The Situation of a Company Hanson Private Limited Assignment

The Situation of a Company Hanson Private Limited - Assignment Example The biggest issue HPL faces are regarding the size of the investment. The company has never made such a large investment in a single project at one go. This would practically stall investments into all other projects in the pipeline for the medium term. Hence, the company is not in a position to afford any failure in this project. The retail partner is willing to agree to a 3-year contract only. However, with such a large investment, there is a risk of not getting the money back within 3 years. It is possible that the products fail or are rendered obsolete at the end of 3 years. The company faces a risk of the debt trap. Right now, HPL maintains a highly favorable debt position. For adding new capacity, there are constraints in raising money through equity and almost all the financing will have to be done through debt. This raises the risk exposure of the company enormously. Hanson manufactures private label products in the personal care space where the competition is very intense. A large number of branded and non-branded companies are vying for a limited shelf space. Hanson already covers 28% of the private label market in personal care space. Therefore, there is a limit to the scope of further acquiring the market share. The personal care market volumes have increased less than 1% in the past 4 years. The marginal growth (1.7%) has been largely driven by the price increases. However, one of the biggest USPs of private label products has been their low prices as compared to the branded ones.

Disney Cohesion Case write up Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Disney Cohesion Case write up - Assignment Example is a large multinational corporation with about one hundred and seventy thousand employees spread all over the world with yearly revenue pegged at about $45 billion. The company has faced problems both internally and externally thus the need to strategically change its management and structure its organizational development (David, 29). The mission of Walt Disney Company is to become the foremost producer and provider of entertainment and information through the use of their variety of brands to have distinct content, services and products for the consumers which must also be pioneering and imaginative. This company operates through organizational structure that has strategic business units, each dealing with its core purposes, which includes the media networks, the parks and resorts, the Walt Disney Studios, Disney Consumer Products and Disney Interactive. The goals of the company are to reach children as well as adult audience through the Disney products, which may include television programs, magazines, books, movies and musical recordings. It also aims at providing the Radio Disney channel through satellite radio, mobile applications and the web while its Disney Consumer Products provides the licenses for those who may wish to provide products based on the products of Walt Disney. Financially, Walt Disney has assets amounting to about US $ 80.5 billion of assets while its revenue has been on an upward trend since the year 2008 running to 2013 with most of the revenue coming from advertising and affiliate fees amongst other sources. It generates the affiliate fees due to its popular ESPN channel, film syndication, merchandising and its ability to produce movies that are a hit in the film market. Walt Disney manages its affairs through the domestic and global integration of its corporate management strategies, which has helped it acquire other film corporations through its massive financial power. Due to its diversified nature of business, it is managed

Digital Image Enhancement Methods for Multimedia Technology

Digital Image Enhancement Methods for Multimedia Technology Chapter 1 1.1 Introduction In today’s communications networks, multimedia is a growing field. There are increasing demands on incorporating visual aspect to other modes of communications. It is therefore unable to be avoided to have situations in which the video and transmitted images being corrupted or degraded in their perceptual quality by variety of ways. 1.2Digital Image Processing An image is defined as two- dimensional function, f(x,y), where x,y are plane coordinates and the amplitude of ‘f’ at any pair of coordinates (x,y) is called the intensity or gray level of the image. When x, y and the intensity values of f are all finite and discrete quantities, we call the image a digital image. To processing the image by means of computer algorithms is called as digital image processing. As compared to analog image processing, digital image processing has many advantages. It can avoid problems such as signal distortion, image degradation and build-up of noise during processing. 1.2 Image Restoration and Enhancement Methods: Now day’s digital images have covered the complete world. Images are acquired by photo electronic or photochemical methods. The sensing devices tend to reduce a quality of the digital images by introducing the noise and blur due to motion or misfocus of camera. One of the first applications of digital images was in the news paper industry, when pictures were sent by submarine cable between New York and London. Introduction of cable picture transmission system in the early 1920’s reduced the time required to transport a picture across Atlantic from more than a week to less than three hours. Some of the initial problems in improving the visual quality of these early digital pictures were related to the selection of printing procedures and distribution of intensity levels. Digital image processing techniques began in the late 1960s and early 1970s to be used in medical imaging, remote Earth resources observations and astronomy. Tomography was invented independently by Sir Godfrey N. Hounsfield and Professor Allan M.Cormack who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in medicine for their invention. But, X-rays were discovered in 1985 by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. Geographers use the similar technique to study the pollution patterns from aerial and satellite imagery. Image enhancement and restoration procedures are used to process the degraded images of unrecoverable objects or experimental results too expensive to duplicate. The use of a gray level transformation which transforms a given empirical distribution function of gray level values in an image into a uniform distribution has been used as an image enhancement as well as for a normalization procedure.( I. Pitas) Image enhancement refers to increase the image quality by sharpening certain image features (edges, boundaries and contrast) and reducing the noise. Digital image enhancement and restoration are two dimensional filters. They are broadly classified into linear digital filters and non linear filters. Linear digital filter can be designed or implemented either spatial domain or Frequency domain. (K.S. Thyagarajan) In Spatial Domain methods refers to the image plane itself .Image processing methods, spatial domain methods are based on direct manipulation of pixels in an image. The intensity transformations and spatial filtering are two principal categories of spatial domain methods. In Frequency domain methods, first image is transformed to frequency domain. It means that, the Fourier transform of the image is computed and performed all processing on the Fourier transform of the image. Finally Inverse Fourier transform is performed to get the resultant image. (Rafael C.Gonzalez and Richard E.Woods) Image Enhancement Techniques are Median filtering Neighborhood averaging Edge Detection Histogram techniques In 1980, recent work on c.c.d. scanners is reviewed and solid-state scanners which include on-chip signal processing functions are described. Future trends are towards `smart’ scanners; these are scanners with on-chip real-time processing functions, such as analogue-to-digital conversion, thresholding, data compaction, edge enhancement and other real-time image processing functions.( Chamberlain,1980) The image enhancement algorithm first separates an image into its lows (low-pass filtered form) and highs (high-pass filtered form) components. The lows component then controls the amplitude of the highs component to increase the local contrast. The lows component is then subjected to a non-linearity to modify the local luminance mean of the image and is combined with the processed highs component. The performance of this algorithm when applied to enhance typical undegraded images, images with large shaded areas, and also images degraded by cloud cover will be illustrated by way of examples. (Peli, T., 1981) Enhancement algorithms based on local medians and interquartile distances are more effective than those using means and standard deviations for the removal of spike noise, preserve edge sharpness better and introduce fewer artifacts around high contrast edges. They are not as fast as the mean-standard deviation equivalents but are suitable for large data sets treated in small machines in production quantities.( Scollar,I.,1983) Filtering CT images to remove noise, and thereby enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in the images, is a difficult process because CT noise is of a broad-band spatial-frequency character, overlapping frequencies of interest in the signal.A measurement of the noise power spectrum of a CT scanner and some form of spatially variant filtering of CT images can be beneficial if the filtering process is based upon the differences between the frequency characteristics of the noise and the signal. For evaluating the performance, used a percentage standard deviation, an index representing contrast, a frequency spectral pattern, and several CT images processed with the filter. (Okada., 1985) A two-dimensional least-mean-square (TDLMS) adaptive algorithm based on the method of steepest decent is proposed and applied to noise reduction in images. The adaptive property of the TDLMS algorithm enables the filter to have an improved tracking performance in nonstationary images. The results presented show that the TDLMS algorithm can be used successfully to reduce noise in images. The algorithm complexity is 2(NÃâ€"N) multiplications and the same number of additions per image sample, where N is the parameter-matrix dimension. The algorithm can be used in a number of two-dimensional applications such as image enhancement and image data processing.( Hadhoud,M.M.,1988) Image processing techniques are used to determine the range and alignment of a land vehicle. The approach taken is to establish a state vector of quantities derived from an image sequence, and to refine this over the mission. The image processing techniques applied fall into the generic categories of enhancement, detection, segmentation, and classification. Approaches to estimating the alignment and range of a vehicle in computationally efficient ways are presented. The estimates of quantities extracted from single image frames are subject to errors. This approach facilitates the integration of results from multiple images, and from multiple sensor systems.( Atherton, T.J.,1990) The JPEG coder has proven to be extremely useful in coding image data. For low bit-rate image coding (0.75 bit or less per pixel), however, the block effect becomes very annoying. The edges also display `wave-like appearance. An enhancement algorithm is proposed to enhance the subjective quality of the reconstructed images. First, the pixels of the coded image are classified into three broad categories: (a) pixels belonging to quasi-constant regions where the pixel intensity values vary slowly, (b) pixels belonging to dominant-edge (DE) regions which are characterized by few sharp and dominant edges and (c) pixels belonging to textured regions which are characterized by many small edges and thin-line signals. An adaptive mixture of some well-known spatial filters which uses the pixel labeling information for its adaptation is used as the adaptive optimal spatial filter for image enhancement. (Kundu, A.1995) The videotexts are low-resolution and mixed with complex backgrounds; image enhancement is a key to successful recognition of the videotexts. Especially in Hangul characters, several consonants cannot be distinguished without sophisticated image enhancement techniques. In this experiment, after multiple videotext frames containing the same captions are detected and the caption area in each frame is extracted, five different image enhancement techniques are serially applied to the image: multi-frame integration, resolution enhancement, contrast enhancement, advanced binarization, and morphological smoothing operations and tested the proposed techniques with the video caption images containing both Hangul and English characters from various video sources such as cinema, news, sports, etc. The character recognition results are greatly improved by using enhanced images in the experiment. (Sangshin Kwak.,2000). The use of an adaptive image enhancement system that implements the human visual system (HVS) has the properties for contrast enhancement of X-ray images. X-ray images are poor quality and are usually interpreted visually. The HVS properties considered are its adaptive nature, multichannel mechanism and high nonlinearity. This method is adaptive, nonlinear and multichannel, and combines adaptive filters and homomorphic processing. The median filtering method is a simple and efficient way to remove impulse noise from digital images. This novel method has two stages. The first stage is to detect the impulse noise in the image. In this stage, first one identify the noise pixel and second one the pixels are roughly divided into two classes, which are noise-free pixel and noise pixel. Then, the second stage is to eliminate the impulse noise from the image. In this stage, only the noise-pixels are processed. The â€Å"noise -free pixels† are directly copied to the output image. Here, hybrid of adaptive median filter with switching median filter method is used. The adaptive median filter framework in order to enable the flexibility of the filter to change it size accordingly based on the approximation of local noise density. The switching median filter framework in order to speed up the process and also allows local details in the image to be preserved. (Kong, NSP., 2008) One of the advantages of Level-2 Improved tolerance based selective arithmetic mean filtering technique is that this filtering technique is to detect and remove the noisy pixels and restore the noise free information. However the removal of impulse noise is often accomplished at the expense of blurred and distorted features of edges. Therefore it is necessary to preserve the edges and fine details during filtering. (Deivalakshmi,S., 2010) An efficient non-linear cascade filter is used to removal of high density salt and pepper noise in image and video. This method consists of two stages to enhance the filtering. The first stage is the Decision based Median Filter (DMF) which is used to identify pixels likely to be contaminated by salt and pepper noise and replaces them by the median value. The second stage is the Unsymmetrical Trimmed Filter, either Mean Filter (UTMF) or Midpoint Filter (UTMP) which is used to trim the noisy pixels in an unsymmetrical manner and processes with the remaining pixels The basic idea is that, though the level of denoising in the first stage is lesser at high noise densities, the second stage helps to increase the noise suppression. Hence, this method is very suitable for low, medium as well as high noise densities even above 90%. This algorithm shows better image and video quality in terms of visual appearance and quantitative measures. ( Balasubramanian, S.,2009) The enhancement algorithm enhances CR image detail and CR image enhanced has good visual effect, so the method id suit for edge detail enhancement of CR medicine radiation image. (Zhang., 2010). Three dimensional TV is considered as next generation broadcasting service.TOF sensors are a relatively new technology allowing real time capture of both photometric and geometric scene information. In order to generate the natural 3D video, first we develop a practical pipeline including TOF data processing and MPEG-4 based data transmission and reception. Then we acquire colour and depth videos from TOF range sensor. Then Alpha matting and enhancement are performed to handle fuzzy and hairy objects (Ji-Ho Cho Sung-Yeol Kim Lee, 2010). Chapter 2 2.1 Median Filtering Median Filtering is a non -linear signal enhancement technique for the smoothing of signals, the suppression of impulse noise, and preserving of edges. In the one dimensional case it consists of sliding a window of an odd number of elements along the signal, replacing the centre sample by the median of the samples in the window. Noise is any undesirable signal. Noise is everywhere and thus we have to learn to live with it. Noise gets introduced into data via any electrical system used for storage, transmission, and/or processing. In addition, nature will always play a â€Å"noisy† trick or two with data under observation. When encountering an image corrupted with noise you will want to improve its appearance for a specific application. The Techniques applied are application-oriented. Also, different procedures are related to the types of noise introduced to the image. Some important types of noise are: Gaussian or white, Rayleigh, Salt-pepper or impulse noise, periodic, sinusoidal or coherent, uncorrelated, and granular. In statistics, a median is described as the numeric value separating the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the numbers from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one. For example: The observations are [7,5,6,8,1,3,8,5,4]. First, we are arranging in ascending order or lowest value to highest value. [1, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8] Then the middle one is picked. Here, number of observations n=9, it is an odd number. The middle value=5. So, the median =5. If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the mean of the two middle values. For example: observations are [7,5,6,8,1,3,8,5,4,6]. First, we are arranging in ascending order or lowest value to highest value. [1, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8] Then the middle one is picked. Here, number of observations n=10, it is an even number. So, averaging the observation 5 and 6 and gets the median value. The observation values are 5 and 6. The averaging value of 5 and 6 gives 5.5. So, the median =5.5. Most scanned images contain noise caused by the scanning method (sensor and its calibration-electrical components, radio frequency spikes) this noise may look like dots of black and white. Median filter helps us by erasing the black dots, called the Pepper, and it also fills in white holes in an image, called salt â€Å"Impulse Noise†. It’s like the mean filter but is better in pixels and will not affect the other pixels significantly. This means that mean does that. Preserving sharp edges Median value is much like neighbourhood Median filtering is popular in removing salt and pepper noise and works by replacing the pixel value with the median value in the neighbourhood of that pixel. When applied on: 1. We do brightness -ranking by first placing the brightness values of the pixels from each neighbourhood in ascending order. 2. The median or middle value of this ordered sequence is then selected as the representative brightness value for that neighbourhood. 2.2Median Filter Action The median filter is also sliding -window spatial filter, but it replaces the centre pixel value in the window by the median of all pixel values in the window. As for the mean filter, the kernel is usually square but can be any shape rectangular, circular, etc depends on an image. An example of median filtering of a single 3*3 window of values is shown in figure 2.1. To arrange the pixel value in ascending order: 0,2,3,3,4,6,19,97 The median value=4(Here no of items=9) The centre pixel value 97 is replaced by the median value 4 as shown below. Figure 2.2 This illustrates one of the celebrated features of the median filter: its ability to remove ‘impulse’ noise. The median filter is also widely claimed to be ‘edge-preserving’ since it theoretically preserves step edges without blurring. However, in the presence of noise it blurs edges in images slightly. 2.3 Synthetic Image Let us consider 6*6 window size. Here, we take 3*3 mask size, to find out the median value. The order of the pixel value:1,2,3,3,3,4,5,7,8.The median value of this mask size=3. Here, the centre pixel value 3 is replaced by the median value 3. Here, we find out the A to P value as shown in figure 2.5. First, we find out the median value for 3*3 mask size and replacing the original centre pixel value by these values. To find A: Order: 1, 2, 3,3,3,4,5,7,8. Median=3. To find B: Order: 1, 3, 3,3,4,4,5,6,8. Median=4. To find C: Order: 2, 3, 3,4,4,5,6,8,9. Median=4. To find D: Order: 1, 2, 2,3,4,5,6,8,9. Median=4. Similar way, we have to calculate F to P. To find P: Order: 2, 4,5,5,5,8,8,9 Median=5. The final output of synthetic image of â€Å"6*6† window as shown in figure 2.6. By checking the synthetic image output by using Matlab. To Refer the Matlab Coding in Appendix A. Output: 3 1 5 6 9 2 7 3 4 4 4 1 2 4 4 4 4 8 1 4 4 4 5 7 1 4 4 5 5 8 3 5 7 9 8 2 Both Hand calculation synthetic image output and Matlab synthetic image output are same. 2.4 Median Filter Implementation on Mat lab: In past years, linear filters become the most popular filters in image processing. The reason of their popularity is caused by the existence of robust mathematical models which can be used for their analysis and design. However, there exist many areas in which the nonlinear filters provide significantly better results. The advantage of non linear filters lies in their ability to preserve edges and suppress the noise without loss of details. The success of nonlinear filters is caused by the fact that image signals as well as existing noise types are usually nonlinear. Due to the imperfection of image sensors, images are often corrupted by noise. The impulse noise is the most frequently referred type of noise. The most cases, impulse noise is caused by malfunctioning pixels in camera sensors, faulty memory locations in hardware, or errors in data transmission. We distinguish two common types of impulse noise. They are Salt-and-Pepper noise and the random valued shot noise. For images corrupted by salt-and-pepper noise, the noisy pixels have only maximum or minimum values. In case of random valued shot noise, the noisy pixels have arbitrary value. Traditionally, the impulse noise is removed by a median filter which is the most popular non linear filter .A standard median filter gives poor performance for images corrupted by impulse noise with higher intensity. A simple median filter utilizing 3*3 or 5*5 pixel window is sufficient only when the noise intensity is less than approximately 10-20%. Here, we implement the median filter using Matlab. To refer the Matlab coding in Appendix B. Output: problem The Noisy Image is corrupted by Salt-and-Pepper noise. By using median filter, 3*3 mask size most of noise has been eliminated. If we smooth the noisy image with larger median filter 7*7 mask size, all the noisy pixels disappear as shown above figure. 3.0 Neighbourhood Averaging Filters Neighborhood averaging filters are similar to mean filters. The Neighborhood averaging filter is the simplest low pass filter; here all coefficients are identical. These filters sometimes are called Averaging filters. The characteristics of neighborhood averaging are defined by kernel height, width and shape. When Kernel size increases, the smoothing effect also increases. The idea behind these filters is straight forward. By replacing the every pixel value in an image by the average of the intensity levels in the neighborhood defined by the filter mask, this process results in an image with reduced â€Å"sharp† transitions in intensity levels. The window is usually square, but can be any shape like rectangular, circular, etc. depending on the size of an image. Each point in the smoothed image, is f(x,y)obtained from the average pixel value in a neighbourhood of (x,y) in the input image. For example, if we use a 33 neighbourhood around each pixel we would use the mask Each pixel value is multiplied by 1/9, summed, and then the result placed in the output image. This mask is successively moved across the image until every pixel has been covered. That is, the image is convolved with this smoothing mask (also known as a spatial filter or kernel). However, one usually expects the value of a pixel to be more closely related to the values of pixels close to it than to those further away. This is because most points in an image are spatially coherent with their neighbours; indeed it is generally only at edge or feature points where this hypothesis is not valid. Accordingly it is usual to weight the pixels near the centre of the mask more strongly than those at the edge. Some common weighting functions include the rectangular weighting function above (which just takes the average over the window), a triangular weighting function, or a Gaussian. In practice one doesnt notice much difference between different weighting functions, although Gaussian smoothing is the most commonly used. Gaussian smoothing has the attribute that the frequency components of the image are modified in a smooth manner. Smoothing reduces or attenuates the higher frequencies in the image. Mask shapes other than the Gaussian can do odd things to the frequency spectrum, but as far as the appearance of the image is concerned we usually dont notice much. The arithmetic mean is the standard average, often simply called the mean. The mean may be confused with the median, mode or range. The mean is the average of a set of values, or distribution; however, for probability distributions, the mean is not necessarily the same as the median, or the mode. For example: The observations are [7,5,6,8,1,3,8,5,4]. First, we find out the total value for these observations. Total=7+5+6+8+1+3+8+5+4=47 Then, finding the average one. Here, number of observations n=9. Average=total/9. =47/9 Average=5.22(Equivalent to 5) So, the average =5. 3.1 Synthetic image Let us consider 6*6 window size. Figure 3.1 Here, we take 3*3 mask size, to find out the Neighbourhood averaging value. The order of the pixel value:1,2,3,3,3,4,5,7,8.The averaging value of this mask size=4. Here , the centre pixel value 3 is replaced by the averaging value 4. By using this method, we have to calculate the median value for whole window size 6*6. 3 1 5 6 9 2 7 A B

Graduation Speech -- Graduation Speech, Commencement Address

I realize that, during these short minutes I have to address my fellow classmates, all I truly have to offer you are my own thoughts and a little bit of philosophy that I have picked up during my three years here at West High School. Throughout our high school careers, we have been presented with clichà ©s and catch-phrases that are meant to epitomize our entire school career into three or four words: Class of 2000, Bridge to the Millennium, and The Future is Now. As true as all of those phrases may be, I do not believe that any of them can define our entire education. The common tie between all of those themes is this: They all focus on what is to come. They tell us of how we should be years from now, as opposed to acknowledging how we are at this moment. What I want to focus on now i...

Early Childhood Education: Raising Children the Right Way Essay

In early Childhood Education; teaching a child to read and write at early ages can have positive results when showing them educational videos and programs. Early Childhood Education is a field that will never lose significance. It sheds light on the best parenting styles and other significant issues related to raising children. It also gives us a glimpse of how young children perceive the world and how we can put this new knowledge to use for the benefits of children, parents and society. Young children slowly develop a concept of gender through interaction with their environment. Children perception of gender and how they define differences between male and female gender roles would offer an excellent research topic in early childhood education. Particularly during the first three years are critical and influence the child for life. Learning is not confined to children of a certain age or to a formal school environment. Encouraging children to play and explore with other children helps them learn and develop socially, emotionally, physically and intellectually. Play is central to children’s learning, regardless of the actual content. The process play helps children get involved with exploration, language experimentation, cognition, and also the development of social skills. Being interactive with other children teaches them about who they are and about the people around them. Early Childhood education affects a child’s learning somewhat in a good way in somewhat not. When a child goes to a pre-school with teachers that will teach them what they will need to know for the upcoming year those students will have a better chance when they get to kindergarten, but if a child goes to a pre-school with little learning material or teaching style those students might have a hard time keeping up with the students that had a better learning experience. Recent study | Published in the Journal of Early Childhood Research | this study found the quality of a pre-school significantly predicts a child’s educational success. Not all early childhood education is created equal. Not only is it important for parents to do their research when choosing a pre-school for their child, but it’s also important for our child care professionals and teachers to be well trained. A teacher’s educational experience greatly affects the overall delivery of a child’s learning in many ways. According to the | National Association for the Education of Young Children’s | (NAEYC) Position statement on standards for programs to prepare early childhood professionals, the level of a teacher’s education directly affects any benefits the child may receive from the program. This includes early learning and development in cognitive, social, emotional and physical domains. High quality college courses will give the teacher specialized knowledge that will help to inform his decisions, teaching methods and curriculum creation. For example a teacher with extensive knowledge in child development will be able to assess each child’s abilities and identify potential developmental delays and/ or adapt curriculum to fit the child’s needs. It is important to understand child development and to recognize each child’s individual characteristics and cultural background when planning learning activities that enable children to â€Å"make sense of their world†. Children develop the skills necessary to solve real life problems and become better prepared to think for themselves when they are exposed to experiences that: 1) spark interest and curiosity, 2) integrate learning experiences, and 3) structure their thinking. These are some skills that are used in the process of childhood education: Symbolization- Students use symbols to represent an idea, Observation- students use senses to learn about something in detail, description- students verbally portray attributes of an object, person, scene, or event and it’s so many more skills that help a child in their childhood development. (www. uen. org) Benefits of early childhood education provide children with the skills that will help increase their vocabulary development and cognitive abilities. Children start learning from birth, early childhood education, whether it is in a local head-start program, a pre-school or at home, can help a child increase vocabulary development by familiarizing them with words and their meanings. According to | Rand Corporation Research | early education has lasting benefits, showing increases in IQ levels and cognitive abilities such as the ability to understand both concepts and abstract thoughts. Children exposed to early childhood education can be more prepared for social environments. A child becomes competent in learning to socially interact with adults and other children. With parental support, the child can learn not only what is socially appropriate in the classroom, but also in public places and in their home. Social competency is a key skill for a child to learn, as it will benefit them throughout their life time. Like clay, children are highly moldable in their preschool, kindergarten, and early elementary years. Between the ages of five and eight, children are actively engaged in making sense of the large, confusing world around them. In this stage, it is important that children receive the educational guidance that urges them to explore and enthusiastically interact with their setting as they develop socially, physically, intellectually, creatively and emotionally. In this early stage of development, much learning is cultivated by play or playful learning. With the world advancing technologically by the day, new and innovative methods to engage young children and accelerate their development are emerging. It is up to the early childhood educator to seize on these developments as they work to cultivate a life-long sense of curiosity and exploration in the future leaders of tomorrow. (Early Childhood Education. com) Conducting learning activities by applying the concepts of contemplative education is what to emphasize the personal transformation of first year students majoring in Early Childhood Education to meet the national standard on the required characteristics of citizens. The objectives of this research were to compare students’ mean score in each aspect of E. Q. with the norm of the Department of Mental Health; to compare students’ mean score of E. Q. before and after conducting the activities; and to study students’ opinions on the learning activities. (University Library) Although the number of children enrolled in early childhood education and care has risen dramatically over past decades, low-income children are less likely than their more affluent counterparts to participate. Public funding for early education can play an important role in increasing enrollment levels among low-income children. This study utilizes National Household Education Survey data for a 14-year period to examine the effects of public funding on the enrollment of low-income children in early childhood education and care. It also considers the effects of funding on the type of care they use. Results suggest that public funding, particularly child-care subsidies and prekindergarten funding, increases the likelihood that low-income children, even those under 3 years of age, will attend non-parental care, including center-based care. These findings indicate that public funding can help close the gap in enrollment between low- and higher-income children. (University Library) Early education can increase cognitive skills in children, according to |Katherine A. Magnuson and her colleagues who report in the February 2007 issue of â€Å"Economics of Education Review†| that children from under-served communities who attended preschool showed more cognitive improvement than their peers. Columbia University researchers confirm this connection through their study published in the July 2003 issue of â€Å"Developmental Psychology. † They found that prematurely born 8 year olds who attended 400 or more days of preschool at ages 2 and 3 years old scored higher on IQ tests than prematurely born 8 year olds of similar backgrounds who attended preschool less often. Children going through early education has great out comes like, improved cognitive skills can lead to improved academic results. Magnuson’s study indicated that children enrolled in prekindergarten performed better in reading and mathematics when they entered grade school. Children enrolled in early childhood education programs are less likely to be held back a grade in school, according to the Public Policy Forum. These children also have a decreased likelihood of being enrolled in special education remedial programs. The future of early childhood education school programs is bright. As more children are born in the United States and other developing countries, educational programs for children will always be needed to prepare them for careers that will help sustain our global society. There will always be a need for an early childhood education program in fields such as bilingual education, literacy, mathematics and science. According to the statistics provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States Department of Labor, employment demand for careers in secondary, middle and elementary schools are expected to show a significant increase. These positions will be available because of the increase in the population, but the demand will also increase due the retirement of teachers within urban areas of the United States. Therefore, there will be more than 244,000 additional jobs available by 2018 for those that have acquired an ECE degree. Additionally, teaching assistant positions are expected to have an increased demand by as much as 10 percent, while administrative positions in early childhood education school setting will have a demand growth by as much as 8 percent. Educational providers of ECE degree programs will need to prepare for these significant increases by training new educators now. Reference Page Table of Contents Early childhood Education- Authors: Ogletree Quinita, Larke, Patrica J Plarked National forum of Multicultural Issues Journal; Dec 2011, vol. 9 Issue, P1-9, 9P University of phoenix library1 Education and families: Authors: Greenberg, Joy Pastan Sep 2010, volume 84 issue 3, P490, 30 P,6 charts, 1 Graph University of phoenix libraby2 Author: M. Lavora Perry June 16, 2010 www.. livestrong. com Google lookup3 www. unicef. org Google lookup4

Hanging (Out) with the Masters

At first glance, it is easy to think that not much is happening in Mark Kostabi’s Hanging with the Masters. We get to simultaneously view works of art from various art movements as they dangle motionlessly from their taut strings. Everything is nonchalant and serene against the sky blue background, the threat of gravity underneath disappears, and even the anonymous human figure tied to a noose by the neck has surrendered. Whatever was supposed to happen in the painting has already happened. No action is caught. This is the state in which we find things because we have unfortunately arrived late.This apparent lack of motion is what makes Hanging with the Masters so busy. By kidnapping an assortment of works of arts, miniaturizing and tying them in place to become manageable spectacles (classic paintings within a present-day painting), Mark Kostabi has converged, or more appropriately eroded, time and space. There is no nostalgia for the kidnapped paintings at all; just a matter -of-factness. Very postmodern. Taken out of their contexts and arranged in a whole new landscape, the works of arts inside the painting call attention to themselves. Each one of them competes for our attention.Even if we recognize only one of the paintings/mobiles/cartoon character Hanging with the Masters blatantly references, we still get the feeling a kidnapping has happened. Something has been violated and celebrated at the same time. The verb hang takes on two meanings: Hang a picture, Hang a person. As if decoration and decoration are the same thing. And Mark Kostabi is unapologetic. DEAD MAN PERFORMING In the middle of it all, there is the faceless, sexless artist with the paintbrush pointing downwards, the hanged human,—all red (red-faced, red-bellied, and red-handed) from an unseen light source. It is as if he/she has failed a mission.In the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin tells us that â€Å"[Mankind’s] self-alien ation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order† (681). After exhausting every possible medium and subject of art, from Campbell’s soup cans to elephant dung, we only have to turn to ourselves next, explore and defy the thresholds of our own body and mind, as if they are the next frontier to turn into art. True enough, the hanged artist in Hanging with the Masters is engrossed in his/her own performance art. He/she is both a subject and object.If in modernism the subject is a â€Å"rational, individualistic, responsible, unified self†, in postmodernism, that subject is dead (Chernus, â€Å"Fredric Jameson’s Interpretation of Postmodernism,† par. 7). What replaces is an â€Å"identity [that] must be conceived as an intersection of conflicting subject positions† (Collins 337). Kostabi’s hanged artist is neither male nor female. We can’t tell if he/she is just p laying dead. We are not sure if his/her execution was forced or self-willed. If this were punishment, we don’t know what the sin was. We aren’t even sure if he/she really is a painter, or just someone with a good grip on the paintbrush.Like a true postmodern subject, everything about the hanged artist is open to speculation. One thing we are sure of though is that now he/she has laid claim to being a work of art. And who doesn’t want to be a work of art, a shiny spectacle, in our YouTube generation? MEETING HALFWAY Hanging with the Masters instantly inherits timelessness just because it gathers samples of classic works of arts all in one place. What’s more is that these works of arts are tied in place. As if we are looking at a museum wall and the theme is A Very Short History of Art.Hanging with the Masters cleverly showcases cultural artifacts of the past (a nude, a cartoon character, a Warhol-style portrait, a mobile, an op-art painting), and at the sa me time it gives a commentary on those cultural artifacts. According to Jim Collins, â€Å"[†¦] the past is not just accessed but ‘hijacked’, given an entirely different cultural significance than the antecedent text had when it first appeared† (333). In postmodernism, such â€Å"highly self-conscious forms of appropriation and rearticulation have been used by postmodern painters, photographers and performance artists† (335).But because they have been hijacked, the works of art have lost their â€Å"aura† and â€Å"quality of presence†, terms which Walter Benjamin uses to describe the authority of the original work of art that is not yet reproduced or recopied (667). For Benjamin, this diminishing aura of the work of art every time it is reproduced or finds itself in a different context (Edvard Munch’s screaming man in a mousepad, for example) is okay because it â€Å"enables the original to meet the beholder halfway† (667) . Also, according to Benjamin, it is perfectly natural and okay for cultural artifacts to lose their original intentions and change into something else.His example is that of an ancient statue of Venus. For the Greeks, it was an â€Å"object of veneration†, but for people in the Middle Ages, it became an â€Å"ominous idol† (669). â€Å"Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura† (Benjamin 669). What we see now in Kostabi’s painting are works of art that are classic examples of the art movements they are part of. They are works of arts that are exclusively tied to a genre, tied in place in the painting’s unseen ceiling, just like the hanged artist. If there is any aura left, it is only a memory of that aura as we try to identify each work of art.Yet, ironically enough, Hanging with the Masters’s style itself is tied to the surrealist art movement. The painting itself cannot escape the same bonds whi ch have taken the other paintings as captives. But of course, this is okay. Everything in postmodernism is okay, and things are not judged based on whether they are good or bad, but only whether they work for us. According to Chernus: †¦a cultural artifact is now just a random collection of signs momentarily existing side by side, ready to change at any moment into another random collection. So it cannot point beyond itself to any meaning.It cannot represent any reality outside itself. It cannot even raise the question of its relationship to any reality outside itself. It refers only to itself; it is its own referent. [†¦] Since the signs are not supposed to relate to anything beyond themselves, it makes no sense to ask what they mean. So the problem of meaning simply disappears. (Chernus, par. 19). THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF IT ALL The meaninglessness of postmodernism can be depressing but that’s what is happening right now. The millions of YouTube video clips uploaded every day don’t have to make sense at all, but we enjoy watching them all the same.The more stupid and the more disgusting, the better. YouTube has given us a platform where we can be our own celebrities, our own artists, our own works or arts, where we can be viewed by millions other simultaneously. And we all wish we’d get lots of hits every day. Just like the hanged paintings in Hanging with the Masters, we try to be amazing so we can be worthy of being looked at. Underneath it all, just like the paintings, we are all just competing for each other’s attention. Maybe we can call each YouTube clip a cultural artifact in its own right. They, after all, tell a narrative.They tell us a little something about the person who uploaded it. They tell us that at one point in time, somewhere in the world, this person took the trouble of recording a clip of himself/herself, never mind the ulterior motive. Sure, for a cultural artifact, it may be fleeting, and it is not e ven tangible, but as each footage weaves into the next one and a medley of voices occur and we are overwhelmed by the sheer number of people out there in the world, a whole community our parents’ parents never knew existed back then, we lose the urge to explain things or make sense of them.We simply turn on our curiosity and enjoy the fact that all these are happening right here right now. As Chernus has said above, there is no reliable meaning anymore and there is no point in finding the relationships of things. It is quite possible then that Hanging with the Masters is really, at the end of the day, meaningless. That, really, it is just a collection of images randomly picked. If the audience recognizes one or two paintings embedded in Hanging with the Masters, then they’re lucky and good for them.That will add a new layer to whatever meaning they decide to put into it. If not, then the painting is still nice, and deep, and mysterious, still very marketable. Which is the fate of cultural artifacts in late capitalism: to become commodities in an everything-is-for-sale world (Chernus, par. 7). It is okay to not find or force any connections among the images trapped inside Kostabi’s painting, or even reunite them with other images outside the realm of the painting.For Chernus, the postmodern way is to â€Å"accept the images living side by side in an ever-changing kaleidoscope† (Chernus, par 26). In this postmodern world where diversity is very much welcome, Hanging with the Masters, as a present-day cultural artifact, makes a strong statement about harmony. In the end, it’s not just about works of art with clashing differences in style and opinion and meanings being able to coexist peacefully in a single canvas. Substitute â€Å"people† for â€Å"works of art† in the sentence and you get the bigger picture.