Trip itinerary Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Trip itinerary - Assignment Example In this ethnically diverse category, most of the people have attained college education level and are professionals who are urbanized. The average age of people in this category is less than 55 years and families may or may not have children. In terms of lifestyle, people in the American Dreams Segment like to visit zoos, watch entertainment TV and read Tribune. In addition, people in this category shop at Kaiser Pharmacy and are able to afford vehicles such as Volkswagen Tiguan signifying their income levels. The itinerary summary involves a planned tour to Oklahoma from Houston by road. In Oklahoma, the family, which consists of two parents with an average age of 48 and 50 years and two children, aged 18 and 20 years will visit several places including zoo parks. The family will also look for an accommodation in Candlewood Suites where they will be retiring for the three nights of their tour in Oklahoma. In addition, the family will also have a chance to carry out shopping activities in Outlet Shoppes and visit Yellow Rose Theatre for entertainment. This itinerary is relevant for this segment because there is enough time to drive from Houston to Oklahoma City considering that the family has a compact Volkswagen Tiguan SUV that is able to carry enough luggages for the four members and can withstand the long journey of about 1500kms to and from Oklahoma from Houston. In addition, travelling to the museums, theatres and shopping in areas around Oklahoma City is within the family level of i ncome. The family will organize necessary luggage including clothes and essential utilities for use in Oklahoma. The family will make sure to have enough money to cater for all the expenses including motor vehicle gasoline since the journey to and from Oklahoma is by road. After being prepared for the trip, the family will start the journey at 0700Hrs from Houston using their Volkswagen Tiguan SUV. The journey from Houston

Product Life-Cycle Model Essay -- essays research papers

Overview The product can be defined as goods, services or both; in the other words it’s anything that satisfies customer need. Each product has its own limited life, however it shares the same aspect and we define the period that the product goes through as the â€Å"Product life cycle†. The Product life cycle consist of four stages starting from introduction stage, growth stage, maturity stage and decline stage. At the introduction stage, the product is not popular and can’t really make a lot of profit. Its marketing cost may be high in order to test a market and set up a distribution channel. At the growth stage, the product start making a profit, the sales increase rapidly with some cost on marketing especially brand building. Competitors enter the market, often in large number depending on how attractive the market is. When a profit starts to decline, it’s the sign of ‘Maturity stage’. At maturity stage, the sales continue to increase but at the decreasing rate until become stable, because of price competition. The product reaches its peak at this stage, most companies fight aggressively to maintain their market share. The competition is very intense, unfortunately a small firms will die one by one. During the decline stage, the profit start to drop gradually, each firm has to manage carefully. There’re not many choice to choose now; take the most out of it before exit or expand the market by using marketing mix strategies in order to extend product life. Can product life...

Money and Academics

Different schools and learning institutions perform differently in terms of providing better academic services. The output is measured using the student output both in the academic and the professional field. However, the underpinnings that characterize all these learning institutions that offer outstanding performances seem to boil down to finances. All schools world wide that display outstanding performance hugely rely on research activities. On the other hand, schools that have no enough funds to support research projects are left confined to pure classroom academics. Research activities expand the scope of the learner’s understanding in a practical manner, thus not only helping to deeply inculcate a concept in the student’s mind, but also equips the same with the capacity to apply knowledge practically. To underscore this fact, all governments in the developed economies disburse funds to learning institutions to boost research activities. In Ohio State University alone, a big fraction of its 750 American Dollars, which has been partially sourced by the Federal government, has been slotted for research activities which will take the shape of field work and internet connectivity. Moreover, the top nine American benchmarks of the research universities are rated highly in academic performance in America. Within this rubric are the Arizona University, Illinois University, Minnesota University, Michigan University, Texas University, the Pennstate University, Wisconsin University, the Washington University and the UCLA (National Science Foundation, 1979). Money playing a pivotal role in eliciting sound academic performance is always concomitant with qualified and well trained teaching and non teaching staff. A qualified teaching staff is always instrumental in explaining both simple and complex concepts in the most effective way, while on the other hand, a qualified non teaching staff ensures effective and efficient coordination and administration of the school. A school that is well administered has all the strategies for success to follow through and does so efficiently. All the intellectual and academic resources that are brought into a common pool ensure success. Learning institutions that are short of finance cannot afford the payment of such personnel. Schools with efficient teaching facilities have better accruals compared to those that lack these. Primary learning facilities such as lecture halls, and writing boards are much needed for effective learning. Schools with dilapidated lecture halls, writing boards, seats and light will definitely produce stunted academic results. Conversely, secondary learning facilities such as laboratories, libraries and computers are also very important if there is to be academic success. Libraries ensure accessibility of information and also shields away distraction while the computer enhances and maintains quick access of knowledge. All top leading learning institutions have adapted the computers which have been installed with the fiber optic cables. Apart from this, their libraries are well supplied with computers which are serviced with the internet. Even the Ohio state university’s one of the smallest branches in the Sillicon Valley has connection with research universities. Almost all researches that aim at ranking universities peg their judgments on internet connectivity in relation to accessibility of information and research output. All these facilities call for money. The schools’ ability to create and sustain departments that provide aids to learning such as counseling centers, centers for linkages and exchange programs is not automatic since their maintenance call for huge capital to maintain the workforce and other running expenses. Centers for linkages apart from establishing direct links between the students and potential employers, also feeds the student fraternity with information on internship opportunities and advise the student on the courses to take in relation to the dynamics of the employment market as well. Exchange programs on the other hand oversee the interschool transfers to help willing students acquire a wider global perspective both on the scope of life and in the field of study. To underscore the importance of counseling in academic excellence, the UCLA University for instance, has the Academic Advantage Program, a counseling center at the UCLA campus to ensure academic based counseling and mentoring program for the 6,000 undergraduates with a dominant aim of bolstering academic excellence. The need for academic based counseling is so rife that centers such as Costello Center which has no affiliation to any school whatsoever, have emerged to offer these services to students who are concerned with the need to realize personal growth in terms of personal, academic, career and social goals. In addition to this, mental health services are offered by the same institutions (Clarke, 2003). Learning institutions that have enough money to support these arrangements have higher propensity to produce more intellectuals than institutions that are financially challenged. Educational institutions that are endowed with enough resources have the capability to sustain continuous spates of free public lectures, talks from professionals, and forums. These programs are of untold values since they do not only allow open dissemination of information or knowledge due to open attendance, but also through the questioning and answering methodology, the student fraternity is challenged to seek more information by further reading. Besides, these schools that are privileged enough to support debates and quiz competitions boost academic dexterity among students. The concept of rewards and punishment are well known and has been recommended by psychologists, educationists and sociologists to be a very effective methodology in teaching and learning. This concept involves rewarding desirable traits and punishing bad ones. Since it is innate in man the desire to have one’s efforts appreciated, it has been the practice of many to use the concept of rewards to motivate hard work so as to elicit good performance. Having known the impact of this methodology, the federal government through the Boston Police Athletic League recently stepped in to congratulate over 100 students for their outstanding performance records. A similar case to this is that one of Charlotte Hand, a Bachelor of Education student in English language, linguistic studies and literature. The above student had given up on pursuing her educational programs due to inability to service her school fees until when she heard of the UCLA’ s incentives that come in the form of rewards of raw academic excellence. Many institutions such as the Ede and Ravenscroft which issue academic gowns in each graduating ceremony and also give 1,000 pounds to the Combined Honors Department to reward non finalists who have an excellent academic track record have increased in number. All these are but few illustrations that stress the importance of issuing of rewards to increase the zest in academic excellence. Schools with large pools of resources are able to achieve this feat and even to stretch it to a broader extent while the financially distressed learning institutions can do this but only in a much constrained condition (Dirks, Elley and Oriner, 1994). Whenever money and resource are scarce, there is a direct effect on school’s examining program by limiting it to the traditional method of examining which is solely exam based. This conventional method of testing is limited in its scope since it does not delve on all the topics and is always occasional. One of the demerits of this procedure is that it places labels on students with low marks as weak, or poor. This stigmatization in turn plummets the student’s ability to learn. In the same wavelength, these financially challenged educational institutions on the backdrop of financial challenges are not able to obtain external exams that would capture well the expected standards of the rest of the students within the learning fraternity. However, other learning institutions are able to embrace more comprehensive methods of examining the students so that their other talents are discovered and nourished as the weak areas are worked on. This has a cathartic effect on the stigma, and therefore accords the student with the chance to improve on feeble areas. Conversely, learning institutions that are bedeviled by financial problems are not able to procure the services of the external markers, making the students vulnerable to subjectivity. This problem is not familiar in developed economies but is very rampart in the developing economies where the latter problem was being exploited by unscrupulous college and university lecturers to award marks to students in exchange of sexual favors. The African continent is rife with such cases. Ameliorations are however being seen in pockets of Africa such as Kenya which has adopted the methodology of using external markers in the end of semester exams since the dawn of the 21 century. Schools and learning institutions that have the financial capability to accord student with learning incentives such as bursaries and educational loans also boost the students’ academic output compared to those that do not. This is because the anxiety that sets in resulting from lack and the fear that occurs out of the anticipation of being dismissed or being suspended from learning always have a reducing effect on one’s the academic output. Just as a government that does not offer learning incentives should not anticipate an intellectually rich population, so should a school that does not issue bursaries and scholarship services to its students expect academic results that only maintain the status quo. It is true that there are cases where students excel in financially challenged schools but this fact must be taken into consideration with the ratio that do not make it in the same schools. The fact that only one student manages decent grades from an institution that is financially challenged is a pointer to the truth that there are many pupils with vast untapped potential from the disadvantaged schools due to the adverse socio-economic conditions. References. Clarke, C. H. (2003). Growth of Canadian universities. US: UBC. Press. Dirks, B. N., Elley, G., Ortner, B. S. (1994). A reader in contemporary social theory. US: Princeton University Press. National Science Foundation (1979).Importance of maintaining Research excellence.US: NAS Â   Â   Â   Â   Â   Â   Â  

Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, and the First Spreadsheet

Any product that pays for itself in two weeks is a surefire winner. That’s what Dan Bricklin, one of the inventors of the first computer spreadsheet. VisiCalc was released to the public in 1979. It ran on an Apple II computer. Most early microprocessor computers had been  supported by BASIC and a few games, but VisiCalc introduced a new level in application software. It was considered a fourth generation software program. Before this,  companies were investing time and money creating financial projections with manually calculated spreadsheets. Changing a single number meant recalculating every single cell on the sheet. VisiCalc allowed them to change any cell and the entire sheet would be automatically recalculated. VisiCalc took 20 hours of work for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more creative,† Bricklin said. The History of VisiCalc   Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented VisiCalc. Bricklin was studying for his Master of Business Administration degree at Harvard Business School when he joined up with Frankston to help him write the programming for his new electronic spreadsheet. The two started their own company, Software Arts Inc., to develop their product. I dont know how to answer what it was like because early Apple machines had so few tools,† Frankston said about programming VisiCalc for the Apple II. â€Å"We just had to keep debugging by isolating a problem, looking at memory in the limited debugging – which was weaker than the DOS DEBUG and had no symbols – then patch and retry and then re-program, download and try again and  again...   An Apple II version was ready by the fall of 1979. The team started writing versions for the Tandy TRS-80, the Commodore PET and the Atari 800. By October, VisiCalc was a fast seller on the shelves of computer stores at $100.   In November 1981, Bricklin received the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in honor of his innovation. VisiCalc was soon sold to Lotus Development Corporation where it was developed into the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet for the PC by 1983.  Bricklin never received a patent for VisiCalc because software programs were not eligible for patents by the Supreme Court until after 1981. Im not rich because I invented VisiCalc,† Bricklin said, â€Å"but I feel that Ive made a change in the world. Thats a satisfaction money cant buy.   Patents? Disappointed? Dont think of it that way, Bob Frankston said. Software patents werent feasible then so we chose not to risk $10,000.   More on Spreadsheets   The DIF format was developed in 1980, allowing spreadsheet data to be shared and imported into other programs such as word processors. This made spreadsheet data more portable.   SuperCalc was introduced in 1980, the first spreadsheet for the popular micro OS called CP/M. The popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was introduced in 1983. Mitch Kapor founded Lotus and used his previous programming experience with VisiCalc to create 1-2-3.   Excel and Quattro Pro spreadsheets were introduced in 1987, offering a more graphical interface.