...Over the years, there have been so many societies that have collapsed. Jared Diamond, a scientist who studies societies and their declines, believes that a collapse results from environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, or a societies response to the their problems (11). Diamond wrote about many societies in his engrossing book Collapse, but out of them all, the Greenland Norse seems to be the one that supports his ideas and opinions the most. The Greenland Norse was a landscape where Vikings settled, but unfortunately their civilization came to an end after being severely damaged. As Jared Diamond would say "collapse isn't inevitable but depends on a society's choices" (21). This shows that the actions of the colonist that settled in Greenland were the main prospect of its end. Overall the collapse of Greenland Norse is instructive because it declined from deforestation and soil erosion, colder climates, military issues with their neighbors, cut-off trade with Europe, and their inability to adopt useful methods from their surrounding societies; these problems fall into all of Jared Diamonds factors in his five point framework impeccably proving his theory. Firstly, the Norse caused ecological downfall by all the reckless logging and farming they did, which resulted in soil erosion and deforestation. Due to this, the settlers lost lumber, firewood, and iron (Diamond 250). Lumber and firewood were scarce because there was no trees left...
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...Collapse- book is about a history topic about how societies choose to fail or survive. The main characters are historical people and unknown kings of Mayan cities or Easter Island villages. Jared Diamond tells the story of the Viking explorer Erik the Red, who discovered Greeland and Vinland (Terranova, in Canada). Another character is captain Olafsson, a norse sailor who wrote the last news about Greenland in 1410. Another main character is Christopher Columbus, who arrived at Hispaniola in 1492, but now this island is two countries, the Dominican Republic and the Haiti. Diamond studied the politics of two presidents. the dominican Rafael Trujillo, who protected the enviroment and the dictator François, Papa Doc, Duvalier, who decided on politics of deforestatation of his country, Haiti. The author considered the bad politics of another main character, king George II, who was interested in sending merinosheeps from Spain to Australia, an idea which was succesful from 1820 to 1950 but then the farmers understood their lands lost fertility. Another main character is Tokuwaga Jeayasu, a shogun of Japan in 1600, who prohibited Christianity in 1600 and protected his country againt deforestation. The book takes us to a lot of places around the globe: Mayan cities, Rwanda, Viking colonies of Vinland or Greenland, Haiti and Dominican Republic, Easter Island and Polynesian colonies in Pacific, and the Chaco villages in New Mexico (United States). The time period was from 800 AC, when...
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...To employees (memo) This afternoon there was a significant cave-in in the San Jose mine that resulted in 33 of our employees being trapped. They are 2300 feet underground. At this time we have no way to communicate with them. Therefore, we do not know how many, if any, are injured or if they are alive. We are working very hard to set up communication and come up with a rescue plan. We will do everything in our power to bring them home safely. We greatly value each and everyone of our employees. Please stay positive and keep the miners and their families in your thoughts and prayers. To family (face-to-face meeting) I have asked to speak with you to inform you that there has been a collapse in the San Jose mine today. The collapse has resulted in 33 men being trapped. Your husband/son is one of those men. I want you to know we are going to do everything we possibly can to rescue everyone. Unfortunately, at this time, we have no form of communication available with them. Therefore we do not know how many are injured or how many have survived. I know this is horrible news and you are very concerned about your loved one. Please take comfort in knowing we will do whatever is necessary to rescue all 33 men. We are working as fast as we can to set up communication and come up with a plan for rescue. We will keep you involved every step of the way. We will also be here to support you through this process. There is a good chance that the rescue could take...
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...“The Collapse” Mark Beasley (30 March 2010) Extract: Bill Wrinkle had it all; he was the leader of one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world, he had the respect (and some might say fear) of his rivals and colleagues and he had the beautiful wife and house. Bill had come from the tough streets of New York armed only with what many competitors called “cunning street smarts” and a propensity to bully and intimidate. He was lauded by the press as a pioneer in the “new economy” expanding his company into new exotic financial products and business lines as well as moving his firm into geographic locations not entered by foreigners before. However, that was all about to change as his life’s work began to crumble and fall all around him in the autumn of 2008. His days of enormous risk-taking and swaggering bravado was about to lead him and some 50,000 employees down a precipitous path to eventual destruction. “How had it come to this?” It was an unseasonably warm evening on the 5th of September 2008 when the lights of Bill Wrinkle’s midnight blue Mercedes lit up the forecourt of his expansive Greenwich, Connecticut home. Of all the palatial mansions that lined the treehugged streets of this part of the world, Bills was by far the most spectacular – a 12 bedroom oasis with tennis court, indoor squash court (which the talented player used almost daily), a 50metre infinity pool, and, enough land to host some of the more grander social gatherings of New Yorks...
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...Collapse University Course Professor’s Name Date of Submission Collapse Turnaround is a state that helps a company or an organization to recover financially that has been performing poorly for a longer period. An example of a company which has once experienced turnaround is The Spring leaf Holdings based in Evansville Indiana. The company deals with credit insurance and consumer lending. The company reported a loss of $1.3 billion during the 2007-2012 global financial crises. The turnaround came in 2013 whereby the company had to strategize on the right direction. It closed over 500 local branches and was forced to retrench 500 positions that included 140 of their Evansville headquarter employees. The company also continued to grow receivables per branch and reached that objective in the financial year 2014.That helped the company to drive Core Earnings up 42% from the previous 2013 financial year. Through gradual improvement, the turnaround was effective, and it improved the company’s profitability by 22 percent in 2014 financial year (Gilson, 2010). Some changes and developments are currently taking place in the field of HR management. HR policy is being defined and implemented to strengthen the performance of the company and develop the skills of employees to hasten its recovery. The purpose of implementing the policy of the HR is to prevent the company from collapsing. Managerial culture is being developed to put in place annual performance reviews, a training program and...
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...The Welfare Dilemma in America Defending Americas Financial Integrity Michael A. Barron, J.D., CPA Credits To: Claude Allen Barron, Ph.D. Merwin Michael Scruggs, M.D., M.B.A. Reagan Shea Thomas, M.S. ABSTRACT I will attempt to defend the ever-‐growing problem that lies within the current Welfare system in the United States of America, and try to explain why it must be reformed so that the country can continue to operate on the perpetual system of capitalism. College of Business | School of Accountancy In a world of increasing demand and decreasing supply by way of domestic distributors, we may at times wonder why the prices of many different resources soar at astronomical prices. The answer to this question is very simple when you just think about it in its entirety; we can simply call the influences of these prices, market externalities. Market externalities often times are confused with how desire influences the world around us, but instead these externalities are caused by outside influences such as government mandate or outsourcing from one country to another. The externalities will continue with the times to keep up with a world of great demand, but there will be no greater supply. This seminar will be composed of only two parts...
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...According to B. F. Skinner (Science and Human Behavior, 1965), the Operant Conditioning is the process by which a response becomes more or less likely to occur depending on its consequences. The schedule of reinforcement is an important component of learning process under the Operant Conditioning. I would like to apply this theory on the 2 dogs with same age in 2 different educating situation. The 2 objects of study are Yorkshire Terrier in my cousin’s home and Toy Poodle in ours. The Yorkshire Terrier was educated under random schedule, while the Toy Poodle was educated under continuous reinforcement schedule. While house training the Yorkshire Terrier and Toy Poodle, classical conditioning was applied. In order to communicate the command and action to the 2 objects, we applied the motivational training. Motivational training engages the use of rewards to strengthen good performance, and overlooks all bad behavior (Marlo Shelby, 1999). It is based on Thorndike's Law of Effect (Burch Mary R. and Jon S. Bailey, 1999), which states that actions that generate rewards tend to increase in regularity and actions that do not generate rewards decrease in frequency. We brought both Yorkshire Terrier and Toy Poodle into the cage while saying the command “House” then gave them snacks, after that we reward them with snacks whenever they get into the cage. Both Yorkshire Terrier and Toy Poodle learnt to get to the cage with the command “House”. After learning the command, Yorkshire...
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...How Did The Great Depression Affect the South? The Great Depression in the South came at a time when the South was still not fully recovered from the civil war. As a result the economy was already in worse shape than their thriving Northern counterparts. The South was the poorest section of the depression with a per capita income ½ of that of the northern states. Workers struggled to feed their families even before the stock market crash of 1929. As people who would be interviewed later on would state, “those were the good old days, but the good old days were pretty tough.” After the depression hit the south fell into even worse hardship. One county in North Carolina saw 3,500 Farm Foreclosures out of 5,280 farms in the county in a single year. This means if you were farming during that time period and lived next to two other farmers’ chances are two out of the three of you would have lost your farm within the year, an amazingly high figure. A swarm of Locus and a drought hurt farmers even more by making it harder for them to grow their crops. Governments in the South during the great depression responded to the economic disaster by raising the sales tax and cutting spending on government programs. These two things lead to an even greater disaster. All of the problems in the South lead Franklin Roosevelt to refer to the south during the great depression as the nation’s number one...
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...The United States and The Fall of Rome a Looking Similar Rome had many downfalls to lead towards its demise like political corruption, military spending and greed. You would think those things don’t exist in the great nation of the United States, but if you thought that then you are clearly ignorant. There are plenty of similarities between the downfall of Rome and the United States, which are economic instability, spreading the military too thin and inflation. The Decline of Rome was due to numerous items such as economic instability, taxation, military dissipation and political corruption. During the years of the downfall Rome began to rely on imports from other countries such as Egypt. Rome imported more then they exported which was a deficiency in income. Once Caesar obtained power he then started to acquire more and more land, which was filled with greed. He wanted people to perceive him to be higher then the gods they people celebrated. This became a problem across Rome and so diversity among religions was considered, “ against the rules.” Caesar began to have relations with Cleopatra. This then turned into a rule of lovers, which they wanted to take over the eastern hemisphere. With the military spread to thin, sickness and zero surplus of food the nation crumbled. Without a military to defend them Rome would easily be invaded and dismissed as a civilization. Though the United States may not be the Fall of Rome, both civilizations had copious things in common. Such...
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...Why factor that cause the collapse of the USSR? On Christmas Day on 1991,Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the president of USSR and announced that USSR from then on was not going to existed anymore. Except the US president Reagan, very few people predict the collapse would happened. Evidences prove that the break-up of the USSR was intended and also out of Gorbachev’s expectations. After Brezhnev died. There were lots of problems left to Gorbachev. There were mainly two problems: Economy crippling and severe relationship with the US and eastern European countries.Gorbachev actually had a specific goal to improve USSR’s development by using Perestroika and Glasnost.However, those two police actually accelerated the coming of the fall. with an unintended consequences.However,there are also historian argues conversely that actually it is an intended result that the long-term economics crippling and stagnation caused the financial sustainability of USSR which directly influence people’s life situation and the USSR development. One of the Gorbachev’s policy Perestroika which was reconstruction on economy was one of the factor leads to fall of USSR which wasn't seen as a stimulant of the collapse by Gorbachev. By that time USSR saw its economic crippling. Gorbachev set up goals for ending the economic stagnation and improving the economy in USSR.Perestroika allowed more independent actions from various ministries and introduced market autonomy reforms.The goal of the...
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...The Collapse of Enron Who were the stakeholders involved in, or affected by, the collapse of Enron? How and what degree were they hurt or helped by the actions of Enron management? Some of the stakeholders were directly responsible for Enron’s collapse. The deregulation of the 1980s presented an opportunity to become the “gas bank” reducing market risk. After this success Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fallow became the market makers, buying and selling over 1,800 products. These top executives’ unethical practices and their internal control system manipulated the law to keep the company’s reputation but were responsible for the collapse. After the collapse the management continued to lie to employees who invested in Enron stock; the rest of shareholders thought that the company was in great shape. The accounting records and balance sheets information were manipulated to reflect an image of success prior to the collapse to attract and mislead investors, the public and shareholders. Andersen’s accounting consultants responsible for Enron’s accounting records destroyed thousands of documents to manipulate such information. This misleading information allowed Enron to acquire the loans necessary to expand its investment even when the company had a huge debt. After the collapse those banks were sued by shareholders and investors for the bad loans written up. At the end of Enron’s collapse, the employees who invested in the company, investors and stockholders were...
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...Zhiyi Song (Song) Principles of Macroeconomics G03 Professor Jean-Pierre Mulumba January 15, 2016 Summary of “Pitfalls to Sound Economic Reasoning” There are five common pitfalls to avoid when people are applying the economic perspective. The first one is biases. People usually bring their biases to the businesses. Government regulation is not always good for everybody’s economics. People should abandon their preconceptions of the economics, then they can avoid the pitfalls. The second one is loaded terminology. People get many information and loaded terminology from newspapers and broadcast media. Some people think that all the government workers are “mindless bureaucrats”,and all the high profits are “obscene”. Those wrong opinions make people far away from success. The third one is fallacy of composition. People should jump our of their own world to see the whole economics, so that people could get a better view and make good decisions. People should not let the fallacy confuse them. The fourth one is post hoc fallacy. Sometimes, people think event A is the cause of event B because A precedes B. But not all the situation are the same. There is an example that the Great Depression. Many people don’t think that the weaknesses in the economy caused the Great Depression, they think the stock market crash caused it. People should not look at the whole situation to find the cause of an event.The last one is correlation. Many people think that if variable X increases and Y also...
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...VISUAL DISTORTIONS NEAR A NEUTRON STAR AND BLACK HOLE ABSTRACT The visual distortion effects visible to an observer traveling around and descending to the surface of an extremely compact star are described. Specifically, trips to a "normal" neutron star with relatively weak surface gravity, an ultracompact neutron star with extremely high surface gravity, and a black hole are described. Concepts such as multiple imaging, red- and blue-shifting, conservation of surface brightness, the photon sphere, and the existence of multiple Einstein rings are discussed in terms of what the viewer would see. Computer generated, general relativistically correct illustrations highlighting the distortion effects are presented and discussed. A short movie (VHS) depicting many of these effects is available to those interested free of charge. I. BACKGROUND It is impossible for a human to travel very near a high gravity star which has a mass like that of the Sun. If, somehow, a person could survive the extremely harmful radiation that would be emitted on or near these objects, the high gravity itself would likely pose insurmountable problems. The person could not stand casually on the surface of such a star because the high surface gravity would tend to flatten them. (Lying down wouldn't help.) Were a person to orbit the star in a spaceship, however, the immense gravitational field would be overcome by a large outward centrifugal acceleration.[1] The problem in this case, however, is the...
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...The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster Karl E. Weick . Reprinted from The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster by Karl E. Weick published in Administrative Science Quarterly Volume 38 (1993): 628652 by permission of Administrative Science Quarterly. © 1993 by Cornell University 00018392/93/3804-0628. This is a revised version of the Katz- Newcomb lecture presented at the University of Michigan, April 23-24, 1993. The 1993 lecture celebrated the life of Rensis Likert, the founding director of the Institute for Social Relations. All three people honored at the lecture-Dan Katz, Ted Newcomb, and Ren Likert-were born in 1903, which meant this lecture also celebrated their 90th birthdays. I am grateful to Lance Sandelands, Debra Meyerson, Robert Sutton, Doug Cowherd, and Karen Weick for their help in revising early drafts of this material. I also want to thank John Van Maanen, J. Richard Hackman, Linda Pike, and the anonymous ASQ reviewers for their he lp with later drafts. The death of 13 men in the Mann Gulch fire disaster, made famous in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, is analyzed as the interactive disintegration of role structure and sensemaking in a minimal organization. Four potential sources of resilience that make groups less vulnerable to disruptions of sensemaking are proposed to forestall disintegration, including improvisation, virtual role systems, the attitude of wisdom, and norms of respectful interaction...
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...TISSA – UUM SECOND SEMESTER SESSION 2015/2016 BKAA2013 AUDITING AND ANSURANCE 1 GROUP ASSIGNMENT BARINGS COLLAPSE GROUP C PREPARED TO: DR. ROSE SHAMSIAH BT SAMSUDIN PREPAED BY: NAME | MATRIC NO. | CHAN KHAI QING | 233058 | TAN JIE YING | 233076 | YAP YEE WAN | 233152 | SUBMISSION DATE: 15 MAY 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 Case Summary 1 2.0 What are Ethics? Generally, why do people act unethically? 2 3.0 Justify why is there a special need for ethical conduct in professions including those in the accounting and auditing related field? 6 4.0 Discuss how the Barings collapse serves as an example of failed internal controls and governance within organization. 13 5.0 Conclusion 20 1.0 Case Summary Nick Leeson, an employee of Barings Bank who after a successful spell working for the firm's office in Indonesia is sent to Singapore as General Manager of the Trading Floor on the SIMEX exchange. Leeson's rise as he soon becomes one of Barings' key traders. However, everything isn't as it appears — through the 88888 error account, Nick is hiding huge losses as he gambles away Baring's money with little more than the bat of an eyelid from the powers-that-be back in London. Eventually the losses mount up to well over £800 million and Nick, along with his wife Lisa, decide to leave Singapore and escape to Malaysia. Nick doesn't realise the severity of his losses until he reads in the newspaper that Barings has gone bankrupt. They then decide to...
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