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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Track employee locations Essay Example for Free

Track employee locations Essay After the deployment of AD it will benefit the users in maintaining a better security with a single sign on user ID and password. It will also help the administrator in maintaining the system policies. EIS will be on top of the system and it will help in smooth functioning, better backup policies, disaster recovery, security etc. By the end of the development, an end user has created a custom information system geared to its own business and that of its customers. The reporting systems generated an EIS software is not only pleasing to look at but easy to use. It allows top-level executives who dont have time to hold weekly meetings or spend time developing complicated reports to get a window on the information they need to run their businesses effectively. The flexibility of EIS programs allows databases across the entire enterprise to be accessed from departments ranging from distribution to human resources. One of the latest developments in EIS software has been its ability to connect to the Internet. This allows executives of international companies to remotely access all databases across the entire organization by simply using a Web browser. Nearly all the industries middle and upper managers now have access to Executive Information Systems (EIS) that were once reserved for high corporate officials. The systems, which afford executives immediate access to needed information, have become ubiquitous throughout such areas as human resources, claims, and sales and marketing. While the majority of insurers use EIS for data-related activities, use EIS to track employee locations as well as other functions. Although Executive Information Systems were originally conceived as a means to give top corporate brass fingetrip access to up-to-date company information, the systems are being increasingly utilized by upper and middle managers as well. These sorts of capabilities historically have just been in the executive suites. Now companies are trying to get this information out to the front lines. The underwriters and sales force managers have it. Its much more front-line focused, he noted. Most companies use EIS to gather data in any number of areas including marketing, sales, claims or human resources. That information is then compiled into a single database from which relevant information can be retrieved. EIS is an especially useful tool for companies who want to focus on improving service levels and marketing while reducing costs. This is driving the need for EIS or decision support type systems. People are looking increasingly at process reengineering. They cant really improve things they cant measure. EIS systems allow them to measure. They can look at what their goals are what their key performance indicators are, and can manage them over time. Many company, use EIS to track employee locations, and also use the system to track specific information concerning sales and claims management. (Dyment, J. J. 1999, pages 20-26. ) Nearly all the industries middle and upper managers now have access to Executive Information Systems (EIS) that were once reserved for high corporate officials. The systems, which afford executives immediate access to needed information, have become ubiquitous throughout such areas as human resources, claims, and sales and marketing. While the majority of insurers use EIS for data-related activities, use EIS to track employee locations as well as other functions. (Eden, C. and Ackermann, F. (1992), pp53-77) The evolution in computerized information systems can be viewed from the viewpoint of the end user and the direction in which information is flowing. If we ask the question For whom is this new information system primarily being developed? we find that early systems were designed primarily for operating personnel generally to communicate among themselves. Only recently have the needs of the executive been addressed. Even in recently developed EIS the information flow is primarily tactical information taken from the operating levels and sent up the ladder to the executive. In the future we see more emphasis on strategic information and more information flow between executives and from the executive down to the operating level. (H. Watson, R. Rainer, and G. Houdeshel, 2002, page 34. ) The majority of information systems developed in the past have been primarily to support operational functions in the organization. Examples are accounting systems to help keep the books of the corporation, and personnel/ payroll systems to automate payroll processing and assist human resource personnel in maintenance of employee records. Of course senior managers sometimes receive reports from these systems but the reports are usually hard copy printouts of extensive amounts of data or summarized reports prepared by lower-level managers or staff. (Damodaran, A. 2001, page 5. ) Early EISs were primarily on-line management reporting systems which provided the same reports, but via a terminal or workstation, perhaps with some color graphics. The first generation of EISs really consisted of colorful computerized briefing books or report books with little value added when compared with their hard copy counterparts. Many of these rudimentary systems (some estimates range as high as 70 percent) were abandoned after several months of usage because of the high cost of the computerized system when compared with the same paper-based system. Other reasons cited for abandoning these systems are High maintenance cost, sometimes requiring one support person for every three executive users †¢ User interfaces not customized to the individual executives and therefore not appealing †¢ Canned systems which were not developed for the individual and therefore do not provide information really needed by the executive (Duncan, K.and K. Moores. 1999) The new generation of EISs currently entering the market still addresses information flow from the operating to the executive level; however, these systems are adding more value to the data, and they are beginning to address strategic, mission-critical information. Rather than simply providing senior executives an electronic report book with unassisted drill-down to layers of underlying canned data, these new systems provide automated analysis tools which help executives convert raw information into knowledge that can be acted upon (Watson, H.J. , R. K. Rainer, C. Koh 1998). Examples of these new analysis tools include monitors which automatically highlight data values that are outside of preset trigger points, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to explain underlying information relationships. For example, the executive may turn on the system in the morning and begin to review information automatically downloaded to the system overnight. The EIS alerts him or her that the end-of-quarter financial results for Far East operations have just been transferred from overseas to the database. The executive chooses to review that information first, and a highlighted monitor brings to his/her attention total Far East operating expenses, which are much higher than planned. Rather than drilling down and aimlessly wandering around in massive amounts of underlying data, the new generation system allows the executive to ask, why are total Far East operating expenses so high?

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Animal Rights and Animal Testing :: Rights Equality Animals Science Essays

Animal Rights and Animal Testing Many humans use animals for testing each year. Animal testing is when the animals are put through something or injected to see how they react to what medical research they have been used for. Animals are used to find cures for diseases or to test drugs that have mild side effects. They are also used to test materials for cosmetic research. Except for severely limited medical research, animal testing should be outlawed. Animal testing endangers the animal’s lives and may cause serious side affect that last the rest of their lives. Others believe that they should not test medicine on humans because humans’ lives are more precious than that of the animals. They believe that since animals have no rights that they should be used for testing. There are three very important reasons why animals should not be used for testing harmful or dangerous materials. One of these is that testing and its use is trivial in the cosmetic industry. The second reason is that animals have rights and animals can feel pleasure and pain just as humans do. The third reason is that testing is cruel and unusual. Another reason is that animal testing and its use is trivial in the cosmetic industry. Testing on animals for the cosmetic industry is not necessary because they have many other ways to find out if it harms the human race. The testing that goes on is harmful to the animals and can cause serious side effects. The cosmetic companies hold down bunnies in vices and spray the cosmetics into their eyes to see if it cause them redness, stinging, or even blindness. They also have baboons strapped down with their heads in vices to do certain tests on them. Animals are also used by pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs and health supplements. They estimate that 17 to 22 million animals are used each year for medical research, and these estimates do not include rats, mice, fish, and farm animals. That means that 90% of all research animals are not included in the statistics. Too many animals are being tested and they do not even need to use the animals for these tests. They can use com puter software materials and get the same results. One more point is that animals do have rights.

Monday, January 13, 2020

Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Clinton Kopas Susan Gabriel English 102 December 1, 2011 The Goal of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Research studies are constantly being conducted in order to improve certain aspects of human life and knowledge. In many cases, these research studies involve human test subjects. One of the more famous studies involving human test subjects was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that began in 1932. Most have heard of this study, few would ever claim that any good came of it.What had originally been a research study aimed at improving knowledge dealing with syphilis in the black male, turned into an extremely long and detrimental study that damaged hundreds of lives. Considering the damage that was done to the subjects and their families, it is easy to wonder if this study actually provided any real advances in medicine or medical knowledge. The origin of the study had good motives, being that it was to promote the health of blacks in the South. The U. S. Public Health Service collaborated with t he Julius Rosenwald Fund to conduct demonstration programs to control syphilis in southern counties.This failed due to funding issues, and the project had to be scrapped. However, the PHS was anxious â€Å"to salvage something of value from the project† (Thomas). So in 1932, a group of doctors recruited a total of 399 syphilis infected black men from Macon County, Alabama to participate in a study concerning the study of â€Å"bad blood†. The organizers took their initial idea and converted â€Å"the original treatment program into a nontherapeutic human experiment aimed at compiling data on the progression of the disease on untreated African-American males† (Herried; Fourtner; Fourtner).This study became formally known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (Herried; Fourtner; Fourtner; Thomas). The formal name that was applied to this study may imply the true motives of the researchers behind it. The study was not necessarily meant to fi nd major breakthroughs in medicine, but to simply study the effects of untreated syphilis. The researchers attempted to justify what they were doing by saying it was going to be for a greater good, and that these men got more treatment than they would have gotten otherwise.This may be true in a sense, but the men in the study were still intentionally withheld from treatment once penicillin was known to cure syphilis. By 1948, penicillin was known to be the most and best effective cure for syphilis. The study went on for 22 more years even though a cure had been found. There is no point in attempting to learn anything more about an infection when a cure has been found. The only treatment that the infected men received was treatment involving arsenicals and heavy metals.This type of treatment was not nearly as effective and researchers knew it would not cure the men entirely, just keep them from being infectious (Reverby). It might not be going too far to even say that the researchers were conducting this experiment on the basis of pure curiosity. After all, there could not be much advancement made just studying the effects of syphilis in blacks compared to whites. Much about syphilis had already been known prior to the beginning of the Tuskegee Study. German scientists had already discovered most of what there is to know about syphilis over 20 years before the Tuskegee experiments had begun. The cause of syphilis, the stages of the diseases development, and the complications . . . . were all known to medical science in the early 1900’s† (Herried; Fourtner; Fourtner). It has been stated by many journalists and even some that were involved in the experiment, that nothing was gained from this long and drawn out experiment. All signs begin to point that it truly was an experiment based solely on curiosity. The black men that participated in the study were poor sharecroppers that would do and believe anything that the doctor told them. Most of these men had never even seen a doctor before in their lives.These men were promised free medical care for their bad blood, and drawn in by signs that claimed â€Å"last chance for treatment†. The doctors and scientists conducting the research had church leaders and other respected members of the community help to enlist people to participate in the study. The researchers even enlisted the help of a black nurse and admired her ability to help them gain the trust of the participants. If the researchers needed to lie to a group of people in order to conduct their experiment, these men would have been some of these easiest to fool (Infoplease; Thomas).The researchers that were involved in the Tuskegee Study are said to have been fairly liberal for the time and open to the education of blacks. However it seems that there was some sort of racist mind set involved in this scheme. The researchers seem to have had no regard to other human life and treated the men like lab rats. The researcher s even made sure that their goal would not be interrupted by others. They went to great lengths to make sure all medical professionals in the area participated in the study and gave orders not to give treatment to the men.The black men were even excluded from the draft during WWII to keep their research from being interrupted (Herried; Fourtner; Fourtner; Thomas) As the years went by, the study did not become less organized and forgotten. There were meetings held and new people were added to the project. The experiment was constantly reviewed throughout the years as the focus changed. Ethical issues were not brought up until halfway through the 1960’s, over 30 years after the experiment had begun. During the 1950’s, the focus turned to the aging of syphilis and the negative impact it had on the body.It was quite clear that syphilis caused great damage over time and would shorten the life span of the host. Even at this point in the study, when so many men had passed awa y and others had gone unaccounted for, the study continued. The researchers believed that the study had gone on for so long that the men were untreatable anyways, even with use of penicillin (Herried; Fourtner; Fourtner). To continue a research study like this and deny men treatment just on the basis of curiosity seems too unethical to be true. But all signs point to this especially when considering another research study that took place during the same time period.From 1946 to 1948, the American government performed research in Guatemala that involved intentionally infecting Guatemalan subjects with syphilis. The idea was to test the effectiveness of penicillin on different stages of syphilis. A very interesting detail is that a man by the name of Dr. John C. Cutler was involved not only in the Guatemalan study, but the Tuskegee study as well. It is strange that although Dr. Cutler was involved in both experiments, he did not choose to test the effectiveness of penicillin on the me n who were already infected with syphilis in the Tuskegee Study.Instead, he and his colleagues chose to allow syphilis infected prostitutes to sleep with Guatemalan prisoners. This truly shows the ethical value that the researchers held and what their true motives were (Villaroasa). Dr. Cutler and the other men involved in the Tuskegee research had no interest in any kind of advancement with the prevention of syphilis. A kind of bureaucracy was formed that helped fuel this unethical study. Men who were involved in the Tuskegee study would be promoted to surgeon general of the U. S. Public Health Service. Dr.Cutler even obtained the position of assistant surgeon general in the PHS. Dr. Cutler defended the integrity of the study up until his death (Thomas; Villarosa) It is hard to imagine that an idea that began with such good intentions could have turned into the catastrophe that was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The men who conducted this study seemed to have been fueled by a strange curiosity that they masked with the idea of medical advancement. It is clear that the researchers did not view people with darker skin colors as equal, as they treated them like lab animals.It is evident and even admitted by some involved in the study that there were no advances in medicine because of the study. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male only came to a close because of a national press release in 1972. By this time, over 370 men that had been used for research were either dead or believed to be dead. If the researchers had any true notion to help them, that number would have been much smaller. Not only had this study affected the men directly involved in it; it affected the men’s wives and their children as well.There is no questioning the goal of the experiment being to see what would happen to someone if syphilis was left untreated. The doctors could have only continued this experiment based off of some strange curiosity. It is possible tha t some of them may have believed what they were doing was for the better, but that is hard to imagine. Nothing was gained from the experiments in the Tuskegee Study. The only possible advancement would be the understanding of ethics for future research. Works Cited Fourtner, A. W. , C. R. Fourtner, and C. F. Herreid. â€Å"†Bad Blood†: A Case Study of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project. Philosophy. tamucc. edu. Texas A&M University. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. Reverby, Susan M. â€Å"Listening to Narratives from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. † Lancet 377. 977B (2011): 1646-647. TheLancet. com – Home Page. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. Thomas, Stephen B. â€Å"The Legacy of Tuskegee. † Thebody. com. HealthCentral Network, Jan. -Feb. 2000. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. â€Å"The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. † Infoplease. com. Pearson Education, 2007. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. Villarosa, Linda. â€Å"The Guatemala Syphilis Experiment's Tuskegee Roots. † Theroot. com. The Slate Gro up, 02 Oct. 2010. Web. 28 Nov. 2011.

Sunday, January 5, 2020

The Start of Restricted Gun Rights in the US

When Virginia was drafting its state constitution in 1776, American founding father Thomas Jefferson wrote that â€Å"no freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.† Yet Jefferson had been dead just 11 years before the first attempt was made to severely restrict gun ownership. It happened in Georgia in 1837, nearly 100 years before the first federal gun control laws would be passed. The Nation’s First Gun Ban Georgia’s state legislature passed a law in 1837 that banned the sale of knives â€Å"used for offensive or defensive purposes† and all pistols except flintlock  Ã¢â‚¬Å"horseman’s pistols.† Possession of those weapons was also prohibited unless the weapons were worn in plain sight. History did not well record the reasoning behind the legislature’s vote. What is known  is that the legislation stood as the law of the land in Georgia for eight years before the state’s supreme court declared it unconstitutional and voided it from the books. Applying Federal Rights to State Law America’s founding fathers made sure to include a right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights. But the right to keep and bear arms wasn’t limited to the Second Amendment; many states incorporated a right to bear arms into their constitutions as well. Georgia was a rare exception. The state’s constitution included no right to bear arms. So when Georgia’s ban on small handguns was finally challenged in the state’s supreme court, in the 1845 case of Nunn v. the State of Georgia, the court found it had no precedent and no state constitutional mandate to apply. So, they looked to the U.S. Constitution and cited the Second Amendment heavily in their decision to strike down the gun ban as unconstitutional. In its decision, the Nunn court held that while the Georgia legislature could ban citizens from carrying concealed weapons, it could not ban openly carried weapons. To do so, stated the court, would violate the Second Amendment right to carry weapons for purposes of self-defense. Specifically the Nunn court wrote, â€Å"We are of the opinion, then, that so far as the act of 1837 seeks to suppress the practice of carrying certain weapons secretly, that it is valid, inasmuch as it does not deprive the citizen of his natural right of self-defence, or of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But that so much of it, as contains a prohibition against bearing arms openly, is in conflict with the Constitution, and void; and that, as the defendant has been indicted and convicted for carrying a pistol, without charging that it was done in a concealed manner, under that portion of the statute which entirely forbids its use, the judgment of the court below must be reversed, and the proceeding quashed.† Perhaps even more significant to the current gun control debate, the Nunn court ruled that the Second Amendment guaranteed all people — not just members of the militia — the right to keep and bear arms, and that the type of arms carried was not restricted only to those borne by the militia but arms of any type and description. The court wrote, â€Å"the right of the whole people, old and young, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not merely such as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in on, in the slightest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying of a well regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free state.† The court went on to ask, since when does â€Å"any legislative body in the Union have the right to deny to its citizens the privilege of keeping and bearing arms in defense of themselves and their country.† The Aftermath Georgia finally did amend its constitution to include a right to bear arms in 1877, adopting a version very similar to the Second Amendment. Except for a handful of relatively minor and overturned state laws attempting to ban freed slaves from owning guns, efforts to restrict gun rights were largely over after the Georgia Supreme Court’s 1845 ruling. Not until 1911, when New York City enacted a law requiring gun owners to be licensed, would major laws restricting gun rights resurface in America. Updated by Robert Longley