Laozi Essays - Taoism, Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Tao, Chinese Philosophy

Laozi Laozi created Daoism, a well-known Chinese philosophy, but very little is known about his mysterious figure. It is said the he was born in the province of Henan in 570BCE (Encarta). Before becoming a philosopher, he worked as a court librarian at the imperial court. He also went by the name Lao-Tzu, which means Old Master. Very little is known about Laozis early life, but he is credited with creating Daoism and writing the Daode Jing, the most widely translated Chinese text. Laozis strong opinions and eccentric beliefs would lead to the formation of Daoism. Laozi overcame many obstacles before gaining followers. His wise council attracted followers, but he refused to set his ideas down in writing. He believed that written words might solidify into formal dogma (Internet 5). Laozi wanted his philosophy to remain a natural way to live life with goodness, serenity and respect. At age 80 he set out toward what is now Tibet, saddened and disillusioned that people were unwilling to follow his path to natural goodness (Grolier). Legend says Laozi set off into the desert on a water buffalo leaving civilization behind (Internet 5). When he arrived at the final gate at the great wall protecting the kingdom, the gatekeeper persuaded him to record the principles of his philosophy for posterity. The result was the Daode Jing. This ancient Chinese classic was translated more than any other book ever; except for the Bible (Internet 6). Laozi gained many followers after writing the Daode Jing. Laozi saw past everyday worries to focus on the dao, or the way of the universe as a whole (Ellis 91). The Daode Jing teaches that the dao is realized through recognition and acceptance of nothingness. Laozi thought that by doing nothing one could accomplish everything. He did not mean to literally do nothing, but to discern and follow the natural forces (Internet 6). First and foremost to be spontaneous in ones actions. He laid down no rigid code for behavior. He believed a person's conduct should be governed by instinct and conscience. Laozi believed that human life, like everything else in the universe, is constantly influenced by outside forces. He believed simplicity to be the key to truth and freedom. Laozi encouraged his followers to observe, and seek to understand the laws of nature; to develop intuition and build up personal power; and to use that power to lead life with love, and without force (Internet 5). Laozis teachings allowed fellow Daoists to have interesting views on the natural world. Laozis legacy will live on forever. His beliefs and opinions about the world as a whole are like none others. Scholars continue to study his teachings and find out more about this mysterious individual. Daoism will always remain one of the most interesting philosophies. Philosophy

How to Get More Traffic From Every Post

How to Get More Traffic From Every Post by Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo at SumoMe.com (free tools to grow your website traffic) Traffic can feel a bit like catch-22. You need people to share your posts but if you have no traffic there’s no one to share At the start of 2014, I decided to prioritize my email list and grow my blog from a small side project to one of the top marketing blogs. In less than a year, traffic grew by more than 400%! Today, I want to show you 10 actionable strategies you can use to grow your own blog’s traffic each time you publish a new post.How to Get More Traffic From Every Post (Plus How OkDork Grew Traffic 400% In 8 Months)  @noahkagan1- Start Building And Prioritizing Your Email List Growing your email list is an amazingly vicious cycle. You get subscribers, email them when an article goes live, they go read it and then share it with people. Then those people subscribe and the cycle delightfully continues. But, to build an email list you have to ask for visitors email addresses. The easiest way to do that is to use plugins for your blog. I use the SumoMe plugin (built by AppSumo) and the apps List Builder and Scroll Box. The tools will help you start building an email list without any technical knowledge. (Scroll Box is a great way to ask engaged readers to sign up towards the end of a postyou can set it to appear only after someone has read 50% or 75% of your post.) The blog is a great example of what you should be doing if you want to build an email list. Each blog post there is a chance to sign up at the top and in the middle of the post. They also have a pop-up that has a persuasive offer to first time or one-off visitors Now, if you had to pick only one place to ask for emails, where would you ask? It’s not in a pop-up or a scroll box: it’s your homepage. Before 2014, my homepage included links to recent blog posts, archives, and the menu bar. After using heatmaps, I removed all of the distractions and left visitors with only 1 option: Now my most trafficked page is also my #1 email address generator. If you’re serious about growing your email list, make it extremely simple for each visitor to give you their email address. Pro tip: How To Turn Your Blog Readers Into Paying Customers 2- Be Part Of A Community I got involved in two key communities for marketers: GrowthHackers and Inbound.org. Before asking for anything from these communities, I did my best to spend time where my readers are, add value, comment in the forums, share articles and upvote other posts (not just OkDork posts). Being part of these communities helped pinpoint what posts our target audience (other marketers) wanted to read, the common elements of the most liked/upvoted posts, and made it more natural to ask for help promoting OkDork content. As a result, by mid-2014 GrowthHackers and Inbound.org were the two largest referring sites to OkDork. Engage your readers (or customers) where they are already spending time. Respond to their questions, suggest resources, add value every time you login or visit the site. Find a forum, sub-reddit, or a similar site that carries your target audience, become part of the community, add value back, and then begin to submit your own high-quality content. Pro Tip: 50% Places To Repurpose Your Content 3- Publish Long Content Arguably the biggest change that brought traffic to OkDork was reaching out to writers who had lots of marketing data that could be put into long form content. Why? Because the content was outrageously good and exactly what our target audience/community wanted. In fact, the majority of viral articles are over 3,000+ words and explore a single topic in depth. The longer the post the most shares it got. (Plus each guest writer notified their own email list and shared the post on Twitter which brought additional targeted traffic to OkDork.) Although it may be tempting to write lots of short content or to ask guest writers to write short posts, set your standards high and publish long content that contains more of what your audience wants. Take note of the posts that get lots of share within your community and make sure you do the same with each post. If your community is data driven include 10x as many statistics or if they are image driven add 10x more images than usual. Pro Tip: 5 Things That Will Change Your Mind About Long Form Content Marketing 4- Build An Inner Circle In May 2014, I put together a list of 15 to 20 friends, colleagues, fans that a) wanted to help me and b) were already enjoying the content on the blog. This â€Å"Inner Circle† or â€Å"Insiders List† reviewed upcoming posts and provided an early traffic boost to new posts - often by sharing it 24 to 48 hours before the post was sent out by email to my main list. Here’s the first email I sent to the Inner Circle: To build your own â€Å"Inner Circle† first list out: Interesting people within the community you are a part of; Customers/readers who provide constructive feedback; People who regularly send you the best articles or resources; Any people connected to special sites or channels you want to be on; And a few influencers who seem too good to be true. After you have the list, send an email like the one above that explains why they were selected, what the list is, and what they’ll get. Offer them a way out so that you’re not spamming people each week. Once you have their permission send an email from your personal account once a week or once every two weeks with a link to the latest blog post. It’s also important to occasionally help your Inner Circle with whatever they are working on. 5- Post On Popular Aggregate Sites In the past, when a new post was live on OkDork I occasionally shared it on a few sub-reddits or a community site like GrowthHackers. There was no system and in the busyness of running a blog, there were times when it wasn’t shared at all. To solve this two things happened: I developed an â€Å"Inner Circle† (above) Created a checklist of the top aggregate sites that referred traffic in the past. The checklist helped me see which aggregate sites and sub-reddits had not yet posted the article. Most of the time the Inner Circle took care of sharing it on their favorite sites, but if a site was missing it was easy to remember to add it or reach out to someone I knew was active in that particular community or site. To create your own checklist list out the top sites/groups/sub-reddits where your customers/visitors spend time. 6-   Make Images and Posts Easy to Share As traffic grows on your site, one of the most obvious ways to help it along is to make it easy to share the content on multiple channels. If a visitor has to copy the link, create a new email, and then share it you’ll only have a few people sharing the article. Again does an awesome job at this with its floating social icons on the left of each post and with an image sharing plugin to make sharing images easier. On OkDork I added the Share plugin to so that on each post people can easily share it on the usual channels Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. The plugin also offers a bunch of other services like Evernote, Amazon Wishlist, Digg, and plain ol’ email. I’m convinced that great long form content gets shares 1) because great content and 2) everyone wants their friends to think they read an indepth article whether they actually read it or not so make sure it’s as easy as possible to share! Pro Tip: Where Is The Best Place To Put Social Media Buttons On Your Blog 7- Repromote Your Old Content Repromoting old content was one of the easiest ways to grow traffic on OkDork. Every two months, we used Google Analytics to find content that hadn’t been visited over a certain threshold in the previous three months. (That threshold should vary depending on your own site.) Then we scheduled each post to reshare it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. over the next three months. The advantage of this is you don’t have to do much work (no creativity required). You can also repromote and schedule content you just posted as well. Here’s a simple graphic from to show you how: Pro Tip: How Promote Your Blog With Social Media (And Double Your Traffic) 8- Quotes In my most popular posts (most shared and organic search), I added quotes throughout. While this had a smaller impact on overall traffic than some of the other methods, it is a more organic way to ask someone to share the post. When you select the best quotes from an article you make it easier to read, share, and re-share. As you repromote old content, you’ll also see an uptick in the number of shares. If you’re not already, you should be using the Plugin to make tweeting selections of your blog post a breeze. SumoMe also offers a highlighter that allows a user to â€Å"† their own selections. It’s a nice complement to the plugin. 9- Send The Highlights Of Each Post In An Email By now the tactics are getting really easy†¦but this is an important one. One of the biggest contributors to traffic came through the email list, but we found a simple way to drive traffic and get a boost in click through rates: making it easier and sexier to click through. Emails announcing a new blog post tend to do one of three things: Mention 1 new post and include a lead paragraph Link out to multiple new posts each with a lead paragraph Include an entire post in the email The first two aren’t terribly convincing- the meat of an article is almost never in the first paragraph! And the third option provides 0 reasons to actually click through and visit the site (meaning no additional traffic). Beginning this past summer, when an OkDork goes out it mentions only 1 new post and breaks out the 3 of the most valuable insights. It’s extremely simple (example below) and doubled click through rate from an average of ~5-6% to ~12-15%. Spend time figuring out what is most valuable to your audience and include those highlights in the email. Pro Tip: 5 Easy Lead Conversion Tips For Your Email Marketing Program 10- Publish on a Regular Schedule The other thing I did was create a calendar that we followed closely to make sure that new posts were going out every week and we didn’t fall behind. If you’re reading this on you already know that publishing regularly is critical to traffic. Not only does it help you be consistent, it creates a healthy expectation within your community and for your readers. A regular schedule made all of the other 9 strategies above doubly effective. In fact, if you’re not publishing regularly or at least with a consistent rhythm many of the tactics above will fall flat or produce few results. Pro Tip: Start A Free Trial Of Now

The United States Economy in World War I

The United States Economy in World War I When war broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, a sense of dread rippled through the American business community. So great was the fear of contagion from tumbling European markets that the New York Stock Exchange was closed for more than three months, the longest suspension of trade in its history. At the same time, businesses could see the enormous potential the war might bring to their bottom lines. The economy was mired in recession in 1914, and the war quickly opened up new markets for American manufacturers. In the end, World War I set off a 44-month period of growth for the United States and solidified its power in the world economy. A War of Production  Ã‚   World War I was the first modern mechanized war, requiring vast amounts of resources to equip and provision massive armies and provide them with the tools of combat. The shooting war was dependent on what historians have termed a parallel â€Å"war of production† that kept the military machine running. During the first two and a half years of combat, the United States was a neutral party and the economic boom came primarily from exports. The total value of U.S. exports grew from $2.4 billion in 1913 to $6.2 billion in 1917. Most of that went to major Allied powers like Great Britain, France, and Russia, which scrambled to secure American cotton, wheat, brass, rubber, automobiles, machinery, wheat, and thousands of other raw and finished goods. According to a 1917 study, exports of metals, machines, and automobiles rose from $480 million in 1913 to $1.6 billion in 1916; food exports climbed from $190 million to $510 million in that same period. Gunpowder sold for 33 cents a pound in 1914; by 1916, it was up to 83 cents a pound. America Joins the Fight   Neutrality came to an end when Congress declared war on Germany on April 4, 1917, and the United States began a rapid expansion and mobilization of more than 3 million men. Economic historian Hugh Rockoff writes: â€Å"The long period of U.S neutrality made the ultimate conversion of the economy to a wartime basis easier than it otherwise would have. Real plant and equipment were added, and because they were added in response to demands from other countries already at war, they were added in precisely those sectors where they would be needed once the U.S. entered the war.† By the end of 1918, American factories had produced 3.5 million rifles, 20 million artillery rounds, 633 million pounds of smokeless gunpowder, 376 million pounds of high explosives, 21,000 airplane engines, and large amounts of poison gas.  Ã‚   The flood of money into the manufacturing sector from both home and abroad led to a welcome rise in employment for American workers. The U.S. unemployment rate dropped from 16.4% in 1914 to 6.3% in 1916. This fall in unemployment reflected not only an increase in available jobs but a shrinking labor pool. Immigration dropped from 1.2 million in 1914 to 300,000 in 1916 and bottomed out at 140,000 in 1919. Once America entered the war, around 3 million working-age men joined the military. About 1 million women ended up joining the workforce to compensate for the loss of so many men. Manufacturing wages increased dramatically, doubling from an average $11 a week in 1914 up to $22 a week in 1919. This increased consumer buying power helped stimulate the national economy in the later stages of the war. Funding the Fight   The total cost of America’s 19 months of combat was $32 billion. Economist Hugh Rockoff estimates that 22 percent was raised through taxes on corporate profits and high-income earners, 20 percent was raised through the creation of new money, and 58% was raised through borrowing from the public, mainly through the sale of â€Å"Liberty† Bonds. The government also made its first foray into price controls with the establishment of the War Industries Board (WIB), which attempted to create a priority system for the fulfillment of government contracts, set quotas and efficiency standards, and allocated raw materials based on needs. American involvement in the war was so short that the impact of the WIB was limited, but the lessons learned in the process would have an impact on future military planning. A World Power   The war ended on November 11, 1918, and America’s economic boom quickly faded. Factories began to ramp down production lines in the summer of 1918, leading to job losses and fewer opportunities for returning soldiers. This led to a short recession in 1918–19, followed by a stronger one in 1920–21. In the long term, World War I was a net positive for the American economy. No longer was the United States a nation on the periphery of the world stage; it was a cash-rich nation that could transition from a debtor to a global creditor. America had proved it could fight the war of production and finance and field a modern volunteer military force. All of these factors would come into play at the start of the next global conflict less than a quarter-century later. Test your knowledge of the homefront during WWI. Sources The Economics of World War Iï » ¿Federal Reserve Bulletinï » ¿. p. 952. Oct. 1, 1919, Washington, D.C.Fraser. â€Å"War and Postwar Wages, Prices, and Hours, 1914-23 and 1939-44 : Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 852.†Ã‚  FRASER.Jefferson, Mark. Our Trade in The Great War. Geographical Review. American Geographical Society, 1917, New York.â€Å"Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820-Present.†Ã‚  Migrationpolicy.org.Perspectives, Advisor. â€Å"100 Years Ago, The New York Stock Exchange Experienced A 4-Month Long Circuit Breaker.†Ã‚  Business Insider. 29 July 2014.â€Å"Social Security.† Social Security History.Sutch, Richard. â€Å"Liberty Bonds.†Ã‚  Federal Reserve History.â€Å"World War I Centenary: 100 Legacies of the Great War.†Ã‚  The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Company.

Domestic Business Activities from an International and Global Point of Research Paper

Domestic Business Activities from an International and Global Point of View - Research Paper Example As Vice President, it is important to have knowledge of domestic activities and policies and to understand the various cultures and operations of the sales force outside of the United States. This can only be accomplished by using a human resource (staff) from around the world as they are familiar with the countries, company, and cultures in which they live and are operating. Proper training, understanding of a various cultures, how business is handled in different parts of the world, varying company policies and operations (although the company is one entity, policies and routines vary slightly, if not extremely, in order to accommodate the differences), language and cultural differences, various sales methods, training, customer service, account management, follow-up procedures, key accounts management, etc. can only be handled by working with the various sales teams and using their expertise. The Vice President must make use of his number one asset which is a human resource in ord er to apply the best approaches and methods and focus on both the macro and microeconomics of the global business. He cannot do this alone but will achieve success if he learns from those in the various parts of the world and learns from those who are experts in the various locations and cultures in which they live and work. They will know the best approaches to communication, sales, customer service, find solutions, developing innovative tactics, etc. The best way of managing a diverse sales team is to incorporate the sales management from each area and empowering them and learning from them.

Create a report consisting of an advice package which offers Essay

Create a report consisting of an advice package which offers guidelines, advice and practicable recommendations for implementing and managing large databases - Essay Example Database technologies are evolving to address the issue of handling large databases. These technologies are dynamic, but the fundamental principles and skills remain the same. Many purveyors are addressing the need for databases that support huge amounts of data; usually in the petabyte range (> 1,000 terabytes) (Kavanagh, 2004). Information technology is dynamic; data is collected as hardware and software advance to handle bulky data. This makes it difficult to define what a large database entails. What is large today will be tiny in the next ten years. A large database can be defined as follows; Implementing and managing large databases has been a problem for most companies. Companies ought to examine and evaluate their database design, to identify the inherent inhibitors to a seamless database management system. The size of a database is influenced by the data volume, hardware, throughput, and software (Dittrich, 2001). Data volume is represented by table numbers, and/or the size of the data. A small database running on a constrained server will portray characteristics of a large database. Throughput is the measurement of usage levels. If a small database serves 9 million users simulataenously, it will be termed as a large database. The software used explains the database management system employed, as well as its implementation. The database is only good at the weakest point of the four factors. These weaknesses can be compensated in various ways: In deciding how to scale a large database, there is the scale-up and scale-out options. Scaling-up is not a preferable option in the modern day of database management systems. Large servers tend to have an adverse price to performance ratio, when compared to commodity machines. The performance for every dollar expended on high-end servers is usually low. The next best alternative would be to scale-out. Upgrading a

Chocolate Research Paper Essay Example for Free

Chocolate Research Paper Essay Chocolate is a key ingredient in many foods such as milk shakes, candy bars, cookies and cereals. It is ranked as one of the most favourite flavours in North America and Europe. Despite its popularity most people do not know the unique origin of this popular treat. Chocolate is a product that requires complex procedures to produce. The process involves harvesting cocoa, refining coca to cocoa beans, and shipping the cocoa beans to the manufacturing factory for cleaning, coaching and grinding. These cocoa beans will then be imported or exported to other countries and be transformed into different types of chocolate products. Cocoa beans grow in countries like Cote dIvoire, Ghana, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Malaysia, but the highest cocoa producing country is Cote dIvoire. The production process of cocoa beans include: first, cocoa is harvested manually. The seed pods of cocoa are collected and the beans are selected and placed in piles. These cocoa beans are then ready to be shipped to the manufacturer for production. Cocoa grows in pods that sprout off the trunks and branches of cocoa trees. The pods have the shape and almost the size of football. The pods start out green and turn orange when they are ripe. When the pods are ripe they are harvested gently with machetes. Machines can damage the trees or the clusters of flowers and pods that grow on the trunk, so workers have to harvest the pods by hand, using short, hooked blades mounted on long poles to reach the highest fruit. The cocoa seeds then undergo a process of fermentation by placing them in large, shallow, heated trays or by covering them with large banana leaves. If the climate is right, they may be simply heated by the sun. Workers mostly women come along periodically and stir them up so that all of the beans come out equally fermented. This process may take up to five or eight days. After fermentation, the cocoa seeds are dried before they can be scooped into sacks and shipped to chocolate manufacturers. Farmers simply spread the fermented seeds on trays and leave them in the sun to dry. The drying process usually takes about a week and results in seeds becoming reduced to about half of their original weight. During the production process, labor is not equally divided between men and women who work in the planation; this brings us to the issue of gender division. The gender divide that exists on the cocoa plantation is that most farm work is conducted by men, although most certainly there are tasks where women are very active, such as scooping the beans from the already opened husks, turning the beans during the fermentation and drying process, and sewing the jute sacs needed for the packaging of the dried beans. Women in the farms normally tend to the needs of the family. When female labor is hired during the harvesting time the wages given to them are not the same as those for men. Perhaps another reason why men are preferred is because of their assumed higher productivity rate compared to that of women. Due to different practices followed in individual regions, even within countries, the participation of women and their assigned tasks vary enormously. For instance, because of the popular method of sun drying cocoa beans in Ecuador, it is necessary to â€Å"clean† the beans. This job is mostly undertaken by women. This is not the case in Ghana or Brazil where sun drying is accomplished while protecting the beans from foreign matters and waste. It is interesting to note however that there is no specific pattern for the assignment of tasks to women, except during the harvest when the scooping of the beans from the opened pods is primarily performed by women in most cocoa producing countries. Given the great differences in the systems of production in producing countries it is difficult to find a common percentage that reflects the average participation of the female work force. It is worth mentioning that unlike the coffee agricultural sector, there are no associations or specific groups that house ‘women only’ involved in the cocoa sector at any level, although all associations and cooperatives are open to all who qualify. Due to fluctuation of cocoa prices in the world market, farmers have no long-term security, and in some situations, they do not have enough funds to support their farming business. Cocoa farmers are always faced with financial hardship; they are not able to provide for their families as they would want nor have enough funds to start up their own farming business because they only receive a fraction of the proceeds from the selling of the beans on the world market and there are many people in the trading chain. Cocoa farmers around the world face many challenges. It is estimated that about one-third of global cocoa crops are destroyed by pests and diseases every year. Many cocoa farmers have limited access to the latest agricultural technologies or methods of cultivation and few of them have business backgrounds to help them effectively market their products and manage their operations. Many of the farming communities live in poverty and are infected with diseases. Industry groups, governments and consumers worldwide have raised concerns about the use of pesticides and child labor on West African cocoa farms. An interview conducted by Christophe Koffi showed that one major problem that women in cocoa production encounter is the lack the of financial capability or backing due to the fact that most of these women find themselves in a male dominated occupation. It is very difficult for them to secure financial aid or loans to manage their farms. For instance, â€Å"Women cannot inherit or even create a cocoa plantation under our patriarch-dominated tradition,† said Vanie, criticising what she called a â€Å"backwards and misogynist† practice† (Koffi, 2008) because we still live in a patriarchal dominated society where women do not have the right to own lands and properties. This paper further talks about the sustanability in the production process of cocoa. We will be looking at Lindt Sprungli’s which is a family company and a major producer of chocolate and other cocoa products with a headquaters in Kilchberg, Switzerland. Lindt Sprungli is one of the few chocolate makers that have complete control over every step of the production chain starting with the precise selection of the finest cocoa varieties from the best growing areas in the world right on through the careful and expert processing until ending with the elegant packaging. Lindt gets its cocoa beans mostly from Ghana and Central and South America. Lindt has been very conservative in the amount of energy its invests in the chocolate production process. Each existing and future facility and investment undergoes very detailed analysis to determine how much energy can be saved. Through better insulation and energy recovery, Lindt Sprungli was able to cut down on energy consumption by more than 13% per ton produced between 2004 and 2010. The company intends to continue reducing the energy consumption rate per ton produced by an average over the coming years. According to the Lindt publication, The company’s efforts: since 1999, Lindt Sprungli’s Swiss subsidiary, Chocoladefabriken Lindt Sprungli (Schweiz) AG, has been an active member of the Lake Zurich Energy Model Group†¦The Swiss government and independent engineers have audited the progress and as a result, the Swiss subsidiary has been granted the official certificate. (Kilchberg, 2012) Since 2007, Lindt Sprungli under water conservation has been participating in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)†¦Since then, the measurements of water emissions and energy consumption have been largely based on the concept of the ‘Methodology Fossil Fuels’ set out in the CDP Protocol†¦Waste water, Lindt Sprungli continuously monitors and analyses the use of water and the output of wastewater in the production process and intends to further reduce the use of fresh water in this process, which, in turn will impact the output of wastewater (Kilchberg, 2012). The major people that benefit from cocoa production are mostly the big corporations. The corporations exploit cocoa farmers in the sense that they do not pay them the true worth of their labour. Women who work on the farms are underpaid and marginalized. There is also the issue of child labor where children of school going age are forced to work on the farms instead of going to school thereby denying them the right to education. The big corporations are not forth coming in releasing information as to how and where they get their cocoa beans from. Most of these African countries where these big corporations get their raw materials from do not have access to good roads, health care facilities, schools, electricity, and there is poverty in most of the communities. These big corporations buy the cocoa beans at a very cheap rate and then import them to the western society and the refined product is processed into different kinds of chocolates (e. g. chocolate drink, chocolate bars of different shapes and sizes and chocolate candies etc. ) . Which are sold consumers at exorbitant prices considering the price at which the cocoa beans are bought from the cocoa farmers. This explains how capitalism and big corporation exploit cheap labour. Almost everyone enjoys a bit of chocolate every now and again. But if you take a closer look at how cocoa is produced, it may well leave a bitter taste in your mouth. The conditions under which the cocoa farmers in many producer countries live and work are worrying: Despite the fact that cocoa is usually their main source of income, the families struggle to make a living from it. Child labour is not uncommon. As consumers we can work with NGOs to find means of helping the farmers to adapt to new systems of cocoa farming that result higher yields, under socially more acceptable and environmentally friendly conditions, to meet market demands and hence ensure a stable flow income. As a major part of the global cocoa industry which has remained inactive and invisible for so long, consumers of chocolate can demonstrate that they want slavery in the cocoa sector stamped out, and your pressure can highlight their lack of commitment and make them more accountable. Finally all cocoa products, including chocolate, run the risk of being tainted by child labour and slavery. To achieve a satisfactory standard of ethical production in chocolate consumers must help to ensure that companies commit to credible and sufficient actions against such things as use of child labour and the exploitation of cocoa farmers and not make false and unsustainable promises to consumers of being â€Å"slavery- free†. The consumers can liaise with government bodies and NGOs to negotiate fair prices for the purchase of cocoa products and this will in turn help the farmers to gain access to basic social amenities of life. Reference Page Archer, D. (2012). ADM’s commitment to sustainable cocoa. Milwaukee: Copyright 2012 Archer Daniels Midland Company . Clarkson, T. (1998). Anti-slavery. Retrieved November 15, 2012, from www. antislavery. org: http://www. antislavery. org/english/privacy_policy. aspx Kilchberg. (2012, April 22). The environment in the Production Process. Retrieved November 13, 2012, from www. Lindt. com: http://www. lindt. com/swf/eng/company/social-responsibility/lindts-sustainable-cocoa-supply-chain/ Koffi, C. (2008, November 7). Ivory Coast women defy taboos. Retrieved November 11, 2012, from iol News: http://www. iol. co. za/news/africa/ivory-coast-women-defy-taboos-1. 423405.

Hong Kong Artist :: Jackie Chan Actors Movies Films Essays

Hong Kong Artist Have you ever seen "Rush Hour" or "Shanghai Noon"? Were you excited when you see all the stunts and kung fu fighting in those films? All these film starred a famous international artist and singer, Jackie Chan, who was originated from my hometown, Hong Kong. It is interesting to know about his childhood, and how he became who he is today. Jackie Chan's Childhood was not very pleasant because his family was very poor. Jackie Chan's real name was Kwong-Sang Chan, and he was born in Hong Kong on April 7, 1954. His Chinese name Kwong-Sang means "born in Hong Kong." Jackie was delivered after twelve months of pregnancy. That was three months more than usual delivery. Therefore, his mother had to have a surgery to bring him out. At his birth, Jackie weighed more than twelve pounds. Jackie had a nickname called "Ah Pao" which means a cannonball. Jackie was not a kid who loved school. He attended the Nah-Hwa primary school in Hong Kong, but he disliked school and left after finishing first grade. At age of seven, his father took position as chief in the American Embassy in Australia. His father determined that the boy should learn some skills and sent him to the Peking Opera School. In Peking Opera School, Jackie learned dancing, singing, acrobatics, acting and martial arts. Also, Jackie met Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao who became successful actors today. During the school days, Jackie and his friends had to train everyday from morning till night. Jackie had mentioned it was the hardest period of his life. They needed to study and work 19 hours a day. Jackie and his friends would be punished and beaten up if they did not fulfill their practice or failed to achieve the standards. After days of practice, they would perform in a troupe called "The Seven Fortunes". Among them, Sammo Hung was the big brother of the group. They often performed in public performances at the Laiyuen Amusement Park and other venues. This was the childhood of Jackie Chan. The early years of Jackie Chan in the film industry was not successful at all. As time changed, the Peking Opera School declined. Their master started to loan "The Seven Fortunes" out as stuntmen to film company. Jackie worked as a stuntmen or the Shaw Brothers Film Company. He performed many dangerous stunts for the company and soon got noticed.