who would have thought Elizabeth Bishop a â€Å"Honky-Tonk Woman†? Bethany Hicok traces Bishop's florid night-life in her 2008 book, Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women's College, 1905-1955, and thanks to Quinn we have the poetic evidence in print. â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together† is a full and complete rendering of Bishop's eroticism. We might give Bishop latitude for not publishing this one in the Second World War period; Quinn estimates the date between 1941-6 when Bishop lived with Marjorie Stevens in Key West (267).Perhaps in the twenty-first century readers are comfortably relieved to hear Bishop express her lesbian sexuality, but in her time she did not want to be publicly scrut inized as a lesbian poet. In some respects, â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together† is like â€Å"Electrical Storm,† since the poem speaks of sex after it has happened. Here, though, the stormy clearing is less anxious and repressive. Instead of diplomats' wives and spiteful neighbors' children, Bishop feels â€Å"the air suddenly clear / As if electricity had passed through it / From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof the rain hisses, / And below, the light falling of kisses† (EAP 44). Technology is god-like, hovering over their chosen house, and yet it is not alien, for the lightning storm's electrical current of rain follows in hisses rhymed with kisses. Bishop is fully in the arena now – with the powers above electrically charging the nature that conducts itself harmoniously in the bedroom. In the second stanza electricity frames the house so readers can imagine it being sketched artistically.Remnants of past prison-houses exist, and yet the past constraints of an inarticulate heart are transformed in this reality where â€Å"we imagine dreamily / Now the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning / Would be delightful rather than frightening;† the pleasure of this reality is also a dream, and it remains a dream in the last stanza. My point is not simply that dreams can come true, but that this true dream is limited to this house's electrical currents. The speaker is â€Å"lying flat on [her] back,† which is an interesting line because it suggests sex, and yet it is from this position, this â€Å"same implified point of view† that the speaker emphasizes inquiry: â€Å"All things might change equally easily, / Since always to warn us there might be these black / Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise / The world might change to something quite different †¦. † What sort of change is envisioned? The poem vaguely considers open futures; â€Å"something quite differentâ €  could be horrific or promising. Whatever change may come, these wires hang over the house, through Bishop's poem and art as charged presences connected to future advancement. â€Å"Dear Dr. -† was written in 1946, around the same time Bishop might have finished â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together. † It continues to wire her present into the future: Yes, dreams come in colors and memories come in colors but those in dreams are more remarkable. Particular & bright(at night) like that intelligent green light in the harbor which must belong to some society of its own, & watches this one now unenviously. (EAP 77) These seven lines pull together a lot. Bishop's dreams – in Paris were quite alienated from her art-culture milieu; in Florida dreams are amplified by Juke-Boxes, liquor and dancing.There she finds physical lushness to match the dream currents that will sizzle in Brazilian experience. And yet in â€Å"Dear Dr. —† near the end of he r relationship with Marjorie Stevens, Bishop is writing from Nova Scotia to her very helpful psychiatrist, Ruth Foster (286), expressing this foreign glow as an alien perspective: â€Å"that intelligent green light in the harbor / which must belong to some society of its own,† suggesting some alien technological prophesy, which â€Å"watches this one now unenviously† (77).Goldensohn writes of electrical impasse in The Biography of a Poetry: â€Å"But still the wires connect to dreams, to nerve circuits that carry out our dreams of rescue and connection, or that fail to: in â€Å"The Farmer's Children,† a story written in 1948 shortly before Bishop went to Brazil, the wires also appear, telephone wires humming with subanimal noise eerily irrelevant to the damned and helpless children of the story† (33). This story, written late in the Florida years, is further evidence of Bishop's â€Å"proliferal† style, the multi-generic â€Å"One Art† deve loped in response to family, Northern traditions, Poe, and Europe.Bishop's evolving art comprised of poetry, fiction, letters and painting demonstrates psycho-sexual evolution found in Southern tropical harbors, far from the Northern remoteness of her mother's Nova Scotia. These poems from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box register extensively the alien vision so far ahead of what was admitted in Bishop's present. By contrasting the reserved perfections from The Complete Poems, such as â€Å"Electrical Storm,† and the limits of history as in â€Å"Brazil, January 1, 1502,† we can see what is held back there, waiting for the more fully expressed imperfect transgressions of Edgar Allan Poe ; The Juke-Box.The Complete Poems provide intricately innovative poems that point out limited perspectives while expanding ethical imaginations of the future, whereas Quinn's book enables readers to thoroughly explore the dream workings of a poet bursting from the libidinal confines of he r time, swinging by green vines through wires of sound and light to transmit electricity for an erotically ample future. Bishop's anxiety and longing for a more tolerant future society, as expressed in â€Å"Dear Dr. —,† can also be traced back to her thwarted effort at publishing â€Å"Pleasure Seas. This powerful erotic poem sits chronologically in the middle of her poetic development away from Europe (signaled by â€Å"Luxembourg Gardens† and â€Å"Three Poems† circa 1935), and stimulated by Florida in the late 1930s. â€Å"Pleasure Seas† illustrates the new powerful range of Bishop to be discovered when reading EAP and the Library of American edition next to The Complete Poems. As an â€Å"Uncollected Poem† in The Complete Poems, â€Å"Pleasure Seas† would perhaps sit more easily in the Poe . . . Box. The aberration of â€Å"Pleasure Seas† in The Complete Poems may explain why only a handful of critics have discussed its s ignificance.Bonnie Costello, Barbara Comins, Marilyn May Lombardi, and Jeredith Merrin have published helpful interpretations of â€Å"Pleasure Seas. † Each critic picks up on the poem as an indication of developments that Bishop makes, or does not quite make, in other published poems. Bonnie Costello, for example, writes in Questions of Mastery: â€Å"’Seascape’ and ‘Pleasure Seas’†¦anticipate the perspectival shifts in ‘Twelfth Morning; or What You Will,’ ‘Filling Station,’ and ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,’ in all of which the poet's pessimism is countered.In these later poems she achieves a vision at once immediate, even intimate, and yet directed at the world and questioning a single perspective of selfhood† (15-16). Costello also makes an important observation in a footnote: â€Å"‘Song' may be a rewriting of ‘Pleasure Seas'† (249, n. 16). However, according to Schwart z and Giroux, â€Å"Song† was written in 1937, two years before â€Å"Pleasure Seas,† which then reads as an amplified fulfillment of the sad song from two years earlier. The latter ocean poem swells with pleasure in face of forces that threaten that very pleasure.Now that we can read â€Å"Pleasure Seas† in the larger context of Bishop's struggle to write sexual poetics, the poem makes more sense and gathers like-minded poems into its vortex of desire. â€Å"Pleasure Seas† is a study of water — contained, distorted and freed. It begins with still water â€Å"in a walled off swimming-pool† (195) – another wall like the ones that go on â€Å"for years and years† in the poem from 1943. This man-made pool contains â€Å"pink Seurat bathers,† like the publicly acceptable automatons in his famous paintings, Bathers and La Grande Jatte.This viewer, though, is a surrealist who observes this scene through â€Å"a pane of bluish glass. † Seurat's bathers have â€Å"beds of bathing caps,† again resembling and anticipating the beds inside and outside the balconied rooms of â€Å"The walls go on for years and years †¦. † Are these bathers' heads in or out of it? Contained within a pool, they are willing prisoners of public space in chemically-treated water. At the close of the poem, they are â€Å"Happy . . . likely or not–† in their floral â€Å"white, lavender, and blue† caps, which are susceptible to greater weather forcing the water â€Å"opaque, / Pistachio green and Mermaid Milk. The floral garden colors of their caps contrast with disarming shades. That awfully bright green is â€Å"like that intelligent green light in the harbor† of â€Å"Dear Dr. ,† belonging to the alien society unenvious of the contemporaneous one. Jeredith Merrin, in â€Å"Gaiety, Gayness and Change,† asks how â€Å"Pleasure Seas† moves â€Å"from entrapme nt to freedom, from (to borrow from Bishop's own phrasing from other poems) Despair to Espoir, from the ‘awful' to the ‘cheerful'†? (Merrin in Lombardi 154).The next sentence of â€Å"Pleasure Seas† envisions free ocean water â€Å"out among the keys† of Florida mingling, interestingly, with multi-chromatic â€Å"soap bubbles, poisonous and fabulous,† suggesting both â€Å"The Shampoo† to come, and the poisonous rainbow of oil in â€Å"The Fish† – another natural being that should exist freely in nature, which is caught in a rented boat. Even â€Å"the keys float lightly like rolls of green dust† connotes geological formations that are susceptible to erosion. Everything green and natural is made alien. The threat is intensified by an airplane; a form of human technological height that flattens the water to a â€Å"heavy sheet. The sky view is dangerous in Bishop's poems; consider â€Å"12 O'Clock News† in whi ch the view from the media plane ethnocentrically objectifies the dying indigenes below. In â€Å"Pleasure Seas† the poet says the plane's â€Å"wide shadow pulses† above the surface, and down to the yellow and purple submerged marine life. The water's surface even becomes â€Å"a burning-glass† for the sun – the supreme force of nature is harnessed as destructive technology, as with the high airplane, which, as Barbara Comins notes in â€Å"That Queer Sea,† is â€Å"casting a ‘wide shadow' upon the water . . . uggesting some inherent anguish in going one's ‘own way'† (191). Comins and Merrin see Bishop here pushing the poetic limits of her sexual expression. Even though the sun turns the water into â€Å"a burning glass,† the sun naturally cools â€Å"as the afternoon wears on. † Nature and technology dance in a somewhat vexed but â€Å"dazzling dialectic† here. Brightest of all in this poem is the â€Å"vi olently red bell-buoy / Whose neon-color vibrates over it, whose bells vibrate // To shock after shock of electricity. † Neon is the most alien of lights. As with the Juke-Box charging its place, this buoy electrifies its environment.Its otherly transgression â€Å"rhythmically† shocks pulses through the sea. â€Å"The sea is delight. The sea means room. / It is a dance floor, a well ventilated ballroom. † These lines from â€Å"Pleasure Seas† contain the charge picked up in â€Å"the dance-halls† of â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. † That poem has seedy, drunken desire releasing the inner alien; in â€Å"Pleasure Seas† it is potentially trans-gendered here in the homonym of the â€Å"red bell-buoy,† the color of passion also found in â€Å"the red-hot wire† of the lizard tail in â€Å"Brazil, January 1, 1502. † That lizard is notably female. Both poems vibrate outward into larger spaces.From paradisal waters, the poem retreats to the â€Å"tinsel surface† of swimming pool or ship deck where â€Å"Grief floats off / Spreading out thin like oil. † Natural poison spills, damages, and disperses. â€Å"And love / Sets out determinedly in a straight line†¦But shatters† and refracts â€Å"in shoals of distraction† (196). These shoals receding around the keys anticipate the homosexual vertigo of Crusoe's surreal islands in the late great semi-autobiographical poems of Geography III, the 1976 volume beginning with young Elizabeth Bishop's formative experience of inversion â€Å"In the Waiting Room† – â€Å"falling off / the round, turning world† (160). Pleasure Seas† ends with water crashing into the coral reef shelf – at the surface of nature, half in, half out – â€Å"An acre of cold white spray is there / Dancing happily by itself. † Out there in the sea, as land gives way to coral reef, the poet creates a  "well ventilated ballroom† to be free and ecstatic. Unlike the public spaces of the Florida honky-tonks, these pleasure seas are solitary. They are, however, natural – and thus contrast the ironic happiness of â€Å"the people in the swimming-pool and on the yacht, / Happy the man in that airplane, likely as not–† (196). This pleasure of 1939 holds the promise of liberation, momentarily.While explorations in the late thirties lead to joyful poems such as â€Å"It is marvellous to wake up together,† and the thirsty â€Å"Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,† another Florida poem bids farewell, circa 1946. â€Å"In the golden early morning †¦Ã¢â‚¬  contains many of the Floridian tropes merging nature with technology. About a trip to the airport, it indicates a break up with Marjorie Stevens (â€Å"M† in the poem). As the speaker is being driven to the airport in the early morning, she reads the newspaper stories of human horror: I kept wondering why we expose ourselves to these farewells ; dangers—Finally you got there ; we started. It was very cold ; so much dew! Every leaf was wet ; glistened. The Navy buildings ; wires ; towers, etc. looked almost like glass ; so frail ; harmless. The water on either side was perfectly flat like mirrors—or rather breathed-on mirrors. (EAP 80) The water as foggy mirror is an example of how technology (a mirror in this case) extends nature to reflect for Bishop an extension of herself that can't quite exist freely on its own, or in the social world. More dramatically, an airplane descends this early morning: â€Å"Then we heard the plane or felt it . . .† She feels the sublime vehicle â€Å"as if it were made out of / the dew coming together, very shiny. † The plane is similar to the aircraft's technological transgression in â€Å"Pleasure Seas,† but â€Å"In the golden early morning . . . ,† it is also like a product of nature made from the dew. This simile resembles the fusion of technology and nature in â€Å"Pleasure Seas† where the red bell-buoy charges the sea, or in â€Å"The walls . . . † where the â€Å"wires were like vines. † These images express Bishop's longing to extend but not quite transcend the provocative desires of the physical world.Her projections are made possible by poetic language's explicit tropic function: it is a technological extension of reality. Bishop's technologies blatantly transgress nature by pointing to her exclusion from it when it participates in traditional symbolic order. She comments, as the flight crew in the poem gets out of the plane, â€Å"I said to you that it was like the procession / at the beginning of a bullfight . . . † (EAP 81). Somebody's going to die. From the outside looking in, Bishop is neither inside the plane, or remaining part of the natural morning. Always liminal, always on the move, she and her poetry are the