Causes of Rwandas Involvement in the DRC

The Pearl Essay Example for Free

The Pearl Essay The book †The Pearl, paints various exercises to a few orders, yet more in business in light of the fact that the entire story rotates the selling of the pearl and the manner in which the various partners acted through. Kino the primary character, along with his better half embarks to discover a pearl to get cash to treat their child Coyotito who has been nibbled by a scorpion. They locate a major valuable pearl that changes the entire objective, from getting the youngster instructing him, purchasing a rifle, and improved life measures. This was excessively goal-oriented thus it was hard to arrive at it. The pearl gives us the two points of view about the idea of people. The idealistic sort of individuals who have love and concern, particularly for their nuclear family and their neighborhood and those kinds of individuals who just spotlight on getting more extravagant regardless of the methods they use to store up property. Toward the start of the story, Kino is a blameless mollified father who thinks about his family in the most ideal manner conceivable (Steinbeck, Wagner-Martin, and Orozco, 1994). One point that shows this is when Kino shut his eyes to tune in to the tune of the family melody that was playing in his brain Steinbeck, Wagner-Martin, and Orozco, 1994). At the time his kid is stung by a scorpion the neighbors demonstrated concern. Then again, human instinct likewise has a shortcoming, of concentrating on picking up riches and not connection. The absolute first picture is the one depicted by the specialist who never visited them yet focused on the rich families as it were. As the story advances we see the helplessness that exists in all individuals, as Kino changes from a blameless adoring spouse to a criminal in view of needing to be rich. Here the specialist also shows the narcissism of individuals failing to mind, regardless of whether the lives of others are in harm's way. Coyotito could pass on yet the specialist clench hand needed cash before treating him. These are the two significant features of human life. This book is likewise significant for all business people and set up businessmen. All undertakings are planned for getting riches yet business morals requires a harmony between relating with individuals well and getting cash from great and certifiable business bargains. The book focuses on the avarice among specialists, which will make them, utilize corrupt methods of getting well off, a training that is particularly against business morals. Among these are center men who get rich from exchanging with needy individuals, giving them so little as their profits for the difficult work they have done. Kino speaks to the poor who work needed to see their fantasies, for example, solid and respectable lives for their families, and instruction for their kids (Steinbeck, Wagner-Martin, and Orozco, 1994). The center men are the merchants who had interfaces abroad, who needed to purchase the pearl at a value that isn't worth speak to these avaricious abusive agents. It is likewise against business morals that individuals ought to overlook the corporate social obligation and get detained on the dehumanizing impacts of picking up riches. Kino got some distance from his neighbors, and he excessively centered around giving substantially to his child instead of keeping center around enthusiastic needs as material needs follow suite. Contemplating corporate social duty, this story obviously paints the presence of representatives and associations, which won't see the general public, which is their objective market as significant partners that need regard, however venturing stones to get more extravagant. The pearl fortune that came Kino’s way didn't increase the value of his locale, however made him right around a pariah of a similar network. Any undertaking must have the qualities of dependability. In this, specialists must be straightforward and maintain respectability or have constancy in every way. The pearl purchasers added to the disintegrating of Kino’s dreams by not offering to purchase the pearl at great cost. In business as well, individuals ought to consistently be capable; in quest for greatness they ought not be excessively driven and ravenous. Kino’s was over eager in the midst of an abusive society that would not permit him get the much he needed from the pearl. Development is consistently in little advances and Kino would have acknowledged to develop in intelligence from the little that he was advertised. Business additionally muss bear the best feeling of equity and decency. This is to state that each system ought to be reasonable, have value in all cases and unprejudiced nature in managing individuals all things considered. Consistency and fairness portrays this point. The specialist ignored the destitute individuals and wouldn’t do his business with them. This is clear since he just stayed with Kino to treat Coyotito in light of the fact that he realized the pearl would pay him. Each undertaking must likewise show the mindful mentality towards the individuals. In this story we see Kino gradually putting his entire self and might to the pearl overlooking that he should think about the family. Business and associations ought to likewise esteem metro goodness and citizenship, which is planned for taking a gander at how the nation in general will profit by the organization or the organization’s adventure. They ought to consequently submit to the law, offer administrations to the network administrations, and to try in securing the earth. In the Pearl’s case, each one peered toward the pearl for their own motivations. Kino’s assailants needed to get the pearl from him in unlawful methods; Kino exclusively needed the chime to profit his family and had no designs to profit the whole network, to level best of his capacity (Steinbeck, Wagner-Martin, and Orozco, 1994). The story likewise shows that that those individuals awaiting for the pearl had no regard, an essential thing business or corporate world. In section four, when Kino was selling the pearl, some took a gander at it and dismissed it as a unimportant peculiarity. The book, upon cautious reflections gives us the thought regarding the righteous, and the un-highminded human instinct. It additionally gives us explicit qualities, for example, honesty, regard, satisfaction, network equity and unprejudiced nature, and great citizenship. By utilizing the style of depicting a people who don't esteem business morals, the book implements in its perusers a solid feeling of corporate social obligation.

Addepar

Addepar INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we’re Mountain View of the Addepar office. Hi Joe, who are you and what do you do?Joe: Thanks for coming today. I’m Joe Lonsdale. I’m the founder and chairman of Addepar and also previously known as the co-founder of Palantir before Addepar.Martin: Great. Can you elaborate a little more on your background, so what did you before you started Palantir and then your time at Palantir, and then the founding of Addepar?Joe: Sure, so as you may know I grew up in this area and my friends taught me computer science and I was at Stanford computer science. I got to work at PayPal while I was here at Stanford. I don’t know if you know the PayPal crowd at all?Martin: Yes.Joe: So that was kind of cool thing I was like a kid watching what happens there.After eBay bought PayPal, one of the jokes (well it’s not very nice one), but the joke they make is that it’s kind of like the communist come in and taking over and all the intellectuals flee. That’s proba bly the wrong description, because I have a lot ofI actually really admire Meg, who was running eBay at the time. But there were a lot of people who left to build great companies.So, they wereabout 13, 14, 15 really prominent companies that were built out of PayPal at that time. I felt like I learnt a lot about the world from that.After that I worked with Peter Teal and helped with his family office, as he did a lot of venture investing. You know, we built macro hedge funds and I learnt a lot about the world from that and then he backed us to start Palantir.Martin: Great. When did you come up with the business idea for Addepar?Joe: You know we came with the business idea for Addepar, probably just like Palantir came out of what happened at 9/11. Addepar in a lot of ways, came out (for me) of what happened in the financial crisis of 2008. So we’re working with Palantir on a lot of the really big contracts with the banks, trying to fix their technology. We realized that a lot of the way global finance works is frankly really stupid.For me it was not shocking that the government technology was really broken because I know why the intends are bad for governments and why governments don’t work well with bureaucracies. And I was actually really surprised how broken global finance is and what I learned is that big institutions, whether they are for profit or the government, there is a lot of structural inefficiencies and a lot of kind of inertia in these very large industries, they can keep things very big things broken for a long time.It turns out that in finance, you have all these separate kingdoms: big banks all build their own walls and data, and they don’t want to talk to each other, they want to keep everyone in them. So you have these separate wall kingdoms and you have all these ways of doing things with literally tens of thousands of different formats with several thousand custodians in the world: custodians like a Charles Schwab or a fidelity or othe r big ones.And each of them have their own thousands of transaction codes.So the world of finance is not work well together. If you go to New York, you see all those building across New Jersey. There are these giant buildings there and you like: What is every one doing every day in these buildings? And basically there are people-driven middleware.So in Silicon Valley middleware is where technology makes everything talk to each other and work automatically, that is so hard in finance. You have hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are effectively acting as middleware, sitting in these building, trying to code things, trying to do things by hand.So we realised that the global finance is really such a mess and we think there are a lot of the reasons why the crisis was so bad, because it is such a mess in the data and it is so hard to figure out what’s happening.Martin: Great. How did you then start Addepar? So what was the first step that you take? Did you talk to some bank ers and really understand what is the issue there? Or did you just build a product and iterated on it? How was it?Joe: Well, hopefully a little bit of talking to people, a little bit of coming up with it by ourselves. We always talk about the early start up process that is all about the product and the team, of course. And on the product side, it’s a little bit of a dialectic where on the one hand, you want to have a view of the world, that you help to instantiate and you got to really be confident about it, like Steve Jobs: I don’t care what anyone says, this is correct. Then, on the other hand you want to be talking to people and getting feedback. Those are kind of like opposite ideas but they are both true, of course right? And in Addepar’s case, our goal was, if you want influence global finance, let’s basically get root access to global finance. What is root access global finance mean? World of money, right? So there is hundred twenty trillion dollars being managed glob ally by that nine different types of institutions. It’s obviously like by the big banks and insurance companies, by pensions, sovereign wealth funds, pension endowments, there are family offices, there are a lot of old wealthy families with money, there are a lot of investment advisers in America, they are called RAAs, there are thousands of them.So all these different groups, they own the money and then all of finance sits on top of this money and does things with it and sends it around. So, the question is: the group who control all the money, how do they know what is going on and how do they get their data, how they do their reporting, how do they see what is happening?And that’s the area that Addepar realises like that is very broken. If we can fix that, we can fix things on top of it. So we started talking to those people, and think what do you do, how do you manage your reporting and get all your data.Martin: How did you come to the business name, Joe?Joe: The business nam e?Martin: Yes, Addepar.Joe: Addepar. Yes, it’s a very funny name. I think these things are difficult to name. In this case it is from a quote, from Ovids Metamorphoses. So it’s a common expression in I guess the Roman world, Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit, which means Add a little to a little and youll have a great amount. And so it’s a quote about perseverance, but it also applies to both management if you’re adding a little to a little and having a great amount.So, we thought it was appropriate for what we are doing.Martin: Cool. And how long did you look for this kind of name?Joe: I think this was just a couple days around the table. We did not spend too much time on this.Martin: Okay.Because for most start-ups, it’s quite hard to first find a name and then a domain as well.Joe: That’s true, that’s true. Fortunately for enterprise software domain does not matter quite as much, but it’s nice to have one of your own domain so. I agree.Martin: Okay, great. So, once you’ve had this kind of idea, what you wanted to tackle, what was the next step?Joe: The next step was really simultaneous step, it was the team building a team. I think in our space, teams matter more than anything else.That is the team, it’s the culture, it’s the people you attract.So it is the kind of chicken and egg problem, you can’t really attract great people unless you already have great people around you. And once you do, you can grow really fast.We spent a lot of time at Palantir really focusing on the culture, and I talked about people that came out of PayPal and the companies that really worked out of PayPal, the ones that I thought did extremely well, obviously like YouTube, Yelp, and then LinkedIn. I think there were just a lot of great talent early on at these companies that attract a lot of other great talent, and there was engineering aspect that was really the key.And so Palantir we were very-very focused on this, my first company and it was that was rated the number one engineering culture in Silicon Valley quite a few times, and so fortunately we already had a great network of people around us.And you have a few people who you were going to be not working at Palantir or anywhere.Martin: How do you find a great engineering culture? So what makes it a great engineering culture?Joe: There are a lot of thoughts.I have a few blogs about it, Ive tried to write about these things.So, it’s probably a different answer different day, because’ it’s a more an artistic thing than a scientific thing. I think there are some things that influence the incentives, because I think people should be here because they are passionate about it, they should be here more for the upside in equity than for the cash. And people who come here and say, I really want to a high cash salary that is usually not a good sign. Usually, that make the engineering culture not very good.One thing we do when we give people offers, we give them three different c hoices. We say: How much cash and how much upside do you want? And it’s almost always the case, in my experience, the best employees show the lowest cash and the highest upside option.You want to place people that really look into the future, really thinking what do we got to accomplish on our mission for the long term. So I think that the mission driven culture is, for me, how I like to build them.Martin: Great.BUSINESS MODEL OF ADDEPARMartin: Joe, let’s talk about the business model at Addepar. So what are basically your customer segments and what type of value proposition are you delivering to them?Joe: Sure, so for Addepar’s customers we started off with the early adopters in the space. So the early adopters of the people who manage money I was talking about more family offices and the RAAs, because those are less institutional, they can try things more quickly. So basically, a typical large RAA, that might buy these six pieces of software and try to make them work togethe r, to run all of their reporting and to hold all their data in one place, do all client access and client notes, they have a lot of different things like managing multicurrency or partnerships.So there are all these different things that they have to manage, so Addepar places all those softwares within one single platform, and this basically saves people a huge amount of time, and it makes their business work better, makes things be answered more quickly for their clients, and they know everything is accurate.So that is the first level of that platform. And the next level above that which we have started to figure out is aside from running from all their reporting and helping them run their business, how can we also help them access all those different types of products and services and teach their clients what is best for them using data using the platform.And then I’d say that the other really important thing that we have just started to work, we’ve started work now with four or five banks and we are starting to work more with the big banks because it used to be that these institutions had better technology and that was a big advantage of theirs, now the family offices and RAAs who have all this new technology are getting ahead, and they are like: Wait a second, we need this too. So it is kind of like an arms race and they all are fighting to work with us, which is really lucky. So we are starting to work with a few of them.Martin: And if you are pitching to those prospects, how are you pitching the value of delivering to them?Joe: It is interesting because I think a lot of times the best way is not to pitch ourselves but for them (customers) to hear from other people in the community. So we actually want to create and deliver value, communicate it really well to people so at the point where they are all talking about it, and that way it is better.But for governments for example, they want something to be new and exciting, but they also want it to be ver y safe, because they are very nervous, very risk-averse.Being at a big institution, this person can get fired if he makes a bad decision, right?So it needs to somehow have a stamp on it, this is safe, it’s okay to buy this and you do that in a lot of different ways. You do that by having other people using it, by having big name advisors and people associated with that you can make them comfortable, but at the same time they want it to be new and exciting.So it is kind of dialectical but they want both, so you have to give that to them somehow.Martin: Okay. How did you acquire the first customers, because you said you first tried to get the more easier…Joe: So in this case for example, you would not make your first customer a big prominent bank in New York. You would want to make your first customer a family office that maybe you have done business with you before and who I know and who can give me feedback. So certain family offices and certain RAAs are around here that my frie nds work with, I’ve worked with and maybe even invested in other companies before.So I talked to them and they told me about their pain points and we iterated. A big part of the early product design is, these companies again come from the iteration of course. You deliver something to them and they say: This is great but we can’t use it because of these two reasons. So you come back as fast as you can and in two weeks, you say: How about now? Then they say: This is wonderful but then these issues… So we kept iterating, keep iterating, where it eventually gets to the point where they love it and the key thing also is to be iterating with enough early people, right? Because if you are just here with one or two, then it may be the case that they are very different. So you have to make sure that you are iterating with a big group of them, and use your judgement, how do we know what the overall market looks like and it involves talking to a lot of people, building on allies and hope fully making friends who want you to succeed. So we actually got a lot investors as well, so that when they are invested, they want us to succeed more.Martin: How long did it take until the product market was okay-ish?Joe: I think it was okay after about two and a half or three years, and that was longer than we thought. That is one of the lessons from both Palantir and Addepar.Frankly, as an investor for other companies I am involved in, enterprise softwares take longer than you think it is going to take, which means you are going to end up having to need more people or more money.There are maybe two major resource: it is mostly people and money. Talent and money, you always need more of both of those things than you think. In my experience, some people, I know there’s a story that Whatsapp sold for 19 million dollars with not too many people and that’s really impressive. I don’t know how to do that, I always need lots of people and lots of money to make it work.Martin: What have been the major obstacles over the years?Joe: Well, those are the big ones, I was getting there. Some people in Palantir which is a 20 billion dollar company now (we are very proud of it) and people don’t realise, people probably see like Oh, it probably worked. And there were multiple times in years two, three and four where some of our most important people were threatening to leave and saying that they were already looking for new jobs. This is a company that ultimately worked extremely well, it isover eleven or twelve years now.But it’s really hard to keep people’s morality up, it’s very hard to keep them excited, because you have setbacks and people aren’t really sure if they want to stick around there a couple times.This is rather the people side.On the money side, there were a couple times Palantir almost couldn’t raise money, because the people would say Guys, you are crazy, you’re trying to fix mobile intelligence, what are you doing. So I think Addepar is doing extremely well right now, and I’m really proud of it. But even with Addepar we have this much bigger vision we are driving towards but the current product is a lot to get to work first with these big banks. Sometimes it is frustrating, you have six to nine months to slog through the stuff they need and everyone wants to be working on the more exciting bigger things. So you got to keep the moral up while you are going, taking the troops through the swamp. You got to be able to do that sometimes before you are able to get where you are going.Martin: And how are you trying to balance this? Are you putting some people more on the long term staff or are you…Joe: Sometimes, this is like the dynamic with Eric who is very good CEO. I am more sometimes a vision guy, so I really want people to work on long term staff, but he says:Joe, if you don’t have other people doing short term stuff, we are not going to get to the long term stuff. Sometimes I think he is right to make sure, you can have big, big visions but you have to have the path work on the way there.So right now we have very important appointments with very big banks, some contracts for winning there, we have a lot of, three hundred and fifty billion dollars on the platform for customers using us. So if we don’t make it work really well today, there will be no long term. And so hopefully, we can get through the near goals and start working on the bigger things later.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM JOE LONGDALE In Mountain View (CA), we meet Founder Chairman of Addepar, Joe Lonsdale. Joe talks about his story how he came up with the idea and founded Addepar, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we’re Mountain View of the Addepar office. Hi Joe, who are you and what do you do?Joe: Thanks for coming today. I’m Joe Lonsdale. I’m the founder and chairman of Addepar and also previously known as the co-founder of Palantir before Addepar.Martin: Great. Can you elaborate a little more on your background, so what did you before you started Palantir and then your time at Palantir, and then the founding of Addepar?Joe: Sure, so as you may know I grew up in this area and my friends taught me computer science and I was at Stanford computer science. I got to work at PayPal while I was here at Stanford. I don’t know if you know the PayPal crowd at all?Martin: Yes.Joe: So that was kind of cool thing I was li ke a kid watching what happens there.After eBay bought PayPal, one of the jokes (well it’s not very nice one), but the joke they make is that it’s kind of like the communist come in and taking over and all the intellectuals flee. That’s probably the wrong description, because I have a lot ofI actually really admire Meg, who was running eBay at the time. But there were a lot of people who left to build great companies.So, they wereabout 13, 14, 15 really prominent companies that were built out of PayPal at that time. I felt like I learnt a lot about the world from that.After that I worked with Peter Teal and helped with his family office, as he did a lot of venture investing. You know, we built macro hedge funds and I learnt a lot about the world from that and then he backed us to start Palantir.Martin: Great. When did you come up with the business idea for Addepar?Joe: You know we came with the business idea for Addepar, probably just like Palantir came out of what happened at 9/11. Addepar in a lot of ways, came out (for me) of what happened in the financial crisis of 2008. So we’re working with Palantir on a lot of the really big contracts with the banks, trying to fix their technology. We realized that a lot of the way global finance works is frankly really stupid.For me it was not shocking that the government technology was really broken because I know why the intends are bad for governments and why governments don’t work well with bureaucracies. And I was actually really surprised how broken global finance is and what I learned is that big institutions, whether they are for profit or the government, there is a lot of structural inefficiencies and a lot of kind of inertia in these very large industries, they can keep things very big things broken for a long time.It turns out that in finance, you have all these separate kingdoms: big banks all build their own walls and data, and they don’t want to talk to each other, they want to keep everyone i n them. So you have these separate wall kingdoms and you have all these ways of doing things with literally tens of thousands of different formats with several thousand custodians in the world: custodians like a Charles Schwab or a fidelity or other big ones.And each of them have their own thousands of transaction codes.So the world of finance is not work well together. If you go to New York, you see all those building across New Jersey. There are these giant buildings there and you like: What is every one doing every day in these buildings? And basically there are people-driven middleware.So in Silicon Valley middleware is where technology makes everything talk to each other and work automatically, that is so hard in finance. You have hundreds of thousands or millions of people who are effectively acting as middleware, sitting in these building, trying to code things, trying to do things by hand.So we realised that the global finance is really such a mess and we think there are a l ot of the reasons why the crisis was so bad, because it is such a mess in the data and it is so hard to figure out what’s happening.Martin: Great. How did you then start Addepar? So what was the first step that you take? Did you talk to some bankers and really understand what is the issue there? Or did you just build a product and iterated on it? How was it?Joe: Well, hopefully a little bit of talking to people, a little bit of coming up with it by ourselves. We always talk about the early start up process that is all about the product and the team, of course. And on the product side, it’s a little bit of a dialectic where on the one hand, you want to have a view of the world, that you help to instantiate and you got to really be confident about it, like Steve Jobs: I don’t care what anyone says, this is correct. Then, on the other hand you want to be talking to people and getting feedback. Those are kind of like opposite ideas but they are both true, of course right? And in A ddepar’s case, our goal was, if you want influence global finance, let’s basically get root access to global finance. What is root access global finance mean? World of money, right? So there is hundred twenty trillion dollars being managed globally by that nine different types of institutions. It’s obviously like by the big banks and insurance companies, by pensions, sovereign wealth funds, pension endowments, there are family offices, there are a lot of old wealthy families with money, there are a lot of investment advisers in America, they are called RAAs, there are thousands of them.So all these different groups, they own the money and then all of finance sits on top of this money and does things with it and sends it around. So, the question is: the group who control all the money, how do they know what is going on and how do they get their data, how they do their reporting, how do they see what is happening?And that’s the area that Addepar realises like that is very brok en. If we can fix that, we can fix things on top of it. So we started talking to those people, and think what do you do, how do you manage your reporting and get all your data.Martin: How did you come to the business name, Joe?Joe: The business name?Martin: Yes, Addepar.Joe: Addepar. Yes, it’s a very funny name. I think these things are difficult to name. In this case it is from a quote, from Ovids Metamorphoses. So it’s a common expression in I guess the Roman world, Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit, which means Add a little to a little and youll have a great amount. And so it’s a quote about perseverance, but it also applies to both management if you’re adding a little to a little and having a great amount.So, we thought it was appropriate for what we are doing.Martin: Cool. And how long did you look for this kind of name?Joe: I think this was just a couple days around the table. We did not spend too much time on this.Martin: Okay.Because for most start-ups, it’s qu ite hard to first find a name and then a domain as well.Joe: That’s true, that’s true. Fortunately for enterprise software domain does not matter quite as much, but it’s nice to have one of your own domain so. I agree.Martin: Okay, great. So, once you’ve had this kind of idea, what you wanted to tackle, what was the next step?Joe: The next step was really simultaneous step, it was the team building a team. I think in our space, teams matter more than anything else.That is the team, it’s the culture, it’s the people you attract.So it is the kind of chicken and egg problem, you can’t really attract great people unless you already have great people around you. And once you do, you can grow really fast.We spent a lot of time at Palantir really focusing on the culture, and I talked about people that came out of PayPal and the companies that really worked out of PayPal, the ones that I thought did extremely well, obviously like YouTube, Yelp, and then LinkedIn. I think ther e were just a lot of great talent early on at these companies that attract a lot of other great talent, and there was engineering aspect that was really the key.And so Palantir we were very-very focused on this, my first company and it was that was rated the number one engineering culture in Silicon Valley quite a few times, and so fortunately we already had a great network of people around us.And you have a few people who you were going to be not working at Palantir or anywhere.Martin: How do you find a great engineering culture? So what makes it a great engineering culture?Joe: There are a lot of thoughts.I have a few blogs about it, Ive tried to write about these things.So, it’s probably a different answer different day, because’ it’s a more an artistic thing than a scientific thing. I think there are some things that influence the incentives, because I think people should be here because they are passionate about it, they should be here more for the upside in equity than f or the cash. And people who come here and say, I really want to a high cash salary that is usually not a good sign. Usually, that make the engineering culture not very good.One thing we do when we give people offers, we give them three different choices. We say: How much cash and how much upside do you want? And it’s almost always the case, in my experience, the best employees show the lowest cash and the highest upside option.You want to place people that really look into the future, really thinking what do we got to accomplish on our mission for the long term. So I think that the mission driven culture is, for me, how I like to build them.Martin: Great.BUSINESS MODEL OF ADDEPARMartin: Joe, let’s talk about the business model at Addepar. So what are basically your customer segments and what type of value proposition are you delivering to them?Joe: Sure, so for Addepar’s customers we started off with the early adopters in the space. So the early adopters of the people who man age money I was talking about more family offices and the RAAs, because those are less institutional, they can try things more quickly. So basically, a typical large RAA, that might buy these six pieces of software and try to make them work together, to run all of their reporting and to hold all their data in one place, do all client access and client notes, they have a lot of different things like managing multicurrency or partnerships.So there are all these different things that they have to manage, so Addepar places all those softwares within one single platform, and this basically saves people a huge amount of time, and it makes their business work better, makes things be answered more quickly for their clients, and they know everything is accurate.So that is the first level of that platform. And the next level above that which we have started to figure out is aside from running from all their reporting and helping them run their business, how can we also help them access all th ose different types of products and services and teach their clients what is best for them using data using the platform.And then I’d say that the other really important thing that we have just started to work, we’ve started work now with four or five banks and we are starting to work more with the big banks because it used to be that these institutions had better technology and that was a big advantage of theirs, now the family offices and RAAs who have all this new technology are getting ahead, and they are like: Wait a second, we need this too. So it is kind of like an arms race and they all are fighting to work with us, which is really lucky. So we are starting to work with a few of them.Martin: And if you are pitching to those prospects, how are you pitching the value of delivering to them?Joe: It is interesting because I think a lot of times the best way is not to pitch ourselves but for them (customers) to hear from other people in the community. So we actually want to cr eate and deliver value, communicate it really well to people so at the point where they are all talking about it, and that way it is better.But for governments for example, they want something to be new and exciting, but they also want it to be very safe, because they are very nervous, very risk-averse.Being at a big institution, this person can get fired if he makes a bad decision, right?So it needs to somehow have a stamp on it, this is safe, it’s okay to buy this and you do that in a lot of different ways. You do that by having other people using it, by having big name advisors and people associated with that you can make them comfortable, but at the same time they want it to be new and exciting.So it is kind of dialectical but they want both, so you have to give that to them somehow.Martin: Okay. How did you acquire the first customers, because you said you first tried to get the more easier…Joe: So in this case for example, you would not make your first customer a big promi nent bank in New York. You would want to make your first customer a family office that maybe you have done business with you before and who I know and who can give me feedback. So certain family offices and certain RAAs are around here that my friends work with, I’ve worked with and maybe even invested in other companies before.So I talked to them and they told me about their pain points and we iterated. A big part of the early product design is, these companies again come from the iteration of course. You deliver something to them and they say: This is great but we can’t use it because of these two reasons. So you come back as fast as you can and in two weeks, you say: How about now? Then they say: This is wonderful but then these issues… So we kept iterating, keep iterating, where it eventually gets to the point where they love it and the key thing also is to be iterating with enough early people, right? Because if you are just here with one or two, then it may be the case t hat they are very different. So you have to make sure that you are iterating with a big group of them, and use your judgement, how do we know what the overall market looks like and it involves talking to a lot of people, building on allies and hopefully making friends who want you to succeed. So we actually got a lot investors as well, so that when they are invested, they want us to succeed more.Martin: How long did it take until the product market was okay-ish?Joe: I think it was okay after about two and a half or three years, and that was longer than we thought. That is one of the lessons from both Palantir and Addepar.Frankly, as an investor for other companies I am involved in, enterprise softwares take longer than you think it is going to take, which means you are going to end up having to need more people or more money.There are maybe two major resource: it is mostly people and money. Talent and money, you always need more of both of those things than you think. In my experien ce, some people, I know there’s a story that Whatsapp sold for 19 million dollars with not too many people and that’s really impressive. I don’t know how to do that, I always need lots of people and lots of money to make it work.Martin: What have been the major obstacles over the years?Joe: Well, those are the big ones, I was getting there. Some people in Palantir which is a 20 billion dollar company now (we are very proud of it) and people don’t realise, people probably see like Oh, it probably worked. And there were multiple times in years two, three and four where some of our most important people were threatening to leave and saying that they were already looking for new jobs. This is a company that ultimately worked extremely well, it isover eleven or twelve years now.But it’s really hard to keep people’s morality up, it’s very hard to keep them excited, because you have setbacks and people aren’t really sure if they want to stick around there a couple times.Thi s is rather the people side.On the money side, there were a couple times Palantir almost couldn’t raise money, because the people would say Guys, you are crazy, you’re trying to fix mobile intelligence, what are you doing. So I think Addepar is doing extremely well right now, and I’m really proud of it. But even with Addepar we have this much bigger vision we are driving towards but the current product is a lot to get to work first with these big banks. Sometimes it is frustrating, you have six to nine months to slog through the stuff they need and everyone wants to be working on the more exciting bigger things. So you got to keep the moral up while you are going, taking the troops through the swamp. You got to be able to do that sometimes before you are able to get where you are going.Martin: And how are you trying to balance this? Are you putting some people more on the long term staff or are you…Joe: Sometimes, this is like the dynamic with Eric who is very good CEO. I am more sometimes a vision guy, so I really want people to work on long term staff, but he says:Joe, if you don’t have other people doing short term stuff, we are not going to get to the long term stuff. Sometimes I think he is right to make sure, you can have big, big visions but you have to have the path work on the way there.So right now we have very important appointments with very big banks, some contracts for winning there, we have a lot of, three hundred and fifty billion dollars on the platform for customers using us. So if we don’t make it work really well today, there will be no long term. And so hopefully, we can get through the near goals and start working on the bigger things later.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM JOE LONGDALEMartin: Joe, you have been involved in PayPal, started Palantir and then Addepar. What have been the major learnings you can share with other people interested in starting their own company? So just that they minimise their stupid mistakes.Joe: Thatâ €™s tough. I think, you know it’s an interesting trade-off between having really high-energy junior talent and having more senior executives. This is something I am still learning. I still think that early on in the company, you don’t want the really senior executives. There are certain people for example who’ve been head of sale or head of marketing at a big company, and if you bring them in in the first year or two, that can be really damaging, because what they do for a living and what they have done for twenty years is that they have a machine and they run the machine, and then they know how to do that. But there is no machine to run early on, so you don’t want them yet.But the other mistake that I think I’ve made, a few times now, is that you have a really great early tech culture that tends to be biased towards being more young, because everyone is late at night hard working, crazy, driving. And then you get to the point where you are starting to have a real sales ne ed and a real marketing need and it is parks to an ore. And at that point you should right away hire the adults, try to hire the person that knows how to run this thing really well and not trying to figure it out for someone who has never done this before. Because it turns out that there are lessons to be learned from people who are doing business for a long time.I think a lot of people in start-ups, they think: Oh well, these older people don’t know anything, and we’re just going to just rely on our talent. But actually, that it is really important to learn from other people around you, who have been through things before and then bring them in at the right time.Martin: What other type of advice can you provide?Joe: I guess the other thing that worked well for me, I think the reason Palantir and Addepar, I think, they worked well because of the talent. I think all of us as entrepreneurs, we probably have big egos and we’re overconfident because we’re like, “We’re changi ng the world.” But it’s not about you changing the world. It’s about the team changing the world. So if you go out and find someone who’s just really, really bright and really hardworking and who you convince to be passionate about the mission, even if that takes you a week and that’s all you did that week, that’s really valuable because now that person is going to be probably… Maybe you’re so confident and you’re the smartest. Even if that person is half of you, it’s worth spending your whole week just getting that person. So people should spend a lot higher percentage of their time recruiting talent than they do. I think that’s a really, really important insight that people miss.And I guess one other thing, similarly, people tend to really want to hoard equity in on the side and say, “This is my company. I want to take it all.” People get that equation really wrong because let’s say there’s five of the most amazing and talented people out there and yo u’ve got a big venture company. Let’s say you’re going to give each of them 3% of your company. The math people get wrong. So if you think, “I’m going to give these five people each 3%,” you feel like, “Oh, I’m losing 15%.” It feels like that, but it’s actually not what the math is. The math is that also you’re going to get 15% less of your own stake. And so you have to think, “Now I have five of the most amazing people. If I was going to make a hundred million dollars on this, then I only make 85 million dollars on this.” But those five amazing people, they probably make it much more likely that it’s worth a lot more, right? So people are always very stingy with that. At Palantir and Addepar, I think hopefully we try to be generous in giving lots of good equity to get the very best people. I think that’s something that’s really important to do.Martin: And how did you spend the time in the first 12 months between really operating the company and findi ng new talent?Joe: It’s a really tough trade off, so that’s why it has to be obsessed. When you’re building a really great startup company, I think it’s a lot like trying to train for a gold medal in the Olympics. It’s not something where you say you have a really healthy work-life balance and you spend a lot of time with your family and your kids and you want to visit your parents on the weekends. There’s all things you’re supposed to do and that you want to do. If you have the power to cut out a lot of other stuff, then you’d be absolutely obsessed. You need to both be running things and spending time recruiting, and networking and getting feedback from customers. So I think the answer is that it’s somewhat unhealthy to start a startup. It has to be something you’re really obsessed with and you’re really focused on, and you have to try to fit in both at once somehow.Martin: When did you find out about your obsession for startups?Joe: Well, I think from a rela tively young age, I had a really strong passion to… I wanted to have a revolution when I was 14 years old. I want to change things and fix things. If I see something broken, then I want to fix it. And I think that that’s what some startups are about. It’s taking something that “Here’s where the world is now, but this is what the world should be,” and you have to run as hard as you can and encourage everyone to come with you and run in that direction.Martin: Joe, besides being chairman here at Addepar, you’re also running a VC fund. So can you tell us about how this came about and what type of investment criteria you have?Joe: Sure. Palantir had a lot of trouble raising from VCs, and some I really respect but I thought that maybe there was a little hole missing for certain type of companies. And a lot of my friends started companies after Palantir, just like Paypal and how a lot of these companies came out of it. Palantir had a lot of companies come out of it. I sat wit h my other friends who were entrepreneurs building things and I ended up… I think almost all of us are angel investors in Silicon Valley. It’s kind of what you do when you’re lucky to have a little bit of success.So we started investing in a lot of them and helping them. It turned out that I was spending more and more of my time mentoring these new CEOs, helping my friends, and I realized, “Gosh, this is like… I’m doing this anyway. I probably should find a way to organize it.” And so along with a couple of friends, we put together a venture capital fund, and we’ve been really lucky to invest in a lot of great companies. We focused on early growth. We focused on top teams, people running platforms. Mostly what we focused on is something we call smart enterprise, which we think it’s a new way that companies start fixing big industries.The high level view of that is that there’s been these five waves of companies in Silicon Valley. So a hundred years ago, you had t he Radio and TV invented here and you had all the electronics companies and then you had the semiconductor companies, the transistor, and then those guys who built those Fairchild and National. They started the first venture capitalists and they invested in the third wave which is enterprise software. So for the first time, you had computers in all these businesses, and so the guys who invented the viability, they started investing the businesses for how they’re going to use the computers. So that’s enterprise software.And then you had a networking wave and a consumer wave. Most people around the world, when they think of technology and starting a company, they think of that fifth wave. They think of the consumer wave because that’s where most of the money has been made. There’s Google and Twitter and Facebook. The last 20 years, that’s where most of the money is made. Money was made in other areas. Money was made in other places. I still think the consumer is important an d we still do some consumer platforms, but we think the vast majority of the important platforms coming up the next 10 or 20 years are going to be about fixing big industries. So I’m biased because this is more like Palantir and Addepar. But I think so long as my friends are building many more companies that are these types of platforms, and that’s more my focus is helping great teams fix big industries.Martin: Great. Joe, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.Joe: Thank you. I appreciate it.Martin: Awesome.

World Religion Judaism, Hinduism, And Islam Essay

World Religion At first glance and hearing about, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam these five religions-look and sound a lot alike. Each one was founded and developed by mankind, follow a list of religious principles and directives to live by, and they all share the same consciousness of wrong doings being reconciled. Because anyone can strike up a new religion at any time, however, religion cannot be judged on how it looks or sounds. As a comparison we will see just how different these religions are. The first difference between the five religions is how they began, each one experienced some type of outside influence for its beginning. Judaism’s founding father was Abraham, who talked to God and was told by an angel that he would birth a promise son that would spring forth great nations and kings. Who was commanded by God to go to a land that he promised to give Abraham descendants. Judaism was developed from Abraham’s faith in God (Whiston p.34). Hinduism has n o single founder (namb.net), but played off the Aryan’s society caste system. â€Å"A caste is a social unit into which individuals are born and which dictates most aspects of daily life† (Adler/Pouwell p.50, 51). Buddhism founder and developer was Siddhartha Gautama, the son of an Indian royal family. Who went out in search of the outcome of fate, being revealed to him under the Bodhi tree, after a long night of meditation was enlighten with wisdom. (Adler/Pouwell p.54).Show MoreRelatedChristianity, Hinduism, And Islam1054 Words   |  5 PagesEvery religion has its own goal, and their own believes, however there are also many similarities in their believes. Although the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam may see things differently, they basically hold the same values and codes. To Islam, the Prophet Mohammad’s teaching is a â€Å"complete and final revelation†. 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No. : Course Submitted to : RELIGION: Religion is a set of beliefs, cultural system and worldviews that establish symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and to moral values. It defines who you are, what you are and your views about the world. It gives its followers guidelines which frames their actions, attitudes, cultures and belief. TYPES OF RELIGIONS: There are more than four thousand religions in this world, however, most of them areRead MoreBuddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism And Monotheistic Religions1108 Words   |  5 PagesIn life, one will undertake a spiritual journey in which you will uncover the meaning of the self. Many religions, including Hinduism, Confucianism and monotheistic religions, have developed philosophies placing importance of the â€Å"self.† Emphasis on morality, virtues, honest contribute to the development of the inner self. In religions such as, Islam and Judaism the importance of conducts and worship will lead you to paradise in the after as promised by Allah or Yahweh. The teachings of proper behaviorRead MoreHinduism And The Middle East894 Words   |  4 Pagesfilled by some type of religion. In order to develop a thorough understanding of the world’s major religions, it is important to look closely at the history, beliefs, and practices of each. There are five major religions that are practiced in the world today. Hinduism developed first, then Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and finally Islam. Hinduism and Buddhism are considered Eastern religions while Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered Western. Both Eastern religions began in India, althoughRead MoreChristianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, And Judaism1644 Words   |  7 Pages The following religions Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are among the top religions when evaluating the number of followers they encompass worldwide (Henderson, 2005, p.1). Through assessing these major belief systems and their views, diversity between them is apparent. These multiplicities range from Hindus who acknowledge multitudes of gods to Muslims who believe in one God, Allah. Although the variety of beliefs and practices exist their remains some central concepts suchRead More Appreciating other Religions Essay684 Words   |  3 PagesAppreciating other Religions Religion is a set of practices and beliefs that allow human beings to search for the meaning of life and the purpose of their existence. These common practices set the foundation for such beliefs to have validity. Every individual must wonder why he/she exists on earth. Questioning about the purpose in one’s life and whether or not there is meaning allows an individual to seek a supernatural, Supreme Being or some form of deity. Technically, religion is essentially theRead MoreThe Religion Of The Holy Trinity1665 Words   |  7 Pagesfree, ridiculous blessing from God. Effortlessness is a partaking in the celestial; the motivation to do God s will. Catholics recognize the unity of body and soul for human. So the entire religion relies or centers on reality that mankind remains between the two universes of matter and soul. The physical world is considered some portion of God s creation and is, in this manner, naturally great until an individual abuses it.The Bible is the rous ed, mistake free, and uncovered expression of God. Read MoreInfluence Of Religion On International Trade Essay1394 Words   |  6 PagesIntroduction Today’s world economy is changing drastically and as a result trade between countries is emerging. International business is constantly growing. Culture has proven to have a huge influence on trade. Religion can be defined as a system of shared beliefs and rituals that are concerned with the realm of the sacred. Religion is a system that guides people’s behaviors and influence them in the way they interact with other people and the world. Religion is one important source of a societyRead MoreMajor Religions and their Effects on Society1299 Words   |  6 Pagesimmortality. Where there is God, there is religion. There are many types of religions for example, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Christianity, Bahà ¡Ãƒ ­, and Greeks. Religion is the glue that keeps people intact with their sanity. Having religion is a good aspect to have and causes beneficial outcomes for oneself and the community. Also, primary the reason for people to preform good deeds and to becom e interactive with their community is due to religion. Also, the reason behind why people decide

Manifest Destiny Essay - 1119 Words

The United States of America has never been content with stagnation. The landmass of the Thirteen Colonies was enough to rival that of the Mother country from which they separated. The forefathers believed that it was the manifest destiny of this nation to eventually claim the expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. By 1890, nearly a hundred years following the original claim of Manifest Destiny, the land that was once open, was now under American control. But no sooner was the Great American Frontier closed, than was the door to East Asian expansion opened with the great gold key of American diplomacy. In a world where imperialism was contagious, and cartographers had to work around the clock to keep up with an ever-changing†¦show more content†¦This was the ultimate continuation that can be witnessed in the expansionism of early America and of later dates. Another great catalyst for expansion early on and then again in the late nineteenth century was a heightened sense of nationalism. This was a prevalent idea when the nation was young and a worldwide norm during the era of Taft and Roosevelt. In 1885, Josiah Strong penned the words, which were at the very heart of this sense of American power and intrinsic worth in his work Our Country: Its Possible Future and Potential Crisis. His thoughts concluded that the United States was a people of unequalled majesty and energy. His belief was that the United States was a people destined for nothing short of unsurpassed greatness. Those early expansionist philosophers of the United States would also share this sentiment. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;Though the two periods of expansionism shared some very similar motives, there were undeniable differences, most specifically with regards to the world at the time of these two crusades. Thomas Nast illustrates beautifully the world of Taft and Roosevelt expansionism in â€Å"The World’s Plunders.† Illustrating the pillaging of the eastern hemisphere by the three dominate powers of Germany, Britain and Russia, inferences can be made to the fact that the world was literally being overrun by a healthy appetite for expansion. The United States of America was in the turmoil of Civil WarShow MoreRelatedEssay On Manifest Destiny1709 Words   |  7 Pagesone of many seminal events in the history of the United States. However, it began the debt we are still in today; the Louisiana Purchase gave us the land that began the Manifest Destiny. â€Å"The term Manifest Destiny originated in the 1840’s when John L. O’Sullivan said in an article that it was the American colonist’s Manifest Destiny to spread over the continent and that God had given them the land for the sole purpose of multiplying and free development.† (History.com staff). It was this philosophyRead MoreThe Manifest Destiny Essay1076 Words   |  5 Pagesfull swing by the 1840s. Which evidenced that the continued expansion of the states was an issue and the idea of a Manifest Destiny was of major importance. John L. O’Sullivan once stated, â€Å"Our Manifest Destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions† (America: A Narrative History). The idea of a Manifest Destiny originated in the 1840s by the Anglo-Saxon Colonists to expand their ideal civilization and institutions across NorthRead MoreManifest Destiny : Ideal Or Justification Essay883 Words   |  4 PagesManifest destiny: Ideal or Justification The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of U.S in 1803. But it is not enough for ambitious Americans, we are not satisfied, we wanted more territory. So western expansion did not end, it actually keep moved. Westward Expansion is a very significant part in U.S history. It operated perfectly based on the ideology called manifest destiny. However, the creation of this theory is on purpose. It was used to push U.S territory to further west. When the idea of manifestRead MoreManifest Destiny Is An American Philosophy Essay2281 Words   |  10 Pages Manifest Destiny is an American philosophy with which it is to justify how that country has understood their place in the world and how to relate to other people. It is a doctrine, phrase or idea that expresses the belief that the United States is destined to spread to the four winds as supports the idea that is, to expand on the territories conquered North America and, in general, on the Western Hemisphere. This doctrine was not free of racism, considering that the American people wereRead MoreManifest Destiny Research Paper :1382 Words   |  6 Pages2014 Manifest Destiny Research Paper: The 1840’S were years of unprecedented growth for United States; in a mere four years, the national domain more than doubled with an additional 1.2 million miles being added to the country. (PBS) This was due to a movement called Manifest Destiny that suggested that the United States was â€Å"destined† to stretch from coast, sea to shining sea, uninterrupted by anything or anyone. (History.com) However, complex and underlying motives guided Manifest Destiny advocatesRead MoreManifest Destiny And Westward Expansion Essay1447 Words   |  6 Pages1) OUTLINE: I. Topic sentence. Manifest destiny and westward expansion was a tremendous key component to the growth of the nation economically because of the impact it had on native americans, women empowerment, and expanding the population of the country. II. Significance of topic. Americans looked towards the western lands as an opportunity for large amounts of free land, for growth of industry, and pursue the manifest destiny. III. List of evidence related to topic. The railwaysRead MoreManifest Destiny: Term or Reality Essay1315 Words   |  6 PagesThe three authors that describe Manifest destiny have very different beliefs but all use one person with vastly different views on Manifest Destiny and his beliefs on the term. The person that first used the term in any form of writing was John O’ Sullivan and is accredited with coining the phrase but much of this time had this strong belief in expanding the territory and states of the United States. Their views on this term were different because some believed that the United States should expandRead MoreExplain The Background, And Repercussions Of Manifest Destiny1956 Words   |  8 PagesExplain the background, and repercussions of, Manifest Destiny. In 1845, John O’Sullivan wrote an Article in the ‘United States Magazine and Democratic Review’ in favor of the annexation of Texas. In this article the term ‘Manifest Destiny’ was created. O’Sullivan wrote â€Å"the fulfilment of our Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.† Thus supplying the American people with the idea that it was their God-givenRead MoreManifest Destiny, By John L. Sullivan1491 Words   |  6 PagesIt is hard to read anything about the history of the United States without coming across the term â€Å"Manifest Destiny†. Manifest Destiny is a term, which was first coined by John L. Sullivan in the summer 1845 issue of the Democratic Review. â€Å"Hence it was carried into the debate on the Oregon question in the House of Representatives and proved to be such a convenient summing up of the self-confident nationalist and expansionist sentiment of the time that it passed into the permanent national vocabularyRead MoreInsight about the Mexican War and the Manifest Destiny Essay1046 Words   |  5 Pagesthe Mexican War and how did it begin? or What is Manifest Destiny and who came up with it? Those are all very good questions, so let me take the time to give you some insight about the Mexican war and Manifest Destiny. The Manifest Destiny was the belief that the United States was destined to expand from coast to coast. It was the concept that which heavily influenced American policy in the 1800s. Americans supported the manifest destiny because the Southerners wanted more land and Northerners

Character Sketch Story of an Hour Free Essays

Kayla Silva Mrs. Barrish English IV 31 March 2010 Character Sketch Some people believe that marriage is bliss. However that is not the case. We will write a custom essay sample on Character Sketch Story of an Hour or any similar topic only for you Order Now In â€Å"Story of an Hour,† Mrs. Mallard I treated wrongly by her husband Brently Mallard. She is very tired of being hurt she wishes her life would end. When finally getting her life back together she wanting to live it long but instead it ends short still. Mrs. Mallard is very heart troubled, happy, and then shocked. Mrs. Mallard has been very heart troubled through her marriage. She is so deeply in love with Brently but not once did he love back to her. All he ever does is hurt her. Her family sees that they are not one big happy couple. â€Å"She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s are. † Mrs. Mallard now is happy when told by her sister that her husband has died. Though her family members believe that she is crying because she is hurt. Now Mrs. Mallard will be able to live her life the way she wants it. Instead of being shut down and treated wrongly. Its says â€Å"She looks out house die her house where its new spring life. † That means that it is no longer darkness for her. Mrs. Mallard is very heart troubled from being hurt from her husband to be she is happy cause he is now gone and then shocked again. When she found out that he was dead she goes to her room and sheds tears of happiness. After her sister finally gets here to come down stairs Brently walks in. Being so shocked to realizes hes not dead after all she dies of what the say is heart diease. How to cite Character Sketch Story of an Hour, Papers

What Role Does Electrons Play in the Formation of Chemical Bonds free essay sample

Valence electrons are the electrons that are on the outermost shell of the atoms electrons which are can be either given away, added, or to be shared. When these electrons are given away, added to or shared, there is a chemical change occurring and the compound that is formed is changed from the original elements. This is called bonding which is pretty much the realm of the electrons. It is the sharing of electrons from each atom that define the chemical bond. Because all bonds involve the sharing of electrons, we can say that all bonds are covalent. Its just that some are more polar that others and some are very, very polar. It is the latter which take on some of the characteristics of an ionic bond. The ionic and covalent bonds are known to be the strongest chemical bonds. An ionic bond forms when two atoms differ so much in electronegativity that one or more electrons are actually transferred from one atom to the other. We will write a custom essay sample on What Role Does Electrons Play in the Formation of Chemical Bonds? or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Ionic bonds generally occur between a metal and a nonmetal. Due to the existence of ionic bonds, elements that normally would not combine because sharing electrons is either not possible or not practical may be combined to form chemical compounds. A covalent bond forms when two atoms share a pair of electrons. The sharing of one pair of electrons produces a single bond whist the sharing of two or three pairs of electrons produces double or triple bonds. If both atoms are equally electronegative, a nonpolar covalent bond forms. If one atom is slightly more electronegative, a polar covalent bond formulates. Covalent bonds allow the greatest possible combinations of chemical compounds to take place. Here is an example of chemical bonding of H 20: H-O-H. This tells us that the formula of H20 is one molecule of water which is made of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen bonded together. The bonds which hold the hydrogen and oxygen together are called covalent bonds which are very strong.

Free Essays on Hemingway V. London

Life, Death, Honor and Defeat Nature and death belong to a special category of forces which man has been unable to tame. Ernest Hemingway’s novella â€Å"The Old Man and the Sea† and Jack London’s short story â€Å"To build a Fire† put both powers on display. Man tragically struggling against the elements is the key theme to both stories. In a struggle, or battle, true men will show honor in defeat and serenity in death. Death will inevitably come, and the comparison of death with life makes up a central concept in both stories. The idea of some type of peace and heaven comforts the characters as they suffer at the hands of nature is also available. From reading the stories most people assume that man is always pitted against nature, however these stories show man’s place within nature. A tragedy is a serios drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force and having a sorrowful or disatrous conclusion that excites pity or terror. Both stories meet the qualification to be a tragedy. As stated in the definition, the reader can see that the protagonist will be defeated by the superior force, but the hero continues his/her mission. Often foreshadowing is readily apparent to the reader in tragedies. For example, when Santiago decides to sail farther out than usual, the reader should have a clue as to what could happen next. London’s character decides to ignore the advice of the old man. The old-timer had instructed the man not to hike alone in â€Å"those parts†. His advice was ignored and the ultimate sacrifice was paid. The superior force in both stories is nature. Santiago, the poor fisherman, is up against an enormous marlin, while London’s character is faced with unimaginable climatic conditions. Although the outside forces are most obvious, the men’s psyche may hold the key to their destiny. Santiago’s determination prevails when battling the marlin. While the man... Free Essays on Hemingway V. London Free Essays on Hemingway V. London Life, Death, Honor and Defeat Nature and death belong to a special category of forces which man has been unable to tame. Ernest Hemingway’s novella â€Å"The Old Man and the Sea† and Jack London’s short story â€Å"To build a Fire† put both powers on display. Man tragically struggling against the elements is the key theme to both stories. In a struggle, or battle, true men will show honor in defeat and serenity in death. Death will inevitably come, and the comparison of death with life makes up a central concept in both stories. The idea of some type of peace and heaven comforts the characters as they suffer at the hands of nature is also available. From reading the stories most people assume that man is always pitted against nature, however these stories show man’s place within nature. A tragedy is a serios drama typically describing a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force and having a sorrowful or disatrous conclusion that excites pity or terror. Both stories meet the qualification to be a tragedy. As stated in the definition, the reader can see that the protagonist will be defeated by the superior force, but the hero continues his/her mission. Often foreshadowing is readily apparent to the reader in tragedies. For example, when Santiago decides to sail farther out than usual, the reader should have a clue as to what could happen next. London’s character decides to ignore the advice of the old man. The old-timer had instructed the man not to hike alone in â€Å"those parts†. His advice was ignored and the ultimate sacrifice was paid. The superior force in both stories is nature. Santiago, the poor fisherman, is up against an enormous marlin, while London’s character is faced with unimaginable climatic conditions. Although the outside forces are most obvious, the men’s psyche may hold the key to their destiny. Santiago’s determination prevails when battling the marlin. While the man...

Hydrogen Peroxide Shelf Life and Effectiveness

Hydrogen Peroxide Shelf Life and Effectiveness Hydrogen peroxide, like many household chemicals, can expire. If youve ever poured hydrogen peroxide solution onto a cut and didnt experience the expected fizz, its likely your bottle of hydrogen peroxide has become a bottle of plain water. The 3-percent hydrogen peroxide solution you can buy for use as a disinfectant typically has a shelf life of at least a year and up to three years if the bottle is unopened. Once you break the seal, the hydrogen peroxide will last 30 to 45 days at peak effectiveness, with about six months of useful activity. As soon as you expose the peroxide solution to air, it starts to react to form water. Also, if you contaminate the bottle- such as by dipping a swab or finger into it- you can expect the effectiveness of the remaining liquid to be compromised. So, if you have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide that has been sitting in your medicine cabinet for a few years, it would be a good idea to replace it. If youve opened the bottle at any point, assume the liquid has outlived its usefulness. Why Peroxide Bubbles Whether your bottle of peroxide is open or not, its always decomposing into water and oxygen. The equation is: 2 H2O2 → 2 H2O O2(g) The bubbles that form in the reaction come from oxygen gas. Ordinarily, the reaction proceeds so slowly you cant perceive it. When you pour hydrogen peroxide onto a cut or any of several surfaces, the reaction proceeds much more quickly because a catalyst is present. Catalysts that speed the decomposition reaction include transition metals, such as iron in the blood  and the enzyme catalase. Catalase is found in nearly all living organisms, including humans and bacteria, where it acts to protect cells from peroxide by quickly deactivating it. Peroxide is naturally produced in cells and needs to be neutralized before it can cause oxidative damage. When you pour peroxide on a cut, both healthy tissue and microbes are killed, but the damage to your tissue mends. Test to See If It Is Still Good If youre not sure whether that bottle of peroxide is worth using, theres a safe and easy way to test it. Splash a bit into a sink. If it fizzes, its still good. If you dont get a fizz, its time to replace the bottle. Tips to Extend the Peroxides Life Dont open the new container until youre ready to use it and dont transfer it to a clear container. In addition to air, light also reacts with peroxide and causes it to change. You can help extend the shelf life of your hydrogen peroxide by storing it in a cool location, since heat accelerates the rate of chemical reactions, including the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide.

Internet Banking in the United Kingdom Coursework

Internet Banking in the United Kingdom - Coursework Example One of the markets leading internet banks egg.com allows individuals to do all the above plus it allows for costumers to get insurance quotes for they're cars, homes, travels, lives & health and emergency cover against thefts or losses of keys, wallets and cards etc (Egg.com, 2006). HSBC are trying to cut counter opening times at branches as online customers are cheaper costing less than one tenth of normal branch customers, It is thought that many are in favour of online banking, while others are opposed to the thought of online banking, below are the views of a computer literate, middle aged working woman: 'I can manage fine with ATMs, internet banking and so on. But think about those who are elderly, visually impaired or otherwise struggle with technological advances. A friendly face at a counter is what they are used to and is probably what they want. My 80 year old father no longer uses an ATM out in the open. He gets his cash from a supermarket checkout, as he feels safer.' Carolyn Jones, UK (BBC News, 2002). Barclays also announced that they are closing 200 banks leading to the loss of around 6000 jobs somewhat due to the materialization of internet banking It is also believed this will result in cost reductions of 200m a year (BBC

Social Work Compentcies PowerPoint Presentation

Social Work Compentcies - PowerPoint Presentation Example Therefore rather than pathologise her connections in the lives of her family members, I choose to treat this as culturally normal and help her figure out ways to establish some boundaries. This shows what I do in my work with clients that I think is represented in the image that I have included here in my portfolio. This video represents an ethical dilemma. During my practicum experience I am often faced with an ethical dilemma. I watched this video and they suggested several strategies that I have implemented in my agency when I face an ethical dilemma. I used the steps recommended in the video to address several ethical dilemmas. I became aware that a client has selling his food stamps. This is a violation of the agency policy. The client sold these food stamps to get money to buy cough syrup for her daughter who had a severe cough. I realized that although this seemed like a legitimate need for money, the food stamp policy is clear, that food stamps are not to be sold. I followed the steps in this video to think about what should be my action steps. Literacy is an important aspect in the community. It would be beneficial to identify the literacy needs in that community. The needs are assessed and evaluated to know which would be the best method to be used to educate the community. The above image inspired me to involve all the participants during the meetings we held. The above image shows that the world is the way it is because of the presence of diversity. In my practicum experience, I noticed that there were different patients who had different need and thus needed to be treated differently. Recognition of cultural diversity entails respecting the differences of people in the society. Each person’s beliefs and lifestyles are respected while having an understanding and support of the differences. Embracing culture in the society is important in enhancing cultural structure in the society. I was able to

Hatsue and Ishmaels Incompatibility in Snow Falling On Cedars :: Snow Falling Cedars Essays

Hatsue and Ishmael's Incompatibility in Snow Falling On Cedars    Dear Ishmael,      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   ...I don't love you, Ishmael.   I can think of no more honest way to say it.   From the very beginning, when we were little children, it seemed to me something was wrong.   Whenever we were together I knew it.   I felt it inside of me.   I loved you and I didn't love you at the very same moment, and I felt troubled and confused.   Now, everything is obvious to me and I feel I have to tell you the truth... I am not yours any more.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   I wish you the very best, Ishmael.   Your heart is large and you are gentle and kind, and I know you will do great things in this world, but now I must say good-bye to you.   I am going to move on with my life as best I can, and I hope that you will too.    Sincerely,    Hatsue Imada         Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, is an emotional story in which we see the life of a man who could not move on and a woman   that did.   The man, Ishmael, is hopelessly in love with the woman, Hatsue.   His love for her can not be dissuaded by anything; not her words, her wishes, or her marriage. He holds on to Hatsue because of his feelings for her, even after he gains the knowledge that it is extremely improbable that he could ever be with her. Hatsue is much more logical and rational with her feelings.   She saw her love with Ishmael for what it was.   She realized she did not really love him and that she was still learning what love really is.   She moved on with her life, whereas Ishmael could not.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Ishmael's view of love did not change throughout the novel.   He met Hatsue as a child, and formed the idea that he loved her through his limited knowledge and through his adolescent view of relationships.   His love was simplistic, yet real.   He had concrete reasons for his love.   He enjoyed being with her.   He looked forward to meeting her in the hollow cedar tree.   He went out of his way to see her, even if she did not see him.

Marriage and the Chinese Revolution

Before the 1949 revolution, Chinese women were regarded as lower in social rank than men, notwithstanding the general disempowerment of women due to the lower social class that they belonged to. Women were considered chattels, especially by the noble classes, in which families arranged marriages for their daughters in order to secure favors from government officials, warlords and even from the imperial household. Moreover, men could have as many wives as they wanted, notwithstanding the utter lack of power of women to secure a divorce from their husbands, in the event that they were abused and badly treated. Mao Zedong said this about the Marriage Law, â€Å"The Marriage Law affects all people's interests and is one of the basic laws of China, next only to the constitution†¦It is the legal means through which to carry out reform of the marriage and family system in China, the weapon with which to fight the feudal family system, and the tool necessary to establish and develop a new marriage and family system.† For all the faults of Mao’s China, the marriage law which the communists implemented liberated the women from the bondage of a patriarchal society which dictated the terms of their existence, including their choice of a life partner. By decreeing the dismantling of a feudal system of relations between men and women, women were now able to truly choose to marry only those that they truly love. While such a state policy exists, it took more than the marriage law to truly ensure that the social inequality in a Chinese marriage was implemented politically and culturally, to ensure that women indeed held half the sky. On the other hand, such liberation of Chinese women in marriage then did not amount to utter sexual promiscuity as in Western countries, except at present, where changing partners and spouses seem to be as fast as changing mobile phones and cars in Chinese contemporary society. As divorce is China is as easy as selling the newest Ipod, it is now steadily undermining once more the value of marriage and the commitment that is intertwined in its concept. If the women were treated as chattels in feudal China that no mutual consent in marriage ever really existed, the present increasing number of divorces seems to manifest that with the increase in personal income and spending of the Chinese is rendering as a commodity the institution of marriage. These things, treating women as chattel and the commodification of marriage, are both social evils which destroy the basic sanctity of marriage, in view of the family as the basic institution in any society. As the Chinese economy grows by leaps and bounds, it has also led to the creation and reproduction of a new inequality in the institution of marriage, where mutual love and commitment are not at the center of the institution but property relations to outpace all other families in a cutthroat competition for financial security and success. It is no different from feudal China where families arranged marriages for their daughters because it destroys the long-held idea, even by Mao Tsetung, that marriage should only be based on mutual respect and love by partners with a deep perspective on their relationship and a long-term goal for the development of both partners’ lives in all aspects – physical, economic, social, and even spiritual. Is divorce China's new fad? By Leon D'souza ZIBO, People's Republic of China– That China's revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, was an incessant womanizer is no secret. For 22 years, beginning in 1954, Dr. Li Zhisui, his personal physician, chronicled the former dictator's dark private world. In his critically acclaimed book, â€Å"The Private Life of Chairman Mao,† Dr. Zhisui writes candidly about the erstwhile chairman's voracious appetite for carnal pleasure. Mao was constantly hosting dances and card-playing parties to find new young women to indulge his fantasies. He was â€Å"married† at least four times and had ten children with whom he had rather distant relationships. However, for all his shortcomings, Mao was a firm believer in the power of womanhood. He was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb, â€Å"women hold up half the heavens,† and in his â€Å"Little Red Book,† which attained Biblical importance during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, he spoke audaciously of the need for equality of the sexes. â€Å"In order to build a great socialist society, it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production,† Mao declared. The former chairman began a transformation of the submissive role that Chinese women were historically relegated to over centuries of dynastic rule. One of his earliest reforms involved sweeping changes to China's harsh marriage norms. Before the advent of Communist Power, marriage was somewhat of an unholy institution in China, a form of socially sanctioned bondage. Chinese director Zhang Yimou's brilliant film, â€Å"Raise the Red Lantern,† tells of the sordid state of affairs in imperial times. Arranged and mercenary marriages were considered normal practice then. A wealthy man could have as many wives as he pleased. Widows were not allowed to remarry and no woman could ever ask for a divorce. Mao changed all that. His first â€Å"Marriage Law† abolished the system of arranged or forced marriage and extended equal protection to women and children. The new legislation forbade bigamy, child marriage and public interference in the freedom for widows to remarry. Mao took personal interest in the implementation of the measure. â€Å"The Marriage Law affects all people's interests and is one of the basic laws of China, next only to the constitution,† he emphasized. â€Å"It is the legal means through which to carry out reform of the marriage and family system in China, the weapon with which to fight the feudal family system, and the tool necessary to establish and develop a new marriage and family system.† Noble goals notwithstanding, Mao's reforms weren't greeted well in a country steeped in a long tradition of patriarchy. Some derided the edict as a formula for societal instability that was sure to trigger an epidemic of divorces. â€Å"It is a law for divorce,† these naysayers argued. In some ways, they were right. Divorce is fast becoming something of an emerging trend in modern China, where successive marriage laws have empowered women who now initiate more than 70 percent of break ups. In fact, so pervasive is this trend that in a story some years ago, The New York Times Seth Faison pointed out that it was even beginning to affect the way ordinary Chinese greet each other in the street. â€Å"For years,† Faison wrote, â€Å"people have greeted each other with a question that reflected the nation's primary concern: â€Å"Chi le ma?† or â€Å"Have you eaten?† Now according to a popular joke in Beijing, people who see a friend on the street voice a new concern: â€Å"Li le ma?† â€Å"Have you divorced?† But unlike other countries, where divorce is seen as a social problem, the Chinese seem to view this trend as a sign of the changing tide for women in a country where they were once mere objects of desire. As the Beijing Youth Daily explained in a story a while back: â€Å"The high rate of divorce reflects a kind of ‘master of my own fate' notion among urban residents. From an overall perspective, it represents a kind of social advancement.† Financial independence resulting from a surge of women in the workforce seems to be driving the divorce rate. Chinese women now actually do hold up half the sky. They account for more than 46 percent of the total working population according to statistics. Women experts and entrepreneurs have come to the forefront in large numbers, playing key roles in hi-tech industries as well as large and medium state-owned enterprises. This has helped level the balance. â€Å"In the past, women were very dependent on men for survival. They were not allowed to work. Today in China, women earn their own money. They are becoming more and more independent, and so they need not remain married to men that aren't loyal to them,† said Huang Yan Ling, an English teacher at the Zibo Foreign Language School. Huang was raised in Zibo, the rural northeastern city in Shandong Province where she now teaches middle school. As a mother herself, and someone who grew up away from the relatively liberal atmosphere of the rapidly westernizing cities along China's eastern coast, she isn't a loud supporter of the spate of divorces. â€Å"I think it is very bad for the children,† she emphasized, when asked why she balked at the trend. Nevertheless, she is delighted that increasing numbers of Chinese women are standing up for themselves, and places the blame for failed marriages squarely on the infidelity of the men involved. â€Å"When most men approach middle age, they have a lot of money. When they have money, they look for younger girls because they just want to have fun. They don't really love their wives,† she suggested matter-of-factly. â€Å"So it is good for some women to file for divorce.† Nevertheless, there is room for tightening up the law to facilitate separations while preventing the situation from spiraling out of hand. One of the ways Huang points to is increasing the amount of alimony payable as child support. â€Å"In China, if a couple files for divorce, the woman usually gets custody of the child. This places her in a difficult position. The man can get away with making payments as low as 300 Reminbi Yuan (approximately $38) per month,† she explained. â€Å"I think this is not right. Men should be made to pay more. That way, maybe they will think twice about cheating on their wives.† At the end of the day, whether bane or boon, China's climbing divorce rate is an indicator of significant social change. Mao's China has opened up for women doors they could never previously have hoped to unlock. Today, women wear the pants in many families here. And although you won't get their husbands to admit it, most married men live in peril of their wives ire. Take Yu Ke Hong for example, one of my colleagues at the Zibo Foreign Language School. A month ago, my brother-in-law, Brian, and I, tried to coax him into buying a dog for his family while we were out pet shopping at the weekend â€Å"dog market.† Yu laughed when we presented the suggestion, then added candidly that his wife would â€Å"throw him out of the house† if he showed up on his doorstep with the cute Chinese Shar-Pie we had picked out for him since she didn't care much for dogs. Enough said. You know who calls the shots in his household. Leon D'souza is a frequent contributor to the Hard News Cafe Marriage and the Chinese Revolution Before the 1949 revolution, Chinese women were regarded as lower in social rank than men, notwithstanding the general disempowerment of women due to the lower social class that they belonged to. Women were considered chattels, especially by the noble classes, in which families arranged marriages for their daughters in order to secure favors from government officials, warlords and even from the imperial household. Moreover, men could have as many wives as they wanted, notwithstanding the utter lack of power of women to secure a divorce from their husbands, in the event that they were abused and badly treated. Mao Zedong said this about the Marriage Law, â€Å"The Marriage Law affects all people's interests and is one of the basic laws of China, next only to the constitution†¦It is the legal means through which to carry out reform of the marriage and family system in China, the weapon with which to fight the feudal family system, and the tool necessary to establish and develop a new marriage and family system.† For all the faults of Mao’s China, the marriage law which the communists implemented liberated the women from the bondage of a patriarchal society which dictated the terms of their existence, including their choice of a life partner. By decreeing the dismantling of a feudal system of relations between men and women, women were now able to truly choose to marry only those that they truly love. While such a state policy exists, it took more than the marriage law to truly ensure that the social inequality in a Chinese marriage was implemented politically and culturally, to ensure that women indeed held half the sky. On the other hand, such liberation of Chinese women in marriage then did not amount to utter sexual promiscuity as in Western countries, except at present, where changing partners and spouses seem to be as fast as changing mobile phones and cars in Chinese contemporary society. As divorce is China is as easy as selling the newest Ipod, it is now steadily undermining once more the value of marriage and the commitment that is intertwined in its concept. If the women were treated as chattels in feudal China that no mutual consent in marriage ever really existed, the present increasing number of divorces seems to manifest that with the increase in personal income and spending of the Chinese is rendering as a commodity the institution of marriage. These things, treating women as chattel and the commodification of marriage, are both social evils which destroy the basic sanctity of marriage, in view of the family as the basic institution in any society. As the Chinese economy grows by leaps and bounds, it has also led to the creation and reproduction of a new inequality in the institution of marriage, where mutual love and commitment are not at the center of the institution but property relations to outpace all other families in a cutthroat competition for financial security and success. It is no different from feudal China where families arranged marriages for their daughters because it destroys the long-held idea, even by Mao Tsetung, that marriage should only be based on mutual respect and love by partners with a deep perspective on their relationship and a long-term goal for the development of both partners’ lives in all aspects – physical, economic, social, and even spiritual. Is divorce China's new fad? By Leon D'souza ZIBO, People's Republic of China– That China's revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, was an incessant womanizer is no secret. For 22 years, beginning in 1954, Dr. Li Zhisui, his personal physician, chronicled the former dictator's dark private world. In his critically acclaimed book, â€Å"The Private Life of Chairman Mao,† Dr. Zhisui writes candidly about the erstwhile chairman's voracious appetite for carnal pleasure. Mao was constantly hosting dances and card-playing parties to find new young women to indulge his fantasies. He was â€Å"married† at least four times and had ten children with whom he had rather distant relationships. However, for all his shortcomings, Mao was a firm believer in the power of womanhood. He was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb, â€Å"women hold up half the heavens,† and in his â€Å"Little Red Book,† which attained Biblical importance during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, he spoke audaciously of the need for equality of the sexes. â€Å"In order to build a great socialist society, it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production,† Mao declared. The former chairman began a transformation of the submissive role that Chinese women were historically relegated to over centuries of dynastic rule. One of his earliest reforms involved sweeping changes to China's harsh marriage norms. Before the advent of Communist Power, marriage was somewhat of an unholy institution in China, a form of socially sanctioned bondage. Chinese director Zhang Yimou's brilliant film, â€Å"Raise the Red Lantern,† tells of the sordid state of affairs in imperial times. Arranged and mercenary marriages were considered normal practice then. A wealthy man could have as many wives as he pleased. Widows were not allowed to remarry and no woman could ever ask for a divorce. Mao changed all that. His first â€Å"Marriage Law† abolished the system of arranged or forced marriage and extended equal protection to women and children. The new legislation forbade bigamy, child marriage and public interference in the freedom for widows to remarry. Mao took personal interest in the implementation of the measure. â€Å"The Marriage Law affects all people's interests and is one of the basic laws of China, next only to the constitution,† he emphasized. â€Å"It is the legal means through which to carry out reform of the marriage and family system in China, the weapon with which to fight the feudal family system, and the tool necessary to establish and develop a new marriage and family system.† Noble goals notwithstanding, Mao's reforms weren't greeted well in a country steeped in a long tradition of patriarchy. Some derided the edict as a formula for societal instability that was sure to trigger an epidemic of divorces. â€Å"It is a law for divorce,† these naysayers argued. In some ways, they were right. Divorce is fast becoming something of an emerging trend in modern China, where successive marriage laws have empowered women who now initiate more than 70 percent of break ups. In fact, so pervasive is this trend that in a story some years ago, The New York Times Seth Faison pointed out that it was even beginning to affect the way ordinary Chinese greet each other in the street. â€Å"For years,† Faison wrote, â€Å"people have greeted each other with a question that reflected the nation's primary concern: â€Å"Chi le ma?† or â€Å"Have you eaten?† Now according to a popular joke in Beijing, people who see a friend on the street voice a new concern: â€Å"Li le ma?† â€Å"Have you divorced?† But unlike other countries, where divorce is seen as a social problem, the Chinese seem to view this trend as a sign of the changing tide for women in a country where they were once mere objects of desire. As the Beijing Youth Daily explained in a story a while back: â€Å"The high rate of divorce reflects a kind of ‘master of my own fate' notion among urban residents. From an overall perspective, it represents a kind of social advancement.† Financial independence resulting from a surge of women in the workforce seems to be driving the divorce rate. Chinese women now actually do hold up half the sky. They account for more than 46 percent of the total working population according to statistics. Women experts and entrepreneurs have come to the forefront in large numbers, playing key roles in hi-tech industries as well as large and medium state-owned enterprises. This has helped level the balance. â€Å"In the past, women were very dependent on men for survival. They were not allowed to work. Today in China, women earn their own money. They are becoming more and more independent, and so they need not remain married to men that aren't loyal to them,† said Huang Yan Ling, an English teacher at the Zibo Foreign Language School. Huang was raised in Zibo, the rural northeastern city in Shandong Province where she now teaches middle school. As a mother herself, and someone who grew up away from the relatively liberal atmosphere of the rapidly westernizing cities along China's eastern coast, she isn't a loud supporter of the spate of divorces. â€Å"I think it is very bad for the children,† she emphasized, when asked why she balked at the trend. Nevertheless, she is delighted that increasing numbers of Chinese women are standing up for themselves, and places the blame for failed marriages squarely on the infidelity of the men involved. â€Å"When most men approach middle age, they have a lot of money. When they have money, they look for younger girls because they just want to have fun. They don't really love their wives,† she suggested matter-of-factly. â€Å"So it is good for some women to file for divorce.† Nevertheless, there is room for tightening up the law to facilitate separations while preventing the situation from spiraling out of hand. One of the ways Huang points to is increasing the amount of alimony payable as child support. â€Å"In China, if a couple files for divorce, the woman usually gets custody of the child. This places her in a difficult position. The man can get away with making payments as low as 300 Reminbi Yuan (approximately $38) per month,† she explained. â€Å"I think this is not right. Men should be made to pay more. That way, maybe they will think twice about cheating on their wives.† At the end of the day, whether bane or boon, China's climbing divorce rate is an indicator of significant social change. Mao's China has opened up for women doors they could never previously have hoped to unlock. Today, women wear the pants in many families here. And although you won't get their husbands to admit it, most married men live in peril of their wives ire. Take Yu Ke Hong for example, one of my colleagues at the Zibo Foreign Language School. A month ago, my brother-in-law, Brian, and I, tried to coax him into buying a dog for his family while we were out pet shopping at the weekend â€Å"dog market.† Yu laughed when we presented the suggestion, then added candidly that his wife would â€Å"throw him out of the house† if he showed up on his doorstep with the cute Chinese Shar-Pie we had picked out for him since she didn't care much for dogs. Enough said. You know who calls the shots in his household. Leon D'souza is a frequent contributor to the Hard News Cafe