Advantages of Group Decision-Making Essay Example for Free

Advantages of Group Decision-Making Essay Firstly, group decision making from experts in different areas is beneficial to solve complicate problems. For instance, in a small company, boss often makes suggestions by himself; the result of his behavior relies on the ability of the boss. So there are cases when he can’t make things right, which may be serious fault to the operation of a company. However, people with different backgrounds consider the problems more carefully and comprehensively, as a result, running the company will be in less risk. Secondly, people making decisions in groups are eager to bear more risks individually. Decisions come with risks. People who make the wrong decision will take the responsibility. A contradiction rises up when they attempt to avoid being wrong and at the same time, solve problems correctly. As a result, people will somewhat not dare to make the final decision. Nevertheless, group decision makers can share the risks because each of them has responsibility for the suggestions to the problem. Moreover, individual risks are decreased when some others rectify the suggestion for him or her. 2.Disadvantages of group decision-making Firstly, low efficiency in decision-making, everyone has his own opinions and under certain circumstances such as brainstorming, it costs more time to decide what to do by group decision-making than by personal decision-making. If things go well, the results will come out quickly. But if each of them in a group can’t comprise in the end, nothing will be achieved. For example, there is news from CCTV about the 2012 DOHA Climate Change Conference, †Nearly 200 countries haggling over how to stop climate change and how to pay for it failed to reach a deal on schedule Friday. That sets the stage for the wrangling to continue late into the night.† Things like these are usually occurred when a large number of people attend. Finally, the conference extended until they arrive at an agreement. Secondly, group decision-making will lose effectiveness when people are not likely to put up with suggestions out of some reasons. In such cases, the leader of the group will be the only one who does decision-making, which has no diffidence with personal decision-making. All the members of the group should have equal opportunities and are willing to speak out. Then, group decision-making functions better in dealing with problems.

Melba Patillo and the Arkansas Nine :: Racial Segregation Integration

Melba Patillo changed history by enduring one of the first high school integration in history. Without Melba's bravery and endurance we would not have black people and white people together in the same building, much less in the same schools. Melba and the other eight black students spent one gruesome year at Central High, which is located in Little Rock, Arkansas. They not only tried to socialize and study, they had to go to press conferences concerning integration and were forced to ride in a car driven by soldiers. They had to be alert every second for the entire year in order to survive. These nine kids, also known as the Arkansas Nine, have showed the world that they can beat segregation. Nineteen hundred fifty seven was a horrible time in Little Rock, Arkansas. Segregationists were opposed to the blacks having any power and threw racial words at black people. There was a large lawsuit about integration in Little Rock in 1952 that wanted to have black students attend an all white school. Unfortunately, a petition was filed opposing black kids going to an all white school. Miraculously ,May 17, 1954 was the surprising day that the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Their ruling stated that segregating public schools made them unequal and was illegal. Segregationists did whatever it was necessary to stop the integration in Central High School. Gov. Faubus tried to stall the integration by having two hundred witnesses testtify in opposition. Fortunately with the help of the NAACP, the court decided to make the integration work in 1957. The school year was exhausting for the Arkansas Nine. The white students had to be mean to the Arkansas Nine or be threatened by segregationists if they helped the Arkansas Nine. Melba, One of the Arkansas Nine, was a strong warrior even as a baby. She was born on Pearl Harbor Day with a scalp infection. The nurse did not tell Mother Lois how to get rid of had the infection, because she said “We do not coddle with n---------s.” If it was not for the janitor eavesdropping on the doctor telling the nurse about the cure, and telling Mother Lois, Melba would not have lived to become a warrior at the school.

Meditation, attention and well-being of college students

Ask any college student today and they would probably say that being in college is one of the most difficult and consuming endeavor that they have had in their lifetime. College life is not only about going to classes, meeting deadlines, writing papers and completing courses. College life is also about developing analytical and critical minds, learning life-skills, building knowledge and applying it to real-life situations.College students need all the help they could get to make their academic lives a little lighter or more manageable. Many self-help books have advocated changing one’s attitude, thinking positively, time-management, building relationships and other methods that one gets a feeling that they do not really provide solutions but just state the obvious. One that has received less attention is in the area of meditation.Literature has found that meditation has positive effects in reducing stress as a relaxation technique. However, meditation has been associated with new age thinking and referred to as spooky stuff that the present generation of college students may not be aware of. Meditation have existed since man first begun creative thinking, it is often referred in religious and spiritual practices. In the early years of psychological investigation, meditation became a popular subject in terms of the experiences that people have when they meditated as well as how it can be an effective relaxation technique.Meditation is being able to become more attuned with one’s inner self and this takes a great deal of directed attention. Attention refers to the ability of the mind or consciousness to attend to a specific area, event, information or thing. Studies on attention have highlighted the detrimental effects of not being able to hold one’s attention, and of how fleeting and short a person’s attention span can be especially in a very complex and stimulus overloaded  environment we have. Directing attention to a single obje ct or thought can be relaxing since it allows the person to be present in the here and now, it was also espoused that training oneself to become more attentive can develop cognitive functioning and thus help in academic performance.College students can benefit in learning and being able to use meditation techniques to cope with the many stresses and anxiety of college life and developing attention skills to further enhance academic performance. It is therefore hypothesized that college students who practice meditation will have a longer attention span and will have higher grades and a more positive mental health and hence increased feelings of well-being.This study will determine if college students who practice meditation techniques on a regular basis have higher attention skills as measured by a behavioral experiment and whether they have more positive feelings of well-being as determined by a well-being inventory.A discussion of meditation and its application into the enhancement of attention, creativity and consciousness is presented to demonstrate the far reaching effects of meditation as a means of aiding college student’s performance in school and their mental health.MeditationMeditation has been defined as process wherein the person achieves an altered sate of consciousness by performing certain rituals and exercises. These exercises include controlling and regulating breathing, sharply restricting one’s field of attention, eliminating external stimuli,  assuming yogic body positions and forming mental images of an event or symbol. The result is a pleasant, mildly altered subjective state in which the individual feels mentally and physically relaxed.Some individuals after extensive meditation practice may have mystical experiences in which they lose self-awareness and gain a sense of being involved in a wider consciousness, however defined. That such meditative techniques may cause a change in consciousness goes back to the ancient time s and is represented in every major world religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, Jews and Christians all have literature describing rituals that induce meditative states (Arambula, Kawakami, Gibney, 2001).Traditional forms of meditation follow the practices of yoga, a system of thought based on the Hindu religion, or Zen which is derived from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. The two common techniques of meditation are an opening up meditation and concentrative meditation.  Ã‚   In opening-up meditation the subject clears his/her mind for receiving new experiences while in concentrative meditation the benefits are obtained through actively attending to some object, word, or idea.Experimental studies of meditation provide only limited insight into the alterations of consciousness that a person can achieve when meditative practice and training extend over many years. In his study of the Matramudra, a centuries old Tibetan Buddhist text, Brown (1977) has described the complex training requ ired to master the technique. He has shown that cognitive changes can be expected at different meditative levels. A somewhat commercialized and popular form of meditation has been promoted as transcendental meditation or TM ( Hanley & Spates, 1978) ).The technique is easily learned from a qualified teacher who gives the novice mediator a mantra and instructions on how to repeat it over and over to produce the deep rest and awareness  characteristic of TM. In TM a person develops a reduced state of physiological arousal; feelings such as peace of mind, a feeling of being at peace with the world and a sense of well-being are reported after engaging in TM. In a now classic study on the effect of TM to college students by Hanley & Spates (1978), it was reported that those who were practicing meditation had more positive personalities.In this study, meditation in the form of transcendental meditation (TM) will be used as the meditative process which will be given to college students wh o will participate in this study. The TM is much easier to learn and practice than the traditional forms of mediation and since it produces feelings of peace and well-being that it suits the purpose of this study. Meditation is categorized under altered states of consciousness and since consciousness is the most basic cognitive function that is closely related to attention, the second part of this study is to determine if meditation enhances attention span and accuracy and in effect would lead to greater academic performance.Meditation and AttentionMeditation and attention is unquestionably linked together, meditation is the process by which attention is narrowed and focused on one object or event, and without engaging one’s attention fully to the immediate task, and then nothing will come out of it. Attention must be acutely directed towards the mantra, the breathing of the individual and the experiences one will have during the meditative state. Meditation in effect enhance s the ability of the person to direct attention and when attention is more keen and developed, a person can have better concentration  and can better attend to the critical thinking skills needed in college education (Shear & Jevning, 1999).Attention has been the earliest subject of the study of psychology, cognitive science have provided evidence that attention is physiological, that it is limited but can be expanded to become more acute and enable the person to become more aware of his/her environment, more appreciative of nature and life and it causes a general feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction.Several studies have tried to find evidence that meditation and attention has a relationship. In a study of the effects of opening-up and concentrative mediation to attention in terms of ignoring distractions and focusing attention (Chan, 2003) found that meditation was positively correlated with the ability to direct attention but it was shown that meditation minutes per day was p ositively correlated with decreased distractions and mistakes, the form of mediation used or how may years a person has been meditating did not have any significant relationship with the owner. In a similar study, concentrative and mindfulness motivation was measured in terms of how effective it contributed to the task of sustained attention.The study compared the sustained attention of students who had meditation training to those who did not (Valentine & Sweet, 1999). The study found that those who had meditation techniques scored better in the sustained attention task wherein those who practiced mindfulness meditation had better scores than the concentrative mediators. The practical applications of an enhanced attention that is not affected by distractions and sustained attention can be directed towards improved academic performance of students.Meditation, Attention and Well-being 7Meditation and CreativityA new concept put forward by Sarath (2006) advocated the use of meditation techniques to mainstream classroom instruction as it enriches the learning process and enhances the creative process and consciousness of students. Creativity is highly related to the issue of meditation because the experience associated with meditation is similar to the second person approach wherein the student actually creates and produces an output that would enable him/her to have a deeper understanding of the concepts raised in class (Sarath, 2006).The author had argued that education and learning should be focused on providing actual experience of the lesson, not just learning something in books and not being able to work with it. Creative expression of one’s talent and interests should be the main thrust of the school. At the same time, a more sustained attention and inability to be distracted by external stimuli are necessary steps in the practice of creative thinking.ConclusionMeditation is not just for the spiritual and magical but it is also a positive process to develop attention and induce students to relax and communicate with their bodies and their surroundings. College students have to deal with pressures and expectations that they sometimes feel cranky, anxious and fed up. Meditation as evidenced by the studies conducted showed that it could positively affect attitudes, attention span and resistance to distractions. Meditation also has been found to be a medium that could enhance the learning process and encourage creativity. As such, this study has found evidence to support the hypothesis mentioned in the first part.Meditation, Attention and Well-being 8ReferencesArambula, P., Kawakami, M., & Gibney, K.   (2001). The physiological correlates of KundaliniYoga meditation: A study of a yoga master. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 26; 2, pp. 47-53.Brown, D.P. (1977). A model for the levels of concentrative meditation. InternationalJournal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 25; 4: 236-273.Chan, D.P. (2003). Effects of medi tation to attention, Unpublished dissertation. University ofCalifornia.Hanley, C. & Spates, J. (1978). Transcendental meditation and social psychological   attitudes.The Journal of Psychology, 99, p121-1127.Sarath, Ed. (2006). Meditation, Creativity and Consciousness: Charting Future Terrain withHigher Education. Teachers College Record, 108; 9, pp 1816-1841.Valentine, E. & Sweet, P. (1989). Meditation and Attention: A comparison of the effects ofconcentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention. Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 2; 1, pp 59 to 70.Shear, J. & Jevning, R. (1999). Pure consciousness: Scientific exploration of meditationtechniques. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6; 2, p. 3)

Othello, By William Shakespeare - 990 Words

Love and jealousy are powerful emotions that can induce behavior that would otherwise not normally be warranted. In Othello, The Moor Of Venice, jealousy is a very important component of the play. Iago uses jealousy to control the Moor, Othello, into committing various acts against his wife, Desdomona, and one of his soldiers, Cassio. It can be deduced that the sheer power of jealousy is the most important theme in Othello because the play shows how a strong General, such as Othello, is subject to this malicious emotion and its trickery, how the strong emotion of love can be transformed into the omnipotent emotion of jealousy, and how jealousy can shroud the truth. In short, Othello, the Moor of Venice, is about the forbidden love between Desdomona and Othello. Roderigo, a man of wealth, is filled with envy, for he craves Desdomona as his own. Thus, Roderigo pays Iago, Othello s ancient, to help him win Desdomona over. Iago creates a cascade of events that lead Othello into a fierce jealousy. This jealousy leads to Othello losing himself, and many people who he had deeply cared for. Furthermore, Iago uses Cassio as his pawn in these events since Cassio took the position of lieutenant, in which Iago so desperately wanted. Indeed, Iago s plans work mostly in Iago s favor. In act three, scene three of the play, Othello s jealous rage commences as he spies Cassio and Desdomona conversing in the castle s garden. When Cassio notices Othello is approaching, he slinks awayShow MoreRelatedOthello, By William Shakespeare957 Words   |  4 Pagesinnocent person kills himself while not knowing the truth. The best example of that would be the play Othello by the great William Shakespeare. As little as a handkerchief could make a difference if it is a symbol for something. In the play Othello by Shakespeare, handkerchief is first introduced by Othello to his beautiful mistress, Desdemona, as a sign of their love. At the end of the play what gets Othello to take extreme meas ures by the location of the handkerchief. As the symbol of the handkerchiefRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare1599 Words   |  7 Pages William Shakespeare’s 16th century play Othello is a duplicitous and fraudulent tale set alternatingly between Venice in act 1, and the island of Cyprus thereafter. The play follows the scandalous marriage between protagonist Othello, a Christian moore and the general of the army of Venice, and Desdemona, a respected and intelligent woman who also happens to be the daughter of the Venetian Senator Brabantio. Shakespeare undoubtedly positions the marriage to be viewed as heroic and noble, despiteRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare1218 Words   |  5 PagesIn a historical time period where emphasis was shifting from religion to race and ethnicity, key indicators of differences that perpetuated into racial prejudice and racial ideologies are evident in Othello by William Shakespeare. Although racism was not fully formed at this moment in history, Othello can be interpreted as a representation and an exploration of this shift in ideology. In the past, before this change to ward racial differences, religion was the major segretory factor in signifyingRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare894 Words   |  4 Pagesthose that which occurred in Othello written by William Shakespeare. Throughout the play Othello, we see the struggles of a marriage that is not accepted by their society. Othello is a extremely cherished black general living in a primarily white community. The play begins with Othello secretly becoming married to a white woman named Desdemona. This reasons others who are white to become angry and excuse to dislike this black man further more than they already do. Othello is a downward spiral from loveRead MoreOthello by William Shakespeare790 Words   |  3 PagesThroughout Othello by William Shakespeare, Othello makes numerous poor decisions due to his jealousy. Hitting Desdemona, trusting Iago, and killing Desdemona are among a few of the poor decisions that he makes. The word jealous can be defined as feeling or showing suspicion of som eones unfaithfulness in a relationship. Othello feels suspicious of Desdemona’s and Cassio’s relationship because of the lies that Iago tells him. Many people try to tell Othello the truth but he only believes the wordsRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare1923 Words   |  8 Pagesdissatisfaction or complication is shown. Firstly in Othello love is presented as ephemeral and transient while atonement love is presented as unrequited and finally in cat on a hot tin roof love is presented as painful and troublesome due to unreciprocated feelings. The tragic plot of Othello hinges on the potential of the villain, Iago, to deceive other characters, above all Roderigo and Othello, through encouraging them to misinterpret what they see. Othello is prone to Iago s ploys seeing that he himselfRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare941 Words   |  4 Pageswas Williams Shakespeare’s play Othello which depicts the tragedy of Othello, a Morris Captain. What is different about Shakespeare play is that the tragic hero is the black Othello and the villain a white Iago. Therefore, Shakespeare depiction of Othello as a tragic character and Iago as a villain, challenges Elizabethan’s stereotypes regarding individuals of African descent. Shakespeare challenges the stereotypical â€Å"type –casting of the black man† in Elizabethan society by depicting Othello asRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare1152 Words   |  5 Pages‘Othello’ was a tragedy of incomprehension at the deepest level of human dealings as no one in the play came to an understanding of himself or any of the surrounding characters. The play ‘Othello’ by William Shakespeare focused on tragedy through the anguish of the main character ‘Othello’ which lead to the suffering and death of numerous characters including himself. Appearance Vs. Reality challenged human dealings within the play ‘Othello’ as no-one came to see anyone’s true self and no-one seesRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare1178 Words   |  5 Pagesprofitable in condition of good and immorality. Othello is presented as good and Iago as evil, but Iago and Othello’s relationship also shares a distrust of their wives. The overall logical argument is based on love, jealousy and betrayal between two lovers that ultimately leads to their separation because of Iago’s evil plan. I am using this article to agree with Berry s view on how Iago separates two lovers just so he can take retaliation on Othello by manipulating everyone to unmasking their trueRead MoreOthello, By William Shakespeare1140 Words   |  5 Pagesâ€Å"Othello† is a play written by William Shakespeare in 1603. In this play, Shakespeare features three major characters: Othello, Iago, and Desdemona. Othello, a black man, and Desdemona, a white venetian secretly eloped in the play. Iago shows racism and prejudice towards their relationship because of their skin colors. In the play, Iago says: â€Å"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, or else the devil will make a