Global Business Today The Hofstede Study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Global Business Today The Hofstede Study - Essay Example Initially, the company plans to open a sales office to relocate key members of their management team to the country as well as hiring executive who are natives of the country. The plans might include developing production facilities in these same countries over the next decade. Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) This dimension implies the level of a society’s broadmindedness for uncertainty. It tells to what point a culture programs its members to feel at ease in unexpected situations. The power distance is quite low in Denmark the Danes incredibly democratic approach the Danes deem independency, equal rights and that management facilitates. Power is equally distributed to the lowest levels of any organization; managers’ count on the experience of their workers. Institutions has incredible informal business atmosphere with direct and involving communication. Employees of any organization expect to be consulted in the decision making process. This facilitate smooth establishment of the Azure Sky Tea offices. Denmark has a high preference for a loosely-knit the level of interdependence of the society to its members. The social framework where persons are anticipated to take care of themselves and their direct families, it is relatively easy to start doing business with the Danes. Danes is more individualist than a collective society (Rothwell 2010). This is similar to the US and facilitates business growth due to personal efforts attributed to the business. Azure Sky Tea therefore, will smoothly fit in the business environment. Denmark is considered a feminine society, an efficient administrator is accommodating to the personnel, and decision making is attained in association of key members. Danes strive for consensus and people value equality, solidarity and quality in their working lives, conflicts are resolved

Reflection 9 Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Reflection 9 - Research Paper Example making companies should consider new marketing and advertising strategies in addition to reinventing their products rather than repackaging them in different ways. Three different kinds of new cereal packaging for traditional cereal can be zippered plastic bags, metalized bag lining, or selling the cereal in air-tight jars. The common factor among all three types of packaging is that they are useful for the customers even when the cereal is finished. For example, zippered plastic bags can be used to carry fresh vegetables like spinach from the grocery store to the home, or to carry salad from home to school. Such a packaging is very useful in the present age when the use of plastic shopping bags is discouraged. Metallized bags are even more useful than the plastic bags since they help keep the food fresh and safe from the moisture and the outside odors. Air-tight jars are also very useful for storing bakery items and confectionaries like biscuits and cookies. My favorite cereal packaging amongst the three is zipped plastic bags because their use surpasses the use of other two options in everyday life. In addition, they are the most cost-effect ive option for the cereal companies to avail. The Canadian people are very fond of biscuits. The cereal makers should consider making biscuits with cereals. The cereal makers should analyze which of their flavors have acquired maximum sales in the past and the same can be converted into biscuits. Another kind of cereal can be spicy and salty cereals. These days, there is a growing trend among the Canadian consumers to eat flavored and fried pulses. Traditionally, cereals are very mildly flavored and the spicy flavor is particularly hard to find. So the cereal makers should try their luck with the fried and spicy range of cereals. Another kind of cereal can be chocolates. The weight-conscious Canadian consumers crave chocolate and can never have enough of it despite their awareness that it is a very high-calorie food item

Imaging Techniques in Medical Science

Imaging Techniques in Medical Science Electrodiagnostics Electrodiagnosis is the field of study that utilizes the science of electrophysiology. Specifically, electrodiagnostics study the human neurophysiology through the utilization of electrical technology. Neurodiagnostics, evoked potentials and electromyography are aspects of electro diagnosis. Electromyography was the first electrodiagnostic examination to be developed. The procedure involves the placement of needles to several muscles to record various stages of muscle activity, minimal contraction, maximal activity and even rest. A normal muscle is electrically silent when at rest. Spontaneous depolarization of individual muscle fibers results from damaged muscle tissue. The mentioned alterations can be detected through the needle examination portion of electrodiagnostic examination. [122] No special preparation is generally necessary. Avoid using any lotions or creams on the day of the examination. Temperature could affect the result of the test hence if the temperature is cold; the patient should wait in a warm room for a while before the test is conducted. One concern with electromyographic testing is that needles are utilized and it could be painful. However, the new computerized technology permits the usage of needles that can records so that small insertion of it feels lesser painful than the insertion of a normal size needle. Needles with small gauge can be used, because nothing is aspirated or injected. A troublesome trend is the performance of nonphysician health care personnel in electromyographic testing. Interpretation of electromyograms and performance of electromyography needs enough technical skill and capability to assimilate physician’s understanding. [121] In a study conducted by Rathinaraj and colleagues regarding the efficacy of spinal segmental stabilization exercise program and the efficiency to improve the muscular activity and pain reduction which is assessed through electromyography because limited studies are conducted using electromyography as an assessment parameter of muscular activity. Their study show ed that exercise play a vital role in alleviating low back pain particularly in the mechanical back pain brought by spinal instability, which needs spinal segmental stabilization exercise program. Positive progress in muscular activity and pain reduction proves the exercise program. History of low back pain is associated with higher baseline muscle activation and that electromyography responses are modulated from this activated state, rather than showing acute burst activity from inactive state, perhaps to prevent trunk displacements. Nerve conduction studies are essential part of the complete electrodiagnostic examination. [123] In a nerve conduction studies, the contraction is caused by the electrical charge distributed to the nerves in the periphery. An electrode capable of recording is posited on a muscle innervated by the specific nerve, and information about impulse can be recorded including its latency. Latency is the time required for an impulse to travel from stimulus to the recording. Nerve conduction velocity and the distanced traveled can also be computed. The said measures are important gauge of damage to the nerve which specifically tests the integrity of the myelin sheath of the nerves. The nerve conduction studies and needle examination are key components of a complete electromyographic examination. The amplitude of the contraction of the muscle can be compared signal’s initial size thus providing information regarding the number of functional neurons that consists the nerve. Nerve conduction study is also referred as nerve conduction velocity test. During this procedure, two electrodes will be attached to the surface of the skin. One electrode will stimulate the nerve while the other one will record it. The speed of nerve conduction studies is associated to the degree of myelination and diameter of the nerve. A nerve functioning normally transmits a stronger and faster impulse than an altered nerve. It is like an electric wire with plastic or rubber insulation around it. Generally the range of normal conduction velocity is 50 to 60 meters per second. However, the normal conduction velocity may be different from one nerve to another and one individual to another. Nerve conduction velocity test is commonly conducted along with electromyography. A condition that may be examined with nerve conduction studies includes Carpal tunnel syndrome, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Charcot-Mari-Tooth syndrome, herniated disc, neuropathy, polyneuropathy, sciatic nerve problem s and peripheral nerve injuries. Nerve conduction study techniques specifically include motor nerve conduction studies and sensory nerve conduction studies. Sensory nerve conduction studies are normal when focal sensory loss is due to nerve root damage for the nerve roots are proximal to the nerve bodies in the dorsal ganglia. [33] Evoked potentials or evoked responses, measures the electrophysiologic responses of the nervous system to different stimuli. Theoretically, almost any sensory modality can be tested, however in clinical practice only few are used in routine basis. [208] Evoked potentials demonstrate abnormal sensory function when the neurologic test results do not reveal abnormalities. It reveals clinically unsuspected pathology when demyelinating disease is suspected. It determines the anatomic distribution of a disease process and it objectively monitors the condition whether the patient is progressing or not. [125] Visual evoked potential examines the function of the visual pathway beginning from the retina going to the occipital cortex. It specifically measures the capacity of the visual pathways to conduct from the optic nerve, to theoptic chiasm and optic radiations going to the occipital cortex. Brainstem auditory evoked potentials measure the function of the auditory nerve and auditory pathways in the brainstem. [124] Somatosensory evoked potential is a diagnostic test to assess the speed of impulse conduction across the spinal cord. The said methodology is consists of using electrical stimulus in the nerves of arms and legs measuring the impulse generated by different points in the body. Electrodiagnostics is utilized to examine lumbosacral radiculopathy potentially underlying low back pain. The examinations serve as an extension of the physical examination and clinical history furthermore it complements the neuroimaging studies. Among the common low back pathologies amenable to electrodiagnostic studies include spinal stenosis and lumbosacral disc herniation. The electrodiagnostics can help in the decision making processes when considering surgical management. [126] Electrodiagnostic studies are essential part of the diagnostic evaluation when the physical examination or history suggests that neural structures may contribute as symptom generators. Lumbosacral radiculopathies, peripheral nerve injuries and plexopathies are of primary concern when examining patients having low back pain. The study assists in quantifying neurophysiologic injuries and alterations using the said techniques. Bone Scan A bone scan shows the images of metabolic activity of the skeleton. Conventionally, it is accomplished by imaging radionuclide whose physiology closely resembles a metabolic activity within the bone. Nuclear scintigraphy of the bone generally uses the radionuclides fluoride-18 (F-18) or technetium-99m (Tc-99m). Tc-99m is commonly attached to medronic acid (Tc-99m MDP) and F-18 incorporated into sodium fluoride (F-18 NaF). The molecules are injected intravenously while a nuclear camera that contains salt crystal captures the decay of photons from radioisotope. This is attained through the process of fluorescence or scintillation that occurs when the photon released by the radionuclide hits the salt crystals within the nuclear camera. The scintillations are converted to images for interpretation by nuclear medicine specialist. [127] A bone scan is used utilized to: [143] Diagnose a bone tumor or neoplasms Ascertain if a cancer already metastasizes to the bones. The common cancers that could spread to the bones include breast, lung, prostate, thyroid, and kidney. Diagnose a fracture, especially if it cannot be seen on a plain x-ray Rule-out osteomyelitis or bone infection Determine or diagnose the etiology of bone pain, when no other cause has been recognized Assess metabolic disorders, such as renal osteodystrophy, osteoporosis, osteomalacia, primary hyperparathyroidism, complex regional pain syndrome, and Pagets disease Bone scans are useful in a wide range of conditions. A common reason to have a bone scan is for examination of pain, in which bone scan can assist in identifying whether the source of the pain if from bone pathology or form soft tissue trauma. There are no specific preparations needed for radionuclide bone scan when using the tracer that map calcium metabolism, F-18 NaF or Tc-99m MDP. Patient should continue take their medications normally and eat normally. It is helpful to stay hydrated since the radiotracers are eliminated through the urine. Bone scans were known to emit much more radiation than CT and radiography. It must be kept in mind when considering whether or not to perform scans on a child. [108] Before the bone scan, the patient should make it known if she is or might be pregnant and if she is breast feeding. The patient can use formula for 1 to 2 days after the scanning to wait until the radioactive tracer is gone from the body. The patient should report to the doctor if he or she have had an X-ray test utilizing barium as a contrast material, such as a barium enema or have taken a medication that contains bismuth within the past 4 days because barium and bismuth can interfere with test results of the scanning. The patient should limit his or her fluids for up to 4 hours before commencing the the test for the patient will be instructed to drink extra fluids after the injection of the tracer. The patient will empty his or her bladder right before the scan. Most probably the patient will have to wait for at least 1 to 3 hours after the injection of the tracer before your bone scan is done. [144] The images produced by the bone scan should depict that the radioactive material has been distributed evenly all over the body. There must be no areas of increased or decreased distribution. Hot spots are portions with an increased distribution of the radioactive material. On the other hand cold spots are areas that show lesser of the amount of radioactive material. [143] Many false-positive results can be expected among older adults. Discitis, osteomyelitis, metastatic disease, rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative spondylosis and ankylosing spondylodis may result in abnormal findings in the spine that are not directly related to acute trauma. False-negative results may occur in the first hours after acute trauma. If possible, 72 hours should be allowed to pass prior to nuclear bone scanning of the lumbar spine is attempted. [127] Thermography Thermography is a noninvasive procedure that images infrared radiation (heat) released by the body surface. It is based on the principle that alterations in different of body functions alter the cutaneous vascular supply. Pain is a complicated phenomenon that cannot be simplified to a direct correlation with cutaneous heat production. Thermography. Thermography does not take a picture of pain itself; it does reveal pathophysiologic conditions related with soft tissue, circulatory neurovascular and musculoskeletal disorders.There are two type of thermography. It includes liquid crystal or contact and electroninc or noncontact thermography. [129] The contact thermography utilizes cholesterol crystals that changes in color with the variations of surface temperature. The crystals are placed inside inflatable transparent boxes with one thermosensitive, flexible side that is applied to the body of the individual. Each of the boxes has a limited temperature range and its utilization for examination requires proper selection of the box with accompanying proper temperature range. An image is taken of the box to record the patterns of surface temperature. The box is chosen by trial and error method. The advantage of contact thermography includes the absence of radiation, much lower cost than electronic thermography and much easier to use. Electronic thermography uses an infrared radiation sensor that converts heat reading to electrical signals that are displayed on a black-and-white or colored monitor. A picture can be taken from the video screen. It can be also stored on a computer. This system has the advantage of viewing large are as of the body during a single examination. Examinations must be conducted in an air-conditioned, draft-free room. The ambient temperature must be between 68 degrees to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The patient should also be instructed to refrain from cigarette smoking for the day of the test. Furthermore, the patient should refrain from taking pain medications, physical therapy and exposure to sunlight for at least 24 hours. The patient must be in equilibrium with room temperature for 30 to 60 minutes before the beginning of the procedure. The examination will be postponed if the patient is febrile. [129] The examination of lumbosacral spine and lower legs with contact thermography consists of individual images of buttocks, posterior and lateral thighs, lower legs, dorsa of the feet, and toes. The examination requires 1 to 2 hours to complete. Abnomalities in the physiologic temperature distribution pattern also indicates alterations. Acute pain is said to be associated with increased heat whereas chronic pain is related to decreased temperature. Increased temperature is found over areas involved in an inflammatory process. Studies have stated a close correlation between abnormal thermograms and surgically proven discs. Investigators have also found that patients with disc herniation have a thermography and myelography accuracy rate of 95% and 84% correspondingly. [214] Thermographic findings correlated with magnetic resonance, myelography and computed tomography abnormalities in 94%, 80% and 84%. Twenty two magnetic resonance scan of patients with prolapsed of the disc associated wit h nerve root lesion, 95% of them had leg abnormalities on thermography. [129] There is a good relationship between changes in symmetry of heat patterns and changes in pain intensity for most of the disorders that causes chronic pain. Thermography has been reported to useful in differentiating pain-free from pained subjects reporting back pain, knee pain, and leg pain. Thermography consistently indicates painful areas among patients with spinal cord injury. Ultrasound Imaging Ultrasound is a type of imaging which uses high-frequency sound waves to look at visceral organs and structures of the body. Ultrasound imaging of the musculoskeletal system is painless and safe. It is also called as ultrasound scanning or sonography. It involves the use of a probe or small transducer and ultrasound gel placed directly on the surface of the skin. The transducer transmits high-frequency sound waves through the gel into the body. Then, the transducer utilizes the sounds that bounce back and use them to create images in the computer. There is no risk for radiation because ultrasound imaging does not utilize ionizing radiation like what is used in radiography. Since sonographic images are captured in real-time, they can show the structure and the body’s internal organ movements, including the blood flow through the blood vessels. Ultrasound imaging is noninvasive medical test that aids physicians diagnose and treat medical disorders. Musculoskeletal ultrasound pro vides pictures of muscle, ligament, tendons, joints and soft tissue throughout the body. [142] Ultrasound images are commonly used to help diagnose certain musculoskeletal conditions such as: tendon tears; muscle tears, masses or fluid collections; tears or sprain of ligaments; fluid effusion or inflammation; early alterations caused by rheumatoid arthritis; nerve entrapment; ganglionic cysts; benign and malignant soft tissue tumors; hernias; foreign bodies; and dislocations. [142] Patients should be instructed to wear loose-fitting, comfortable clothing for the examination. The patient may be required to remove some of the clothing and accessories in the area to be examined. Ultrasound examinations are sensitive to motion. An active or crying child can lengthen the examination process. No other preparation is required. Musculoskeletal ultrasound evaluation is usually completed within 15 to 30 minutes but can take longer. Ultrasound may have difficulty penetrating the bone, hence only the outer surface can only be viewed. There are also limitations on the depth the sound waves can penetrate, thus deeper internal structures of larger patients may not be seen easily. [142]

Lotus Case Study :: essays research papers

Executive Summary & Problems In The Beginning   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Lotus Development Corporation was created by Mitch Kapor, a software designer whose initial goal was to develop a sophisticated spreadsheet program. The company was founded in 1982 and its headquarters based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1983 Lotus created the first killer application, 1-2-3 DOS for the IBM PC, catapulting them into the largest software company in the world. Lotus was noted as being one of the finest franchises in their business sector. The Rise and Fall Up to 1983 Lotus operated in a largely college industry were only a handful of companies created killer apps such as WordPerfect. Between 1983-1986, Lotus had created Symphony and Jazz which were the first fully integrated application programs to combine word-processing, spreadsheets, graphics, and database management. However, the market responded negatively to the introduction of these products. During 1986, Imitation by Borland and the limited success of Symphony and Jazz prompted newly elected president Jim Manzi to approach product development in at a new angle. Jim Manzi began an acquisition program that would give Lotus, products in every applications category, ultimately resulting in Notes. . Competition Heats Up Competition in the industry was intense during 1990. Borland and Microsoft had both emerged as large competitors of Lotus. Each had develop duplicate versions of Lotus ¡Ã‚ ¦s 1-2-3- program. The popularity of Microsoft surprised the industry when the company introduced a bundled  ¡Ã‚ §suite ¡Ã‚ ¨ that included its spreadsheets, word processors, graphics package, and database manager. There strategic approach to software development and marketing led to a growing market share for the company. Initially Lotus did not write a version of 1-2-3 for Windows because they did not want to help Microsoft build their contribution margin and attain market acceptance. However, over time Lotus could not ignore the growing success of Microsoft so they eventually rushed a flawed a version of 1-2-3 for Windows to market in 1991. The release of the product caused Lotus great embarrassment, because they reacted to the situation instead pf being proactive in the beginning they made a decision and introduced a product that was not ready for market. Lost Opportunity In 1990 Lotus made an attempt to gain a significant share of the network application industry by initiating merger negotiations with Novell. The merger of the two companies would have created the largest computer software company in the world. The combined sales for Lotus and Novell in 1989 were $978 million, compared with Microsoft ¡Ã‚ ¦s $804 million during the same year.

Erickson Integrity Versus Despair Essay

Older adults spend more time thinking and reflecting about their past than they use to. They also tend to be much less critical now of decisions made years ago then they do at that time. They often remember dreams they wanted and how close they may have come. Is this process of reflection something that older adults go through? This may be in response to retirement, the death of a spouse or close friends, or may simply result from changing social roles. According to Erikson (1982), a personality theorist who examined aging as a stage of development, this struggle comes about as older adults try to understand their lives in terms of the future of their family and community. As the older adult enters late life, they begin the struggle of integrity and despair, which is the process by which people try to make sense of their lives. Thoughts of the older adults own death is harmonized by the understanding that they will live on through their extended family. Erikson calls this understanding a â€Å"life-affirming involvement† in the present. Within the integrity versus despair, older adults encounter a life review, the process by which older adults reflect on the events and experiences of their lifetime. The most important event at this stage is coming to accept one’s whole life and reflecting on that in a positive manner. Erikson believed that to achieve integrity, a person must come to terms with the choices and events that have made his or hers life unique, and accepting one’s life for what it is. He believed older adults that reached integrity become self-affirming and self-accepting, and they judge their lives to have been worthwhile and good. The adult feels a sense of fulfillment about life and accepts death as an unavoidable reality. Those people who can look back on their lives with happiness and decide that they have lived a well rounded and fulfilling life will gain ego integrity and will not be fearful of death. â€Å"People develop ego integrity and accept their lives if they succeed, and develop a sense of wisdom a â€Å"detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself†(Erikon’s Psychosocial Stages of Development, 2009). If a person looks back on their life and remembers negative thoughts and dissatisfaction with life they will develop despair and experience a fearfulness and anxiousness about death. â€Å"Too much wisdom leads to presumption, too much despair to a disdain for life† (Erikson’s Psychosocial  Stages of Development, 2009). It has also been said that â€Å"children won’t fear life if their elders have enough integrity not to fear death.†(Psychological Theory- Erikson, 1995). I think that Morrie Schwartz is a great example of Erikson’s integrity theory. Morrie’s basic core of integrity ran deep, more so than any one person. Morrie showed this when he commented on his own battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease â€Å"It was very important for me to make clear to myself that my body is only part of who I am. We are much greater than the sum of our physical parts. The way we look at the world is fashioned by our values and our thoughts about good and evil, things that go into making up who we are†.

Bag of Bones CHAPTER ONE

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I'd finished my writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all of that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her hand and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That's how you identify the dead here in Derry no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope. The Rite Aid and the Shopwell are less than a mile from our house, in a little neighborhood strip mall which also supports a video store, a used-book store named Spread It Around (they do a very brisk business in my old paperbacks), a Radio Shack, and a Fast Foto. It's on Up-Mile Hill, at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. She parked in front of Blockbuster Video, went into the drugstore, and did business with Mr. Joe Wyzer, who was the druggist in those days; he has since moved on to the Rite Aid in Bangor. At the checkout she picked up one of those little chocolates with marshmallow inside, this one in the shape of a mouse. I found it later, in her purse. I unwrapped it and ate it myself, sitting at the kitchen table with the contents of her red handbag spread out in front of me, and it was like taking Communion. When it was gone except for the taste of chocolate on my tongue and in my throat, I burst into tears. I sat there in the litter of her Kleenex and makeup and keys and half-finished rolls of Certs and cried with my hands over my eyes, the way a kid cries. The sinus inhaler was in a Rite Aid bag. It had cost twelve dollars and eighteen cents. There was something else in the bag, too an item which had cost twenty-two-fifty. I looked at this other item for a long time, seeing it but not understanding it. I was surprised, maybe even stunned, but the idea that Johanna Arlen Noonan might have been leading another life, one I knew nothing about, never crossed my mind. Not then. Jo left the register, walked out into the bright, hammering sun again, swapping her regular glasses for her prescription sunglasses as she did, and just as she stepped from beneath the drugstore's slight overhang (I am imagining a little here, I suppose, crossing over into the country of the novelist a little, but not by much; only by inches, and you can trust me on that), there was that shrewish howl of locked tires on pavement that means there's going to be either an accident or a very close call. This time it happened the sort of accident which happened at that stupid X-shaped intersection at least once a week, it seemed. A 1989 Toyota was pulling out of the shopping-center parking lot and turning left onto Jackson Street. Behind the wheel was Mrs. Esther Easterling of Barrett's Orchards. She was accompanied by her friend Mrs Irene Deorsey, also of Barrett's Orchards, who had shopped the video store without finding anything she wanted to rent. Too much violence, Irene said. Both women were cigarette widows. Esther could hardly have missed the orange Public Works dump truck coming down the hill; although she denied this to the police, to the newspaper, and to me when I talked to her some two months later, I think it likely that she just forgot to look. As my own mother (another cigarette widow) used to say, ‘The two most common ailments of the elderly are arthritis and forgetfulness. They can't be held responsible for neither.' Driving the Public Works truck was William Fraker, of Old Cape. Mr. Fraker was thirty-eight years old on the day of my wife's death, driving with his shirt off and thinking how badly he wanted a cool shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. He and three other men had spent eight hours putting down asphalt patch out on the Harris Avenue Extension near the airport, a hot job on a hot day, and Bill Fraker said yeah, he might have been going a little too fast maybe forty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He was eager to get back to the garage, sign off on the truck, and get behind the wheel of his own F-150, which had air conditioning. Also, the dump truck's brakes, while good enough to pass inspection, were a long way from tip-top condition. Fraker hit them as soon as he saw the Toyota pull out in front of him (he hit his horn, as well), but it was too late. He heard screaming tires his own, and Esther's as she belatedly realized her danger and saw her face for just a mome nt. ‘That was the worst part, somehow,' he told me as we sat on his porch, drinking beers it was October by then, and although the sun was warm on our faces, we were both wearing sweaters. ‘You know how high up you sit in one of those dump trucks? ‘ I nodded. ‘Well, she was looking up to see me craning up, you'd say and the sun was full in her face. I could see how old she was. I remember thinking, ‘Holy shit, she's gonna break like glass if I can't stop.' But old people are tough, more often than not. They can surprise you. I mean, look at how it turned out, both those old biddies still alive, and your wife . . . ‘ He stopped then, bright red color dashing into his cheeks, making him look like a boy who has been laughed at in the schoolyard by girls who have noticed his fly is unzipped. It was comical, but if I'd smiled, it only would have confused him. ‘Mr. Noonan, I'm sorry. My mouth just sort of ran away with me.' ‘It's all right,' I told him. ‘I'm over the worst of it, anyway.' That was a lie, but it put us back on track. ‘Anyway,' he said, ‘we hit. There was a loud bang, and a crumping sound when the driver's side of the car caved in. Breaking glass, too. I was thrown against the wheel hard enough so I couldn't draw a breath without it hurting for a week or more, and I had a big bruise right here.' He drew an arc on his chest just below the collarbones. ‘I banged my head on the windshield hard enough to crack the glass, but all I got up there was a little purple knob . . . no bleeding, not even a headache. My wife says I've just got a naturally thick skull. I saw the woman driving the Toyota, Mrs. Easterling, thrown across the console between the front bucket seats. Then we were finally stopped, all tangled together in the middle of the street, and I got out to see how bad they were. I tell you, I expected to find them both dead.' Neither of them was dead, neither of them was even unconscious, although Mrs. Easterling had three broken ribs and a dislocated hip. Mrs. Deorsey, who had been a seat away from the impact, suffered a concussion when she rapped her head on her window. That was all; she was ‘treated and released at Home Hospital,' as the Derry News always puts it in such cases. My wife, the former Johanna Arlen of Malden, Massachusetts, saw it all from where she stood outside the drugstore, with her purse slung over her shoulder and her prescription bag in one hand. Like Bill Fraker, she must have thought the occupants of the Toyota were either dead or seriously hurt. The sound of the collision had been a hollow, authoritative bang which rolled through the hot afternoon air like a bowling ball down an alley. The sound of breaking glass edged it like jagged lace. The two vehicles were tangled violently together in the middle of Jackson Street, the dirty orange truck looming over the pale-blue import like a bullying parent over a cowering child. Johanna began to sprint across the parking lot toward the street. Others were doing the same all around her. One of them, Miss Jill Dunbarry, had been window-shopping at Radio Shack when the accident occurred. She said she thought she remembered running past Johanna at least she was pretty sure she remembered someone in yellow slacks but she couldn't be sure. By then, Mrs. Easterling was screaming that she was hurt, they were both hurt, wouldn't somebody help her and her friend Irene. Halfway across the parking lot, near a little cluster of newspaper dispensers, my wife fell down. Her purse-strap stayed over her shoulder, but her prescription bag slipped from her hand, and the sinus inhaler slid halfway out. The other item stayed put. No one noticed her lying there by the newspaper dispensers; everyone was focused on the tangled vehicles, the screaming women, the spreading puddle of water and antifreeze from the Public Works truck's ruptured radiator. (‘That's gas!' the clerk from Fast Foto shouted to anyone who would listen. ‘That's gas, watch out she don't blow, fellas!') I suppose one or two of the would-be rescuers might have jumped right over her, perhaps thinking she had fainted. To assume such a thing on a day when the temperature was pushing ninety-five degrees would not have been unreasonable. Roughly two dozen people from the shopping center clustered around the accident; another four dozen or so came running over from Strawford Park, where a baseball game had been going on. I imagine that all the things you would expect to hear in such situations were said, many of them more than once. Milling around. Someone reaching through the misshapen hole which had been the driver's-side window to pat Esther's trembling old hand. People immediately giving way for Joe Wyzer; at such moments anyone in a white coat automatically becomes the belle of the ball. In the distance, the warble of an ambulance siren rising like shaky air over an incinerator. All during this, lying unnoticed in the parking lot, was my wife with her purse still over her shoulder (inside, still wrapped in foil, her uneaten chocolate-marshmallow mouse) and her white prescription bag near one outstretched hand. It was Joe Wyzer, hurrying back to the pharmacy to get a compression bandage for Irene Deorsey's head, who spotted her. He recognized her even though she was lying face-down. He recognized her by her red hair, white blouse, and yellow slacks. He recognized her because he had waited on her not fifteen minutes before. ‘Mrs. Noonan?' he asked, forgetting all about the compression bandage for the dazed but apparently not too badly hurt Irene Deorsey. ‘Mrs. Noonan, are you all right?' Knowing already (or so I suspect; perhaps I am wrong) that she was not. He turned her over. It took both hands to do it, and even then he had to work hard, kneeling and pushing and lifting there in the parking lot with the heat baking down from above and then bouncing back up from the asphalt. Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight. There were red marks on her face. When I identified her I could see them clearly even on the video monitor. I started to ask the assistant medical examiner what they were, but then I knew. Late August, hot pavement, elementary, my dear Watson. My wife died getting a sunburn. Wyzer got up, saw that the ambulance had arrived, and ran toward it. He pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed one of the attendants as he got out from behind the wheel. ‘There's a woman over there,' Wyzer said, pointing toward the parking lot. ‘Guy, we've got two women right here, and a man as well,' the attendant said. He tried to pull away, but Wyzer held on. ‘Never mind them right now,' he said. ‘They're basically okay. The woman over there isn't.' The woman over there was dead, and I'm pretty sure Joe Wyzer knew it . . . but he had his priorities straight. Give him that. And he was convincing enough to get both paramedics moving away from the tangle of truck and Toyota, in spite of Esther Easterling's cries of pain and the rumbles of protest from the Greek chorus. When they got to my wife, one of the paramedics was quick to confirm what Joe Wyzer had already suspected. ‘Holy shit,' the other one said. ‘What happened to her?' ‘Heart, most likely,' the first one said. ‘She got excited and it just blew out on her.' But it wasn't her heart. The autopsy revealed a brain aneurysm which she might have been living with, all unknown, for as long as five years. As she sprinted across the parking lot toward the accident, that weak vessel in her cerebral cortex had blown like a tire, drowning her control-centers in blood and killing her. Death had probably not been instantaneous, the assistant medical examiner told me, but it had still come swiftly enough . . . and she wouldn't have suffered. Just one big black nova, all sensation and thought gone even before she hit the pavement. ‘Can I help you in any way, Mr. Noonan?' the assistant ME asked, turning me gently away from the still face and closed eyes on the video monitor. ‘Do you have questions? I'll answer them if I can.' ‘Just one,' I said. I told him what she'd purchased in the drugstore just before she died. Then I asked my question. The days leading up to the funeral and the funeral itself are dreamlike in my memory the clearest memory I have is of eating Jo's chocolate mouse and crying . . . crying mostly, I think, because I knew how soon the taste of it would be gone. I had one other crying fit a few days after we buried her, and I will tell you about that one shortly. I was glad for the arrival of Jo's family, and particularly for the arrival of her oldest brother, Frank. It was Frank Arlen fifty, red-cheeked, portly, and with a head of lush dark hair who organized the arrangements . . . who wound up actually dickering with the funeral director. ‘I can't believe you did that,' I said later, as we sat in a booth at Jack's Pub, drinking beers. ‘He was trying to stick it to you, Mikey,' he said. ‘I hate guys like that.' He reached into his back pocket, brought out a handkerchief, and wiped absently at his cheeks with it. He hadn't broken down none of the Arlens broke down, at least not when I was with them but Frank had leaked steadily all day; he looked like a man suffering from severe conjunctivitis. There had been six Arlen sibs in all, Jo the youngest and the only girl. She had been the pet of her big brothers. I suspect that if I'd had anything to do with her death, the five of them would have torn me apart with their bare hands. As it was, they formed a protective shield around me instead, and that was good. I suppose I might have muddled through without them, but I don't know how. I was thirty-six, remember. You don't expect to have to bury your wife when you're thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the last thing on our minds. ‘If a guy gets caught taking your stereo out of your car, they call it theft and put him in jail,' Frank said. The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could still hear Malden in Frank's voice caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. ‘If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar casket for forty-five hundred dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fed him his lunch, didn't I?' ‘Yes. You did.' ‘You okay, Mikey?' ‘I'm okay.' ‘Sincerely okay?' ‘How the fuck should I know?' I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth. And then: ‘She was pregnant.' His face grew very still. ‘What?' I struggled to keep my voice down. ‘Pregnant. Six or seven weeks, according to the . . . you know, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?' ‘No! Christ, no!' But there was a funny look on his face, as if she had told him something. ‘I knew you were trying, of course . . . she said you had a low sperm count and it might take a little while, but the doctor thought you guys'd probably . . . sooner or later you'd probably . . . ‘ He trailed off, looking down at his hands. ‘They can tell that, huh? They check for that?' ‘They can tell. As for checking, I don't know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.' ‘Why?' ‘She didn't just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those home pregnancy-testing kits.' ‘You had no idea? No clue?' I shook my head. He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. ‘She wanted to be sure, that's all. You know that, don't you?' A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, she'd said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always. ‘Sure,' I said, patting Frank's hand. ‘Sure, big guy. I know.' It was the Arlens led by Frank who handled Johanna's send off. As the writer of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my aunt and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother almost completely ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimer's lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only slightly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception. Everything else was arranged by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral ceremony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jo's dad offered a prayer for his daughter's soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the summer and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing ‘Blessed Assurance,' which Frank said had been Jo's favorite hymn as a girl. How Frank found Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never found out. We got through it the afternoon and evening viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday morning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new pair of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there. Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completely into the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home; what did Sid advise? He advised something, but I'll be damned if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddy's rental car for the drive to Boston, where they would spend the night and then grab the Southern Crescent the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesn't fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no breakdown lanes in the sky if the engine quits. Most of the Arlens left the next day. Once more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house which had become solely my house' by then with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents. Frank stayed another day. We picked a big bunch of flowers behind the house not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose aroma I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sat there for awhile under the beating sun. ‘She was always just the sweetest thing in my life,' Frank said at last in a strange, muffled voice. ‘We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, I'll tell you. Anyone tried, we'd feed em their lunch.' ‘She told me a lot of stories.' ‘Good ones?' ‘Yeah, real good.' ‘I'm going to miss her so much.' ‘Me, too,' I said. ‘Frank . . . listen . . . I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I won't be pissed.' ‘But she didn't. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?' ‘Not that I saw.' And that was just it. I hadn't seen anything. Of course I'd been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadn't she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible . . . but it somehow wasn't Jo. ‘Was it a boy or a girl?' he asked. ‘A girl.' We'd had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan. Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, ‘I worry about you, Mikey. You haven't got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.' ‘I'll be all right,' I said. He nodded. ‘That's what we say, anyway, isn't it?' ‘We?' ‘Guys. I'll be all right.' And if we're not, we try to make sure no one knows it.' He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. ‘If you're not all right, Mikey, and you don't want to call your brother I saw the way you looked at him let me be your brother. For Jo's sake if not your own.' ‘Okay,' I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don't call people for help. It's not because of the way I was raised, at least I don't think so; it's the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It's not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, ‘Are you all right?' I can't answer no. I can't say help me. A couple of hours later Frank left for the southern end of the state. When he opened the car door, I was touched to see that the taped book he was listening to was one of mine. He hugged me, then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth, a good hard smack. ‘If you need to talk, call,' he said. ‘And if you need to be with someone, just come.' I nodded. ‘And be careful.' That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a dream for the last few days, but that got through. ‘Careful of what?' ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I don't know, Mikey.' Then he got into his car he was so big and it was so little that he looked as if he were wearing it and drove away. The sun was going down by then. Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket. All the same, I slipped in front of the word processor and wrote for an hour or so. It went pretty well, as I remember. And you know, even when it doesn't, it passes the time. My second crying fit came three or four days after the funeral. That sense of being in a dream persisted I walked, I talked, I answered the phone, I worked on my book, which had been about eighty percent complete when Jo died but all the time there was this clear sense of disconnection, a feeling that everything was going on at a distance from the real me, that I was more or less phoning it in. Denise Breedlove, Pete's mother, called and asked if I wouldn't like her to bring a couple of her friends over one day the following week and give the big old Edwardian pile I now lived in alone rolling around in it like the last pea in a restaurant-sized can a good stem-to-stern cleaning. They would do it, she said, for a hundred dollars split even among the three of them, and mostly because it wasn't good for me to go on without it. There had to be a scrubbing after a death, she said, even if the death didn't happen in the house itself. I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours' work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasn't, I told her, it would be done, anyway. ‘Mr. Noonan, that's far too much,' she said. ‘Maybe and maybe not, but it's what I'm paying,' I said. ‘Will you do it?' She said she would, of course she would. Perhaps predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didn't want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding anything that would embarrass them or me: a pair of Johanna's silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (‘We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael,' she said to me once, ‘have you noticed?'), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unflushed toilet. In truth, I can't tell you any one thing I was looking for; that sense of operating in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic killer had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. Piece of fish for supper, she had sa id. And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice. Near the end of my ‘pre-cleaning,' I looked under our bed and saw an open paperback on Jo's side. She hadn't been dead long, but few household lands are so dusty as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johanna's face and hands in her coffin Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get dusty inside a coffin? Surely not, but I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept creeping back, like Tolstoy's white bear. Johanna and I had both been English majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury Town cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwright with the reptile's face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantic's heart. So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The Moon and Sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.) She had been using a playing card from some defunct deck as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had been, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. ‘A hundred years from now,' she had said, ‘the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham.' This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didn't laugh. I fell in love. The playing card marked pages 102 and 103 Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maugham's version of Paul Gauguin. The narrator tries to buck Stroeve up. My dear fellow, don't be unhappy. She'll come back . . . ‘Easy for you to say,' I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me. I turned the page and read this: Strickland's injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve found himself on the floor. ‘You funny little man,' said Strickland. It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life I understood it wasn't a mistake that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead. My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadn't been there, I would have fallen to the floor. We weep from our eyes, it's all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every pore of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain; in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing ‘Blessed Assurance' in his high, sweet tenor voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadn't really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not: it insisted she was dead. You funny little man, said Strickland. I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when they're unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are logic like Dal clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs. I put the playing-card bookmark back between pages 102 and 103 a turn of the index finger away from You funny little man, said Strickland now and forever and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it. Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the box spring and caressed her cheek like a feather. Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane. ‘Give me that,' she hissed. ‘It's my dust-catcher.' She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face a shroud of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed. I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadn't been asleep long the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me. There was nothing there, of course dreams are just dreams. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.

About Richard Neutra and the Architecture of Modernism

About Richard Neutra and the Architecture of Modernism Born and educated in Europe, Richard Joseph Neutra helped introduced the International Style to America, and also introduced Los Angeles design to Europe. His southern California firm envisioned many office buildings, churches, and cultural centers, but Richard Neutra is best known for his experiments in modern residential architecture. Background: Born: April 8, 1892 in Vienna, Austria Died: April 16, 1970 Education: Technical Academy, ViennaUniversity of Zà ¼rich Citizenship: Neutra became a US citizen in 1930, as the Nazis and Communists rose to power in Europe. Neutra is said to have studied with both Adolf Loos as a student in Europe and Frank Lloyd Wright when Neutra came to America in the 1920s. The simplicity of Neutras organic designs is evidence of this early influence. Selected Works: 1927-1929: Lovell House, Los Angeles, California1934: Anna Stern House, CA1934: Beard House, Altadena, CA1937: Miller House, Palm Springs, CA1946-1947: Kaufmann Desert House, Palm Springs, CA1947-1948: Tremaine House, Santa Barbara, CA1959: Oyler House, Lone Pine, CA1962: Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania1964: The Rice House, Richmond, Virginia Related People: Le CorbusierWalter GropiusPhilip JohnsonLudwig Mies van der RoheAdolf LoosFrank Lloyd WrightRudolf Schindler More About Richard Neutra: Homes designed by Richard Neutra combined Bauhaus modernism with Southern California building traditions, creating a unique adaptation that became known as Desert Modernism. Neutras houses were dramatic, flat-surfaced industrialized-looking buildings placed into a carefully arranged landscape. Constructed with steel, glass, and reinforced concrete, they were typically finished in stucco. The Lovell House (1927-1929) created a sensation in architectural circles in both Europe and America. Stylistically, this important early work was similar to the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in Europe. Architecture Professor Paul Heyer wrote that the house was a landmark in modern architecture in that it showed the potential of industry to go way beyond mere utilitarian considerations. Heyer describes the Lovell House construction: It began with a prefabricated light steel frame that was erected in forty hours. The floating floor planes, constructed of expanded metal reinforced and covered by concrete applied from a compressed air gun, were suspended by slender steel cables from the roof frame; they express the changes of floor level strongly, following the contours of the site. The swimming pool, at the lowest level, was also suspended within the steel frame, from U-shaped reinforced concrete cradles.- Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America by Paul Heyer, 1966, p. 142 Later in his career, Richard Neutra designed a series of elegant pavilion-style homes composed of layered horizontal planes. With extensive porches and patios, the homes appeared to merge with the surrounding landscape. The Kaufmann Desert House (1946-1947) and the Tremaine House (1947-48) are important examples of Neutras pavilion houses. Architect Richard Neutra was on the cover of Time magazine, August 15, 1949, with the heading, What will the neighbors think?   The same question was asked of southern California architect Frank Gehry when he remodeled his own house in 1978. Both Gehry and Neutra had a confidence that many took as arrogance. Neutra, in fact, was nominated for an AIA Gold Medal during his lifetime, but was not awarded the honor until 1977- seven years after his death. Learn More: Neutra: Complete WorksThe Oyler House: Richard Neutras Desert Retreat directed by Mike Dorsey, DVD, 46 minutesRichard Neutra: And The Search for Modern Architecture by Thomas S. Hines, Rizzoli, 2006Neutra by Barbara Lamprecht, 2004Richard Neutra: Mà ¶bel Furniture by Barbara Lamprecht, 2015Life and Shape: The Autobiography of Richard NeutraThe Drawings of Richard Neutra by Thomas S. Hines, Architectural Digest, February 28, 1993

Does the Potato Diet Work Learn the Truth Behind This Hyped Health Hack

Does the Potato Diet Work Learn the Truth Behind This Hyped Health Hack SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips What is the potato diet? Does the potato diet work? Is it healthy? In this total guide to the potato diet or the potato hack, we’ll go over what this diet is, why it’s become so notable recently, and the potato diet results you can expect. We’ll also discuss if the potato diet is healthy, if you should do it, and how to make it go smoothly if you do decide to potato diet. Finally, we’ll provide some potato hack recipes. What Is the Potato Diet? There are several types of potato diets, but they all involve eating cooked potatoes and very little else for a certain amount of time. So the â€Å"potato diet† (or â€Å"potato hack†) is basically what it sounds like- a diet of potatoes! However, not everyone does the potato diet the same way. Because of all the variations out there, there are two major questions you need to ask about any particular potato diet: how long you do the potato diet and exactly what you can eat on the potato diet. How Long Is the Potato Diet? You can do a potato diet for any length of time, but in general, there are two potato diet â€Å"camps†: the short-term potato diet (or the â€Å"potato hack†), and the long-term potato diet. Short term potato diet/potato hack: For short-term weight loss of a few pounds, many people do the â€Å"potato hack,† and only eat potatoes for a short amount of time. The typical length of time is 2-3 days, but some people go up to a week. The idea behind the â€Å"potato hack† is that by completing one every once in awhile, you can maintain a particular weight without long-term super-restrictive dieting. Potato hacking was pioneered by Tim Steele (anchor link), who claims to have based the potato hack on an 1849 diet plan for â€Å"dyspeptics.† Long-term potato diet: For major weight loss over a long period of time, some people will do a potato diet for multiple months at a time. This is what notable Australian potato dieter Andrew Taylor did- he went an entire year eating only potatoes, plus a few seasonings. The potato says, "look deep into my eyes..." What Can I Eat on the Potato Diet? Sadly, potato chips, french fries, mashed potatoes with lots of cream and butter, and other high-fat, high-salt potato foods are not allowed on any potato diets. Other than that, there’s a surprising amount of variation in potato diet plans. This variation tends to have three types: First, there’s variation in what kinds of potatoes you can eat. In some potato diets, you eat nothing but cooked white potatoes. Some allow you to eat the skin, and some have you peel the potatoes. (Note that the potato skin does have lots of nutrients and fiber). Some potato diets allow you to eat any variety of cooked potato: white, russet, gold, new, fingerling, blue, red, and so on and so forth. There are even potato diet plans that allow you to include sweet potatoes and yams. In fact, some variations have you consume an all-sweet potato diet! Second, there’s variation in what oils and seasonings are allowed. Some potato diets hold to a strict no-seasonings and no oils rule- just plain potatoes. There are potato diets that allow small amounts of low-calorie seasonings (like spices and hot sauces) but no oils or other add-ins. Some potato diets let you use small amounts of healthy oils (like olive oil) and non-dairy milks (for mashed potatoes). Just so long as you aren’t adding lots of high-calorie and/or high-fat ingredients to your potatoes (like heaping your baked potato with cheese and sour cream), the granular particulars of the seasonings you consume on your potato diet probably don’t make a huge difference in the outcome. Third, there’s variation in how you are allowed to cook the potatoes. Super-strict potato diets may allow you to eat only boiled potatoes, or put you on a 100% baked potato diet! Others allow you some flexibility to bake, roast, saute, or boil potatoes as you please, just so long as you meet the other guidelines about oils and seasonings. Note that there are usually beverage restrictions on a potato diet, too. Water, coffee, and tea (without milk or sugar) are the most commonly allowed beverages. You won’t be doing much good if you’re eating only potatoes but drinking a gallon of Coke every day! No potato casserole for you on this diet! Who’s Doing the Potato Diet? The potato diet movement has circulated in Paleo diet circles, with many Paleo bloggers giving rave potato diet reviews. This is actually a departure from the typical Paleo focus on lots of meat. There have also been some high-profile potato dieters in recent years. Here’s a rundown of the biggest figures in the potato diet world: Australian man Andrew Taylor ate only potatoes for a year. In the first month of his all-potato diet, he lost 22 pounds; over the course of the year, he went from weighing 334.4 pounds (151.7 kg) to 218 pounds (99 kg). He says that he began the diet as a way to combat his out-of-control food addiction. According to Taylor, he got 99% of his calories from potatoes (including sweet potatoes) and only 1% from seasonings and spices (and, apparently, the occasional beer). He’s since written a book called DIY Spud Fit to help other prospective long-term potato dieters. None other than magician Penn Jillette (of Penn Teller fame) kick-started a year-long, 100-pound weight loss regime by eating nothing but five skinless potatoes a day for two weeks. He lost 18 pounds during that two-week period. Afterwards, he transitioned to a â€Å"nutritarian diet† and lost 100 pounds over the course of a year. He, too, has written a book about his weight-loss experience, called Presto! How I Made 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales. Chris Voigt, the Potato Commissioner of Washington State, spent 60 days eating 20 potatoes a day to try to prove that potatoes are healthier than people give them credit for. He included some oil, salt, and seasonings. While he wasn’t trying to lose weight, he did lose 21 pounds and saw some other nutritional benefits. Tim Steele, creator of the potato hack, is another notable potato diet figure. He believes that potato hacking helps the gut microbiome to become more diverse and that this helps digestion. He has an entire blog and a self-published book dedicated to potato hacking. Mr. Squiggles is also considering the potato diet. Does the Potato Diet Work? Can eating potatoes and nothing but potatoes really lead to weight loss? What are the potato diet results you can expect? After all, potatoes are very starchy and typically avoided by dieters. Surprisingly, it seems like the potato diet can lead to weight loss. You probably noticed that most of the potato diet proponents mentioned above experienced some fairly dramatic potato diet results: Andrew Taylor lost over 100 pounds in 12 months. Penn Teller lost 18 pounds in two weeks. Chris Voigt lost 21 pounds in two months. It is clearly possible, then, to lose weight on the potato diet. But why does the potato diet make you lose weight? Weight loss is caused by a caloric deficit- basically, you use more food energy than you take in. For most potato dieters, the diet isn’t about consciously limiting calories. You are supposed to eat (potatoes, of course) whenever you get hungry, and eat until you are full. However, you may go into a caloric deficit (and thus lose weight) on the potato diet for two major reasons: Potatoes keep you full: The potato has an unusually high satiety index. This means that people feel fuller for longer after eating potatoes than almost any other food. If you feel fuller, you won’t need to eat as often. This means you’ll probably eat fewer calories. Fewer calories means you are more likely to go into caloric deficit and use more energy than you are taking in. You’ll get bored of potatoes: Eventually, you will get bored of potatoes, which will also cause you to eat less in quantity and less frequently. You won’t be stuffing yourself with extra bites when you are already stuffed because you’ll be tired of eating potatoes. And you won’t necessarily want to do a whole lot of snacking when your only option is a potato. You may want to commit unspeakable crimes against potatoes by the time you're done potato hacking. Is the Potato Diet Healthy? Of course, just because the potato diet results in weight loss doesn’t mean that the potato diet is actually good for you. While there may be some short-term health benefits to the potato diet, in the long-term, it’s not good for you. Why the Short-Term Potato Diet Could Be Healthy There are a few reasons why a short-term potato diet may have some health benefits: Potatoes Are Pretty Good for You If you’ve dieted before, you may have been told that white potatoes are â€Å"bad† for you. This is not actually true. Lots of what is bad about eating a lot of potatoes does not have anything to do with the potatoes themselves. What do I mean by this? Well, think about the most common potato dishes: potato chips, french fries, mashed potatoes loaded with cream and butter, potato skins, twice-baked potatoes, potato gratins, and so on. These are often fried and full of bad fats and salt, with ingredients like heavy cream, bacon bits, and gobs of cheese. It’s not the potatoes that are the problem here! People say that potatoes have a high glycemic index, but it actually varies depending on the type of potato and how it is cooked. Additionally, glycemic index doesn’t tell the whole nutritional story. Potatoes may be starchier than your average vegetable, but they are still a vegetable, and are packed with valuable nutrients. Just so long as you don’t plan on subsisting only on potatoes for your entire life, eating potatoes for a few days can actually be quite healthy. If you’re doing a sweet potato diet, sweet potatoes have a similar macronutrient profile as regular potatoes (With 7.7% of calories coming from protein, 91.7% from carbs, and only .6% from fat). However, they have more sugars and less starch, and a different spread of micronutrients (including huge quantities of Vitamin A). It turns out potatoes are lot healthier when you don't fry them in oil or slather them in butter, cream, and cheese. Who knew? You Aren’t Eating Unhealthy Fats and Sugars In addition to being surprisingly nutritious on their own, eating nothing but potatoes has another benefit: if you’re eating only potatoes, you aren’t eating all of the unhealthy sugars and fats you would normally eat. The typical American diet is very unhealthy. Even people who are trying to eat right are often surprised to find how many of their foods contain added sugars. So, by doing the potato diet, you are naturally cutting out lots of unhealthy foods you might normally consume. Of course, the potato diet is far from the only way to do this, but it is a health benefit. You can see the impact of this in Chris Voigt’s two-month potato diet: his bad cholesterol, blood glucose, and triglyceride levels all went down. This was likely due to a combination of potatoes’ heart-disease fighting qualities and the lack of intake of unhealthy fats and sugars during this time. You Can Change Your Relationship to Food Even a short-run potato diet can help you adjust your relationship to food. It can help you realize things like how often you eat when you’re bored or tired and how often you crave particular unhealthy foods. If you can push through the first couple days, you will likely find that your cravings decrease and you have a better sense of when you are hungry and when you are full. Another potential benefit of a short-term potato diet is that it can help you transition to a healthier diet afterwards. After eating nothing but potatoes for several days, pretty much any other foods will feel like a luxurious treat. So it’s a good chance to try to start some healthy habits after the potato hack. (Don’t be too restrictive- more on that below. But consider implementing some smaller changes like preparing healthier breakfasts without added sugars, eating fruits and veggies for snacks, and cutting down on sugary beverages.) Look at all the sweet, beautiful vegetables you can eat when you're done with your potato hack. Why the Potato Diet Is Unhealthy in the Long Run While potato hacking occasionally may have some health benefits, in the long run, the potato diet is not very good for you. Nutritionists’ potato diet reviews are not good. Here's why: Essential Nutrient Deficits While potatoes are much healthier than people typically believe they are, no one food can provide all of the essential nutrients you need for life indefinitely. Any mono diet (a diet where you consume only one thing) leads to long-term nutritional deficits. If you consume only potatoes, about 92% of your calories will come from carbs, 1% from fats, and 7% from protein. That’s not enough fat or protein. Fat is essential for brain function, and protein is essential for muscle function, the immune system, hair and nail strength, and bone health. You will also end up with micronutrient deficiencies. Micronutrients (like vitamins and minerals) play a key role in lots of our body functions, including immune function. Nutritionist Alyosa Hourigan pointed to the lack of bio-available iron in potatoes as a major issue with Andrew Taylor’s year of spuds. And iron deficiency leads to anemia. If you’re doing a sweet potato diet, note that long-term, you may end up with excess Vitamin A. Lost Muscle Mass Remember how we just said protein is essential for muscle function? Without enough protein, your muscles will start wasting. So you’ll keep losing weight, but you’ll be losing muscle mass, not fat. And the problem with this is that losing muscle mass lowers your metabolism. And a lower metabolism means weight loss becomes even harder to maintain. When you do lose weight, it’s important that you try to preserve as much muscle as possible. This helps your weight loss be more healthy and sustainable. Disordered Eating Patterns A short-term potato diet can act as a useful â€Å"reset† to some of your unhealthy eating habits. However, long-term potato dieting is so restrictive that it becomes its own kind of unhealthy eating habit! Eating only one food (like potatoes) or food group (like fruits) long-term is called a mono diet or monotrophic diet and is a recent fad in the dieting world. One major figure in the mono-diet world is Freelee the Banana girl, who regularly eats over 30 bananas a day. But this sort of mono dieting long-term can promote an unhealthy relationship with food, because it doesn’t actually build healthy eating habits- it just removes the element of choice completely from the equation, instead of helping you learn how to create healthy meals and snacks. Overall, it’s much better to address your underlying issues with your relationship with food instead of transitioning to another disordered eating pattern, even if it’s nominally â€Å"healthier† and causing weight loss. You're doing the potato diet for six months? But why? Should You Do the Potato Diet? Based on the available evidence of its long-term nutritional harms, I can’t recommend doing a long-term potato diet. Even if you are able to lose lots of weight on this diet, the truth is that in the long run, most restrictive diets do not work. People usually regain the lost weight. While Penn Jillette and Andrew Taylor had some pretty dramatic potato diet before and after stories, it’s too early to see if their major weight losses will last. For long-term healthy weight loss, you need to make gradual, sustainable changes to your food habits and physical activities. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use a short â€Å"potato hack† to help kick cravings and start out a new food regimen. You just have to remember that you will have to maintain sustained changes in your food choices once the potato diet is over. If you don’t plan carefully and create a long-term diet that you can live with, you run the risk of returning to unhealthy eating habits as soon as the potato diet is over and just regaining all the weight. Another reason to do a short potato hack is to lose a little weight quickly for a big event. This is fine just so long as you realize that you almost certainly will not keep the weight off if you don’t make other lifestyle changes. The potato diet: little-known red carpet preparation secret? Potato Diet Plans: How to Make a Potato Diet Work If you’ve decided to try potato hacking, how can you make the process go smoothly? Here are three tips to help you make a potato or sweet potato diet plan: Note: If you are worried about your eating habits, I suggest that you speak with a nutritionist instead of attempting a long-term potato diet. However, most of these tips for short-term potato hacking would also apply to a long-term potato diet. Choose an Optimal Time to Potato Hack Profound misery should not be the main impact of your potato hack. Starting a short-term potato diet around Christmas or other holidays, right before your birthday, during a vacation, or during any time where there is likely to be lots of social celebration involving food is not a good idea. First, you are really hampering your chances of successfully completing the hack. Second, even if you can bring yourself to finish it, all of the built-up temptation and frustration from seeing lots of yummy foods really increases the risk of binging on junk immediately after finishing. This completely negates the point of potato hacking in the first place. Remember, for the potato diet to really work, it has to be accompanied by long-term, sustainable changes in what you eat. Buy Enough Potatoes Because potatoes are cheap and keep for a while, it makes sense to buy enough potatoes for the entire hack before starting. You can invest in a variety of potato types, or go all in on one kind. This way you won’t have to run to the store- and right into the heart of temptation- mid-potato-hack. Tim Steele, potato hack pioneer, says you should plan to go through 3-5 pounds of potatoes a day. Cook Some Potatoes in Advance Cook a bunch of potatoes the day before you start your potato hack. You could bake some, or boil some, or both. This way you will have a ready-made stock of potatoes to come back to throughout your hack that you don’t have to spend time preparing. It will also save time if you want to make something like mashed potatoes, potato pancakes, or hash browns, because the first step will already be done. You don’t necessarily have to cook enough potatoes for the entire hack at the beginning, but having a ready stock will make the entire experience more convenient and less onerous. Eating nothing but potatoes is tedious enough; no need to compound the boredom by having to painstakingly boil, bake, or roast potatoes before every single meal. Plan Ahead for Meals and Snacks Plan ahead? You may be thinking. Why would I need to plan my meals ahead? I already know I’ll be eating potatoes! To make the potato hack work, you need to have cooked potatoes ready and with you when you need them. This means that you need to pack potatoes for your lunch and for snacks when you leave for work or school in the morning. If you have access to a microwave, you may be able to quick-bake a potato on the premises. You also need to call ahead at restaurants and make sure they can prepare something like a plain baked potato for you. (It’s probably easiest to just avoid restaurants while you are potato hacking, but sometimes it can’t be helped.) Free fourth tip: you might want to wash those potatoes. Potato Diet Recipes Looking for some potato hack recipes? We’ve compiled several potato diet recipes you can use with little adjustment. Note that for these potato hack recipes, it’s important to choose the right potato for what you are making. We even have a couple of sweet potato diet recipes! The Baked Potato- From Low Fat Vegan Chef This oil-free baked potato recipe is potato hack friendly! They recommend russet potatoes, which is the classic baking potato. The Boiled Potato- From Better Homes and Gardens This guide to boiling potatoes provides advice on selecting and preparing your potatoes for boiling. Oven Baked Fries- From This Rawsome Vegan Life These oil-free oven-baked fries are baked on parchment paper. They are seasoned with garlic powder, black pepper, and lemon juice, but you can adjust to best fit your own potato hack. Dairy-Free Mashed Potatoes- From Forks Over Knives This potato-hack-friendly mashed potato recipe uses the starchy cooking water from boiling the potatoes to moisten the mash. Baked Potato Pancakes/Latkes- From Plants Rule This recipe for oven-baked potato pancakes recommends using potato starch as a binding agent for the latkes- perfect for an all-potato diet! Oil-Free Hash Browns- From Straight Up Food With a nonstick pan, oil-free hash browns are a breeze! This recipe calls for powdered onion or garlic, but you can season as you please (or not, if your potato hack is seasonings-free). Potato Wedges- From SF Gate This recipe has you adhere spices with citrus or vinegar to avoid using oil, so you may need to skip it if you’re totally seasonings-free on your potato hack. Otherwise, it’s a great potato diet recipe! Healthy Sweet Potato Fries- From the Road Not Processed This sweet potato fries recipe finishes cooking the fries under the broiler to get some caramelization. The author suggests some seasonings, but these are not necessary. Sweet Potato Latkes- From Skinny Taste These latkes use eggs as a binding agent and a small amount of oil, so this is only appropriate for a more flexible potato hack. However, you could also try substituting sweet potatoes in any of the above potato recipes (including the latke recipe) and see how it goes. Mmm, a conservatively spiced potato! The Bottom Line on Potato Diets During a potato diet or potato hack, you consume primarily potatoes for some designated length of time (with some variation in seasonings, potato varieties, and cooking methods). Some people do longer potato diets for major weight loss, while others do short term potato hacks for a few days to help maintain a particular weight or lose a few pounds before an event. Does the potato diet work? An all-potato diet results in weight loss for two major reasons: Potatoes keep you full for longer, so you eat less You get bored of potatoes, so you eat less But is it healthy? A short term potato hack may have the following benefits: Potatoes are actually pretty healthy. Because you’re eating potatoes, you aren’t eating all the other fats and sugars you would normally eat. The monotony of a potato diet may help you change your relationship to food- you will get a better sense of when you are full, and when you are eating because you are bored. However, a long-term potato diet is unhealthy for the following reasons: Over time, you’ll develop major nutrient deficits. With a lack of protein, you’ll have muscle wasting, which will slow down your metabolism. Mono diets can actually contribute to an unhealthy relationship with food instead of addressing it. The truth is that most diets don’t work in the long run. For a diet to really be effective, you need to make manageably and sustainable changes. So while a short-term potato hack is potentially a useful tool to kick-start some dietary habit changes or to lose some weight fast for an event, a long-term potato diet is too restrictive to work for most people. If you do decide to potato hack, here are some tips to help with your potato diet plan: Choose a good time to potato hack when it won’t be too difficult to stay on track. Buy enough potatoes at the start of the hack to last you through the hack (3-5 lbs/day) Cook some potatoes in advance of starting the hack. Plan when you’ll need potato snacks and meals (like work lunches) in advance. Finally, we provided some potato hack recipes to help you prepare for a potato hack. Happy hacking! Potatoes, potatoes everywhere. What's Next? Thinking about the potato diet because you're worried about your heart health? See our guide to understanding your blood pressure, learn what side of your body your heart is on, and figure out what you should do if you're feeling pain under your left breast. The potato diet could really change up your digestion. Let us tell you what green poop means. Curious about what other household ingredients can do for you? We can tell you about all the benefits of black seed oil and let you know how coconut oil can make your hair beautiful.

Beers Law Definition and Equation

Beer's Law Definition and Equation Beers Law is an equation that relates the attenuation of light to properties of a material. The law states the concentration of a chemical is directly proportional to the absorbance of a solution. The relation may be used to determine the concentration of a chemical species in a solution using a colorimeter or spectrophotometer. The relation is most often used in UV-visible absorption spectroscopy. Note that Beers Law is not valid at high solution concentrations. Other Names for Beers Law Beers Law is also known as the Beer-Lambert Law, the Lambert-Beer Law, and the  Beer–Lambert–Bouguer law. The reason there are so many names is because more than one law is involved. Basically, Pierre Bouger discovered the law in 1729 and published it in Essai doptique sur la gradation de la lumià ¨re. Lambert quoted Bougers discovery in his Photometria in 1760, saying absorbance of a sample is directly proportional to the path length of light. Even though Lambert didnt claim discovery, he was often credited with it. August Beer discovered a related law in 1852. Beers law stated the absorbance is proportional to the concentration of the sample. Technically, Beers law relates to only to concentration, while the Beer-Lambert law relates absorbance to both concentration and sample thickness. Key Takeaways: Beer's Law Beers law states that the concentration of a chemical solution is directly proportional to its absorption of light.The premise is that a beam of light becomes weaker as it passes through a chemical solution. The attenuation of light occurs either as a result of distance through solution or increasing concentration.Beers law goes by many names, including the Beer-Lambert law, Lambert-Beer law, and Beer-Lambert-Bouguer law. Equation for Beers Law Beers Law may be written simply as: A ÃŽ µbc where  A is absorbance (no units)ÃŽ µ is the molar absorptivity with units of L mol-1  cm-1 (formerly called the extinction coefficient)b is the path length of the sample, usually expressed in cmc is the concentration of the compound in solution, expressed in mol L-1 Calculating the absorbance of a sample using the equation depends on two assumptions: The absorbance is directly proportional to the path length of the sample (the width of the cuvette).The absorbance is directly proportional to the concentration of the sample. In this example of the Beer-Lambert law, a green laser is attenuated as it passes through a solution of Rhodamine 6G. Amirber How to Use Beers Law While many modern instruments perform Beers law calculations by simply comparing a blank cuvette with a sample, its easy to prepare a graph using standard solutions to determine the concentration of a specimen. The graphing method assumes a straight-line relationship between absorbance and concentration, which is valid for dilute solutions.   Beers Law Example Calculation A sample is known to have a maximum absorbance value of 275 nm. Its molar absorptivity is 8400 M-1cm-1. The width of the cuvette is 1 cm. A spectrophotometer finds A 0.70. What is the concentration of the sample? To solve the problem, use Beers law: A ÃŽ µbc 0.70 (8400 M-1cm-1)(1 cm)(c) Divide both sides of the equation by [(8400 M-1 cm-1)(1 cm)] c 8.33 x 10-5 mol/L Importance of Beers Law Beers law is especially important in the fields of chemistry, physics, and meteorology. Beers law is used in chemistry to measure the concentration of chemical solutions, to analyze oxidation, and to measure polymer degradation. The law also describes the attenuation of radiation through the Earths atmosphere. While normally applied to light, the law also helps scientists understand the attenuation of particle beams, such as neutrons. In theoretical physics, the Beer-Lambert law is a solution to the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BKG) operator, which is used in the Boltzmann equation for computational fluid dynamics. Sources Beer, August (1852). Bestimmung der Absorption des rothen Lichts in farbigen Flà ¼ssigkeiten (Determination of the absorption of red light in colored liquids). Annalen der Physik und Chemie. 86: 78–88.Bouguer, Pierre (1729). Essai doptique sur la gradation de la lumià ¨re. Paris, France: Claude Jombert. pp. 16–22.Ingle, J. D. J.; Crouch, S. R. (1988). Spectrochemical Analysis. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.Lambert, J. H. (1760). Photometria sive de mensura et gradibus luminis, colorum et umbrae [Photometry, or, On the measure and gradations of light, colors, and shade]. Augsburg (Augusta Vindelicorum), Germany: Eberhardt Klett.Mayerhà ¶fer, Thomas Gà ¼nter; Popp, Jà ¼rgen (2018). Beers law - why absorbance depends (almost) linearly on concentration. Chemphyschem. doi:10.1002/cphc.201801073

Role of Manager Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Role of Manager - Essay Example In the result, experts (Gootnick, pp. 36-40, 1999) are now carrying out studies to understand different aspects of various fields, and this paper is an attempt in the same series that will look into the relationship of individual differences, personality, and intelligence with the role and working of managers in organisations. In particular, analysis (Haslam, pp. 23-29, 2007) has indicated that experience is one of the most imperative components that enable individuals to involve in the process of learning that subsequently allows effective execution of any work or task. In addition, it is an understanding that experience is the key factor that resulted in alteration of abovementioned three notions under focus of this paper. In this regard, one can state that experience plays a crucial role in ensuring effective development of managers; however, experts (Fumham, pp. 56-60, 2008) have noted that experience as mixture of personality, individual differences, and intelligence is not the key notion but the more important thing is the reaction of the manager in response to the experience. In other words, experience does not give lesson but one has to get a lesson from experiences. It will be easier to understand this notion by considering an example. For instance, a manager confronts a situation of an unsatisfied employee in an organisation, and he responds by talking to him personally. On the other hand, another manager confronts the same situation but he decides to consider employee as an under-performing employee without any discussion. The experience or rather confrontation was same; however, responses were different that would have resulted in contradictory outcomes in that organisation. At this point, individual variability or individual differences play a critical role in supporting manager in effective management of the people (Haslam, pp. 46-60, 2007). However, when it comes to individual variability, experts have identified strong relationship of intelligen ce with individual differences and that intelligence plays a significant role in enabling effectiveness in the work. However, individuals often view intelligence from the traditional lens related to academic achievement. In the context of manager’s role, traditional intelligence does not but the practical intelligence ensures effectiveness in manager’s functions. In order to understand the role of intelligence in manager’s part, let the paper include an example. In particular, a traditionally intelligent person refers to the easy understanding of academic facts that is applicable in the example of a student; however, a practically intelligent person means easy understanding of tacit knowledge (Fumham, pp. 69-74, 2008) that works in situation of the manager. In the case of student, knowledge is declarative, whereas when it comes to manager, knowledge becomes procedural that is a student focuses on ‘knowing that’ while manager endeavors on ‘know ing how’ notion that explains how intelligence, particularly, practical intelligence supports manager in effective execution that is effective management of people at the workplace. In order to understand the difference further, academic knowledge refers to information that explains behavior, and on the other hand, tacit knowledge means information that guides or initiates behavior. Further analysis of literature (Hosie, pp. 20-33, 2006) has indicated that there exist certain characteristics that facilitate managers in carrying out their works in terms of managing people, and that simultaneously involves self-development of the managers. In particular, tacit knowledge and experience were once again major

Cloning Brachyury from SW480 in pNEB193 plasmid Essay - 2

Cloning Brachyury from SW480 in pNEB193 plasmid - Essay Example This concentration permitted me to proceed on to the next step of the experiment as it had more than 500 ng of RNA. However, it was noted that some students obtained very low concentrations of 15 ng/ ÃŽ ¼L compared to the class average of 169.3 ng/ ÃŽ ¼L. If the class results are analyzed, it can be noted that the standard deviation of this experiment is 151, hence, the range of results is (169 +/− 151) 18 – 320. Table 1 shows that sample F concentration. Nevertheless, samples H, L for example are much higher than the range of the results. The key point of the experiment which determined if the experiment could go on or not was the quality of RNA. That is depicted in figure1: gel denaturation of RNA, the ratio between 28S and 18S RNA is 1.3 – 2.5; many of the students had this value while some were not due to sample degradation or they did not load their samples in the appropriate wells. 3 – The second experiment was the cDNA synthesis where RT – PCR (SuperScript III RT) was used to synthesis it from RNA which was determined by the students as B, D, E, G K O and P. Every student began with a concentration of 6.16 ng. After the synthesis of cDNA, the concentration of the the whole sample was measured by the demonstrator using a Nanodrop. The data of the whole class was very close to the average 747 .2 ng/ ÃŽ ¼L (table 2). The standard deviation was 131.2 which were very small. Thus, almost all students did the experiment correctly as the results of the class data were in the range of 547 – 631 ng/ ÃŽ ¼L. On my part, the sample obtained was 302 ng/ ÃŽ ¼L which also was in the range. This allowed all students to go on to the next experiment. 4 – The next step of the experiment involved the use of the PCR to amplify the full length of Brachyury and human ÃŽ ² – actin from the cDNA that was obtained. Using 0.8% agarose gel electrophoresis, the products of the PCR were analyzed. The PCR in my group worked and had