In The Eight Fold Path Of Yoga Meditation Is The Eighth Step (Smith, 1

In the eight fold path of yoga meditation is the eighth step (Smith, 11). Once here a Yogi must become more aware and more sensitive to what is within themselves (?Meditation?). ?A Yogi must first lose themselves here to find peace with themselves? (Smith, 11). The armor that a person has built around themselves throughout their lives must be lost and they have to see themselves clearly (Smith, 19). Meditation begins with concentration (?Meditation?). In concentration meditation a Yogi must focus all their energy onto one thing. ?Such as an object (a candle flame), a sensation (something felt while walking), or an emotion (love)? (?Chakras and Meditation?). At first it might be hard to keep mind focused on one object. A person must train themselves to concentrate. Narrow the mind on to one category of objects. Then focus onto one of the objects. When the mind begins to wonder, go to another object in the category. When it becomes easy to focus on one object for a long time then a Yogi is ready to move on to concentrate on one single object (Lidell, 94). Chakra meditation falls under concentration meditation. There are seven major chakras along the spin. They start at the base of the spine and go up to the top of the head. The seven major chakras are connected by three major nadies. Sushumna, the middle nadi, has neutral characteristics. Nearest your left hand is the ida nadi. It has yin characteristics. The third nearest your right hand is pingala nadi. It has yang qualities (?Chakras and Meditation?). Through these nadis the chakras are connected and energy passes from one to another. Each chakra is said to be an energy transformer (?Chakras and Meditation?). When a chakra is activated or meditated on, it releases a unique type of energy. This energy is measurable and immeasurable. The measurable energy is electromagnetic energy and light photons. The immeasurable energy is called prana. ?Prana is the vital, essential energy of the universe? (Smith, 231-233). The chakras are the centers in the body were this energy is activated and stored (Smith, 231-233). For the chakras to be activated properly it depends on the sitting position. During meditation a Yogi should sit Indian style, with their legs crossed. One heel should be in front of the pelvis bone and the other in front of the first heel. The knees spread as far apart as possible and rested on the floor. This sitting position will provide a stable base. The neck and spine will be straight. Breathing will also be easier because the chest cavity is open. This will also help with concentrating and will promote clearer thinking (Smith, 224-225). Chakra meditation is very simple and easy to do. A yogi simply concentrates on each chakra starting with the root chakra traveling up the shushumna and activating the next higher chakra (?Chakra and Meditation?). It may take weeks or months to move from one chakra to the next. It is a very long process. The seven main chakras are muladhara, swadishthana, manipura, anahata, vishuddha, ajnal and sahasrara. ?The chakras are located along the ethereal counterpart of the spinal cord and cannot be seen through normal vision? (Smith, 231-233). To bring the body to a state of rest a Yogi must focus their attention to the processes of breathing, the heartbeat, and the flow of electromagnetic energy. Then the prana will begin to move up the Sushumna awakening the higher chakras. This awakening must start with the first chakra muladhara. This is the root or base chakra. It is located at the base of the spine (?Chakras and Meditation?). Each chakra is thought of as a lotus flower that has a color and a number of petals. This chakra is a yellow lotus with four petals. The main element of this chakra is the earth and survival (Lidell, 71). This chakra deals with the survival of one's self. The Yogi should think of physical survival mainly, food, shelter, and the need for self preservation. When meditating one should be totally away from the rest of the world. At this level everything is solid and concrete. At this level viewing is that ?...each person is an individual who must look out for himself" (Smith, 233). At this level of reality a Yogi must achieve success on the material plain. It's not possible to go any further until food, clothing, shelter and transportation have all been taken care of (Smith, 233). After all of this has been

Loose Ethics in US Congress

Loose Ethics in US Congress Free Online Research Papers In today’s United States Congress the loose interpretation of the rules is a major problem. Since some of the guidelines have room for interpretation members have gone against the common practices in order to get the votes needed for legislation. In November 2003, a bill on prescription drug coverage for Medicare may be one of the best examples of this loose interpretation of the rules. It has been common practice since 1973 when electronic voting began to hold votes open for fifteen minutes, though votes have been left open for a few minutes after the norm to accommodate members who were delayed to the floor (Mann Ornstein, 2006). In November 2003 the vote was left open for two hours and fifty-two minutes. Members both republican and democrat where outraged. If this could be allowed all the normal practices of the house have been thrown out. The new way would consist of allowing votes to remain open in order for the majority to gain the votes needed to pass legislation. Also , during this vote, a member of Health and Human services was allowed on the floor to twist arms and lobby. This display violated a long standing tradition of the House, in which the floor is off limits to outsiders. The senate has also showed a decline in the normal procedures, the filibuster, which was normally used only in times in which it had been limited to matters of great national importance , has became common practice by the minority party . They use the filibuster in order to raise the bar to sixty votes instead of fifty when a filibuster threat was raised (Mann Ornstein, 2006). Instead of using the unlimited debate that is allowed in the Senate to power in bipartisanship and good for the general interest of the people, the rules have been bent to further party interest. The barrage of uncommon and loose rule bending practices threatens to taint the integrity of the United States Congress and the welfare of the United States citizens. The congress was set up in a way that would allow for our representatives to constructively make the right choices and changes for our country and if not follow in order to further party or personal gains. Due to the loosening of the rules it has caused a breakdown in the framework of our government. Research Papers on Loose Ethics in US CongressQuebec and Canada19 Century Society: A Deeply Divided EraThe Effects of Illegal ImmigrationTwilight of the UAWPersonal Experience with Teen PregnancyCapital PunishmentThe Hockey GameHip-Hop is ArtMoral and Ethical Issues in Hiring New EmployeesOpen Architechture a white paper

Five Police Convicted Of Murder in Thailand Research Paper

Five Police Convicted Of Murder in Thailand - Research Paper Example The police arrested the teenager mainly because of thieving a motorcycle. By hearing this news, the family members visited the police station and endeavoured to talk with Kiettisak. However, with this attempt, after certain days, the mutilated body of the teenager was found in the neighbouring province of the police station. In this particular situation, the family members of the teenager launched a campaign to investigate the above discussed matter with validated responses. It is worth mentioning in this regard that due to the initiative taken by the family members of the teenager in the form of launching campaign against the case, the court finally reached its verdict (Asian Human Rights Commission, 2012). The article provided valuable and relevant information about the justice system, which is currently prevailing in Thailand, can be gained. In this similar context, based on the article, it can be ascertained that the existing criminal justice system in Thailand represents the absence of jury system in the nation and the police are mainly overburdened with varied legal activities. This can be justified with reference to the article where the police officers were held responsible to investigate the matter, but the final verdict was viewed to be provided by the Criminal Court (Asian Human Rights Commission, 2012). Apart from this, it has been quite apparent from the article that it is quite possible to file any sort of criminal charge privately in Thailand, wherein cases are not essentially referred to a public prosecutor. This exactly happened in the case of murdering the teenager wherein his family members made deliberate efforts in filing the criminal case in the form of conducting campaigns to investigate the case and reach into a final verdict (Asian Human Rights Commission, 2012). Â  

Program Planning Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Program Planning - Assignment Example Most single parents are as a result of teenagers who bore children at an early age of below 20years and it is evident that such infants may suffer as compared to those borne by women of a higher age of around 30 years (Baldwin et al., 2009). Teenagers are not yet ready to commit to bearing their children and raising them in the best way since they have some other pleasures of life to enjoy. It is during this time that they would want to practice some vices being done by their fellow youths e.g. smoking and alcohol intake which affect the babies they are carrying. In fact some teenagers who get pregnant do not attend prenatal care because they would not like it to be known by their parents and friends that they are pregnant. Therefore, in efforts to boost the health of infants born year by year, the community health activist should enforce campaigns to reduce teenage births (Baldwin et al., 2009). Child bearing past the teenage is essential because the prospective mothers will have completed school and will know the importance of attending prenatal clinics even before planning to get pregnant. Such parents will also have no fear of it being known that they are pregnant since most of them will be legally married and working hence no financial constraints. This can reduce the cost incurred by taxpayers in US who raise around 7 billion dollars per year to support malnourished infants. Since teenage births lead to birth of children in marriages that mostly end up in divorce, its discouragement will enhance only married or mature people giving birth hence such infants will not suffer psychological torture. The reason as to why there are large numbers of infants born of poor health hence dying is because most of them are raised by single parents who probably bore them in their teen age. Such parents may have avoided attending antenatal health services that educate people on maintaining good health for the good of both

Hooters Of America Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Hooters Of America - Essay Example (Hooters of America, Franchise Disclosure Document, 2010). Therefore, their beginning can be traced back to 1984 with a different name while their functionality under the name of â€Å"Hooters of America† can be traced back to 1989. â€Å"Hooters of America† is mainly concerned with the business of running Hooters Restaurants. However, it has many affiliates, which run different kinds of businesses under the title of â€Å"Hooters† such as Naturally Fresh, Inc., Super Sports Merchandisers, Inc., Super Sports Marketing, Inc., Hooters National Advertising Fund, Inc., Hooters Magazine, Inc., Hooters Racing, Inc., Hooters Sports News, Inc., Hooters Sports Productions, Inc. and National Golf Association, Inc. (Hooters of America, Franchise Disclosure Document, 2010). There are varieties of eatables served at Hooters Restaurants and there are certain unique characteristics that make Hooters Restaurants different from other dining spots. â€Å"Hooters of America† offers franchises for the institutionalization of its restaurants and its services under the name of â€Å"Hooters of America† (Hooters of America, Franchise Disclosure Document, 2010). It is a public traded company. As far as the expanded business of the company is concerned, â€Å"Hooters of America† is a large networked corporation with many affiliates. Their head office is in Georgia. All the affiliates of the company are also located in Georgia (Hooters of America, Franchise Disclosure Document, 2010). The company has license to operate in the whole United States of America and also outside the States. The company provides franchises for restaurants (Hooters of America, Franchise Disclosure Document, 2010). The franchises of â€Å"Hooters of America† are spread in the whole United States due to which, it can be easily stated that the business network of the company is widely expanded. The company,

User Behavior Mining in Software as a Service Environment

User Behavior Mining in Software as a Service Environment Abstract—Software as a Service (SaaS) provides software application vendors a Web based delivery model to serve large number of clients with multi-tenancy based infrastructure and application sharing architecture. With the growing of the SaaS business, data mining in the environment becomes achallenging area. In this paper, we suggest a new metric along with a few existing metrics for customer analysis in a Software as a Service environment. Keywords: Software as a Service, SaaS, Customer Behavior analysis, Data mining in SaaS Environment I. Introduction With the rapid development of Internet Technology and the application software usage, SaaS (Software as a Service) as a complete innovative model of software application delivery model is attracting more and more customers to use SaaS for reducing the software purchase and maintenance costs as it can provide on-demand application software, and the users can adjust the functions provided by services to meet changes in demand. SaaS is gaining speed with the considerable increase in the number of vendors moving into this space[1]. The SaaS model is different from a regular website model. In a regular website model, users of the software directly interact with the software application. But in the case of a SaaS model, users interact with the application through the service provider. The difference between a regular website model and a SaaS model can be shown in figure 1. Figure: 1 II. Motivation Software as a Service (SaaS) is being adopted by more and more software application vendors and enterprises [2].SaaS is beneficial for the customers in such a way that, a customer can unsubscribe from the services whenever he wants which makes it a challenge to manage customer relationships. One of the characteristics of the SaaS business model is that one SaaS service needs to serve a large number of customers, among which considerable portion are customers for whom services are offered on trial basis. As there is competition in the market, both trial and paying customers may move their business to another service provider based on their requirements. It is essential for a service provider to retain the customers from migrating to another service provider. Previous studies show that a small increase in retention rate would lead to a considerable increment in the new present value of the customers. To withstand the competition in the market, a service provider should satisfy the cust omers by understanding their current behavior and predicting their next move like if they are having any problems in using the services, how much are the customers satisfied based on the seriousness and activeness of the customers. III. Related Works A lot of work has been done in the area of analyzing the customers’ behavior on website model. Various methodologies are stated by various authors on various processes in mining the web. In [3] Sindhu P Menon and Nagaratna P Hegde, analyzed the views and methodologies stated by various authors on various processes in web mining. In [4] R. Suguna and D. Sharmila listed out work done by various authors in the web usage mining area. In [5] the authors Jiehui Ju. Et.al, gives a quick survey on SaaS. It covers key technologies in SaaS, difference between Application Software Provider and Software as a Service Provider, SaaS architecture and SaaS maturity model and the advantages that SaaS offers to small businesses. In [6], the authors Espadas et. al, presents the analysis of the impart of a set of requirements and proposes guidelines to be applied for application deployment in Software as a Service (SaaS) Environment. In [7], the authors Ning Duan, et. al, proposed an algorithm and two metrics which work with the collaboration among the users of a customer in a Software as a Service environment. IV. Problem Definition In a SaaS Environment, an effective relationship with the customer depends on how much the status of each customer is understood. In order to understand the status of a customer, it is necessary to study the behavior of ehte customer form time to time. It is necessary to predict the customers’ seriousness and activeness in using the service. This prediction may help the service providers in improving their business strategies. In a business to customer website model, the mining is done based on selected metrics like visit frequency, average depth, average stay time etc. In the case of SaaS model, there is another level of users who actually use the service. So, regular user behavior metrics may not yield accurate results in the case of SaaS model. If individual customer’s user’s behavior is studied, then the difference between the customers may be identified. A lot of research is done on user behavior analysis in regular website model but those methods used for user behavior analysis may not guarantee accurate predictions. So an extra parameter or metric is to be considered. As in the SaaS model, a tenant is the direct customer of the service provider and the actual users of the service are the users of the customers, one way to study the behavior of the customers may be by summing up the individual user’s metrics of a customer to evaluate the customer’s behavior. But this way ignore the individual differences of the behaviors of the users of a customer. In addition to these regular web usage mining metrics if collaboration among the users is also considered in the analysis of customer behavior, it may yield better results than just using the regular metrics. But previous works done in user behavior analysis in SaaS uses only collaboration metrics in the analysis which ignores almost half of the analysis data. The experiment done aims at using collaboration metrics along with another metric which works with the data not considered in the collaboration metric calculation so that all the available data is considered in user behavior prediction. V. Experiment The experiment is done in two phases, namely Data Collection Phase and Data Processing Phase. In the Data collection phase, the necessary data (like server log files, transaction history, etc) are collected. In the second phase i.e. in Data Processing phase, the actual analysis takes place. This phase is further divided into individual modules like preprocessing, pattern discovery, and pattern analysis. Preprocessing is a process of refining the sever log data and transaction history removing noise in data (if any) and populating database for further use in next modules. It includes data cleaning, user identification, session identification, transaction identification. Pattern Discovery is the process of discovering the usage patterns from the cleaned raw log data. As in this experiment, it is not regular usage patterns that are to be considered, collaboration patterns are to be considered. Regular usage patterns are the sequences of activities that are performed by the users individually. But, collaboration patterns are those that are performed by users by interaction. Collaboration patterns are not the transaction patterns rather they are the patterns of users that collaborate to perform a transaction. Definition of Collaboration: Collaboration is defined to happen when different users of a customer work on the same business object during a certain period of time. For example, in a Human Resource management SaaS service, the vacation request is submitted by a regular employee user of a customer and then is approved/rejected by manager user of the same customer. Here two users of a customer are involved in the process of granting a leave. This is called collaboration. After the raw data is cleansed, the data used for collaboration discovery may contain details of the transactions performed by the users of any tenant with tenant id(tid), user id (uid), transaction id (transaction_id) (may also be called business object id), date, time, service id (sid). In this table more than one user may be involved in the completing of a transaction. Algorithm: Collaboration User Set Identification Input: Table 1 that consists of the transaction details Output: Collaboration_Table with collaboration transaction details Initially Collaboration_Table is empty Get first record from Table 1 Insert details into Collaboration_Table While end of table 1 not reached Get next record from table 1 Search for transaction_id in collaboration_Table If found, update collaboration user set and no_of_users Else Add details to collaboration_table as new record Table 1: Sample table showing the contents of Table 1 Table 2: Sample Collaboration Table Pattern analysis plays vital role in the experiment. This module deals with the behavior analysis based on the collaboration patterns extracted above. From [7], there are two type of collaboration. They are random collaboration and repeated collaboration by certain group of users. The first type of collaboration can indicate the activeness of the customer no matter which users are involved in the collaboration process. It can be called as Active Collaboration Index (ACI). The second type of collaboration can be described by the usage patterns among the users of a customer. It can be called Patterned Collaboration Index (PCI). A high ACI value tells that a customer is actively using the SaaS service and if such a customer is still a trial customer, it probably shall be the high priority target to get it converted into paying customer. A high PCI value tells that a tenant is seriously using the SaaS service with relatively strong loyalty, cross-selling or up-selling opportunity can be explored for such a customer. The formula to calculate ACI and PCI are as follows The AppCNorm is the normalizing factor indicating collaboration characteristic of SaaS service. While some SaaS service are rich with collaborations and others may not be. In order to balance the difference among different SaaS services, this normalization factor is employed. Where Pni denotes the collaboration pattern i of customer n, N is the total number of customers, and m is the total number of patterns in customer n. supp(pni) is the support value of pattern Pni, and len(Pni) is the length of the pattern. These collaboration metrics works only with the collaboration data and neglects the remaining data which is almost half of the data. Hence another metric can be added along with the above metrics which considers the non-collaboration transactions. As the new metric is for non-collaboration transactions of a tenant, it can be called Average Usage Index (AUI). This can be calculated using the formula This AUI increases the accuracy of prediction of activeness of the customer along with ACI. VI. RESULTS For this experiment, the data created is for 100 customers of a Software as a Service provider who is providing 6 different components of an application as different services. Among these 100 customers, first 50 are taken as paid customers and the other 50 are taken as trial customers. Table 3: Summary of transactions Table 4: Sample pattern list Table 5: Sample Calculated Metrics From the above calculated values, we can observe that though T0 is a paid customer, less ACI and PCI values indicate that this customer is not using the services to the full and hence revenue generated from this particular customer is not appreciable. Rather, this customer may be planning to unsubscribe from the service and hence is an important target for the service provider to retain the customer. In the case of T45, it has high ACI value, high AUI value indicating active usage of the services and high PCI indicating that this customer is completely migrating his business onto the SaaS service generating the service provider more revenue. Among the sample trial calculated values, customer T50 is active and serious and hence, there is a high probability for this customer to convert into paid customer. On the other hand, customer T89 is not very active and is not serious indicating that he may be facing technical difficulties in using the services and hence should be helped with or is thinking to unsubscribe from the services. Table 6: Summary of Calculated metrics From the above table, for any tenant to be considered active in using the services, minimum ACI and AUI values needed are 1 and 1 respectively and minimum PCI value needed is 2. VII. Conclusion The metrics ACI and PCI are introduced in previous works done by Ning Daun, et. al in [7] which works with collaboration data and leaving the non collaboration data. In our work, a new metric is introduced AUI which considers the non collaboration data also in customer behavior analysis. Still further, frequent pattern analysis can be applied on this non collaboration data to get usage patterns and so the analysis can be further improved. VIII. References [1] Wei Sun, Xing Zhang, Chang Jie Gou, Pei Sun, Hui Su, IBM China Research Lab, Beiing 100094, â€Å"Software as a Service: Configuration and Customization Perspective† IEEE Congress on Services Part II, IEEE 2008. [2] E. Knorr, â€Å" Software as a Service: The Next Big Thing†, http://www. infoworld.com/article/06/03/20/76103_12FEsaas_1.html† [3] Sindhu P Menon, Nagaratna P Hegde, â€Å"Requisite for Web Usage Mining – A Survey†, Special Issue of International Journal of Computer Science Informatics: 2231-5292, Vol-II, Issue-1, 2, pp. 209-215. [4] R. Suguna, D. Sharmila â€Å"An Overview of Web Usage Mining†, International Conference of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887), Vol. 39, No, 13, February 2012, pp. 11 – 13. [5] Jiehui, et. al, â€Å"Research on Key Technologu=ies in SaaS†, International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Cognitive Informatics, 2010, pp. 384-387. [6] Espadas et. al, â€Å"Application Development over Software-as-a-Service platforms†, The Third International Conference on Software Engineering Advances, 2008, pp. 87-104. [7] Ning Duan, et. al, â€Å"Tenant Behavior analysis in Software as a Service Environment†: Service Operations, Logistics and Informatics (SOLI), 2011 IEEE International Conference, pp 132-137, July 2011.

The Use of Soma to Shape and Control Society in Huxleys Brave New Worl

The Use of Soma to Shape and Control Society in Huxley's Brave New World The future of the world is a place of thriving commerce and stability. Safety and happiness are at an all-time high, and no one suffers from depression or any other mental disorders. There are no more wars, as peace and harmony spread to almost every corner of the world. There is no sickness, and people are predestined to be happy and content in their social class. But if anything wrong accidentally occurs, there is a simple solution to the problem, which is soma. The use of soma totally shapes and controls the utopian society described in Huxley's novel Brave New World as well as symbolize Huxley's society as a whole. This pleasure drug is the answer to all of life's little mishaps and also serves as an escape as well as entertainment. The people of this futuristic society use it in every aspect of their lives and depend on it for very many reasons. Although this drug appears to be an escape on the surface, soma is truly a control device used by the government to keep everyone ensla ved in set positions. In the utopian society Huxley creates, everything is artificial. The future of the world depends merely on a handful of directors, and everyone else is simply created as a pawn to maintain this futuristic economy. One of the ten world controllers in the "Brave New World" portrayed in the novel is Mustapha Mond. Mustapha is a driving force behind the utopian society that keeps everyone happy, yet empty inside at the same time. In fact, Mustahpa Mond has been interpreted to mean "the chosen one," for he is like a God to the people (McGiveron 29). People are created in laboratories such as the "Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre," where peo... ... through life without ever truly having to face reality or make logical decisions. Soma symbolizes and shapes many parts of society and is arguably the main symbol in Huxley's satirical masterpiece. The truth is that this utopian society is synthetic and massed produced like soma, and society is cowardly while soma is a crutch to humanity. Works Cited Clareson, Thomas. "The Classic: Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.'" Extrapolation. 3.1 (1961): 33-40. Hoffman, Nicholas. "Huxley Vindicated." The Spectator 249.8036 (1982): 8-9. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: HarperPerennial, 1989. Jog, D.V. Aldous Huxley The Novelist. India: Book Centre, 1979. McGiveron, Rafeeq. "Huxley's 'Brave New World.'" Explicator 57.1 (1998): 27-30. Meerloo, Joost. "How Will Man Behave?" The New York Times Book Review. New York, 1958: 22-23.